Bren struggled. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know how to say.”
“You don’t know,” I said. He bobbed his head in a half-yes-half- no.
“How’s your Language, Avice?” said one of YlSib. They spoke to Spanish Dancer and it answered. I could follow some, and when I shook my head Yl or Sib would translate a few clauses.
It’s not good that we are this. We wish to be other than this. We’re like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her because we imbibe what is given to us by EzCal. There was a long silence. We want instead to be like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her in that we want to be... and then there was silence again, and Spanish Dancer shook its limbs.
“It tried to use your simile twice, contradictorily,” Sib said. “But it couldn’t quite manage.”
Now, Spanish Dancer went on, it’s worse. We didn’t expect this. It was a bad thing when we were made intoxicated and helpless by the god-drug’s words, lost ourselves, but now it’s different and worse. Now when the god-drug speaks we obey. Yes, it said that with modulations that meant nothing to me, but no matter how alien the Ariekene mental map, sense of self, I thought that must be truly terrible. I’d seen the crowds respond instantly to EzCal’s instructions, choiceless about it. We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey. We want Language to put to our use.
They resented their new druggy craving and their newer inability to disobey. This conclave could hardly be unique in that. But it dovetailed with what they had always wanted to achieve: their longtime striving for lies, to make Language mean what they wanted. That older desire seemed to make them execrate their new condition even more than other conscious Ariekei.
“We promised to bring you here,” Bren said. “Said it like a Host.” He smiled at the child’s oath. “They were adamant they had to see you. I better get you back before you’re missed, then YlSib will have to go on. Other drops. These people aren’t the only ones trying to find a different way.”
What a dangerous circuit, through rebel cells in the collapsed, regrowing city. I’d always stressed, as I’d had it stressed to me, how incommensurable Terre and Ariekene thinking were. But I thought about who it was had told me that, those many times. Staff, and Ambassadors with a monopoly on comprehension. It was giddying to feel suddenly that I was allowed and able to make any sense of Ariekene actions. What I saw there was dissent, and I understood it.
I saw only these liars, these fervent attempters to change their speech. Bren and YlSib might go from them to others trying to eradicate all their cravings and live Languageless; from there perhaps to those fighting to disobey EzCal’s casual orders; then to others who were maybe searching for chemical cures. I wasn’t even really participant on this trip, the first visit, though I was present and Bren trusted me. He hadn’t brought me out of camaraderie—I was there because I was a simile, and these dissidents wanted me for strategic purposes, as another group might request a piece of ’ware, or a chemical, or explosives.
Embassytown in its crisis was throwing up fervour. Give me three days, I thought, and I’d find people who believed that EzCal, or Ez, or Cal, was the messiah, or the devil, or both; that the Ambassadors were angels; or devils; that the Ariekei were; that the only hope was to leave the planet as fast we could; that we must never leave. So with the Ariekei, I thought, and felt hopeful and depressed at once. Language was incapable of formulating the uncertainties of monsters and gods common elsewhere, and I was abruptly convinced that these gatherings were the Ariekene cargo cults. Was I at a Ghost Dance? Bren and YlSib were patronising the far-fetched, millennial and desperate.
I watched Spanish Dancer struggle to express me, to make me mean things I’d never meant before, try to force similes into new shapes. We are like the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her because we... because like her we are... we are hurt... It circled me and stared at me, and tried to say ways it was like me.
“Why won’t MagDa’s plan work?” I said. “I know, I know, but... just say to me once why we can’t just keep going until the ship.”
Bren, Sib and Yl looked at each other, to see who would speak. “You’ve seen how EzCal’s acting.” It was Sib. “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?”
21
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 not a crash injury.”
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.