Embassytown

And... I was just... He and Scile were working, I thought, and...”

He put his own note, from his doppel, on the bed. He let me pick it up. People brought food and murmured in sympathy: CalVin had collapsed fast into selfishness, as others fought to fix the world, but Cal, and CalVin, had been central enough beforetimes to retain something. CalVin had been a leading Ambassador. Tipped to head the Embassy when JoaQuin retired. For many of the committee, their failure hadn’t been a failing but a sickness, and this was its dreadful result. I unfolded Vin’s message.

I’m not like you. Forgive me.

Tell her something from me.

Please forgive me. I’m not so strong. I’ve had enough.

Perhaps I’d expected or hoped for something like that second line.

“You see my orders,” Cal said. “So what shall I tell you?” And though he tried to make it unpleasant, I couldn’t bear the break in his voice. I looked at the other paper, Scile’s letter. “I think it was... Vin found that just before...” Cal said. I hadn’t heard MagDa and Bren come in. I realised they were there when Cal said something like, “Avice Benner Cho and I are just comparing our valedictories.”

Dearest Avice, I read.

Dearest Avice,

This is to say goodbye. I am walking. Out. I hope you can forgive me for this but I cannot stay, I will not do life here anymore —

And then I stopped, refolded the thing. Even Cal looked at me with a bit of sympathy.

“He was something, once,” I said. “I won’t indulge this.” This isn’t the man I married, I could have said, and I shocked them by laughing coldly. I pictured the visionary enthusiast I’d loved traipsing through Embassytown to find a place to end himself. I wondered when we would find him.

MagDa took the note from me. Da read it, handed it to Mag.

“You should read this,” Da said.

“I’m not going to read it,” I said.

“It explains things. His... theories...”

“Jesus fucking Christ Pharotekton, MagDa, I’m not going to read it.” I stared them down. “He took the Oates Road. He’s gone. I don’t care about his fucking theologies. I can tell you what it says. Language is the language of God. The Ariekei are angels. Scile’s their messenger, maybe. And now it’s the fall. Our lies corrupt them?”

Bren’s expression was fixed. MagDa shifted and couldn’t deny the accuracy of what I said.

“You think you’re the only one suffering?” they said. “Get over yourself and do it now, Avice.” “It was when he read this” — Mag or Da shook Scile’s letter — “that Vin did himself in, do you realise that?”

“What were they doing?” I said. “What was Vin thinking? So does Scile say what... ?” I regretted asking.

“Just that he can’t bear it here anymore,” Bren said. “So he’s gone. And the reasons why. The ones you said.”

THE FANWINGLESS, self-mutilated Ariekei were murdering more of their neighbours. Bren sent vespcams searching. He followed vague directions I was sure came from YlSib and other contacts. We saw the deafened Ariekei’s raids, had camswarms enter the corpses of houses and the holes where dwellings had uprooted or sublimed. I didn’t know what we were searching for. He’d given us no idea of which direction he’d walked away to die, and I repeatedly imagined the lenses finding Scile’s body. They did not.

Where there was the new breed without their fanwings, they were bunkered down in ruins, touching each other’s skins, and pointing. If they caught our cams they destroyed them. They hunted the oratees.

There were Ariekei not so far-gone as the addict-living-dead, nor so enraged as the marauders: in biorigging nurseries or their skeletons, they talked frantically in Language so fast Bren found it hard to follow. “I’ve not heard talk like that,” he said. “Things are changing.”

They were trying to live. They shouted for EzRa’s voice, and built encampments around the speakers that had been silent for days now. They cleaned them like totems. They tended what few young survived, and protected the post-sentient oldsters, also addicted, though they didn’t know it. We saw a stand-off between a tiny group of these at least residually civilised, and the walking ruins, who looked at the mindless elders and made mouth-moves of hunger.

On my own I watched other things. Grubbing through border-cam footage from the night we found Vin — no one knew I was doing it — I found at last a few seconds of my husband, on his walk, out of Embassytown. One more change of shot after abrupt change, and I was watching him descending one of our lower barricades.

He glanced up, at what must have been another cam, the stream from which I couldn’t find, so I never saw his expression full-on. I could tell it was Scile, though. He went, not walking slowly nor with obvious depression. He walked into the dangerous street like someone exploring, in those seconds I saw, before the signal stuttered, and there was just the street and he was gone.

DURING THE WEEKS of his incarceration, Wyatt, Bremen’s redundant man, had repeatedly demanded to talk to us. At first, in a nebulous sense of due process, the committee had agreed. All he’d done was shout in panicked bullying, denounced us. We stopped coming.

Some people speculated that he had managed to send an emergency flare to Bremen: even if he had, and even if it was well programmed, it would be months before it reached them, and months again until they sent any response through the immer. Too late for us to be saved, even as mutineers.

I didn’t think much about it when MagDa first told me Wyatt was demanding to see us again. We’d been keeping him in solitary, in case of those imagined other Bremen agents in Embassytown to whom he might give orders. “He’s finally heard about Ra,” Mag said. “He knows he’s dead.” Incommunicado or not, I was surprised it had taken so long for word to get to him. “You should hear this, actually.” We watched the feed from Wyatt’s cell.

“Listen to me!” He addressed the cameras carefully. “I can stop this. Listen! How long has Ra been dead, you idiots? How can I help if you won’t tell me what’s happening? Bring me to Ez. You want to rule, you can rule, be a republic, I don’t care, I don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want, but if you want there to be an Embassytown at all then for God’s sake let me out of here. I can stop this. You have to take me to Ez.”

We’d seen him wheedling, and blustering, but this was new.

At our perimeter, oratees and their Ariekei enemies came at us incessantly. At the start of what looked like our last defence campaign, MagDa, Bren, the best of the committee and I went to see Wyatt.

EMBASSYTOWN JAIL was still staffed by a few guards who, out of helplessness as much as duty, didn’t disappear. Wyatt had refused to explain anything to us until we took him with us — under guard — to see Ez. We watched the half-Ambassador in his cell, in a dirty prison uniform. “What did you think?” Wyatt muttered. He was speaking to us while he stared at Ez. “How did you think that worked?” he said. He nodded and added, “Hello, Avice.”

“Wyatt,” I said. I didn’t know why he singled me out.

“Two strangers, two friends, just so bloody happened to get a score like that on the Stadt Empathy test? Christ Uploaded, are you stupid?” He shook his head and held up his hands in apology — he wasn’t trying to fight. “Listen. This didn’t just happen: this was done. Understand?” He pointed at Ez. “Scan that bastard’s head.”

His insinuation was that whatever he wanted to explain might change things, might give us a fingerhold of hope. If that was true, Ez must have known it too, but had done and said nothing. He’d pissed away even his own hope.

“Scan it,” Wyatt said. “You’ll see. He was made.” Made by Bremen. “My eyes only,” Wyatt said. “You might still be able to get the orders off my datspace, if you haven’t destroyed it. ‘Ez.’ Operative Joel Rukowsi. I’ll give you the passes.”