Embassytown

9

PEOPLE WANDERED through streets in a kind of utopian uncertainty, knowing that everything was different but unsure in what sort of place they lived now. Adults were talking and children playing games. “I’m minded to be careful,” I heard one man say, and I could have laughed in his face. Minded, are you? I could have said. Minded how? What will you do? How will you be careful?

We’d always lived in a ghetto, in a city that didn’t belong to us but to beings far more powerful and strange. We’d lived among gods—little tiny gods but gods compared to us, considering what was at their and our disposal—and ignored the fact. Now they’d changed, and we had no way to understand that, and all we could do was wait. Embassytowners’ foolish discussions were as meaningless right then as the sounds of birds.

Our news figures said things to me from screens and tridflats like: “The situation is being closely monitored.” We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after. I walked through the tiny Kedis district. The ruling troikas there had heard about the killing, knew enough Terre psychology that all our fears were rubbing off on them, and they were very anxious, too.

I couldn’t persuade Ehrsul to come to join me in the agitation and rush of Embassytown main, in the hilltop districts where people massed, following rumours that taught them nothing, staring, powerless spectators, into the city moving as opaquely as ever but differently opaquely now. We could all see it. I went to her apartment. Ehrsul was subdued, but then we all were.

She spiked me a coffee with one of the edgers many of us were taking. She moved backwards and forwards on her treads. Her mechanisms were smooth, but inevitably with that repetition tiny infelicitous noises in the machine of her became audible, then irritations.

“Have you found anything out?” I said.

“About what’s going on? Nothing. Nothing.”

“What about on the... ?”

“I said, nothing.” She made her face blink. “There’s all kinds of blather all over the nets, but if anyone out there understands what’s happened or knows what’s about to happen, they’re talking about it below what I can tap.”

“EzRa?”

“What about them? Do you think I’m just neglecting to tell you important bits? Christ.” I was embarrassed at her tone. “I don’t know where they are any more than you. I haven’t seen them since the party either.” I didn’t say that I’d seen Ra more recently. “Oh, there’s plenty of rumours: they’re in the out, they’re taking control, they’re preparing an invasion, they’re dead. Nothing I’d stake a rep on. If your channels to the Embassy haven’t netted anything, why would my pitiful little searchware?” We regarded each other.

“Alright,” I said slowly. “Come with me...”

“I’m not going anywhere, Avice,” she said, and her voice foreclosed argument. I was not, this one time, wholly disappointed at that.

I WENT TO the coin wall. The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock. But I knocked, and Bren answered.

I was looking down when he opened the door, to give myself a second. I raised my head to him. He looked much older to me, because his hair was grey. That was all, though: he was hardly collapsing. He recognised me. Before I met his eyes, I’m sure.

“Avice,” he said. “Benner. Cho.”

“Bren,” I said. We stared at each other, and eventually he made a sound between a sigh and a laugh, and I smiled if sadly and he stepped aside for me to enter the room I remembered so extraordinarily well, which hadn’t changed at all.

He brought me a drink and I joked about the cordial he’d given me the first time I was there. He remembered the chant we’d used when spinning coins, and recited it to me, imperfectly. He said something or other, something that meant you went into the out, you’re an immerser! A congratulations. I felt like thanking him. We sat looking at each other. He was still thin, wore what could have been the same smart clothes I remembered.

“So,” he said. “You’ve come here because the world’s ending.” A muted screen behind him played out the confusion of Embassytown.

“Is it?” I said.

“Oh I think so. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I think it’s the end of the world, yes.” He sat back. He looked comfortable. He drank and looked at me. “Yes I do. Everything you know’s finished. You know that, don’t you? Yes, I can see you do.” I saw his affection for me. “You impressed me,” he said. “Such an intense girl. I wanted to laugh. Even while you were looking after your poor friend. Who breathed Host air.”

“Yohn.”

“Anyway. Anyway.” He smiled. “It’s the end of the world and you’re here why? You think I can help?”

“I think you can tell me things.”

“Oh believe me,” he said, “no one in that castle wants me to know anything. They keep me as out of it as they can these days. I’m not saying I’ve no ins at all—there are those who keep an old man in gossip—but you probably know at least as much as me.”

“Who’s Oratees?” I said. He looked sharply up.

“Oratees?” he said. “It really is? Oh. Well. Christ Pharotekton.” He smoothed down his shirt. “I did wonder. I thought maybe that must be it, but...” He shook his head. “But you doubt. You can hardly believe it, can you?”

“Oratees isn’t a person,” Bren said. “They’re a thing. They’re junkies.”

“Everything that could happen has happened sometime,” he said. He leaned towards me. “Where are the failed Ambassadors, d’you think, Avice?” It was so shocking a question that I held my breath.

“If I put it to you outright, you wouldn’t imagine, would you, that every single one of the monozogs the Embassy raises is suited to Ambassadorial duties?” he said. “Of course not. Some doppels don’t take—don’t look enough like each other to be fixed, have quirks, can’t think enough alike, despite all the training. Whatever.

“You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s just not thought. You know that doppels retire, when the other dies.” He raised his hands, slightly, indicating himself. “You’ve never been in the Embassy crèche, have you? There are those who never get out of it in the first place. If you’ve been grown and raised and trained for one job, and you can’t do it, what’s the profit in letting you out? That could only cause trouble.”

Little rooms of rendered twins, mouldering. Slack and separate doppels gone bad, one whole, one like a melted image; or perhaps both wrong; or neither wrong in any physical way but with some bone-deep meanness; or just not able to do what they were born to.

“And if you’re already out,” Bren said, “by the time you realise you hate your job or your doppel, or whatever? Well. Well.” He spoke gently, breaking something to me. “When he died, my... it was an accident. It’s not as if we were old. People knew us... me. I was much too young to disappear. They tried to entice me to the rest home of course. But they couldn’t force me. So what if my neighbours don’t like me? So what if they see something crippled? No one likes a cleaved showing off their injury. We’re stumps.” He smiled. “That’s what we are.

“There are trainees who can never speak Language. I don’t know why. Just can’t speak in time no matter how they practise. That’s simple: you don’t let them go. But there are harder cases. They might look like any other pair. It’s happened before, to varying degrees. We had a colleague, when I was training. WilSon. Whatever joined-up mind it was behind their Language, for the Hosts to understand, it must have been a little out. A tiny bit. Nothing I could hear, but the Hosts... well.

“We were doing exams. We’d been tested by other Ambassadors and Staff, and in our last practical we had to speak to a Host. It was waiting. I don’t know what it thought it was doing, how they asked it to help. Hello, WilSon say, when it’s their turn.

“Straightaway we can see something’s wrong,” he said. “From how the Ariekes moves. Every time they talk to us, they taste our minds, and we’re alien. So it’s heady stuff. But if the two halves of an Ambassador aren’t... quite enmeshed enough? Not two random voices: close enough to speak Language and for them to get it. But wrong? Broken?” I said nothing.

“You know what Language is to them,” Bren said. “What they hear through the words. So, if they hear words they understand, they know are words, but it’s fractured? Ambassadors speak with empathic unity. That’s our job. What if that unity’s there and not-there?” He waited. “It’s impossible, is what. Right there in its form. And that is intoxicating. And they mainline it. It’s like a hallucination, a there-not-there. A contradiction that gets them high.

“Maybe not all of them. Every Host WilSon spoke to knew something was strange, and a few of them...” He shrugged. “Got drunk. On their words. Didn’t matter what WilSon said. Isn’t it a nice day; Please pass the tea; anything. The Hosts heard it and some of them got swoony and some of them wanted it again and again.

“Ambassadors are orators, and those to whom their oration happens are oratees. Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.”

OUTSIDE PEOPLE ran through the streets in frightened carnival. There was the noise of fireworks. Bren refilled my glass.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“WilSon? They were quarantined, and they died.” He drank.

“Everyone respects me, but that can’t stop them hating me,” Bren said. “I understand that. They don’t like to see my wound.” He wrote his name in the air—his full name, seven letters: BrenDan. There’d been a time he was BrenDan, or more properly . Then his doppel had died, and he’d become BrenDan, . He couldn’t say his own name correctly.

BrenDan looked at me thoughtfully for a long time. He went to a desk. “Let me show you something.”

He threw me a shallow box. Inside were two links. His, and his doppel Dan’s. I examined the filigree circuits, the wires and contacts, the carefully carved initials and silver leaves. Their clasps had been cut open. I looked at him and could see the tiny marks on his neck where his had been embedded.

“What are you thinking?” he said. “Are you thinking that I keep them so they’re close at hand? Are you thinking I hide them away, to try to forget them? Avice. If I’d thrown his away and kept mine, you’d think I was clinging to my dead identity, or resenting his death. If I threw them both away, you’d see me in denial. If I kept his but not mine you’d say I was refusing to let him go. There’s nothing I can do you won’t do that to. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it, it’s what we do. Whatever I do, it’ll be one story or another.”

(Later, the next but one time I was with him, because I did come back and after that he came to me, he said to me, “I look at that link and I hate him.” I said nothing. What could I say? We were sitting on the sofa in my rooms. They were nothing like as splendid as Bren’s. “I don’t know when it started,” he said. “For a long time I thought I hated him when he died, because he died, poor bastard. Now I think it might have started earlier. You mustn’t blame me.” He was suddenly plaintive. “I’m sure he hated me, too. It was neither of our faults.”)

“They must have suspected what would happen, you know,” Bren said. “The Ambassadors. It was always the oddballs who seemed to risk... unplaiting... just enough to make a few Ariekei oratees. Those were the ones they restrained. Other sorts of troublemakers went AWOL or native.”

“You think they knew?” I said. “And who went what?”

“They must have hoped EzRa were a drug,” he said. “So they’d affect one or two of the Hosts and not be usable. One in the eye for Bremen. They’ve all been very concerned about who was calling what shots, what agendas were being forced, since they heard EzRa were coming.”

“I know,” I said. “But Bremen must’ve known too, if this has happened before. Why would they send them... ?”

“Known about oratees, you mean? Why would we tell Bremen about that? I don’t know what they had in mind, but this, letting EzRa speak, was the Embassy’s riposte, I think. Not that they expected this, though. Not like this. Language like this, right there but so impossible, so doping, that EzRa are infecting every, single, Host. All of which are spreading the word. All hooked on the new Ambassador.”

OUR EVERYDAY pantheon gone needy, desperate for hits of Ez and Ra speaking together, fermenting Language into some indispensable brew of contradiction, insinuation and untethered meaning. We were quartered in an addict city. That procession I’d seen had been craving.

“What happens now?” I said. It was very quiet in the room. There were hundreds of thousands of Ariekei in the city. Maybe millions. I didn’t know. We knew hardly anything, at all. Their heads were all made of Language. EzRa spoke it and changed it. Every Host, everywhere, would become hardwired with need, do anything, for the blatherings of a newly trained bureaucrat.

“Sweet Jesus Pharotekton Christ light our way,” I said.

“It is,” said Bren, “the end of the world.”

10

THE ARIEKEI told us how it would be. I was ahead of this curve, but it didn’t take long for the rest of the Embassytowners to understand that the Hosts were junkies, though they may not have known how or why. I suspect there was a power struggle in the Embassy, that some would have tried, out of habit, without rationale, to wall up information. They didn’t win.

The streets of Embassytown were something between carnival and apocalypse: moods of ending; hysteria; happiness, or its giddy approximation. Constables apprehended people walking determinedly toward the edge of town, in biorigging that might let them breathe the city air.

“You’re going nowhere!” the officers said. “Get that off. People are dying...” Some would-be city voyagers must have got through. Embassytowners wanting something from the Hosts. Pointless—the Ariekei wouldn’t perceive them as people, but as the meat belongings of Ambassadors.

I was able to bluff my way back into the Embassy. Seeing the way the Ambassadors were scurrying I felt for a moment almost protective of them. They didn’t question me. Even JasMin seemed to have forgotten they disliked me. One of EdGar gave me a kiss, to my surprise. I couldn’t see his doppel. I saw the discomfort in Ed or Gar’s eyes, from stretching their link’s field.

“Where... ?” I said.

“Coming, coming.” Being so separated must have made it hard to concentrate. We didn’t say much until his doppel turned a corridor corner and joined us.

“Have you been into the city?” I said. (“Of course.” “No one’ll talk to us.”) “D’you know what’s happening?” (“No.” “No.”) “Where’s EzRa? Where’s Wyatt?” (“Don’t know.” “Don’t care.”)

“You don’t know where EzRa are?” I said. “After they caused all this shit? So what, you’ve just left them to fucking conspire?”

“Conspire?” Ed and Gar laughed. “They won’t even talk to each other.”

AN ARIEKENE ship-beast came toward us over their city, in which the outline of that obscure malaise was spreading, building to building. When the flyer touched down on the pad, we rigged up something like an official welcome. It’s perhaps tendentious to say “we”, but I made myself part of that community then, around the Staff and Ambassadors, and I think no one resented it.

Every Ambassador I could think of was there. The Ariekei entered the hall with gusts of aeoli breath, our wind, with the gilted curtains snapping like capes around them. They walked on the altwood floor with the sound of fingernails. Not a fraction so many as had come that last pilgrimage time, but this was a more formal group. JoaQuin and MayBel stepped forward, and others shuffled behind them. Our two sides watched each other. Eye-corals craned.

The Ariekei spoke so quickly only the most fluent listeners could follow. I turned to see how the crowd were taking all this, and with shock saw my husband. He stood in the doorway, and with him was the new Ambassador.

I WAS THE FIRST, but a few other people in the room started to notice them, and there were gasps. Ra, tall and looking very tired, stood in a pose midway between hopeful and resentful. Behind him, Ez looked at the floor. His bantam swagger was gone. His augmens were off.

Scile saw me. He met my eye, then looked around the room again. Standing where he stood, he could have been shoring EzRa up, could have been protecting them, could have been menacing them.

I recognised some of the visitors. On one fanwing I saw a moment of bird-shape in tree-shape. Pear Tree. I stared at it. The Hosts said EzRa’s name.

EzRa found a reserve of dignity, and met that attention. The Ariekei spoke in a confusion, one then another, squabbling even, until at last something like sense emerged. Someone began to translate what they said.

This is how it will be.

An unqualified future tense, rare in Language. This wasn’t an aspiration: the Hosts could only envisage that this was how it would be. They didn’t allow discussion: later we would make sense of it all. They didn’t raise details. They didn’t present requests or even demands, not really. They expressed need. All they could say, repeatedly, in various ways, was that they needed.

We will hear EzRa speak. This is how it will be. We will hear them speak. First now we will hear EzRa speak.

I could see some Staff making calculations, muttering: the best of them could strategise even during this. I admired that. They were working out what to do, what relations could remain and how others would be saved, how we could live, what we would make Embassytown be. They made me hope, and I’d not expected that.

The Hosts had a simple and single priority, it seemed. I was never a fool; I’d known there must be antagonisms, camps and struggles among them, before I ever saw that bloody result of one; and now a paradox, that that memory rose in me at that moment, when all that was evident was one implacable agenda. First we will hear EzRa speak.

Ez came forward, then, grudgingly, Ra. They looked at each other with very different emotions, those two unalike men. They whispered. They spoke Language together, and brought the Hosts to rapture.

11

AS THEY UNFOLDED those times seemed pure chaos, but by the prodigious efforts of the better Staff, a kind of life emerged. Even routines. It’s shocking how fast a whole city can be made to change.

Trade, all the moments and minutiae of exchange: knowledge, services, goods, promises and extras. Our culture. The way we lived. All of those things had to be fixed.

There was a dangerous excitement, an amoralism manifesting in small cruelties and mass indulgence, that some let take them, while others struggled to make things work. In the first weeks, if you came to the Embassy, it would probably be guarded, but perhaps not. Meeting rooms and galleries might be uncleaned, might contain detritus of parties. I didn’t find much pleasure in transgressions. I knew the vomited-up red wine wasn’t puked in ostentation, nor left to rot in libertine performance, but because those who partied had seen or heard about the Ariekene demand; couldn’t conceive of how we could keep going or what would happen if we failed to fulfil them; so didn’t know if they would live another week, and had never been so afraid.

Ehrsul did not answer my buzzes, and I was so overwhelmed I didn’t pursue it or visit her, as a good friend perhaps should have. EzRa was at some parties, I heard from others, then saw myself. After a short time it was only Ez who was there, at the millennial debauches. Ra did other things.

There were assignations and the collapses of relationships. There were many marriages. I had my own hurried liaisons. Really those first days are hard to talk about. The heroes who ensured that Embassytown wasn’t swept away by insistent addicted Hosts were the clerks, who set up structures while the rest of us failed not to fall apart. A little later I became something again, something important to Embassytown: just then I was not.

In those days Embassytown felt as small as it ever had to me. Not two days could pass without me meeting, at some gathering, eager or desultory or both, people I’d avoided for thousands of hours. Burnham, a simile from back when, caught my eye from the other end of a crowd gathered because of a bullshit rumour that information was about to be imparted by the Embassy gates. He looked away as carefully as I did, as I had every time since Hasser’s and Valdik’s deaths, since way before this new cataclysm, that I’d bumped into him or Shanita or any of the dispersed Cravat crew.

I wandered Embassytown while civil servants took pills to stay awake and worked out plans to keep us alive. I bumped, more than once, into older friends: Gharda; Simmon, the guard. He had nothing to guard. He was terrified: his biorigged prosthesis seemed sick.

Staff too lowly had no idea what to do, and those too high were crippled by the loss of everything. So were all those Ambassadors who told people that it was the viziers’ faults, that they would never themselves have let things come to this, that it had always been Staff who were the real powers and who had let everyone down. No one listened to that fairy tale any more.

It was ignored people who’d done the same thing for years who changed themselves for the sake of Embassytown, and changed Embassytown. Our bureaucratic feudalism of expertise became a remorseless meritocracy. Even a few Ambassadors proved themselves. Rarely the ones I’d have guessed. That’s true but a trite observation.

One of the first of the new leadership’s achievements was the defeat of Wyatt’s insurgency. Simmon was key to that little war. He told me about it afterwards, invigorated again. “You saw how suddenly all Wyatt’s lot got moving? They were opening the arsenals. I guess whatever’s going on triggered some bloody Bremen emergency protocol. That’s what all that chaos was, a few days ago.”

I’d not noticed whatever uprising of our overpower’s representatives he was talking about. There was plenty of chaos enough.

“We got wind of it—never mind how—and we were ready for them. But we had to take risks.” He was drawing the plan, the actions, in schema, with his hand in the air. “We could probably just have pre-empted them, you know? But that Bremen tech they’ve got—we reckoned it had to be pretty damn useful. So we waited and went in after they’d opened the silos. We had a few officers placed with them—it’s not as if we hadn’t been preparing for this before. We took them with only a few casualties, and we got the weapons. Although honestly, they’re not as useful as we’d hoped. Still.

“They didn’t put up much fight. It’s only Wyatt who was the problem. We’ve put him away. Incommunicado. There are bound to be Bremen agents still out there, and we have to make sure he can’t get codes or instructions or whatever to them.” I didn’t tell him I hadn’t noticed the drama. Even ignorant of it as I’d been, I was galvanised, hearing of it.

RA, THE DIFFIDENT half of our cataclysmic Ambassador, was allowed his solitude and whatever his little projects were; Ez was allowed his louche collapse. But they were on orders, and they were guarded. They had duties. They were what kept us alive.

“A city of brainwashed,” EdGar said to me. “Stronger than us, armed. We need them hospitable.”

There was no thinking or strategy from the Hosts in those first days. I who was so used to glossing all their strangeness with special pleading—it’s some Ariekene thing, we wouldn’t understand— was aghast to become convinced that they were not indulging any inhuman strategy, but mindless addict need. At first crowds of Ariekei were gathered permanently outside the Embassy. When they became agitated and their demands particularly insistent, every few hours, EzRa would be fetched, appear at the entrance, and in flawless Language say something— anything at all—amplified to carry, to the crowd’s obvious stoned relief.

The second time EzRa said to them We are happy to see you and look forward to learning together, the oratees reacted without quite the degree of bliss they’d shown previously. The third time they were unhappy, until EzRa announced some new pointlessness about the colour of the buildings, the time of day or the weather. Then they were rapt again. “Fucking fantastic,” I said to someone. “They’re building up tolerance. Keep EzRa inventive.”

We watched news programmes that after kilohours of trivialities now had to learn to report our own collapse. One channel sent an aeoli-wearing team with vespcams into the city. They were neither invited nor barred. Their reports were astonishing.

We were not used to seeing Ariekene streets, but there are new freedoms during a breakdown. The reporters edged into the city, past plaited ropes tethering gas-filled Host rooms, past buildings that shied away from them or rose on spindled limbs like witch-huts. Ariekei crossed our screens. They saw the reporters, stared and ran over sometimes like tottering horses. They asked questions in their double voices, but there were no Ambassadors to answer them. The reporters knew Language, translated for viewers.

“ ‘Where is EzRa?’ ” That was what the Hosts said.

The reporters weren’t the only Terre in the city. Their vespcams glimpsed men and women in Embassy suits moving among the skittish houses. They were routing cables and speakers— Terretech that looked jarring in that topography. They were extending a network of hailers and coms boxes. In return perhaps for our lives, the maintenance of our power, water, infrastructure, biorigging, they were getting ready to bring EzRa’s voice right into the city.

“We need EzRa now,” EdGar said. “They have to perform. That was our deal.”

“With them, or the Hosts?” I said.

“Yes. More EzRa, though. And that means we need Ez.”

He was drinking and drugging. More than once, he’d disappear at the times he was scheduled to speak Language to the Ariekei, leaving Ra speechless and waiting. I didn’t care if Ez killed himself, but that he’d take us with him if he did.

“They’re like normal Ambassadors in one way, right?” I said. “Recordings work? So build up a library of EzRa’s speeches, then let the fucker do what he wants. Let him drink himself dead.” They’d thought of that, but Ez would not comply. Even begged by Ra or threatened by Staff or guards, he would only speak with his Ambassador-colleague an hour or so at any one time. We could grab the odd snippet onto dat, but he was careful not to let them collect a store of EzRa’s Language.

“He knows he’d be redundant,” EdGar said. “This way we keep needing him.” Even in his decline and terror, Ez thought with ruthless strategy. I was impressed.

BY VESPCAM, I saw the first times that EzRa’s voice was played into that strung-out city.

The buildings had been unhappy for days. They were rearing and breathing steam, purging themselves of the biorigged parasites they bred, that were Ariekene furniture. Look out from the Embassy, to where the city began, an organic vista like piled-up body parts, and the motion of the architecture was clear. The wrongness was endemic.

The city twitched. It was infected. The Hosts had heard EzRa’s impossible voice, had taken energy from their zelles and let out waste, and in the exchange the chemistry of craving had been passed, and passed on again by the little beasts when they connected to buildings to power light and the business of life. Addiction had gone into the houses, which poor mindless things shook in endless withdrawal. The most afflicted sweated and bled. Their inhabitants rigged them crude ears, to hear EzRa speak, so the walls could get their fix.

EzRa spoke. They said anything in Language. Their amplified voice sounded through all the byways. Everywhere in the city Ariekei staggered and stopped. Their buildings staggered with them.

It disgusted me. My mouth twisted. Everything beyond Embassytown shuddered with relief. It moved through pipework, wires and tethers, to every corner of the grid, into the power stations stamping in a sudden wrong bliss. Withdrawal would start again within hours. By the edge of our zone we could feel it in the paving: a shaking as houses moved. We could track their biorhythms through our windows, could gauge how badly the drug of speech was needed.

IN THE PAST, each few months at harvest- or weaning-time, we’d send aeolied Ambassadors and barter-crews out to where Ariekene shepherds of the biorig flocks would explain different wares, these machines half-designed half-born to chance, what each did and how. Now, the Ariekei neglected their out-of-city lands. Biorigging still entered the city, and we could see by the convulsions of the enormous throats that stretched kilometres to the foodgrounds that pabulum was still coming in too. And that, with reverse peristalsis, addiction was being passed out.

“This world’s dying,” I said. “How can they let it go like this?”

We saw no attempts at self-treatment, no struggles. No Ariekene heroes. Ambassadors could converse with them in the hours after they’d had a hit of EzRa’s voice, when they seemed to humans lucid, but only to make the shortest of plans, for scant hours ahead.

“What do you think they should be doing?” MagDa was one of the few Ambassadors working to usher in change. I’d joined them. I was trying to be part of this new team. I knew MagDa and Simmon, scientists like Southel. Mostly though it was people new to me. “There’s no equilibrium possible.” “This is chance. A cosmic balls-up.” MagDa hadn’t equalised. I saw broken veins beneath the eyes of one and one only, and new lines beside the mouth of the other. “This is just a glitch between two evolutions,” they said. “How would they accommodate it?” “This doesn’t mean anything.” “They’ll listen themselves to death before they’ll try to change.”

The Hosts had always been incomprehensible. In that one sense, nothing had altered.

The upper floors of the Embassy had become a moral ruin. A little farther down, I saw Mag and Da cajole the Ariekei who came, force them to focus just long enough that we could be sure they’d understood our requests, for materials and expertise. And in return, what was it MagDa offered?

Have it say about colour, I thought I heard one Host say.

It will, MagDa said. You will bring us the tool-animals before tomorrow and we will make sure it describes every colour of the walls.

“We keep going through colours for them,” Mag said to me.

“They’re loving it,” Da said. “But eventually...” “... the piquancy of it’s going to wear off.”

After this exchange I made new sense of EzRa’s little speeches to the city. Someone would generally translate. Some nodded to logic. Others were random sentences, or statements of preference or condition. I’m tired, subject-verb-object like children’s grammars. What I’d previously thought whims of subject I realised might be gifts for particular Ariekene listeners, in return for this or that favour. Economies and politics.

In the Embassy corridors, Ra, that impossible not-doppel, joined MagDa and me. Mag and Da kissed him. His presence meant we were approached by people desperate for some kind of intercession. He was as kind to them as he could be. I’d seen too many messiahs thrown up by Embassytown. “How long do we have to go on?” one distraught woman asked him.

“Until the relief,” he said. So many hundreds of thousands of hours, scratching out an interstitial living while the Hosts hankered for EzRa’s sounds.

“Then what?” the woman said. “Then what? Do we leave?”

No one answered. I saw MagDa’s faces. I thought of what life would be, for them, in the out.

Reliefs had arrived on catastrophised worlds before. No communications could warn; there’s no outracing an immer ship. No crew could know what they’d see when their doors opened. There were famous cases of trade vessels emerging from immer to find charnel grounds on once-established colonies. Or disease, or mass insanity. I wondered how it would be for our incoming captain to emerge in our orbit, as close as she or he dared to the Ariekene pharos. If we were lucky, that ship would find a populace desperate to become refugees.

MagDa in the out? CalVin? Or even Mag and Da and Cal and Vin? What would they do? And they were among the most collected of the Ambassadors. By then most others were falling, to various degrees, apart.

“They go into the city,” MagDa told me when we were alone. She was talking about Ambassadors. “Those of them who can still pull themselves together a bit.” “They go in, and find Hosts.” “Ones they’ve always worked with.” “Or they just... stand between buildings.” “And they just start to talk.” They shook their heads. “They go in groups of two or three or four Ambassadors and just...” “... they just... they try...” “... to make the Ariekei listen.” They looked at me. “We did it once, ourselves. Early on.”

But the Ariekei wouldn’t listen. They understood, and might even answer. But they would always go back to waiting for EzRa’s announcements. The vespcams got everywhere, wouldn’t let Ambassadors hide their breakdowns. I’d seen footage of JoaQuin howling, and speaking Language, and in their misery losing their rhythm with each other, so the Ariekes to which they desperately tried to talk didn’t understand them.

“Did you hear about MarSha?” MagDa said. I remember nothing about their voices that warned me that they were about to say anything shocking. “They killed themselves.”

I stopped in my work. I leaned on the table and looked at MagDa slowly. I couldn’t speak. I put my hand over my mouth. MagDa watched me. “There’ll be others,” they said quietly, at last. When the ship comes, I thought, I could leave.

WHERE’S WYATT?” I asked Ra.

“Jail. Just up the corridor from Ez.”

“Still? Are they... debriefing him... or what?” Ra shrugged. “Where’s Scile?” I had not seen, nor heard from, nor heard of, my husband, since the start of this ruinous time.

“Don’t know,” Ra said. “You know I don’t really know him, right? There was always a crowd of Staff around us when we were talking... before. I don’t even know if I’d recognise him. I don’t even know who he is, let alone where he is.”

I descended, passed searchers looking through a room full of papers for useful things. We were doing a lot of scavenging. More floors down, and I heard someone call my name. I stopped. It was Cal, or Vin, in the entrance to a stairwell. He blocked my way and stared at me.

“I heard you were around here,” he said. He was alone. I frowned. His aloneness continued. He took my hands. It was months since we’d spoken. I kept looking around him and I kept frowning. “I don’t know where he is,” he said. “Close, I’m sure. He’ll be here soon. I heard you were here.” This was the one I’d meant to wake. He stared with a desperation that made me shudder. I looked down to avoid his eyes and saw something I could barely believe.

“You turned off your link.” I said. Its lights were off. I stared at it.

“I was looking for you, because...” He ran out of anything to say and his voice got to me. I touched his arm. He looked so suddenly needful at that that I couldn’t help pitying him.

“What’s been happening to you?” I said. Bad enough for me, but the Ambassadors had become abruptly nothing.

In the corridor behind him his doppel appeared. “You’re talking to her?” he said. He tried to grab his brother, who didn’t take his eyes from me but shook his doppel off. “Come on.”

They weren’t equalised. As with MagDa, I could see differences. They whispered an altercation and the newcomer backed away.

“Cal.” The first man, the half who had sought me out, said, looking at me. “Cal.” He pointed at his brother, at the other end of the corridor. He prodded his own chest with his thumb. “Vin.”

I knew his look of longing wasn’t, or wasn’t just, for me. I met it. Vin walked backwards to join his brother, looking at me for several seconds before he turned.

12

I TRAVELLED INTO the city with MagDa and Staff, part of a group trying to keep a paralysed Embassytown alive. Aeolius on me exhaling air I could breathe, I walked at last into that geography. We couldn’t risk corvids: the systems in place to ensure safe landing were now too often not operated.

We couldn’t wait—our biorigged medical equipment, our food-tech, the living roots and pipes of our water system needed Ariekene attention. And I think there was also in us something that needed to keep checking, to try to test what was happening. Like mythical polar explorers, or the pioneers of Homo diaspora, we trudged in formation, carrying trade goods.

The architecture quivered as we came and related to us as germs in a body. Ariekei saw us. They murmured, and MagDa spoke to them, and often they would respond in ways that suggested they hardly knew we were there. We were not relevant. We went past the speakers Staff had helped to place, and around each of them, though they were currently silent, were gatherings of Ariekei. These were the furthest gone: we were learning to distinguish degrees of addiction. They would wait there for more sound, whispering to each other and to the speakers, repeating whatever they had last heard EzRa speak.

Ra had to cajole and threaten Ez into their performances, now. One concession—because Ez was treated like a capricious child, with castor oil and sugar—was, within the limits of barter necessity, to let Ez decide what they would say. What we would hear translated into Language, then, were rambling discussions of Ez’s past. If EzRa spoke during one of our trips into the city we couldn’t escape listening to them. Christ knows what Ra thought as he spoke these platitudes that Ez wanted his audience to get drunk on.

... I always felt different from the others around me, the Ariekei listeners would repeat. We would walk past a patchwork of Ez’s ego in scores of voices. She never understood me...,... so it was my turn...,... things would never be the same again... It was almost unbearable to hear the Ariekei say these things. Ez, I realised, built up an arc over many days. These weren’t disparate anecdotes: it was an autobiography. And that, I heard in an Ariekene voice, was where the trouble really started, and what happened next you’ll have to wait to hear. Ez was ending each session on a cliffhanger, as if that was what kept his listeners avid. They would have listened no less hard had he expounded details of import duties or bylaws on construction specifications or dreams or shopping lists.

WE WOULD MAKE our way to some nursery for the processing of bioriggage, a cremator full of memory, a residence or leviathan hearthlair or wherever, and when we found through the efforts of MagDa or another Ambassador the Host for which we were looking, there would follow careful discussion. It was a tortured business, negotiation with an exot addict. But we would generally achieve something. And in the company of a Host or with a cage full of the tool-parasites our maintenance needed, or with plans or the maps we were learning to use and draw, we would retrace our way. It was always a full day’s expedition. The city would react vividly to us, walls sweating, window-ventricles opening. The ears that each house had grown would flex with expectation.

That was another reason we preferred not to be outside when EzRa broadcast. I wasn’t alone in finding the gluttony of the architecture and its inhabitants, the frantic eavesdropping of the walls, horrible.

Order was tenuous and dangerous but there: this wasn’t the collapse it so might have been. The ship would come. Until then we lived on the brink. When we left, we would leave a world of desperate Ariekei crawling in withdrawal. I couldn’t think about that, or what would happen after that. It would be a long time until we had the luxury of guilt.

I met the same Ariekei more than once on our expeditions. Their nicknames were Scissors; RedRag; Skully. If EzRa’s broadcast sounded they would snap to as utterly as any other Ariekei. But other times they did their best with us: a cadre was emerging among the Hosts who were, perhaps, our counterparts; trying, from their side, to keep things going. Harder for them, given that they were afflicted.

IN EMBASSYTOWN we had countertendencies, now, to the drive toward collapse. Schools and crèches started running again. Though no one knew yet on quite what basis our economy worked any more, shiftparents mostly kept care of their charges, and our hospitals and other institutions continued. Out of necessity our town didn’t fuss about the lines of profit or accounting that had previously driven its production and its distribution.

I mustn’t give the impression that it was healthy. Embassytown was violently dying. When we citynauts returned it was to streets that weren’t safe. Constables escorted us. We couldn’t punish those determined to party their way to the end of the world. Besides, all of us sometimes went to their convivials. (I wondered if I’d meet Scile at any: I never did.) The curfew was unforgiving, though. Constables even left some dead, their bodies censored by pixellation on our news channels. There were fights in Embassytown, and assaults, and murders. There were suicides.

There are fashions in suicide, and some of ours were dramatic and melancholy. More than one person took what was known as the Oates Road, strapping on a mask to breathe and simply walking out of Embassytown, and on, out of sight and into the city; even, some stories had it, out beyond it; to let what would, happen. But the most common choice for those oppressed to death by the new times was hanging. According to what protocols I’ve no idea, news editors decided that those mostly bloodless bodies could be shown without digital disguise. We grew used to shots of dangling dead.

The news didn’t report the suicides of Ambassadors.

MagDa showed me footage of the bodies of Hen and Ry, lying entangled on their bed, intertwined by the spasms caused by poison.

“Where are ShelBy?” I said. ShelBy and HenRy had been together.

“Gone,” MagDa said.

“They’ll turn up,” Mag said. Da said: “Dead.” “HenRy won’t be the last.” “They won’t be able to hide this sort of thing much longer.” “In fact, given the population size...” “... the rate’s higher than average.” “We’re killing ourselves more than others.”

“Well,” I said. All business. “I suppose it’s no wonder.”

“No, it’s not, is it?” MagDa said. “It really isn’t.” “Is it any wonder?”

WE DRAGOONED some of Embassytown’s transient machines, uploading what ’ware we could to make them less stupid. Still they were unfit for all but basic tasks.

Ehrsul would still not answer my buzzes, or, I learnt, anyone’s. I realised how many days it was since I’d seen her, was ashamed and abruptly fearful. I went to her apartment. Alone: I wasn’t the only one from the new Staff who knew her, but if any of the worst outcomes I suddenly pictured were true, I could only bear to find out, to find her, on my own.

But she opened her door to my knocking almost immediately. “Ehrsul?” I said. “Ehrsul?”

She greeted me with her usual sardonic humour, as if her name hadn’t been a question. I could not understand. She asked me how I’d been, said something about her work. I let her blather a while, getting me a drink. When I asked her what she’d been doing, where she’d been, why she hadn’t responded to my messages, she ignored me.

“What’s going on?” I said. I demanded to know what she made of our catastrophe. I asked, and her avatar-face simply froze, flickered, and came back, and she continued her meaningless tasks and directionless wit. She said nothing to my question at all.

“Come with me,” I said. I asked her to join MagDa and me. I asked her to come with me into the city. But whenever I mooted anything that would mean her leaving her room, the same stuttering fugue occurred. She would skip a moment, then continue as if I’d said nothing, and talk about something outdated or irrelevant.

“It’s either a fuckup of some kind or she’s doing it deliberately,” a harried Embassy ’waregener told me later, when I described it to her. You think? I was about to respond, but she clarified: it might be an autom equivalent of a child singing I can’t hear you, with fingers in its ears.

When I left Ehrsul’s, I saw a letter in front of her door, opened and discarded. She didn’t acknowledge it, even as I bent very slowly to pick it up, right in front of her, looking at her the whole time.

Dear Ehrsul, it read. I’m worried about you. Of course what’s going on’s got us all terrified, but I’m concerned... and so on. Ehrsul waited while I read. What must my expression have been? I was holding my breath, certainly. Her avatar stuttered in and out of focus until I was done.

I didn’t recognise the name at the letter’s end. I saw from the way it fluttered, minutely, when I bent to put it back on the floor, that my fingers were shaking. How many best friends had she collected? Maybe I was her uptown version, linked to Staff. Perhaps each of us had a niche. Perhaps all of us had been afraid for her.

Thinking about her made me think also of CalVin, of whatever pointless actions they were performing, and of Scile, from whom I had still heard nothing. I buzzed Bren, repeatedly, but to my infuriation and concern he didn’t answer. I went back to his house but no one came to the door.

I DON’T THINK I’d understood what Ra dealt with until I was on Ez duty. We could of course have simply held a gun to Ez’s head, but when we threatened too hard, he threatened us back, and his behaviour was so unpredictable we had to take seriously the possibility that he’d refuse to speak, and damn us all, out of spite. So instead we chaperoned him everywhere, at once jailers, companions and foils. That way when it was time for him to perform, he could make our lives hard, and we could let him kick us around, until, sulkily, he acquiesced.

Security was always in at least twos. I asked to join Simmon. When I met him he gripped my right hand in greeting with his left. I stared. The right arm he’d worn for years, an Ariekene biorigged contrivance of imprecise colour and texture but exactly mimicking Terre morphology, was gone. The sleeve of his jacket was neatly pinned.

“It was addicted,” he said. “When I was charging it it must’ve...” He had used a zelle, like the Hosts and their city. “It was sort of spasming. It tried to grow ears,” he said. “I cut it off. It was still trying to listen, even lying there on the floor.”.

Ez was in EzRa’s Embassy chambers. He was drunk and wheedling, excoriating Ra for cowardice and conspiracy, calling MagDa filthy names. Nasty but no nastier than many arguments I’d heard. Ra was what surprised me. He stood differently than I’d seen him do before. He whom we often mocked for his taciturnity spat back epithets.

“Make sure he’s ready to speak when he gets back,” Ra said to us. Ez gesticulated an obscenity at him.

“Can I at least go to a party? Or will you bastards try to keep me even from that?” Ez moaned as we followed him to the venue in the Embassy’s lower floors. We stood watch, policed the drink he took, though we’d never seen excess seem to alter his abilities to speak Language. We watched him fuck and argue. The glints on his link puttered frantically, hunting for and not finding its pair, striving to boost a connection Ez was avoiding.

I could say it was depressing, that party, like a walk through purgatory, we at the end of the world rutting into oblivion and drugging ourselves idiot to autogenerated rhythms and a hammer of lights through smoke. Perhaps to those participating it was joyful. It didn’t hold Ez’s interest. I was as impassive as a soldier.

Ez took us to what had been an office equipment warehouse in the middle floors of the Embassy and was now an ersatz bar. He drank until I intervened, which made him delighted because then he could denounce me. The only people in this peculiar thrown-together place were ex-Staff and one or two Ambassadors. They showed no concern that he was risking our world with every glass.

“Your friends,” I whispered, and shook my head. He met my eyes quite unmoved by the disgust.

Embassytowners had taken over the lower floors of the Embassy, looking for safety. Those levels had become back-alleys. Men and women, nurseries and shiftparents reconfigured cupboards and spilled out of meeting rooms, turning architecture inside-out. We went walking through these night streets made of corridors, where lights not broken had been reprogrammed into diurnal rhythms and house numbers were chalked on inside doors by which people leaned and talked while children played games past their bedtime. Embassytown had come inside.

Sotted and maudlin, Ez began to badmouth Ra. “That lanky shit,” he muttered as we followed him through semiautonomous zones policed by their own incompetent constables. “Coattailing me, then coming the big I-am.” Ra was the only person in Embassytown who shared Ez’s colloquialisms and accent. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? Easy for him to play the nice boy when, with... he can...” Cheap lamps flickered above us, new stars. “I shouldn’t...” Ez said. “I’m tired, and I want to stop this... and I want Ra to leave me alone.”

I said, “Ez, I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“Please stop calling me that! Fucking stupid, stupid... It’s...”

I knew his former name. He was the man who had been Joel Rukowsi. I looked at him in the rubbish-specked hall. I wouldn’t call him Rukowsi, or Joel, and when I repeated his name Ez he slumped and accepted it.

Simmon and I rescued him from the fights he provoked. When it was time eventually for him and Ra to perform their dawn chorus, the first speech of the day, he insulted us as we led him back up through the changed building, through new fiefdoms, embryonic slums, where new ways of living were incubating. At the chamber I reached for the door, and Ez halted me with a touch and without speaking asked me for a moment. That was the only time that night I felt anything from him other than scorn. He closed his eyes. He sighed and his face went back to drunk and ornery.

“Come on then, you bastard,” he shouted, and shoved open the door. Ra and MagDa were waiting. They disentangled while Ez mocked them.

We watched EzRa fight. When Ez made some prurient cruel comment about MagDa, Ra shouted at him.

“What do you think you are?” Ez laughed back. “What do you think this is? ‘You leave her out of this!’? Are you serious?” Even I had to bite back a bit of laughter at that unexpected imitation, and Ra seemed a little shamefaced.

“Here,” said Ez later, as sound engineers and bioriggers prepared him for broadcast. Ra read the paper Ez handed him.

“Not going to go over that stuff from yesterday?” Ra said. His voice was suddenly and surprisingly neutral.

“No,” said Ez. “I want to keep on. I think I left it at a good moment, let’s keep things going.” They don’t care! I wanted to shout. You could describe the fucking carpet, the effect would be the same.

Ra asked questions about cadence and timing, wrote notes in the margin. Ez had no copy: he’d memorised what he wanted to say. When they spoke I wasn’t looking at them but over the city, and it twitched as the first hit of language came, as EzRa continued with their stories of Ez’s youth.

13

CYNICALLY, WHO WERE WE? Not many, a gathering of no ones, floakers, dissident Staff, a handful of precious Ambassadors. But our numbers were growing, and our edicts weren’t completely ignored. Embassytowners had begun to do as we suggested, asked, or ordered.

We—MagDa above all—worked hard at our few Ariekei contacts. We worked hard full stop, too hard for me to feel just then whatever it was I ultimately probably would, from Ez’s abuse, from reading Ehrsul’s letter. MagDa even persuaded some of the most contained and coherent Ariekei into the corridors of the Embassy, not simply on eager pilgrimage to EzRa, but on new business. She might reward them with a snip of unheard recording of EzRa, one of our rare stolen buggings.

“Some of them know this is a problem,” said Mag. “The Ariekei. You can tell.”

“Some of them,” said Da. “... there’s some kind of debate, some kind of...” “Some of them want to be cured.”

Like fucking fungus, rumours spread. Our cams still gusted through the city. Some were intercepted by the antibodies the houses secreted, which came up like segmented predators. But when their investigations left them satisfied that the cams were no threat, they left them unmolested. The footage taught us more about our Hosts’ city than we had ever known: too late. And every little half-seen movement, everything we saw out there, the what-and-where of which we couldn’t identify or clarify, gave traction to stories about missing secrets, fifth columns, Staff self-exiled, old grudges.

In the farmlands, huge flocks of biorigging spawned in irregular harvests. Foods and tech came from those stretches by biotic ways. Addiction was chemical: there was a slow stream of it from the city to the kraals and the rural Ariekei. They began to neglect their charges and come to the city, for the sound they suddenly needed without ever having heard. Their deserted manors grew sick, wheezing and hungry. Herds of rigged equipment, medical tech and building tools, girdered and rhino-sized spinners of protein and polymer foundations, went feral.

When their shepherds reached the city there was no one to meet them. The country Ariekei saw their worst-afflicted compatriots lying by speakers and starving to death, waiting for the next sentence. Their bodies lay unhonoured. If the buildings around them were still healthy enough their dog-sized animalculae would break the corpses down: if not, the slower processes of internal rot would smear them gradually into the road.

Fights were common. Withdrawal and Ariekene need meant aggression. The afflicted would tear into things on sudden searches for EzRa’s Language. A less affected Ariekes, usually from the country, might frill its fanwing in formal pugnacity, but the more addicted had no time for traditional displays and would simply hurl themselves hooves and giftwings at their startled opponents. Once I saw footage of EzRa’s broadcast start in the middle of such a battle. The combatants slumped against each other immediately and coiled together as if in affection, still bleeding their blood.

“Things are getting worse again,” Da said. We were going to infect the entire planet.

“That’s not the only thing we have to contend with.” It was Bren.

He stood in the doorway. A suspiciously perfect pose, all framed. “Hello Avice Benner Cho,” he said.

I rose. I shook my head at him. “You prodigal bastard,” I said.

“Prodigal?” he said.

“Where have you been?”

“Prodigal extravagant?” he said. “Or penitent?” A little cautiously, he smiled at me. I didn’t quite smile at him for a minute, but then, fuck it, yes I did.

“HOW DID YOU get in here?” someone said, so newly promoted by circumstance that they added “Who are you?” to hisses of embarrassment. Ra shook Bren’s hand and tried to welcome him. Bren waved him away.

“It’s not just these Ariekene refugees we have to contend with,” Bren said. “Though they’ll certainly complicate matters.” He spoke with monotone authority. “There are other things.”

Of course he couldn’t speak Language since his doppel had died, but there were some Ariekei—you might sentimentally and misleadingly call them old friends—that came to his house and told him things.

“Do you think none of them want this to change?” Bren said.

“No, we know,” Mag said, but he continued.

“You think there are no Hosts who are horrified? They’re thinking through a fug, true, but some of them are still thinking. You know what they call EzRa? The god-drug.”

After a silence I said carefully, “That is a kenning.”

“No,” Bren said. He glanced around the room, gauging who knew that old term for the compound trope. “It’s not like a bone-house, Avice.” He thumped his chest, his bone-house. “It’s more straightforward. It’s just truth.”

“Huh,” someone said shakily, “that’s religion for you...”

“No it is not,” Bren said. “Gods are gods and drugs are drugs but here, here, there’s a city not only of the addicted but of... a sort of faithful.”

“They don’t have gods,” I said. “How... ?”

He interrupted me. “They’ve known about them ever since we got here and told them what they are and what they do. They couldn’t talk about voidcraft or trousers either, before we arrived, but they find ways now. And there are some Hosts who’ll do anything to stop this. That might not be much yet, maybe, until they can get themselves free enough to try to free themselves more. But if they do, well. They’ll end it however they can. You should think of all the ways a few determined Ariekei might try to... liberate... afflicted compatriots.”

He joined me again, in private, that night, in my rooms. He asked me where was my friend Ehrsul and I told him that I didn’t know. That was almost all I said that night. Bren himself didn’t have much to say, but he had come, and we sat together while he said it.

I LEFT THE CITY. Three times.

Seeing those immigrant Ariekei from the outlands gave us ideas. There were some which hadn’t yet left their homesteads but had started to yearn for EzRa’s pronouncements. We went to them.

Our craft had ventricles through which I could put my head and look down as we flew. It exuded air in its belly-bridge, pressurised enough that the bad atmosphere couldn’t push in. I took breaths, then put my head out to watch the ground.

A kilometre below, the demesnes of the Host city. Plateaus and cultivation and simple massive rocks, fractured, their fractures filled with black weedstuff. Meadows crossed with tracks and punctuated by habitations. More grown architecture: rooms suspended by gas-sacs watched us as we flew, with simple eyes.

Leaving Embassytown and then the city felt as dramatic as entering immer. It might have been beautiful. Swaying through fields, even now during the breakdown, farms ambled hugely after their keepers if they still had them, or alone. Symbionts cleaned their pelts. The farms would birth components or biomachines in wet cauls.

Orchards of lichen were crisscrossed with the gut-pipework that spanned out from the city, still looked after in places by tenacious Host tenders. A long way off were steppes where herds of semiwild factories ran, which twice each long year Ariekene scientist-gauchos would corral. We hoped to find a few of these cowboy bioriggers left, to trade their creatures’ offspring.

There was I; Henrych, who had been a stallholder and now had joined the new committees; Sarah, with just enough knowledge of science to be useful; BenTham the Ambassador. The Ambassador were unkempt, bewildered and resentful. Unlike several of their fellows, though, they had still enough decorum to ensure that they were exactly equally dishevelled.

We landed and from the hillside came the distress call of grass, as our vehicles began to graze. In our aeoli masks we gathered equipment, made camp, called in to Embassytown, established a timetable. Checked once more over the orders and the wish list. “I don’t think this tribe exchanges many reactor pups,” I said, down the line to home. “Talk to KelSey. They’re with the wetland cultivators, aren’t they? That’s where they’ll get them, along with some incinerators.” So on. We divided hunting duties between the various crews beyond the city.

Our spancarts were skittish, their foreparts stretched in rippling caterpillar motion. We stacked them full of datchips, all sound-files. Some were stolen, some made with Ez’s grudging consent, when this system had been formulated and mooted to them.

I was almost certainly not as calm as this telling would imply. I’d been looking down onto the surface of the country I was born in, grew up in, returned to, that was my home, and that, that view beyond Embassytown, had been impossible for me till then. So there was that, and there was what I was doing, and the stakes of it. I was looking into a season and a surface without cognates. I’d been into the out, but in homily fashion, my own planet was the most alien place I’d seen.

Things like crossbred anemones and moths froze as we passed, waved sensory limbs behind us. Our cart rutted toward settlements and animals like rags of paper flew in the hot sky. The farmstead at the end of knotted man-thick tributaries of the pipework was as restless as most architecture. A squirming tower laid young machinery in eggs. The paper-shred birds picked parasites from it. Its keepers started when they saw us, then galloped for our company. The farm lowed.

So far out, the addiction seemed weaker or different. BenTham could communicate our desires and understand theirs. They knew that we might have something they could hear, and they clamoured for that, unsatisfied by the degraded remnants of fix that backwashed down the arteries from the city whenever EzRa spoke, or what they half-heard from the nearest speakers, kilometres away, or what previous barterers had offered.

We showed our wares, voilà , like a peddler in the hills in old books. I played a datchip, and from it, in Language, EzRa said, When my father died I was sad but there was a freedom in it too. The Hosts reared and said something. “They’ve got this one,” BenTham said. They’d played it many times, and it had no more effect: they at last heard it for its content, and they didn’t care about Ez’s father.

We offered other bits from his history, cliche´s of diplomacy, idle thoughts, weather reports. We gave them for free. We are very happy about the increased opportunities for technical assistance, and tempted them with the first few phonemes of I broke my leg when I fell out of a tree.

“They’re asking if we have the one about unacceptable levels of wastage in the refinement industry,” Ben or Tham said. “They heard about it from neighbours.”

Husbanding carefully, we gave them enough to buy the biorigging we needed, and some expertise, some explanations. Doing so we spread the addiction, too: we knew that. We brought out pure product, EzRa speech, and these as yet only half-affected outlanders would succumb.

I made a similar journey twice more after that first time. Soon afterwards, another of our buoyant dirigible beasts didn’t return.

When at last our cams found it they reeled back to us footage and trid of it dead and strewn in burnt-out flesh and a slick of guts across the countryside. There drowned in it and shattered, all dead, were our people. Ambassador; navigator; technician; Staff.

I’d known Ambassador LeNa slightly, one of the crewmembers well. I held my mouth closed with my hands as we watched. We were all affected. We fetched back the bodies and honoured them as well as we could with new ceremonies. Our crews searched the mouldering wreckage.

“The ship wasn’t sick, I don’t think,” our investigator told us in committee. “I don’t know what happened.”

IN EMBASSYTOWN we did our best to stand in the way of warlordism, but we small band of ersatz organisers could only slow a degeneration toward that kind of rule. More Ambassadors were joining us, terrified into organisation, inspired by MagDa. Others of course remained useless. Two more killed themselves. Some deactivated their links.

Ez seemed... not calmer perhaps, but more broken, I thought, when I chaperoned him again. Delivering him finally to Ra, though, they argued even more viciously than before. “I can make things bad for you,” Ez kept shouting. “There are things I could say.”

When we went into the city, we had to pass the corpses of houses and Hosts. The death breakdown of biorigging designed and bred to be immortal contaminated the air with unexpected fumes. We heard more Ariekei fighting around speakers. Some of their dead had died from the violence of the desperate; some, those without enough of the new sustenance they needed, just died; and in some places there were more organised brutalities, cadres exerting new kinds of control. The living grabbed what datchips we gave them: these were rewards for these new tough local organisers, in crude concert with which we were just managing to maintain a tenuous system.

One evening as we returned to Embassytown, I lagged behind my colleagues, shaking the mulch of rotting bridges from my boots. I looked back into the Ariekene city, and I saw two human women looking at me.

They were only there a second. They stood one to either side of an alley mouth, metres away, looking at me gravely, and then they were gone. I couldn’t have described them well, probably not even recognised them again, but I knew that they had had the same face.

IT WAS ONLY LATER, when things went wrong all over again and these new routines were made bullshit, that I realised I’d come to expect us to muddle through until the ship came and flew us all away.

One scheduled evening we could find neither Ez nor Ra at the time of their broadcast. Neither would answer our buzzes. That was like Ez, but it wasn’t like Ra.

Ez was in none of his preferred places. We searched the dangerous corridors of the Embassy: no one had seen him. We tried to buzz Mag or Da, who were often with Ra, but they wouldn’t answer either.

We found the four of them in MagDa’s new rooms, high in the Embassy. There were several of us, constables and new Staff like me. When we turned onto a last stretch of hallway we saw a figure huddled by the apartment door. We levelled our gun-things but she didn’t move.

It was Da. As I approached I thought she was dead. But then she looked up at us, with despair.

Into the rooms and to a dreadful scene. Still as a diorama. Mag on the bed, in the same precise pose as Da outside, the wall between them. She looked up at us too, and back at the dead man on the bed with her. It was Ra, quite ruined with blood. A handle emerged from his chest, like a lever.

Ez sat a way off, rubbing his head and face, smearing blood on himself, blubbing. “... I really didn’t, it wasn’t, oh, God, it was, look, I, I’m so, it...” he said, and so on. When he saw us, among other emotions I swear I saw shame broader than for one dead man: he knew what he’d done to all of us. My hand kept twitching as if I’d take the thing out of Ra.

Later we found out that at first the argument had been, ostensibly, about MagDa. That was the marshalling of unconvincing, rote things to express other deeper terrors and resentments. The surface specifics didn’t really matter. This wasn’t about whatever they shouted as they fumbled and implements turned deadly.

We weren’t very used to murder. It wasn’t me who closed Ra’s eyes but it was me who held Mag’s hand and led her away. There wasn’t much time to just grieve: the ramifications of the situation were obvious. I was already thinking of the tiny stock we had of EzRa prerecorded on datchip.

When I returned the others were hauling Ez away and taking Da to join her doppel. I secured the scene. I was alone for some minutes with Ra’s corpse.

“Did you have to?” I said. I think I whispered out loud. I was trying hard to keep myself together and I succeeded. “Couldn’t you have backed down?” I put my hand on Ra’s face. I looked at him and shook my head and knew that Embassytown and I and all the Embassytowners would die.