Embassytown

“It’s an amp, too,” Southel told us. “A stimulant. Pumps the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Emp centres.” She took the thing away and learnt it, tried to uncover what it was and did, to take it apart and build another. MagDa spent hours with her, focused her energies on the project.

“They’re up to something,” Bren said to me. “MagDa. You can see they’ve had an idea.”

Ez never said he’d help us, but we didn’t give him any choice, and his only resistance lay in sulking. He would obey us.

“Will you do it?” I said to Bren that night. I spoke quietly. He looked away. It was at these times that I felt we could speak, when he was naked and I watched the night lights of the city now made carnival with biofires glaze him through his windows, his aging athlete’s body.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’m too old, too stuck. I don’t even think I could. I know there aren’t many choices. I wouldn’t be any good at it: I’d say the wrong thing the wrong way. Whoever does this needs very very much to want to live, and I don’t, enough. Don’t be offended. I’ve no death wish but nor do I have the necessary... verve.

“Yes, I know. Ez is Cut, it has to be a Turn-speaker. Well, we can always go to the Ambassadors and find someone desperate enough to cut themselves off from their doppel. That might not be so hard now. I’ll lay you money...” He laughed at that, at how silly money had become. “I’ll bet there are some new cleaved for us to pick from. And some’ll be Turn. But you know, anyway, who we’re going to choose.” He turned to me. “It has to be Cal.”

Neither of us spoke. I didn’t even look at him.

“What do we know about Ez and Ra? They weren’t doppels. But maybe what they did share was important. Hate. We’re not training a new Ambassador, we’re distilling a drug. We have to replicate every ingredient we know about. We need the Turn to hate the Cut. A voice tearing itself apart. Alright, Ez came and ruined the world. So, sure, why wouldn’t the Ambassadors hate him? Why wouldn’t I?” He smiled at me, beautifully. “But I’m tired of this place and I don’t hate Joel Rukowsi enough, Avice. We need someone who does. Cal hasn’t just lost his world, he lost his doppel. He hates Ez enough. Me, I’d be weak tea. My question is, do you think Cal knows he’ll do it, yet?”

Probably, I thought. He must know what his duty would be: to become symbiont with the man who had destroyed his history, future and brother.

BEFORE HE WENT into surgery the committee gathered for what we all knew was a valedictory-in-case. Cal was like some foul-tempered birthday boy. He sought me out.

“Here,” he said. He was right up in my face, and I stepped back and tried to say something neutral, but he was shoving something at me. “You should... have this,” he said. Sometimes you could hear him pause like that, waiting for Vin to finish a clause. He gave me the letter Vin had left. “You’ve read it,” he said. “You know what you meant to him. This is yours, not mine.” Sort of to punish him for various things I didn’t shrink back but actually took it.

“What the hell were you doing with Scile, all that time?” I said.

“You’re asking about this now?”

“Not back then,” I said, coldly. Folded my arms. “Not at the Festival of Lies. I know perfectly well what you did then, Cal.”

“You... have no idea...” he said slowly, “why we did what we... had to—”

“Oh Pharotekton spare me,” I interrupted in a rush. “Because I think I have in fact a pretty solid fucking idea why—if you don’t know what’s happening to Language how do you know what’ll happen to Ambassadors, huh?—But in point of fact even if that’s not your whole story I do not care. I don’t mean then, I mean now. Since all this started. Surl Tesh-echer’s long gone, but you were spending time with Scile since EzRa arrived. And everything went... What’ve you been doing? You and, and Vin?”

“Scile’s always full of plans,” he said. “We did a lot of planning. He and I. Vin... got something else out of it, I think.” He regarded me. It was when he’d read Scile’s note that Vin had taken his own life. Irrespective of what Scile was in himself, what he wanted, Vin had found a community with him—of some grief or loss or something. A fraternity of those who’d once loved me, or still did? My stomach pitched.

WHILE CAL was under anaesthetic, Ez began to panic and insist that he wouldn’t do anything, that he wouldn’t help us, that he couldn’t, that it wouldn’t work. I heard from one of the guards how MagDa had arrived in the middle of his little meltdown. Mag had stood by the door while Da walked over to where Ez was sitting, and leaned over and punched him in the face. Her knuckles split.

She’d said “Hold him,” to the guards, and brought her bust-up fist down on him again. He’d shouted and wriggled, his head cracking side to side. Joel had stared up at Mag and Da in the utterest astonishment, bloodily whooping with pain. Mag had said to him in a quite flat and calm voice, “In fact you will speak Language with Cal. You’ll learn how, and you’ll do it fast. And you won’t disobey me or any other Staff or committee members again.”

I wasn’t there but that’s how I was told it happened.

19

THE STRATEGYLESS onslaughts on our barricades continued. Our new town edges smelled bad, of Ariekene death. Our bricks rubbled around Host corpses. Our biorigged weapons were hungry and dying. Our Terretech ones were failing. Within days we’d be fighting hand-to-giftwing.

It was the usual siege-stuff that would finish us: the ending of resources. No food came through the dedicated loops of colon that linked Embassytown to our subcontracted farms, now, and our stores were hardly infinite. We had no power from the Ariekene plants, and our own backups would fail.

I’d never been able to convince myself that there was no harm to it, but I couldn’t stop nostalgia. Just then, looking down streets with angles not as we’d have built them, which terminated or twisted in ways that still seemed almost playfully alien, toying with our teleologies, there was no way I couldn’t remember when I’d stared down them in my early life and systematically populated that out-of-sight city with every kind of child’s impossibility and story. From there followed a quick run-through of everything. Learning, sex, friends, work. I’d never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn’t see how that wasn’t cowardice, but not only did I not regret the out, but nor, suddenly, did I the return. Nor even Scile. When I unhitched my attention and let it wander down out-of- reach streets—which have been clocked before as yantras for reminiscence—it wasn’t that I thought well of my husband; it was that in those moments I remembered what of him I’d loved.

I was spare with all that, rationed it. We tended our aeoli. The poor things had been relocated, their fleshly tethers cut and cauterised, with as little trauma as possible, but they were suffering. We had no Terretech that could replace them, and our air-gardeners frantically protected the biomes of them and their companion things, which shaped currents, sustained our rough air dome. They strived to keep them safe, unhearing, charged by unaddictable technologies, as protected as possible from cross-contamination, but despite all efforts we knew we might not be able to keep our breath-machines from addiction or sickness, and no Host savants would help us now.

As the aeoli wheezed, so would we, and the Ariekei would breach our defences and walk in. When they’d finished with us we would lie with the dead’s traditional lassitude, and the Ariekei would prod us and ask us forlornly to speak like EzRa. Either they would all die, then, or new generations would be born and start their culture again. They would perhaps construct rituals around our and their parents’ bones.

These were the bad dreams we were having. It was into this landscape that god-drug EzCal arrived.

I’D LEFT BREN and MagDa and others to the task of bullying and nurturing our last hope. I’d preferred to oversee other duties, the movement of supplies and weaponry. Despite knowing that Cal was waking, that he was being reintroduced to Ez, that they were making their first attempts, that they were sitting the Stadt test, that the results were being calculated, I didn’t ask what was happening. I even avoided Bren.

Rumours spread that something was being made, that an autom had been perfected that could speak