Embassytown

He changed his aim as he came, pointing at Bren and Spanish Dancer. I tried to push the Ariekes away, but Scile wasn’t aiming at it now but at Ez, and then at Cal, and Cal began to turn his eyes to me. Scile fired. Calls and screaming started in Terre and Ariekene voices, as in a plume of blood where energy took and opened him, Cal fell away, staring at me, and died.

Part Nine THE RELIEF

30

THIS IS WHAT said.

It was in a plaza in the city, a big square made bigger by cajoling the buildings. I remember it very well. Bren stood by me and whispered a translation but I could make almost perfect sense of it all.

I remember the weather, the houses, the air and the crowd of Ariekei. Thousands, addicts jostling to the edges of the opening. Some must have expected EzCal, wanted their god-drug fix. This is what Spanish Dancer said.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. We were grown into Language. After history we made city and machines and gave them names. We didn’t speak so much of certain things. Language spoke us. The words that wanted to be city and machines had us speak them so they could be.

When the humans came they had no names, and we made new words so they would have places in the world. They didn’t do as other things do. We spoke them into Language. Language took them in.

We were like hunters. We were like plants eating light. The humans made their town in our town like a star in a circle. They made their place like a filament in a flower. We spoke the name of their place, but we know it had another name, sitting in the city like an organ in a body, like a tongue in a mouth.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much because we were like this one, who years ago was the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her. We were like her. You decide why we were like her and why we were not like her. Why she’s like herself or is not. We’ve been like all things; we left the city during the drugtime and speak more now.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak. We’ve been like countless things, we’ve been like all things, we’ve been like the animals over Embassytown in the direction of which I raise my giftwing, which is a speaking you’ll come to understand. We didn’t speak, we were mute, we only dropped the stones we mentioned out of our mouths, opened our mouths and had the birds we described fly out, we were vectors, we were the birds eating in mindlessness, we were the girl in darkness, only knowing it when we weren’t anymore.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You’ve never spoken before. You will. You’ll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.

You have never spoken before.

That was what Spanish Dancer said to its gathered people. It said more. It was much less clumsy with them than I’d been when I changed it: it understood much better the psyches it wanted to alter, and its words were surgery.

At first those in the square listened, not knowing what for. As its words grew more outlandish and impossible, there were brayings of consternation. They were raucous, as they would be at any virtuoso lies, then something much more. There was a hysteria of admiration and concern.

As Spanish spoke, Ariekei shouted in more than astonishment. These were the sounds of crisis. I remembered them from when I’d taught Spanish Dancer to lie. I was hearing minds reconfigured. Deaths: old thoughts dying. I saw the upthrown giftwings and fanwings of ecstasy, ecstasy in an old sense, not without pain and terror, of visions, and then the silence of the adult Ariekei new-born.

There were only a few that first time. Most who listened were left terrified perhaps, tremulous, having glimpsed something. When at last they calmed, some eventually clamoured for EzCal again, their need making them forgetful.

But there were others who tipped over, became new things, learnt language, at what Spanish Dancer said. I understood almost every word it spoke.

Sometimes when Spanish Dancer is talking to me in my own language, it doesn’t say but , or . I think it knows that pleases me. A present for me.

31

POOR SCILE.

How do I tell this?

MOST MORNINGS I go to Lilypad Hill. The adjutants and I discuss plans. “Anything yet?” I say, and every morning so far they’ve checked the readings and shaken their heads, “Not yet,” and I’ve said, “Well, soon. Be ready.”

Can I say Poor Scile, after everything? I can. His actions disgust me—there are dead friends who’d be alive if it weren’t for him—but could you not feel pity to see him?

He’s in the jail we made from the infirmary. His neighbours are those failed Ambassadors still too broken to walk out of the doors when we opened them. Scile knows he’s alive because, criminal as he is, he didn’t do anything so very bad, so unforgivable as to warrant execution. We’ve decided we don’t have the death penalty just for murder.

I go to see him sometimes. People understand. It’s pity, concern, curiosity and the ghost of affection. He can’t believe what’s happened. He can’t believe he so failed.

It was pandemonium when he killed Cal. I’m surprised he wasn’t shot in turn, that we were able to take him alive.

“You will not do this,” he said. Cal still twitched on the ground. Scile swung his gun at Spanish Dancer. “They will not be like you.” We stopped him before he fired again. Spanish smacked his pistol away. Grabbed Scile’s shirt and said to him “?” Scile put his hands over his ears and called Spanish Dancer a devil.

It hadn’t been a suicide walk but a pilgrimage. He’d gone to find the Absurd army, to walk behind them a witness and apostle while they—what, cleaning fire, holy avengers who’d rather cut themselves than be tainted by lies?—purged the ruined Ariekei, got the world ready again, a nursery, for unborn pure-Languaged young.

It had been a brutal hope but it had been hope. I’m sure Scile heard when EzCal was born, no matter where he was. I don’t know how word could have reached him but word does. He must have known EzCal and their oratees couldn’t withstand the Absurd. But he didn’t reckon with me and Bren and Spanish Dancer. The horror he must have felt to see us and what we did, from the camps, beside the army. He was patient, waiting until the god-drug arrived before doing his holy work.

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.

RECENTLY 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.