“Jesus,” I said. Spanish Dancer, 
, spoke with its voice and hands as its once-fellows approached to murder or brutalise it. I wondered what would happen to it if it were deafened now, now that language was different for it. Spanish’s and the Absurd’s motions registered to the enemy as little as windblown plants.
They’re not ignoring, I thought. They don’t know. They didn’t know that these minds weren’t like the others they’d finished or changed, how could they? I dug among our packs.
“Show your fanwings!” I shouted to Spanish. “Show them you can hear!” YlSib began to translate, but Spanish was already unfurling, and the others were copying it, except for Dub and Rooftop, who did so only when Spanish told them to in Language. Another missile came close. “Tell Dub and Rooftop to get in front,” I said.
I made a datchip play, and the thin voice of EzCal exhorted us to something or other. But every one of the Ariekei had already heard that speech so did not react to it, and I cursed and threw it away.
“Oh,” said Bren. He understood. I fumbled again while the Absurd came close enough that I could hear their murder-croons. I spilled a handful of chips and finally got another to sound. EzCal said, We are going to tell you what it is that you must do...
We Terre heard it as sound. Spanish Dancer and the others heard it too, now, as sound: they just cocked their fanwings quizzically. But Dub and Rooftop were still addicts. They snapped upright, shuddered so elementally it was as if gravity took them toward the source of the voice. They glazed.
“Yes,” said Bren.
I played another. Dub and Rooftop were swaying, recovering from EzCal’s first words; jerked giddily they were caught up again. Rooftop shouted at what was, I realised, EzCal’s descriptions of trees.
Our self-defeaned Ariekes kept waving at the others, and Spanish and the others mimicked it, their own fanwings opening and closing, and in the middle of them all Dub and Rooftop lost themselves. I kept the sound going. “
,” said Spanish, and I could think how horrible the sight of that powerless staggering must be to it, reminding it what it had been, making it watch its friends suffering in compulsion, but I wouldn’t cease.
As the first of the Absurd crested our rise and came towards us, weapons up, first one, then more, then many, hesitated. I pressed another chip and heard Bren say yes.
Every army has one soldier at its very front. A big Ariekes, its Cut- and Turn-mouths open as if it were howling, picking its feet high as it came for us. I was holding out a datchip as if it might stop it. Its eyes spread in all directions, one for each of us, watching Spanish, and the Ariekes that had been our captive jerking its arms as the Absurd did to each other, and Dub and Rooftop stumbling. If I was thinking anything I was praying. It was very close.
Abruptly the soldier stopped. It lowered its sputtering mace. It involuted its eyes, opened them again and watched us. I was still playing EzCal’s voice. It wasn’t the only motionless one, now. As if I were merciless, I made Dub and Rooftop dance their addiction. The Absurd gripped each other, gestured or stood still, watching.
“Don’t stop,” said Bren.
“,” said Spanish, and Bren said again, “Don’t.”
“What... ?” said Sib.
“What is it?” said Yl.
The army of hopeless and enraged had been driven to murder by their memories of addiction, and the sight of their compatriots made craven to the words of an interloper species. That degradation was the horizon of their despair. I’d made them see the motions of their ex-selves hearing their god-drug— there was no mistaking that tarantella—but that other Ariekei had fanwings unfurled, could hear, but were unaffected.
There wasn’t supposed to be such a thing as uncertainty in the minds of the Absurd. Its sudden arrival arrested them. Our ex-captive waved its giftwing and its stump. Stop, it was saying, and many in the army that faced us knew that it was saying so, and were stunned to know that they knew it.
Poor Rooftop, I thought, poor Dub. Ariekene dust coiled around me and I blinked. Thank God they never learnt to lie. We’d needed real addicts, to prove that the others were free, and the rage of the Absurd therefore misdirected. I kept Dub and Rooftop moving. I made them sick on god-drug. Spanish Dancer watched them, fanned its fanwing. I was shouting.
INFORMATION MOVED desperately slowly among the Absurd— even their quickest thinkers still had only a tenuous understanding that they could transmit information. What they said to each other at first with their waving and upheld limbs was simple: Don’t attack. Following that: Something is happening.
The information was discombobulated with distance, moving backwards through the rank. At the front, gestures got close to: They can hear but are not addicted. Farther back, ranks of the Absurd told those behind them simply: Stop.
“,” said Spanish. Our Deaf went to the front of the army, and Spanish went with it. With the Absurd generals watching, the two of them—ostentatiously, in wing signs and sigils scraped in the earth, ideograms that startled me—started to talk.
THERE WERE MANY many hours, two days and nights of frustration and silences, while the army waited. Hesitated. Individuals kept coming up from the ranks to see what was happening. Every one that did was astonished: unaddicted Ariekei; Terre waiting respectfully; the process of slow dawning between hearing and Absurd, as we still questionably called them; scrawls in dirt.
Those with a little knowledge became agents of patience among the others. We could see their influence, by whatever gestural persuasions, when, toward the end of the second day, human refugees approached from the army’s flank, easily killable, but the fanwingless didn’t assault them.
The Terre must have realised that the Absurd had stopped, wondered at the strange calm and come to find its source, and the Languageless had let them. The refugees set up camp a way away from us, and watched.
It took a time before the boundary of comprehension between Absurd and ’s group, the New Hearing, was more fully breached, but nothing like so long as I’d once have expected. We weren’t teaching the deafened to communicate: we were showing them they already could, and did. It wasn’t incremental but revelatory; and revelations, though hard-won, are viral.
“We need EzCal here,” I said.
“They won’t come if they know what’s happened,” Bren said. “If they know that they’ve lost.”
Even if it means the end of the war? But I knew he was right. “Well then we can’t tell them the truth. We see any vespcams we smash them. They can’t know what’s happened.”
TOWELLER AND BAPTIST understood the mission we gave them. They wouldn’t have done a few days before. They returned to the city in a flyer with the Absurd.
“They know what they have to do?” I said to Spanish Dancer.
“
.” They’d sneak back in the wounded ship, take on the roles of loyal addict-soldiers, bringing news of a breakthrough. They’d tell EzCal that the Absurd had stopped, were just waiting, and that the god-drug and their entourage must come. It couldn’t occur to EzCal that they were being lied to. That was what we were relying on. How could it? They would, after all, hear it from Ariekei, in what they would think was Language. Say it like a Host.