Embassytown (53 page)

They’d come to affect baroque: perhaps it was a comfort to some Embassytowners. There were trims of glitter on Cal’s clothes, a crest on his aeoli mask. Even Ez wore purple.

In silence their failings were transmuted, or camouflaged at least. Cal’s sneer passed for regal: Ez’s sulking a thoughtful reserve. They had a small entourage: people who had recently been my colleagues. Some greeted me and Bren when their flier landed. Simmon shook my hand. Southel had come, and MagDa. I couldn’t describe their expressions. Wyatt was with them, still guarded, it seemed, but consulted, great operator, prisoner-vizier. He didn’t meet my eye. Baptist and Toweller stepped down, back from Embassytown, greeted their companions. Greeted me. The Embassytowners watched them, in what must have been great shock. This journey hadn’t turned out as expected.

The officers who’d come had weapons. I know that if the situation had been a little different, EzCal might have tried to have them kill us, as they’d tried to kill us when we travelled. Now, though, the remnants of the Staff in their pointless retinue and the officers and even JasMin, who were there, wouldn’t let them. By now everyone in Embassytown had seen the incoming army, and my transmission, and everyone knew that we had stopped them. All Cal had for a last few hours was the pretence that he ruled.

Those Terre refugees had come closer day on day: they were mingling with us now, though mostly all they did was watch our interactions with the Absurd. Ez looked into the sky, and back across the distance toward Embassytown.

Much later I’d hear stories of his actions during my travels: how he’d contrived to test Cal’s patience; the plans for what could only be considered a coup, which Cal had crushed more in contempt than anger. Ez eyed us. I could see him calculating.
Jesus do you never stop?
I thought. I didn’t give a shit about his story. To Embassytown and the Languageless, Ez and Cal’s squabbles were vastly less important than that they were EzCal.

I stood with delegates from the Absurd army, twenty or thirty thrown up from the ranks. “So it’s you I’m talking to, is it, Avice Benner Cho?” Cal said coolly. “You speak for . . .” He indicated the fanwingless closest to me, our erstwhile captive.

“Theuth,” I said. “It goes by Theuth.”

“What do you mean ‘it goes by Theuth,’” he said. “It doesn’t go by anything. . . .”

“
We
call it Theuth,” I said. “So that’s what it goes by. I’ll show you how to write that down. Or better, Theuth will.”

B
AD ENOUGH
to be defeated, isn’t it? Even now you’d try to take us out, Cal: me, Bren, the rest of us. Because the way we saved Embassytown means the end of your reign, as it has, look, ended; and even though your whole damn prefecture was a function of despair and collapse, you’d rather lose it on your terms than be saved on ours. That was what I wanted to say.

There were Absurd with Theuth and Spanish, those most adept at the generation of the ideogrammatic script they were inventing, the most intuitive at the reading and performing of gestures. It wasn’t a stable group. Even a few brave Ariekene addicts had arrived, too, come all the way from the city subsisting on pilfered datchips, to see the historic agreement, the change. Rooftop was there, playing its own sound files to itself in sadness. Human runaways squatted on overlooking ledges coloured with Ariekene mottled moulds, and watched the negotiations. They came and went as they wanted.

Cal, perhaps Ez too, tried to depict what was happening as protracted discussion. Really it was just a slow process of explaining facts, and receiving orders, in a nascent script. What took days was making sure the Absurd understood, and understanding what they wanted us to do about it.

You’ve no authority, I could have said to Cal. This is a surrender. You’d love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts. But you’re just here because I told the Absurd you were the one they’d have to tell what to do. And the humans watching, the refugees scowling under their cowls, are going to remember how it’s obvious that you don’t know what’s happening. You’re doing a lot of
hanging around
during this particular change of epoch, because you’re only a detail.

C
AMS WENT EVERYWHERE
. There were a proliferation of independent home-rigged kits, or those hijacked or gone rogue and uploading their feeds to whatever frequencies they could. Embassytown was watching on the other side of all the lenses.

At night the Ariekei surrounded my party. We asked them to: I still wasn’t certain EzCal wouldn’t attempt revenge.

“What’s going to happen?” MagDa said. They looked at me with wariness and respect.

“It’ll be different,” I said, “but we will be here. Now they

know they can be cured it changes everything. How is it in the city? And in Embassytown?”

Panic and expectancy. Among the Ariekei it was still mostly confusion. There was fighting between factions—they’d seemed united under EzCal’s proxy
, and obeyed EzCal’s orders, but now they fought for reasons difficult to make sense of.

“We’ll—they’ll—do everything they can to spread this,” I said. “No more fixes necessary. We’re trying to work together. Theuth mostly speaks for the Languageless now. Spanish is talking to us—to YlSib, obviously, but it can even . . .” MagDa hadn’t seen Spanish and me in the evenings: talking, haltingly. “But I have to tell you something,” I said to her quietly. “I’ve heard how people are describing what this is, and it’s wrong. There is no cure. Spanish and the others . . . they might not be addicted anymore but they’re not
cured
: they’re changed. That’s what this is. I know it might sound the same, but do you understand that they can’t speak Language, anymore, MagDa? Anymore than you ever could.”

I
T WAS A MORNING
, very cloudless. In the lower lands around me, among the filamented undergrowth of the planet, I knew there were agents of script, disseminating the new skill, the concept of it, among the Absurd. Already there were deviant forms from those first suggested, dissident renditions of ideograms, specialist vocabulary created by the semiogenesis of scuff-and-point.

It wouldn’t be long before some Ariekene reader reproduced the ground-scratch writing in stain, on something they could hand over, rather than trying to remember and replicate it. Maybe we’d show them how. I imagined a pen held in a giftwing.

The leading cadre of the Absurd stood still. The Embassy-town entourage were as smart as they could manage in these circumstances. Various of the human refugees were watching. Theuth and Spanish stood close to me, looking at the cams.

Spanish attracted my attention with its giftwing. “
” It spoke to me softly. I hesitated and it spoke again. “
”

EzCal faced me. They looked like kings again. Ez’s face was blank: Cal’s was swollen with anger.

“Listen. Do you understand?” All the Embassytowners could hear me easily, but it was EzCal I was speaking to. “Do you understand how it’s going to be?

“The Absurd are coming back to the city, and so are we. We’ll set things up together. They’ll have some ideas. I tell you, if I were Kora-Saygiss, your little quisling, I’d be careful. It was smart of you not to let it come. We’ll work out the details. We’ll be there, in Embassytown.”

Until the relief. Everything’s different, forever, I thought. I glanced at my notes. “They were going to kill us because we were the source of god-drugs. They knew it was too late for them, they were lost, but they were going to make a totally new start for those after them if they got rid of the problem. Us. You understand how selfless they were? It wouldn’t help
them
. It was for their kids. This generation would either be deafened, dead or dying in withdrawal.

“But now they know the addicted can be cured.” I ignored MagDa’s stares and pointed at Spanish: it pointed back at me. “And if they can be cured then we’re an irrelevance. That is why we get to live. See? But they have to
be
cured. That’s the condition. Otherwise we’re still a sickness. And it takes time to cure oratees.” I gestured at Rooftop, still untouched by metaphor. Everyone looked at it. It looked back. “And there’s plenty of them. So your job is to keep them going in the meantime, EzCal, till they don’t need you anymore. Without you to tide them, the addicted’ll start to die. Too quick to be cured, or even deafened. So you have to keep them alive.”

“
,” Spanish said. There were gasps from all the humans, who’d never heard it speak its doubled Anglo-Ubiq. Spanish was explaining again why the Absurd would have killed us all and mutilated their compatriots, and why they would now let us live. The Ariekei loved the Ariekei. That verb of ours was the only one that came close. It wasn’t flawless, but that’s in the way of translation. It was as much a truth as a lie. The New Hearing and the Absurd loved the addicted, and would cure them one of the two ways out, induct them into one group or the other.

“None of you have been ambassadors for a long time,” I said. “Who’ve you been speaking for but yourselves? And now you’re not a god or a fix or a functionary, EzCal—you’re a factory. The Ariekei have a need: you fulfil it. And believe me, the content’ll be policed.” Ez’s face didn’t move. Cal’s twisted. No chance to issue orders that could, literally, not be disobeyed. “The city’ll be full of Absurd. So if you try to stir things, put instructions in what you say, even restart the war, they’ll stop you. If we’re too much trouble to bother with, we’re gone. They don’t want to take the fanwings of all the addicted, deafen every single adult Ariekei in their cycle, now there’s another way: but they will if they think they have to. Do you see?”

There’s nothing else for you to do, I thought. You have no choice. Those officers, the ones you brought with you, will hold weapons to your heads and demand you speak Language if necessary. And I’ll be with them. Spanish and the Absurd would spread the two cures. Recourse to the knife wasn’t the existential catastrophe it had been for all those here, who’d thought it ended thought. It would never be relished, but for those who couldn’t get clean, it might be considered.