Embassytown

precious Ambassadors. But our numbers were growing, and our edicts weren’t completely ignored. Embassytowners had begun to do as we suggested, asked, or ordered.

We—MagDa above all—worked hard at our few Ariekei contacts. We worked hard full stop, too hard for me to feel just then whatever it was I ultimately probably would, from Ez’s abuse, from reading Ehrsul’s letter. MagDa even persuaded some of the most contained and coherent Ariekei into the corridors of the Embassy, not simply on eager pilgrimage to EzRa, but on new business. She might reward them with a snip of unheard recording of EzRa, one of our rare stolen buggings.

“Some of them know this is a problem,” said Mag. “The Ariekei. You can tell.”

“Some of them,” said Da. “... there’s some kind of debate, some kind of...” “Some of them want to be cured.”

Like fucking fungus, rumours spread. Our cams still gusted through the city. Some were intercepted by the antibodies the houses secreted, which came up like segmented predators. But when their investigations left them satisfied that the cams were no threat, they left them unmolested. The footage taught us more about our Hosts’ city than we had ever known: too late. And every little half-seen movement, everything we saw out there, the what-and-where of which we couldn’t identify or clarify, gave traction to stories about missing secrets, fifth columns, Staff self-exiled, old grudges.

In the farmlands, huge flocks of biorigging spawned in irregular harvests. Foods and tech came from those stretches by biotic ways. Addiction was chemical: there was a slow stream of it from the city to the kraals and the rural Ariekei. They began to neglect their charges and come to the city, for the sound they suddenly needed without ever having heard. Their deserted manors grew sick, wheezing and hungry. Herds of rigged equipment, medical tech and building tools, girdered and rhino-sized spinners of protein and polymer foundations, went feral.

When their shepherds reached the city there was no one to meet them. The country Ariekei saw their worst-afflicted compatriots lying by speakers and starving to death, waiting for the next sentence. Their bodies lay unhonoured. If the buildings around them were still healthy enough their dog-sized animalculae would break the corpses down: if not, the slower processes of internal rot would smear them gradually into the road.

Fights were common. Withdrawal and Ariekene need meant aggression. The afflicted would tear into things on sudden searches for EzRa’s Language. A less affected Ariekes, usually from the country, might frill its fanwing in formal pugnacity, but the more addicted had no time for traditional displays and would simply hurl themselves hooves and giftwings at their startled opponents. Once I saw footage of EzRa’s broadcast start in the middle of such a battle. The combatants slumped against each other immediately and coiled together as if in affection, still bleeding their blood.

“Things are getting worse again,” Da said. We were going to infect the entire planet.

“That’s not the only thing we have to contend with.” It was Bren.

He stood in the doorway. A suspiciously perfect pose, all framed. “Hello Avice Benner Cho,” he said.

I rose. I shook my head at him. “You prodigal bastard,” I said.

“Prodigal?” he said.

“Where have you been?”

“Prodigal extravagant?” he said. “Or penitent?” A little cautiously, he smiled at me. I didn’t quite smile at him for a minute, but then, fuck it, yes I did.

“HOW DID YOU get in here?” someone said, so newly promoted by circumstance that they added “Who are you?” to hisses of embarrassment. Ra shook Bren’s hand and tried to welcome him. Bren waved him away.

“It’s not just these Ariekene refugees we have to contend with,” Bren said. “Though they’ll certainly complicate matters.” He spoke with monotone authority. “There are other things.”

Of course he couldn’t speak Language since his doppel had died, but there were some Ariekei—you might sentimentally and misleadingly call them old friends—that came to his house and told him things.

“Do you think none of them want this to change?” Bren said.

“No, we know,” Mag said, but he continued.

“You think there are no Hosts who are horrified? They’re thinking through a fug, true, but some of them are still thinking. You know what they call EzRa? The god-drug.”

After a silence I said carefully, “That is a kenning.”

“No,” Bren said. He glanced around the room, gauging who knew that old term for the compound trope. “It’s not like a bone-house, Avice.” He thumped his chest, his bone-house. “It’s more straightforward. It’s just truth.”

“Huh,” someone said shakily, “that’s religion for you...”

“No it is not,” Bren said. “Gods are gods and drugs are drugs but here, here, there’s a city not only of the addicted but of... a sort of faithful.”

“They don’t have gods,” I said. “How... ?”

He interrupted me. “They’ve known about them ever since we got here and told them what they are and what they do. They couldn’t talk about voidcraft or trousers either, before we arrived, but they find ways now. And there are some Hosts who’ll do anything to stop this. That might not be much yet, maybe, until they can get themselves free enough to try to free themselves more. But if they do, well. They’ll end it however they can. You should think of all the ways a few determined Ariekei might try to... liberate... afflicted compatriots.”

He joined me again, in private, that night, in my rooms. He asked me where was my friend Ehrsul and I told him that I didn’t know. That was almost all I said that night. Bren himself didn’t have much to say, but he had come, and we sat together while he said it.

I LEFT THE CITY. Three times.

Seeing those immigrant Ariekei from the outlands gave us ideas. There were some which hadn’t yet left their homesteads but had started to yearn for EzRa’s pronouncements. We went to them.

Our craft had ventricles through which I could put my head and look down as we flew. It exuded air in its belly-bridge, pressurised enough that the bad atmosphere couldn’t push in. I took breaths, then put my head out to watch the ground.

A kilometre below, the demesnes of the Host city. Plateaus and cultivation and simple massive rocks, fractured, their fractures filled with black weedstuff. Meadows crossed with tracks and punctuated by habitations. More grown architecture: rooms suspended by gas-sacs watched us as we flew, with simple eyes.

Leaving Embassytown and then the city felt as dramatic as entering immer. It might have been beautiful. Swaying through fields, even now during the breakdown, farms ambled hugely after their keepers if they still had them, or alone. Symbionts cleaned their pelts. The farms would birth components or biomachines in wet cauls.

Orchards of lichen were crisscrossed with the gut-pipework that spanned out from the city, still looked after in places by tenacious Host tenders. A long way off were steppes where herds of semiwild factories ran, which twice each long year Ariekene scientist-gauchos would corral. We hoped to find a few of these cowboy bioriggers left, to trade their creatures’ offspring.

There was I; Henrych, who had been a stallholder and now had joined the new committees; Sarah, with just enough knowledge of science to be useful; BenTham the Ambassador. The Ambassador were unkempt, bewildered and resentful. Unlike several of their fellows, though, they had still enough decorum to ensure that they were exactly equally dishevelled.

We landed and from the hillside came the distress call of grass, as our vehicles began to graze. In our aeoli masks we gathered equipment, made camp, called in to Embassytown, established a timetable. Checked once more over the orders and the wish list. “I don’t think this tribe exchanges many reactor pups,” I said, down the line to home. “Talk to KelSey. They’re with the wetland cultivators, aren’t they? That’s where they’ll get them, along with some incinerators.” So on. We divided hunting duties between the various crews beyond the city.

Our spancarts were skittish, their foreparts stretched in rippling caterpillar motion. We stacked them full of datchips, all sound-files. Some were stolen, some made with Ez’s grudging consent, when this system had been formulated and mooted to them.

I was almost certainly not as calm as this telling would imply. I’d been looking down onto the surface of the country I was born in, grew up in, returned to, that was my home, and that, that view beyond Embassytown, had been impossible for me till then. So there was that, and there was what I was doing, and the stakes of it. I was looking into a season and a surface without cognates. I’d been into the out, but in homily