Embassytown

“These ones are Georgian or Roman, I gather,” one organiser told me. “They talk early Anglo, though.” Men and women bled of colour, in clumsy symbolism, fortified in a house and fighting grossly sick figures. Colour came back, and protagonists were in an edifice full of products, and sicker enemies than before relentlessly came for them. We read the story as ours, of course.

WE KNEW THE Ariekei would breach our defences. They entered the houses that edged our zone, found their ways to rear and side doors, large windows, to holes. Some came out of the front doors into our streets and tore apart what they found. Those with remnants of memory tried to get to the Embassy. They came at night. They were like monsters in the dark, like figures from children’s books.

There were other dangers: there were human bandits. A rumour circulated that one group of criminals included Kedis and Shur’asi, as well as Terre. There was no evidence. Still, when, by what was certainly human action, a Shur’asi was found dead by our main barricade, the excuse was whispered that it had been part of that predatory gang. They only died by violence or mishap, and for that race the death — every Shur’asi death — was an abomination as epic as the Fall.

Not all the Ariekene corpses we cleared were killed by us, nor by the random brutality of other afflicted Hosts. Some were destroyed with what seemed a more deliberate alien savagery.

“That’s those we saw,” Bren told me. “Without their fan-wings. We’re worrying about the addicts, but we need to think about them, too.”

“Where are YlSib?” I said.

“They’re not lunatics, you know,” he said. “There are ways of being in the city. Yl, Sib... and others. You know ambassading doesn’t always take.”

“That place has to close, Bren. Christ. Those people can’t be kept like that.”

“I know.”

I stayed the night with him, for the second time. We said even less than we had the first time, but that was really alright, as alright as it got that night. “Do you think there are languages made up of three voices?” I asked him at one point.

“It’s a big out,” he said. “Sure. And four, and five.”

I said, “And places where exots speak Anglo in ways that mess up human heads.”

We stood naked by his window, his arm over my shoulder and mine around his waist, and listened to fires, shouts, shattering.

BREN GOT A BUZZ early the next morning. He would not say from whom, to my anger. He raced us to the border. A tide of Ariekei were coming. They galloped at the barricades in a wave, an invasion organised with last gasps of sentience. I very much stress that I wish to hear the voice of EzRa please, the Ariekei shouted as they came to kill us. Is there a possibility that we could hear EzRa speak?

The guards were calling for backup. MagDa, our comrades and Staff came. With animal-guns fast-bred without ears, with rapidly machinofactured bullets, with hurled clubs and polymer crossbows firing quarrels made of reclaimed stair-rods, we staved the Hosts off. Ariekei burst, screaming their polite requests, we most sincerely ask. Zelles scuttled up our barriers and we shot them too. Kedis were with us. There were Shur’asi playing out electrified wires. I saw Simmon firing expertly with what had once been his off arm.

With only the tiniest organising the Ariekei would have taken us, but they were drugless and incompetent. They had to clamber over hillocks of their dead. Scavengers came: wild house antibodies. Our own birds tasted the air over the carnage and arced away again. My eyes were watering from acrid Ariekene innards. There was a commotion from side streets. Something was slamming into the Hosts. I shouted for Bren’s attention. It was a mass of those other, self-mutilated Ariekei. They’d come hidden among the others, a fifth column. Bren watched them without expression, while the rest of us gaped, as they dispersed our junkie attackers brutally.

“Bren was the first here,” Da said quietly to me. She looked over to where Mag spoke to him. “With you. He knew this would happen, didn’t he? How?”

I shook my head. “He knows people.”

“Do you?”

I wasn’t going to mention YlSib. Da was no fool: it wouldn’t have surprised me if she was aware of everything, including relevant names. “Come on,” I said.

“What do you know, Avice?”

I didn’t answer but I met her eye, to make sure I didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed; so if she could tell I was holding back, she knew it was because I was trying to show respect for something. I was buzzed right then, from an ID I didn’t recognise, sound only, no trid or flat. The voice was muffled beyond recognition.

“Say that again,” I shouted. “Who is this? Say that again.”

Whoever it was did and that time I heard. I held my breath and hoped I was wrong and put it to speaker, so Mag and Da and Bren could hear. But I was right. The words came one more time, much clearer.

“CalVin’s dead.”

ALL WE FOUND in their rooms was the detritus of drink and of sex. There was no answer on CalVin’s buzz. We went to clubs they’d been known to visit, where to my disgust a last fervent few were still trying to blot out the end of the world. They told us CalVin hadn’t been there for days. The last time, they’d been accompanied by some uninterested man.

Down to other bars, and nothing and still nothing. I knew abruptly who had been with CalVin. We took a route to where I’d once lived, where Scile had once lived, and to which now that I’d gone, he’d returned. My key still worked. Scile’s stuff was everywhere, the flat was all his now, but he was absent. There was a note from him, to me, on the bed that had once been ours. It had been opened already. I unfolded it just enough to read the line This is to say goodbye, and stopped.

CalVin were in another room. The message had been wrong: CalVin wasn’t dead. Vin was dead. He dangled. Cal was watching him move pendulum-precise. I saw another note, on another mattress.

Cal looked at me. God knows what he saw in my face right then. “I didn’t feel it,” he said. “I didn’t know. I...” He touched his neck, his link. “It was... but we turned it on again. I should have known. I didn’t know. How could... I didn’t know.”

He sounded bestial with loss. “How?” he shouted. “Who is this?” He threw out his hands at his dead doppel, his brother, impossibly alone dead.

Part Six NEW KINGS

17

I HELD SCILE'S letter for hours, and I don’t think I even knew it. It was I who ended up alone with Cal, after we’d taken him to the Embassy and given him drugs to calm him.

“Did you cut him down?” he said.

“We took care of him,” I said.

“Why are you here?” he said to me as others came and went.

“MagDa’ll be here in a minute,” I said, “they’re just organising some —”

“I didn’t mean...” He didn’t speak for seconds. “I wasn’t complaining, Avice. Vin’s gone... Why are you here with me?” Even now it was hard to acknowledge something we’d known for months, the fact of disparity. After a long time I just shrugged.

“I just didn’t know.” He spoke with wonder. “I had to... we separate sometimes now, we have to, a little bit.