Embassytown

fashion, my own planet was the most alien place I’d seen.

Things like crossbred anemones and moths froze as we passed, waved sensory limbs behind us. Our cart rutted toward settlements and animals like rags of paper flew in the hot sky. The farmstead at the end of knotted man-thick tributaries of the pipework was as restless as most architecture. A squirming tower laid young machinery in eggs. The paper-shred birds picked parasites from it. Its keepers started when they saw us, then galloped for our company. The farm lowed.

So far out, the addiction seemed weaker or different. BenTham could communicate our desires and understand theirs. They knew that we might have something they could hear, and they clamoured for that, unsatisfied by the degraded remnants of fix that backwashed down the arteries from the city whenever EzRa spoke, or what they half-heard from the nearest speakers, kilometres away, or what previous barterers had offered.

We showed our wares, voila , like a peddler in the hills in old books. I played a datchip, and from it, in Language, EzRa said, When my father died I was sad but there was a freedom in it too. The Hosts reared and said something. “They’ve got this one,” BenTham said. They’d played it many times, and it had no more effect: they at last heard it for its content, and they didn’t care about Ez’s father.

We offered other bits from his history, cliche?s of diplomacy, idle thoughts, weather reports. We gave them for free. We are very happy about the increased opportunities for technical assistance, and tempted them with the first few phonemes of I broke my leg when I fell out of a tree.

“They’re asking if we have the one about unacceptable levels of wastage in the refinement industry,” Ben or Tham said. “They heard about it from neighbours.”

Husbanding carefully, we gave them enough to buy the biorigging we needed, and some expertise, some explanations. Doing so we spread the addiction, too: we knew that. We brought out pure product, EzRa speech, and these as yet only half-affected outlanders would succumb.

I made a similar journey twice more after that first time. Soon afterwards, another of our buoyant dirigible beasts didn’t return.

When at last our cams found it they reeled back to us footage and trid of it dead and strewn in burnt-out flesh and a slick of guts across the countryside. There drowned in it and shattered, all dead, were our people. Ambassador; navigator; technician; Staff.

I’d known Ambassador LeNa slightly, one of the crewmembers well. I held my mouth closed with my hands as we watched. We were all affected. We fetched back the bodies and honoured them as well as we could with new ceremonies. Our crews searched the mouldering wreckage.

“The ship wasn’t sick, I don’t think,” our investigator told us in committee. “I don’t know what happened.”

IN EMBASSYTOWN we did our best to stand in the way of warlordism, but we small band of ersatz organisers could only slow a degeneration toward that kind of rule. More Ambassadors were joining us, terrified into organisation, inspired by MagDa. Others of course remained useless. Two more killed themselves. Some deactivated their links.

Ez seemed... not calmer perhaps, but more broken, I thought, when I chaperoned him again. Delivering him finally to Ra, though, they argued even more viciously than before. “I can make things bad for you,” Ez kept shouting. “There are things I could say.”

When we went into the city, we had to pass the corpses of houses and Hosts. The death breakdown of biorigging designed and bred to be immortal contaminated the air with unexpected fumes. We heard more Ariekei fighting around speakers. Some of their dead had died from the violence of the desperate; some, those without enough of the new sustenance they needed, just died; and in some places there were more organised brutalities, cadres exerting new kinds of control. The living grabbed what datchips we gave them: these were rewards for these new tough local organisers, in crude concert with which we were just managing to maintain a tenuous system.

One evening as we returned to Embassytown, I lagged behind my colleagues, shaking the mulch of rotting bridges from my boots. I looked back into the Ariekene city, and I saw two human women looking at me.

They were only there a second. They stood one to either side of an alley mouth, metres away, looking at me gravely, and then they were gone. I couldn’t have described them well, probably not even recognised them again, but I knew that they had had the same face.

IT WAS ONLY LATER, when things went wrong all over again and these new routines were made bullshit, that I realised I’d come to expect us to muddle through until the ship came and flew us all away.

One scheduled evening we could find neither Ez nor Ra at the time of their broadcast. Neither would answer our buzzes. That was like Ez, but it wasn’t like Ra.

Ez was in none of his preferred places. We searched the dangerous corridors of the Embassy: no one had seen him. We tried to buzz Mag or Da, who were often with Ra, but they wouldn’t answer either.

We found the four of them in MagDa’s new rooms, high in the Embassy. There were several of us, constables and new Staff like me. When we turned onto a last stretch of hallway we saw a figure huddled by the apartment door. We levelled our gun-things but she didn’t move.

It was Da. As I approached I thought she was dead. But then she looked up at us, with despair.

Into the rooms and to a dreadful scene. Still as a diorama. Mag on the bed, in the same precise pose as Da outside, the wall between them. She looked up at us too, and back at the dead man on the bed with her. It was Ra, quite ruined with blood. A handle emerged from his chest, like a lever.

Ez sat a way off, rubbing his head and face, smearing blood on himself, blubbing. “... I really didn’t, it wasn’t, oh, God, it was, look, I, I’m so, it...” he said, and so on. When he saw us, among other emotions I swear I saw shame broader than for one dead man: he knew what he’d done to all of us. My hand kept twitching as if I’d take the thing out of Ra.

Later we found out that at first the argument had been, ostensibly, about MagDa. That was the marshalling of unconvincing, rote things to express other deeper terrors and resentments. The surface specifics didn’t really matter. This wasn’t about whatever they shouted as they fumbled and implements turned deadly.

We weren’t very used to murder. It wasn’t me who closed Ra’s eyes but it was me who held Mag’s hand and led her away. There wasn’t much time to just grieve: the ramifications of the situation were obvious. I was already thinking of the tiny stock we had of EzRa prerecorded on datchip.

When I returned the others were hauling Ez away and taking Da to join her doppel. I secured the scene. I was alone for some minutes with Ra’s corpse.

“Did you have to?” I said. I think I whispered out loud. I was trying hard to keep myself together and I succeeded. “Couldn’t you have backed down?” I put my hand on Ra’s face. I looked at him and shook my head and knew that Embassytown and I and all the Embassytowners would die.

Part Five NOTES

14

WE HID THE DEATH for days. We were miserable with secrecy. There’d be panic when Embassytown knew. I couldn’t convince myself panic in three days’ time would be much worse than panic now: still we hid it, like a reflex.

We had only a few recordings of EzRa. Ez had been careful. Once we risked repeating a speech that the Ariekei had heard before, but the footage we saw of consternation, the fights we spurred among outraged listeners,