Embassytown

Language, that the Ambassadors and their friends were preparing a miab, would risk immer, to escape. We didn’t leak the truth because it seemed too tentative. When EzCal did emerge into our newly nightmared town, I realised another reason we had said nothing: for the performance of it. A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

I couldn’t avoid picking up information: when Cal was woken, when he was healed. Though I avoided what details I could, I knew before he and Ez emerged into the Embassy square that they would do so, and I was there ready. Everyone in Embassytown seemed to be there, in fact. There were even Kedis and Shur’asi. I saw Wyatt, flanked by security, to both guard and secure him. There were automa too, Turingware struggling, so some of them expressed inappropriate bonhomie. I couldn’t see Ehrsul. It was only with disappointment that I realised I’d been looking.

We were close enough to the borders of our shrunken town to hear the gusting of Ariekene attacks on the barriers, and the missiles and energies of repulses. Officers kept Embassytowners back from the Embassy’s entrance. It struck me that I must have chosen to cut myself off from what had been happening in the hospital so that I could experience this as nearly as possible a member of the crowd. I looked up at the other committee members, who were parting, and stepping forward was Cal, with Ez behind him.

“EzCal,” one of the official escort shouted, and Christ help me someone in the crowd took it up and it became, briefly, a chant.

Cal looked like something horrific, made worse in the moving glare of lights. His head was shaved, his scalp the palest part of his pale skin, the link on his neck shining. I think he was kept alert by some concoction of drugs: he moved in little insect bursts. His skull was crossed with dark sutures: big physical stitches, a crude technique, supposedly dictated by dwindling supplies of nanzymatic healers, but one that so exaggerated the spectacle I wondered how medically necessary it had really been. He stared into the crowd. He stared right at me, though I’m certain he didn’t see me.

Joel Rukowsi was Ez again. Physically he was unmarked, but of the two he seemed the less alive. Cal spoke to him harshly. I couldn’t hear the words. It was Ez who was the empathic, the receiver, who had to make this work.

“So I lost everything,” Cal said into the crowd at last. Amplifiers carried his voice and everyone was quiet. “I lost it all and I went down, into that lost place, and then when I realised that Embassytown needed me, I came back. When I realised it needed us...” And he paused and I didn’t breathe, but Ez stepped forward and said in a voice that was, unlike his face, strong, “... we came back.”

Applause. Ez looked down again. Cal licked his lips. Even the local birds all seemed to be in the plaza, watching.

“We came,” Cal said, “and let me show you...” and after another heart-stopping pause Ez muttered, “... what we’ll do.”

They looked at each other, and I could suddenly see an echo of what must have been hours of preparation. They watched each other’s eyes and something happened. I imagined the pulses of the implants, hot-synching them, pumping out into the universe the lie that they were the same.

Ez the Cut-speaker and Cal the Turn counted each other in and opened their mouths and spoke Language.

When we heard them, even we, humans, let out gasps.

I went away a time and now I’ve returned.

THE CITY WOKE. Even its dead parts shuddered. We all bloomed like flowers, too.

Through the wires below our streets, past the barracks and barricades, at the speed of electricity under brick and tarmacked roads empty of Terre and picked through now by Ariekei suddenly still, into the kilometres of rotting architecture, the house-beasts waiting for death, up and through the speakers. From scores of loudhailers came the voice of the new god-drug, of ez/cal, and the city came out of hermetic miserable withdrawal ez into a new high.

Thousands of eye-corals craned; fanwings that had been slack suddenly flapped rigid and strained to capture vibrations; mouths opened. Flights of collapsed chitin stairs raised in tentative display, suddenly stronger with the onrush of chemical fix that came with that new voice. I went away a time and now I’ve returned, and we heard the creak of reinflating skin, of flesh responding, metabolisms far faster than ours sucking on the junk energy it drew from the dissonance of EzCal’s Language. All the way to the horizon, the city, its zelles and its inhabitants, rose and found themselves wherever in their walking death they’d stumbled.

Ariekene towers and gas-raised dwellings woke over the edges of Embassytown, looked down at us, opened their ears and listened. The addicted city came out of its coma of need. Our guards and gunners shouted. They didn’t know what they were seeing. Their quarries, the oratees, were suddenly still and listening.

There was to be nothing more about Joel Rukowsi’s life, it was clear. This was Cal’s script, not Ez’s. In several different ways, varying the shape of the sentences so the Language wouldn’t lose its efficacy, he and Ez repeated that EzCal had come to speak. Embassytowners were crying. We knew we might live.

We would have to re-establish ways of communicating our needs to the Ariekei, and working out what we offered. Somewhere in that city now trying to rouse itself there must be those Hosts with which we had established understandings, which might now be able to take some kind of control again, with which we could deal. It wouldn’t be a healthy polity. A few in control of their addiction would rule over those not, compradors at our behest: a narcocracy of language. We’d have to be careful pushers of our product.

Bren was on the stairs, and I waved, pushed through the crowd to him. We kissed, believing we wouldn’t die. EzCal were silent. Elsewhere, out of my sight, hundreds of thousands of Ariekei stared at each other, high but coming lucid for the first time in a long time.

“Hosts!” we heard from the barriers. There were only a few minutes before they began to gather, to clear away their dead.

For one moment, simultaneously in every quarter, every Ariekes listening and their revivifying rooms stiffened again, in an aftershock of feeling. I saw it on the cam, later. It happened when, without looking at each other, according to I don’t know what impulse, Cal and Ez leaned forward and with flawless timing, spoke the staccato Cut-and-Turn Language word that meant yes.

Part Seven THE LANGUAGELESS

20

I WAS A TRADER AGAIN. I went with others in corvids to the country. Business. Now in this reign of EzCal, god-drug II, we could leave again.

MayBel was our speaker on this trip. They could say that name: .

In the weeks since I’d flown out last, the landscape had raggedly changed. By the jut of rocks there were skeletons, where biorigging had come to die. The meadows were torn up by the tracks of stampeding machines, the new routes of refugees into the city in search of the god-drug voice, and later refugees out, in that exodus we still didn’t understand. The city had been depleted, by more than the numbers of dead.

We came down where there were farmlands worked, newly, differently from before. A society was starting. It wasn’t strong. The farmers were addicts again, of a new drug, but it was better than being the mindless starvelings they had been. We had no choice but to be dealers.

We went with our datchips beyond the reach of the speakers. We found Ariekei who still thought EzRa was the ruler and voice of Embassytown, and had unaccountably been silent these past days. Despite MayBel’s