hinted at any secrets.
“We’re on the edge,” I said to my colleagues. “Of the immer. They’re exploring. Embassytown was going to be a way station.”
“All the biorigging and so on,” Wyatt said. “It’s nice.” He shrugged. “Nice to have. But Avice Benner Cho’s right. You’ve had more attention than a little place like this deserves.”
None of us looked at Mag or Da. We all knew now what several of us had suspected before, that their lover Ra had been an agent, had betrayed them, and us. It was no surprise he’d had an agenda, but that it was something so inimical to Embassytown shocked me. And that Ra, in the days of crisis when everything had changed, had not said. Though, I didn’t know what MagDa knew.
I missed the immer. The way the mess and mass of it gushed by ships on their way to impossibly far parts of the everyday universe, immersed in that infinitely older unplace. I imagined being an explorer on pioneering ships built for ruggedness, buffeted by currents through dangerous parts, through schools of immer-stuff sharks, repelling random or deliberate attack. I didn’t believe in the nobility of the explorer, but the thought, the project, compelled me.
“They’d have to build fuelling stations,” I said. “And it’s a hard place to emerge: they’d have to put more markers in place.” Buoys that jutted half in immer, half in the quotidian void, with lights and immer-analogues of lights to guide incomers. The night over Embassytown was to have glimmered with more than just Wreck. It would have been strung with little colours. And while ships stored up on fuel, supplies, chemicals for life systems, and uploaded the newest dat and immerware, Embassytown would be where crews waited and played. “They want to make us a port town,” I said.
Wyatt said, “Last port before the dark.”
Embassytown might come to be a kilometres-wide sprawl of bordellos, drink, and all the other vices of travellers. I’d been to many such places in the out. Then we might have had our own street children, harvesting food and mutating the rubbish on town dumps. It wouldn’t be inevitable. There are ways of providing port services without the collapse of all the civic. I had been to more salubrious stopover cities. But it would have been a struggle.
To control a source of beautiful half-living technology, of curios, of precious metals in near-unique molecular configurations might have been desirable. To control the last outpost, a jumping-off to an expanding frontier, was non-negotiable.
“What’s out there?” I said. Wyatt shook his head.
“I don’t know. You’d know better than me, immerser, and you don’t know at all. But something. There’s always something.” There was always something in the immer. “Why’s there a pharos here?” he said. “You don’t put a lighthouse where no one’s going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they
“They’ll come,” MagDa said. “Bremen.” “To see how they’re doing.” “Ez and Ra, I mean. To check on them.” They looked at each other. “We might not have so long to wait.” “As we’d thought.”
“More than five bloody days is too long, now,” someone said. “We’re at the end.”
“Yes but...”
“What if we—”
Wyatt was a clever man who had misplayed his hand, and was trying to salvage something: his life, at least. He’d told us everything, and not out of despair as it might seem, but as a gamble, a strategy. We looked at the glass that separated us from Ez. Ez raised his eyes to ours, to all of ours, as if he knew we stared.
GROUPS OF ARIEKEI were on their rooftops, between dead buildings, roaming in armed gangs: all strategies to protect themselves from the mutilated rampagers. Ariekei dead were everywhere, and here and there the remnants of Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Terre, dragged by Ariekene murderers for reasons beyond our reason. Packs of zelles wandered, hungry for food and EzRa’s speech, deserted by their erstwhile owners and gone incompetently feral.
It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition, so not war at all really but something more pathological. In each holdout, a few Ariekei tried to be the things they remembered. But they could concentrate only for hours at a time, before the equivalents of delirium tremens overtook them. Their companions would whisper words they’d heard EzRa say to whichever of their company was succumbing, trying to imitate the Ambassador’s timbre. They were just words, just clauses. Sometimes those convulsing would return to half-mindfulness: enough to remember that something needed rebuilding.
Between those remnant settlements were the truly mindless that didn’t even know that they shook when they did, and only hunted for food and for the voice of EzRa, and were hunted by each other. The self-mutilated, though, were suddenly rarer. I wondered if they were dying.
In places we had to haul our barriers back, abandon sections of Embassytown to the oratees. At the same time, there was an unexpected exodus of Hosts — we still called them that, sometimes, in unpleasant humour — from the city. Ariekei in small but growing numbers found the mouths and orifices where industrial guts linked the city to the meadows of biorigging and wild country. They followed them out.
“Do they think they’ll find EzRa out there?” We didn’t know where they were going, or why. I thought perhaps they simply couldn’t bear to live any more in a slaughterhouse of architecture, amid what had been their compatriots. Perhaps their need for quiet deaths was stronger than their need for EzRa’s voice. I tried not to experience too much relief, or even hope, at that notion, at the possibility that more would leave; but, cautiously, I felt some.
WE EXHUMED Ra. I didn’t see it.
We thanked Christ that he’d not been cremated or rendered biomass. It was MagDa who’d saved his body: he’d had no faith, but his family’s listed tradition was Unitarian Shalomic, which abjured those usual local methods, and in an effort at respect MagDa had had him interred in a small graveyard for those of such heresies.
We waited like parents-to-be while doctors worked with the schematics Wyatt provided. They removed from Ra’s dead head the implant, the hidden booster of his ordinary-seeming link. It was the size of my thumb, sheathed in organics, though it was all Terretech. It made me wonder if, had the Bremeni designers used Ariekene biorigging, the implants themselves would have become infected like the Hosts, and the thing that let Ez and Ra be EzRa would have become hooked on their voice. What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.
THE COMMITTEE dragooned scientists from wherever they still worked: the stumps of hospitals; rogue- ministering in the streets; of course from the infirmary. We begged and forced others to start work again. Southel, our scientific overseer, organised the researches. They moved fast.
I believe Joel Rukowsi, Ez, thought himself a consummate game-player. He thought how broken he looked was a front, I think. We asked him why he’d said nothing about his hidden, embedded technology, why he’d have gone to his death with the rest of us rather than do something that might keep us all alive. He implied some hidden agenda but I don’t think he had an answer. He was just eaten by his own secrets.
He didn’t understand the mechanisms, could only truculently describe how it had worked for him. He looked at the insert we had dug out of Ra, warm in my hand.
“I don’t feel anything,” he said. “I just knew... how he was feeling, what to say. I don’t know if it was that thing made it easier, or what.”
The researchers had teased apart the filigrees that enmeshed it into Ra’s mind with disentangler techzymes. Its nanotendrils dangled from it like thin hair, twitched in my hand in vain search for neuro-matter. It mimicked the theta, beta, alpha, delta and other waves detected from its companion piece in Joel Rukowsi, coordinated the two feeds into impossible phase. Whatever the brain-states, the output would seem shared.
