Embassytown (42 page)

Infrastructure wasn’t the only thing attacked. After the Farm Massacre the fanwingless swept into an encampment defended by other, hearing, Ariekei: this became the Cliff-Edge Incident. We had troops there with them equipped with rare out-tech, and they were able to shoot several of the attackers. But half our officers were killed by the time the marauders suddenly left, galvanised by some signal we couldn’t understand. Perhaps by an empathy to tides we couldn’t sense, like birds circling and become one organism.

We didn’t become inured to the footage. EzCal called the committee together, and brought
, Pear Tree, with them. EzCal told us they were making changes in the way the city was administered, as if that might help. Cal talked about making allegiances against “bandits”. I tried to listen, to understand the shape of politics now. From Bren’s scorn I knew that where there wasn’t anarchy or secret renegacy in the city, there were strange comprador authorities like that of
.

We had to witness absurd joint patrols. Under EzCal’s orders, our constables policed outlands beyond the city accompanied by Ariekei dragooned into militia. An Ambassador had to be present, of course, to transmit instructions, on what EzCal stressed was god-drug authority. They took weapon training: career bureaucrats attempted to transform themselves.

The missions disaggregated, failed, as orders relayed by disorientated Ambassadors were interpreted differently by Ariekei and Terre. The Ariekei were not even resentful, so far as I could see—and I knew now that there was such a thing as Ariekene resentment—only bewildered. The first three such patrols achieved nothing and the fourth was attacked. When we reached the site the rescue squad found our Terre people dead and their Ariekei colleagues mostly gone, inducted no doubt by brute surgery into the rebels. The joint patrols were ended.

“W
HAT IF THEY
don’t want to fight? Even after they’ve had their fanwing taken? Or what if they want to fight the ones that took their fanwing?” I, traitor, was at the secret liars’ club in the city, again, so Spanish Dancer’s comrades could consider me. They contemplated urgently. As urgently as Bren had brought me back through the city. Spanish Dancer itself wasn’t there.

“A fanwing isn’t just an ear,” Yl said. She and Sib looked at me. “It hears, yes.” “It’s the mind’s main doorway.” “More important than sight.” “Their physiology’s nothing like ours.” “If they’ve got no fanwing, they hear no sounds at
all
.” “And with no sound, they can’t hear their own speech.” “Which means an Ariekes can’t speak.” “So it can’t speak Language.”

Perhaps there was no sense of truth left for them, or thought. Those rebels must be a fractured community, without speech, if they were a community at all. Language, for the Ariekei, was truth: without it, what were they? An unsociety of psychopaths.

“So even if they didn’t want to be part of the rebellion,” I said, “with their fanwings taken, they’re . . .”

“Insane.” “Or something like it.” “Maybe some
don’t
take part.” “Maybe they drift. Get lost.” “Maybe they die.” “But they’re not what they were.” “It’s no surprise that most of them join.” “. . . The bandits.” YlSib smiled without humour at EzCal’s absurd terminology.

“They can’t all have been press-ganged,” I said. The key cadre of that army was surely those that had deafened themselves. That despairing, literally maddening act of revolt had perhaps been performed independently, risen up in hundreds of Ariekei; perhaps a gathering had agreed together, and in a mass act of self-inflicted agony, between EzRa’s meaningless pronouncements—because we realised these dissidents had been attacking us, if in more disorganised fashion, before the reign of god-drug II—had made themselves an organising core. There might be a room somewhere littered with rotting fanwings, the birthplace of this millennial mass.

Each trapped in itself. God knew how many of them, a strike-force of the lonely and lost. How did they move together? How did they coordinate their assaults? I thought again that they must be gusted by instinct and some deep-grammar of chaos: they could not plan. Maybe each strike wasn’t a careful raid but just a sharp edge of the random. I remembered, though, what had looked like interactions among the self-deafened during the First Farm Massacre, and was perturbed.

“They’ve started coming into the city in squads,” Sib said. It wasn’t a city, just tribes of junkies and thralls where a city had been. “What they used to do was
kill
the other Ariekei.” “If you’ve broken free from something like god-drug . . .” “. . . maybe they thought those who didn’t were disgusting.” But they weren’t killing them now: they were recruiting. YlSib made simultaneous plucking motions, twisting imagined fanwings from their anchorings.

I shuddered and turned it into a headshake, and told them I wanted to see Spanish Dancer, as if it was a friend. I wanted to understand it, to make sense of its strategy for emancipation. YlSib were pleased. They took me to the grotto under eaves fringed like fingers where the Ariekes lived. For quite a long time, we all sat silently.

A
HAMLET OF
houses in the suburbs, gently regrowing, were taken suddenly down with biorigged weapons of serious power, crossbred from existing strains. Informer Ariekei working with the god-drug told us that something terrible was coming.

All who live in the city and all who live in Embassytown must stand against these attackers
, EzCal said, with
beside them. No matter how assiduously the compelled Ariekei tried to obey them, those words were too nebulous to mean much. EzCal never spoke an intoxicating order making all Ariekei obey
: they must have been afraid of unintended consequence.

I wanted to return, as often and for as long as I could, to the liars in the city straining to meet
’s challenge. I was trying to learn how to get there—the route and strategies for the route—but still could only go when YlSib and Bren came with me. After that dramatic attack on the remains of the city, Spanish Dancer and the other gathered Ariekei were distressed (I recognised it). One of their number had left them.

YlSib listened. “They argued with it.” “It told them . . .” “It said it was ashamed.” Bad enough when the first god-drug had pushed them into trips: so much worse now they could see their tripping selves made to obey. “It . . . oh.” “It plucked itself.”

“No,” I said.

It wasn’t just, I thought, the loss of their—what, friend?— to self-savagery, of mind as well as body, so it could not hear nor speak again, that must hurt them. They wanted to be a hope, against the revolutionary suicide of those that tore out their social mind with their fanwings, became nihilist revenge. Were there ranks among the Languageless? Were those that made themselves an aristocracy above those attack-recruited? I looked at Spanish Dancer’s many dark-point eyes, which had seen its companion tear its fanwing like trash, after their years of work, their project that had started long before this end of the world.

B
Y OUR BARRICADE
gates, in rump street-markets, quickly tolerated, an economy of recycled necessities, people began to talk again about the relief. When it would come, where we would go, and what life would be like for Embassytowners exiled to Bremen.

Our now wild cameras inhabited the plains. Many broke down or their signals degraded. But some still got footage to us.

Some were a long way into country not punctuated even by farms, beyond the transport ducts. I heard rumours of certain footage before I saw it. I scorned the idea that it existed but was being kept from me—wasn’t I committee? But though it failed, I discovered that there had been an effort to do just that. I shouldn’t have been shocked. An internal split, a craven and conniving column reporting direct to the god-drug. There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex. There was no way they could contain these files: a day after the first stories about them started circulating, the rest of us got to see them.

A group of us uploaded them to committee datspace. Bren was agitated. I was taken aback by his impatience, that he so obviously had no idea if the whispers about what we were to see were true. I was so used to him knowing things he didn’t tell me. I teased him about it, in a rather brittle manner. We watched the cam’s memories. Plenty of kilometres away but hardly in another country. The viewpoint swept through narrows: I swayed to avoid overhangs the recorder had ducked days before. Some fool at the back said something like “Why are we watching this?”

Through a nook in rock the cam went to a valley of pumice-coloured earth, burred birdlike suddenly tree- then tower-high over the slope, focused where a river had been. We gasped. Someone swore.

There was an army. It marched in our direction. There were not hundreds of Ariekei but thousands, thousands.

I heard myself say
Jesus, Jesus Christ
. We knew now why the city seemed depleted.
Pharotekton
, I said.