Embassytown (55 page)

He sacrificed himself, he must have thought, for the Absurd. Perhaps he had in mind the child Ariekei that would one day walk through empty Embassytown, think of explanations for its ruins, and say them in Language. Scile was ready for us all to die.

He wasn’t quite wrong: there had been a fall. The Ariekei are different now. It’s true that now they speak lies.

Poor Scile, I’ll say it again. He must think he’s fallen among Lucifers.

R
ECENTLY A MIAB
incame to Lilypad Hill. We were no longer the people to whom it had been sent. I think that’s why I felt what I can only call
naughtiness
, opening it. I felt what only I would recognise as the faintest immerdamp around it. Like bad children we pulled out treats. Wine; foods; medicine; luxuries: there were no surprises. We opened our orders, and Wyatt’s sealed instructions too. He didn’t try to stop us. They were no surprise either.

T
HE
N
EW
A
RIEKEI
can speak to automa, and can understand them.

“I don’t want to go in,” I said.

“It’s fine, it’s just . . .” Bren nodded.

He and Spanish Dancer took longer than I expected. I waited in the street, watched hoardings move. The products they advertise aren’t sold anymore.

They rejoined me. “She’s there,” Bren said.

“And?”

“
.”

“And . . . ?” I said. “Did she speak to you?” I said to Spanish. It and Bren looked at each other.

“
.”

I looked up at her building. There must be cams at points; there are cams everywhere, and my friend had always been part of her surroundings. I didn’t wave.

“
Ehrsul I know that you can understand the words I’m saying
, Spanish said,” Bren said. “In Anglo. And she doesn’t even look back. She goes: ‘No, you can’t speak to me; Ariekei can’t understand me.’ ‘Avice would like to know how you are,’ it says. ‘What you’ve been doing.’ She says, ‘Avice! How is she? And you can’t speak to me. You don’t understand me, and you can’t speak anything but Language.’”

W
E PASSED
an avenue of outdated trids, a grassroots market, while I said nothing, and Bren did not insist. In the command economy of our reconstruction, our basics are provided, but extras, luxuries, throw up such barter. They make me think of markets in other cities, on other places.

The blockades have been taken down. Some city-dwellers say that as they can breathe our air but we can’t breathe theirs, the Embassytown atmosphere should be extended over the whole city. Where there are new additions being grown, Ariekene buildings are subtly unclassic. Here a spire; an angled window; a familiar kind of buttress: our Terre topography’s become fashionable.

CAN’T BE FOUND
; and DalTon can’t be found: or no one who knows where they are, human or indigenous, will say. Of course their disappearances made me suspect club justice. But I’m in informing networks as good as any, and if something like that has happened, it’s been very quiet. Which is no way to
encourager les autres
. I think probably either that they were some of the many killed and effaced by the war, or that one is or both are hiding—it’s not as if you can’t still do that in the city—waiting for whatever. I suppose we’ll have to be vigilant.

DalTon’s one thing, as far as I’m concerned. As for
, though, I don’t think revenge of lynch or any other kind is what most New Ariekei want, if they even say they lived under
. No Ariekei I know have been able to answer my questions, about what it was like, about whether they remember how they thought, before. About Language. Spanish Dancer’s first speech, about that change, was as much infection as exposition. I don’t say they don’t remember; I say that they can’t tell me how it was if they do.

No one knows why some Ariekei are immune to metaphor. No attention from Spanish or its growing number of deputies, its proselytisers, altering their listeners with careful, infectious, ostentatiously lie-filled sermons, works on all of them. Each meeting there are successes: Ariekei staggering out of Language, into language and semes. Others come close, to go next time or the next. And there are those who refuse to; and those that, like Rooftop, sick with purity, just can’t. They still can’t speak to me, only to Ambassadors. They only understand a dying Language. Now we have the drugs, the voices, to keep them alive, and no more gods.

E
Z
S
EY
, I
HEARD
one oratee tell YlSib, was its favourite, because the tremor occasioned by their voice was . . . and there, vocabulary, mine and its, failed us. Others prefer EzLott, or EzBel, according to the high they give.

Scile was usually a better thinker than his last murder would imply. He knew how we’d created EzCal: he should have thought we could just do it again. We unhooked the mechanisms from inside Cal’s head, and they were safe, but even had they not been, we never faced another end.

“I’ve got something,” MagDa had said. “Southel’s been putting together a few prototypes for weeks.” “Boosters.” “We’ve had volunteers. We’re ready to go.”

While we’d pursued ours, that had been their secret plan. A stockpile, against Cal and EzCal, whose power lay in their uniqueness. MagDa’s and my and Bren’s treacheries dovetailed. Scile had brought no narrative to a conclusion. He killed Cal and very little changed.

At first it was the cleaved Turn who volunteered, shaved their heads and had sockets implanted, tried out boosters like clawed tiaras, hooked into links and let gun-prodded Ez, Rukowsi, read them, and speak with them. Lott was the first to take on the role while her doppel, Char, was still alive.

Some are afraid to, but many Ambassadors have powered down their own links. They don’t equalise. They don’t speak Language much anymore. There’s not much call. I don’t think they all dislike each other. Bren says he disagrees, but I tell him he can’t think beyond his own history, which is understandable.

We keep Joel Rukowsi safe because we need him and his freakish empathic head, but even that I think will change. We’ll find others like him. In the meantime we work him hard, and stockpile hours of drugtalk. We can afford to be generous to the exodusers.

It’s two cities now—one of the addicts, one of all the others—that intersect politely. The Absurd and the New have much more in common than either do with the oratees. Hearing’s nothing: the Absurd and the New
think
the same.

Spanish exchanges politenesses with Ariekei at every corner, with the Terre, with the fanwingless too, by the touchpads they carry, our Terretech contribution. I’m learning to read and write their evolving scrawl, like a young Ariekes. As soon as they awake into their third instar, now, like some rough ritual they’re hard-trained out of their instincts. They have only a few liminal days of pure Language, when word is referent and lies are uncanny, between animal instar and consciousness. Afterwards, the young New Ariekei know their city wasn’t always this way but can’t imagine it other.

Of those that can’t unlearn Language, some are deafening themselves, knowing it’ll cure them, that it’s not the cutting-out of speech and mind they might once have thought. Others, like Rooftop, are preparing to leave. We’ll never visit their autarchic communities. They won’t be linked by pipework to the city. We’ll hand over many many datchips, enough to last a long time. The exiles will live out their addiction and raise a new brood, never let them hear the chips, until their children speak Language too, but unafflicted and free. Humans—vectors of addiction—will be banned and taboo: the city, where they speak differently now, they’ll explain, will be taboo. For the next little future, it’s not humans but the New Ariekei that’ll ambassador between the city and the settlements.

I know how it’ll go, though. A New Ariekes will come to trade: they’ll speak to it, Language to language, and they’ll think they do, but they won’t understand each other. Some of the young’ll be intrigued by this odd stranger, and a few adventurous Language-speaking young will make their way to the city gates. That’ll be the story. Doubtless there’ll still be addicts here— outcasts, holy fools or whatever their status then—and the newcomers will hear the drugtalks broadcast for them, and instantly be addicted too.

T
HE SHIP’S CREW
will have weapons, of course: Bremen weapons, more advanced than ours. But we’re very many and they’ll be few. Besides, we mean them no harm. We’ll have an honour guard.

“Welcome, Captain,” I’ll say as the doors open onto Ariekene soil. “Please come with us.” They’ll be guests as much as prisoners.

That’s tendentious. They’ll be prisoners, but we’ll treat them well.