“You think it’s safe for us to carry on like this?”
“And, among other things,” Bren said, sounding, if I’m honest, disappointed, “even if it did work, you saw what happened to the Ariekei when EzRa ended, without their... dose. So what about when the relief gets here? When we leave?” He indicated Spanish Dancer. “What happens then, to them?”
ANOTHER OF OUR FLYERS disappeared. It had been doing rounds of farmsteads close to the city, as per EzCal’s orders, asking for—insisting on—what we needed: it wouldn’t be hard for us to dismantle the speakers if what we required wasn’t forthcoming, and the Ariekene farmers knew that. The coms broke off and weren’t re- established. We released vespcams.
Squads were subduing the last independent zones on isolated floors of the Embassy, where squatter-chiefs and their groups had refused amnesty. I was out at a barricade, a mass of broken furniture, odds and sods of houses, unneeded machines; but coagulated here, unusually, not with plastone but a quick-setting polymer, a resin poured all over and set hard as brick and glass-clear. The detritus was visible, like rubbish floating in water, frozen in a moment. We weren’t at war anymore, and machines were cutting a V-trench walkway through the barrier, an excised wedge with perfect flat faces through the tough transparency and the crap within. The pass’s edges were randomly punctuated with sectioned debris.
I was with Simmon. We were watching the gusting staticky visions of vespcams on his handscreen. “What’s that?” I said. It was the lost corvid. It was dead. The ground around it was scorched. There were heaps that might be human bodies.
WE CAME FAST and armed over the wild, over paths made by Ariekei and their animals and zelles, perhaps by wild outsider humans, exiles from Embassytown, in outland farms. We hadn’t established contact with all of them. I was surprised by a brief and strong sense of loss for floaking, of all things. I tried to tell myself that this, what I was doing, was heir to that tough going-with-the-flow, but I was hardly taken in.
The airship was spread across the ground. We descended into a terrible aftermath. Eventually we went to work. The closest thing we had to a specialist took samples from what might be bite-marks or burn-marks on all the corpses. They were everywhere.
“Oh God,” said our investigator. There was Lo, of Ambassador LoGan. His chest was caved and cauterised. “That’s not a crash injury. That’s
Vizier Jaques was there, and the edge of his wound, his missing arm, was neither shorn clear nor burned, but a rip from which he’d bled out. He’d died in excruciation, it looked like, scrabbling for his flung-away limb. The microbes the group had brought inside them had started the job of decay, and the Ariekene landscape in which they worked made for chemical oddness, so the rot wasn’t like rot in Embassytown.
Everyone was dead. The expedition had included a rare Kedis functionary. A mature hermale I hadn’t known. “Oh Jesus, it’s Gorrin,” someone said. “The Kedis are going to be...”
We went slowly from body to body, putting off each as long as we could. The wind was cold as we picked through the remnants of our friends. We tried to gather them: some fell apart; others we wrapped to take home.
“Look.” We were trying to reconstruct what had happened, following the scraped earth, reading it, it and the dead become hieroglyphs. “This was brought down.” A hot toothed missile had burst into the flyer’s side.
“There are no predators like that...” someone started to say.
“But it came down slow enough for them to get out.” That was me. “They came out and then they were... they were hit outside.”
We found remnants of biorigging eggs, from a recent barter trip, smears of yolk and foetal machines. The crew had been returning. The aeoli we wore made our own voices loud in our ears, as if each of us was alone. Carrying our dead we flew with carronades ready, looking for the ranch where our compatriots had been. It was announced by smoke. Outlying dwellings were ruined, the nurseries mostly gone. There was one hutch that seemed still just alive, and in distress, but we had no idea how to provide it a coup de gra?ce, and could only try to ignore its pain.
There were no Ariekene dead. The kraal was empty. Dust-coloured animals ran away, and our arrival sent up rag-paper scavengers, flocks that moved like thinking smoke.
Someone fired and we all dived for the floor shouting. The gun howled: it was of one of Embassytown’s treasures, an old banshee-tech gun cobbled into a form humans could use. The officer had shot it at nothing—a movement, a scuttling of tiny fauna. Ariekene young had been abandoned, and floated in a broth of dead. There were bodies of their elders. Hoofprints were everywhere. We set cams to follow what we thought might be trails.
Body-thick arteries emerged from the farm, entangled in the earth and the tube that went over the rockscape toward the city. The pipeline was burst. The matter of it was spewed by a sabotage blast, the ground a quag of dirt and amniotic fluids.
“What’s this?”
In a hollow were organic discards. Frameworks like splayed fish ribs; skin in webbing between tines; a nest of intricate bones. These were remnants of fanwings. We gathered the little trophies. Behind us we heard the distress call of a last building left alive.
We’d put speakers in the farms with which we’d made contact, and the ongoing supplies of EzCal’s voice should have guaranteed us what we needed, but we’d had trouble before. Now we knew why. We sent crews and cams along the supply pipes, and found other ruptures. We lost another flight, and then the officers we sent to find it.
EzCal went to the centre of the city to broadcast. Their journey there from Embassytown was as extreme in its pomp as we could do, then. There was pressure on those of us in the committee, still ostensibly Ez and Cal’s organisers, Ez’s jailers, indeed, to attend and wear smart clothes. Wyatt came with us. His reward for birthing EzCal was that he was freed, kept under watch but made committee. He was expert in crisis politics, and he wasn’t a Bremen agent anymore, or not just then. Whatever happened later we’d deal with later.
“If he could get away with a goddamn canopy, he would,” I said quietly to MagDa. The god-drug walked in the city, Ez looking down and unsmiling, Cal, his head still shaved in the style he now maintained, his stitches gone but new tattoos mimicking them on his scarred scalp, looking up, occasionally glancing at Ez with energy and hate. “They’d have us carrying them on our fucking shoulders.”
MagDa didn’t smile. We were in the middle of that daily promenade from Embassytown, behind EzCal, surrounded by Ariekei who followed their instructions and shouted sort-of cheers. Mag and Da were stricken.
“I don’t know...” said MagDa to me. “I don’t even know what we’ll do.” “When the ship comes.”
“We have to guard our resources,” Cal said, after their performance, looking at footage of ruined farms. EzCal insisted that the rations of Embassytowners be reduced. They ordered squads of constables to the nearest plantations, and to those that provided our most needed pabulum. The attacks were becoming more frequent. Each group of officers that went out was accompanied, as they had to be for communication with those they were sent to protect, by an Ambassador.
“It’ll be fine,” PorSha said to me, preparing. “It’s not the first time.” “We’re used to it.” “We had to go out to haggle, before, didn’t we?” “Out of the city.” “It’s the same.”
It wasn’t the same. Before, with Embassytown and the world collapsing, they, and all the better Ambassadors, had kept us alive with their desultory trades. This time they followed orders. I had originally thought that Cal would do as little as he could when he became part of god-drug II. I was used to being wrong.
EZCAL DID FIND Pear Tree, the erstwhile leader of that once-powerful Ariekene faction. Perhaps Cal had his own investigators. Not all the city-dwelling Embassytowner exiles would share Yl and Sib’s perspective: they might
