Embassytown

them mind.

“We’ll clear them out, when we can,” Cal said. In the meantime the city was scattered fiefdoms, with each of which we tried to establish protocols. I found out something of their specifics—“that one’s run by a little coalition of the not-very dependent; that one’s too risky to go into right now; the Ariekes running that place there, around the minaret, it was a functionary before the fall”—from Bren. Bren learnt them from YlSib.

“MagDa won’t push you on it,” Bren said to me. “But...” Bren saw the expression on my face. “You can see what’s going on,” he said finally. “They’re not running things now, they’re not in a position to close the infirmary...”

“You think they would if they could?”

“I don’t know and just now I don’t care. Cal certainly won’t. You saw what happened when EzCal spoke. If MagDa needs to know anything you know, please tell them. We need them clued in. They’re smart, they must know the sort of source you’re getting information from, but they won’t ask. They have plans, I’m sure. They’ve been spending time in Southel’s lab. Have you seen them talking to her?”

It wasn’t as part of an official group, committee business, that I went back into the city, when I did. I went with Bren, to meet his friends again: YlSib, that secret rogue Ambassador.

OUR AIR-SHAPING was weak enough now that we had to wear aeoli within what had recently been Embassytown streets. So far as we could Bren and I were careful to avoid vespcams, though I knew if we were seen we’d only be a rumour among many. We stationed ourselves in the ruins. From a balcony in an apartment where children had lived (I trod over the debris of toys) we saw EzCal go again among crowds of Ariekei that listened and obeyed their instructions.

“Next time they’re going to head into the city,” said Sib. I hadn’t heard YlSib enter. “So...” Sib pointed out of the window at EzCal. “Language works differently with this one.”

“We should have called them OgMa, not EzCal” Bren said. We looked at him for an explanation. “A god,” he said, “who did sort of the same thing.”

YlSib wore biorigged pistols. Bren and I had cruder weapons. YlSib moved with vastly more facility than the halting citynauts with whom I’d made earlier forays. They didn’t hesitate on the way to where brickwork in ruins became biology. The air changed on our way. The way the currents went over me wasn’t like the wind in Embassytown. We were in a place full of new sounds. Small fauna claimed areas. Ariekei in the streets didn’t stop for us, though some raised eye-corals and stared. There were pools overhung by bladderwrackish polyps that dripped reactions into the liquid. I wondered if they were foundations, deliberate town planning.

I looked down an avenue of marrowy-trees to Embassytown. An Ariekes near us startled me, asked repeatedly in Language what we were doing. I raised my weapon but YlSib were speaking. I’m , they said. These are— and then they said something yl that wasn’t our names. They are coming with me. I’m going home. , YlSib said, and they put stress in their formulation by making it a personal. I, homegoer, was what they said, so I wondered if going home was a powerful thing to the Ariekei too.

“They know us,” said Yl. “These days some are too gone to remember, but if we meet any who can speak, we should be alright.” “Although,” Sib said, “I guess there might be new allegiances. Some of them might have...” “... reasons to not let us pass.”

In fact some Language we heard on that journey made little sense. Phrases spoken by wrecks of speakers out of nostalgia for meaning. YlSib led us finally to a shredded clearing. I gasped. There was a man waiting for us. He leaned below a column of metal that recurved over his head very like a streetlamp. He looked transplanted from an old flat image of a Terre town.

They nodded, muttered to Yl and Sib and Bren. They made sure I couldn’t hear them. The man reminded me of no one. He was nondescript and dark-skinned, in old clothes, an aeoli of a kind I didn’t recognise breathing into him. There was nothing I could have said about him. He left with YlSib and Bren came back to me.

“Who the fuck is that?” I said. “Is he cleaved?”

“No,” said Bren. He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe his brother’s dead by now, but I don’t think so. They just didn’t like each other very much.” Of course I knew this counterworld of exiles existed now, of misbehaving cleaved, Staff unstaffed, bad Ambassadors; but to see its doings astounded me. How had they kept going during the days of collapse, before god-drug II?

“Do you speak to any of the similes still?” Bren said.

“Jesus,” I said. “Why? Not really. I saw Darius at a bar, ages ago. We were both embarrassed. I mean Embassytown’s too small for me not to run into them sometimes, but it’s not as if we talk.”

“Do you know what they’re doing?”

“I don’t think there’s a ‘they’, Bren. It’s all... disbanded. After what happened. Maybe some of them still meet... But that scene was ruined ages ago. After Hasser. Can you imagine now? No one cares about them anymore, including their speakers. Language...” I laughed. “It isn’t what it used to be.”

YlSib returned, scraping decaying city-stuff off their clothes. “That’s true,” Bren said. “But it’s not true that no one cares anymore. You don’t know where we’re going: your company’s been requested.”

“What?” I had not thought that this infiltration was about me, that I was a task to be fulfilled. YlSib led me to a basement-analogue and ushered me in, into the biolit presence of Ariekei. “Avice Benner Cho,” YlSib said. They spoke my names perfectly simultaneously, at the same pitch, so though it was two voices it sounded to me like one.

The room smelt of Ariekei. There were several. They were making noises, speech and mutterings of thought. One approached me out of the half-dark and spoke a greeting. YlSib told me its name. I looked at its fanwing.

“Christ,” I said. “We’ve met.”

It had been a close companion of Surl Tesh-echer, , surl the best liar in Ariekei history. It was the Ariekes I’d once called Spanish Dancer. “Does it remember... ?”

“Of course it remembers, Avice,” Bren said. “Why do you think you’re here?”

BREN AND YLSIB gave to the gathered Ariekei a clutch of datchips. They took them quickly, their limbs and digits betraying agitation. “Do EzCal know you’re recording them?” I said.

“I hope not,” Bren said. “You’ve seen? They’re trying to do what Ez did when he was part of EzRa—make sure we can’t build up a stock of recordings to make them redundant.”

“But you have.”

“These are just their public recitations,” he said. “They can’t stop people tapping those, and why would they? They think because it’s been said, because it’s out there, the Hosts’ve heard it, and it’s lost its thing.”

I looked one by one around the other Ariekei there. There were other patterns on other fanwings I thought I had seen before. “Some of these were in Surl Tesh-echer’s group as well,” I said. I looked at Bren. “They were its friends.”

“Yes,” Bren said.

“What they can do is lie,” Bren said. “Not that any of them’s anything like as virtuoso as Surl Tesh-echer was. It was...” He shrugged. “A harbinger. On the edge of something.”

“Your husband was right,” YlSib said. “To stop it. In his terms he was right. It was changing everything.” There was a silence. “This lot have had to carry on without it since. It’s slow.” “They do what they can.”

Every Ariekes took a datchip, each to a different part of the room. Each in similar elegant motion draped its fanwing over it. Their membranes spread. They withdrew, hunched into sculptures, made the room a drug-house. With the volume very low, they ran the sounds. Responded instantly as I watched, trembling, judders of bio- ecstasy. I could see lights of speakers through taut fanwing skin, hear the muffled chirruping of audio: the soul of EzCal, or its spurious fabricated semblance.

“How the hell can those recordings still work?” I whispered. “They’ve already been heard.”

“Not by them,” Bren said. “They wait. Bloody willpower. They fold up their wings when they know EzCal’s going to speak. They were already doing it with EzRa. They make themselves hold out. They’re trying to go longer and longer without.”