Embassytown (45 page)

“It would depend.” He looked at the glass by his counter. “Talking about that one, I might say . . .”

“No I don’t mean any specific one, but in general,
that
one.” Pointing. “Or
that
one.” Moving my hand. “Thatness.”

“There’s nothing.”

“No?”

“Of course not.”

“Thought so. So how would I distinguish that glass and that one and that one?” I tallied them with my finger.

“You’d say ‘the glass in front of the apple and the glass with a flaw in its base and the glass with a residue of wine left in it.’ You know this. What are you asking? They taught you these basics, didn’t they?”

“They did,” I said. I was quiet a while. “Years ago.” I spoke in years again, not kilohours. “But if you were translating an Ariekes saying, ‘The glass with the apple and the one with the wine,’ to
me
, you’d probably just say, ‘That glass and that one.’ Sometimes translation stops you understanding. I’m not fluent. Maybe that’s helping me right now.”

“Translation always stops you understanding,” he said. “What is it you’re thinking?”

“How many days before they get here?” I said. “Can you get hold of YlSib? And others? Any you can?” He narrowed his eyes but nodded. “We need to go. Get YlSib or whoever to contact Spanish Dancer and the others. I’ll—” I stopped. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know whether . . . Maybe I can tell Cal.”

“Tell
me
,” Bren said. “I thought you’d despaired.”

“I did too.”

“What, then? Tell me.”

I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.

Bren nodded, and listened to what I can’t call a plan—it was hunch and hope—and when I was done he said, “No, we can’t tell Cal.” He touched me under the chin, and put his arms around me, and for a moment I let him take my weight and it was lovely. “Of course we can’t.”

“But we’re trying to fix things,” I said. “You know EzCal aren’t stupid . . .”

“It’s not about whether they’re stupid,” he said. “It’s about who they are, and what they represent. Maybe Cal would see reason. Maybe. But I don’t think so, do you? Want to risk it, really?”

“If we go, he’ll find out.”

“Yes. And see you as an enemy. And he’ll be right. Don’t think he—they—won’t find time to try to stop us.”

“Alright then,” I said. “I’ll be an enemy.”

He smiled at me. “What else are we going to do, Avice?”

We turned arm-in-arm to look at the screen on which the captive Languageless tried to shuffle, alone in their room, watched by cams. It was a quiet moment for our banishing, as we got ready to exile ourselves. We saw the two Ariekei our rulers held moving not quite like two things unconnected, but according to something else; not a plan but a knowledge of each other; a community.

24

I
WAS STILL OF
some cultural interest. So was Bren
Dan
, the free cleaved, troublemaker, licensed dissident. If we disappeared together people would notice. And we might already be watched. That was why the next time, the last time, I went into the city alone.

While the committee fretted and Cal took what power we’d had, Embassytown streets got on with things. Walking through my shrunken town with my aeoli and supplies, I was surprised to pass more than one outdoor party. Some shiftparents of the playing children saw me watching and caught my eye, and even the poignancy of that, of knowing together that this was a last game to keep those children occupied, didn’t detract from a moment’s pleasure.

There were constables on the streets but not much for them to do except wait for the war: they didn’t police with fervour. They didn’t clear out the proselytisers, the, I don’t know, Shakers, Quakers, Makers, Takers, each with their own theology damning or rescuing us. They weren’t treated, even the most brimstone of them, as threats or pests, but as performers. People teased them, while they remained doggedly devout.

I wanted to stop, to ask someone to join me at a cafe´ where they were giving away free drinks or accepting the little IOUs we proffered in polite charade. The usual lament:
I may be some time.
The wistfulness of we who are about to leave. I got out of Embassytown close to where Yohn and Simmon and the others and I had held our breath and where I’d touched a tether. I exited through the corridors of a border house, alone.

On my chart were marked various colonies of city Ariekei, each annotated, the latest information Bren could gather.
1: Heartland.
. Loyal.
To my left.
2: Status uncertain. 3: Contributed to troop but dispute with
. 4: Communalistic? 5
, and on. I knew the displayed boundaries were all porous. As the Absurd approached, those little polities got more insular, their between-fix politics and cultures more divergent, the streets that separated them much worse. I wasn’t at all safe.

The first few hundred metres altbrocks had ambled, I’d heard bird wings and been with insects. Now I was in the territories of local fauna, with at least two names: our vernacular; their markers in Language. I stood still for a dog-sized thing we called a browngun, which the Ariekei termed
or
depending on a taxonomic distinction we never understood. It crossed my path with an urchin frog-tongue gait. Overhead passed the scraps and biorigged machines, wild, or carrying Ariekei.

I could navigate immer but this geography nearly defeated me. It was dangerous in no-person’s-lands, and it would be more so at the settlements, where I’d be threatened not by the random rages of the mindless but by the guarding of borders. With this new tribalism inhabitants of different areas sometimes fought. More than once I had had to hunker beyond a house-bone or a trash pile, watching such violence.

My breath was short with fear. Around a convolute, half-hearing the diaphragmatic burr of this neighbourhood, I stopped abruptly. There were two men in front of me.

They saw me and raised rifles. I couldn’t see their faces through the visors of their aeoli. The incongruity of Terre figures right there stopped me for a dangerous moment but I moved, just before they fired, and bullets thumped into the ventricle or alley where I’d been. I ran. I heard them behind me. I shoved beneath underhangs, lost myself. I grit my teeth, my heart slamming.

I wasn’t panicked. My thoughts were precise. I turned fast at another noise. Someone human was reaching for me from a doorway like gills. I staggered back but he put his finger to his mask, in a
shhh
face, and beckoned. I went to him and he pulled me into a chamber. We sat, listening. I stared at him, but he wasn’t memorable in any way. I scanned him like I might decode him.

“Are you alright?” he whispered.

“Yes.” I started to say
Who are you?
or
Who were they?
but he shook his head. He listened again.

“Come with me,” he said at last. I tried to ask again who he was, but he still didn’t answer. He didn’t owe me any explanation, I supposed, after all. I let him lead me, creeping.

At the end of a long detour, Yl and Sib were waiting. They greeted him tersely. The three of them confabulated too quietly for me to hear. The man turned and raised his hand to me briefly as he left.

“His name’s Shonas,” Sib said. “He was a vizier once. He’s been in the city for about eight years.” We headed cautiously back toward my original intended route.

“Why’s he here?” I said. “And who shot at me?” A lintel arced to let us in.

“He came here after a breakdown between him and an Ambassador,” YlSib said. “It was a bit of a scandal. He disappeared. You were in immer probably. In the out.” “You wouldn’t remember.” As if. “The other two were DalTon.”

I don’t remember being surprised. Those dashing dissidents I’d assumed dead, cleaved, or incarcerated in that terrible infirmary. “They went away.” “They went weird.” “Shonas came into the city to stop them, and . . .” “. . . Well. He’s on our side.” “Against Am
bass
ador DalTon.” “We hadn’t heard from those bastards for a long time until all this started, don’t know what they’ve been working on.” “They’re pigs in shit, now.” “They must love all this.” “They got wind of your plan.”

A parallel economy of narratives, counterfights and revenge. “How do they know what I’ve got planned?” I said.

“Word gets out.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Come on. Stories get
out
.” “They might not know anything except
you’re coming to the city.
Which would mean you have a plan.” “Which whatever it is they’re against.”

“Are they working with Cal? With EzCal?”

“What? Because they tried to stop you?” YlSib glanced at me. “Just because Cal would try to stop you too?” “It’s hardly the same thing.” “DalTon have their own reasons for everything.”

“Which are?” I said.

“Oh there are so many reasons out there,” YlSib said, exhaustedly. “Who can keep track of them all?” “Pick one.” “They aren’t your friend.” “Won’t that do?”

“No.”

“They’re tired of all of it.” “And you’re not.” “And you’re trying.” “How’s that?”

Dal and Ton, nihilist since the crisis and before. It was a vindication that they thought me worth attacking. Ask Cal if he’d rather Embassytown be destroyed or survive without him, he’d claim the latter and mean it: but he’d go to his grave, and all our graves, to stop me, when he knew my plan, because it would undermine him. DalTon wanted to stop me because I wanted to save the world. I’m sure it made much more and coherent sense to them, with their long, furious self-exile. There were kilohours of story there I’d never know. DalTon were against me, Cal was against me, DalTon were against Cal, Shonas was against DalTon, Shonas was for me but not against Cal, and so on. I never, in Embassytown, the immer or the out, had the constitution for intrigue. Floaking, I’d hoped, was a way around it. But politics finds you.