Embassytown - China Mieville [102]
The committee dragooned scientists from wherever they still worked: the stumps of hospitals; rogue-ministering in the streets; of course from the infirmary. We begged and forced others to start work again. Southel, our scientific overseer, organised the researches. They moved fast.
I believe Joel Rukowsi, Ez, thought himself a consummate gameplayer. He thought how broken he looked was a front, I think. We asked him why he’d said nothing about his hidden, embedded technology, why he’d have gone to his death with the rest of us rather than do something that might keep us all alive. He implied some hidden agenda but I don’t think he had an answer. He was just eaten by his own secrets.
He didn’t understand the mechanisms, could only truculently describe how it had worked for him. He looked at the insert we had dug out of Ra, warm in my hand.
“I don’t feel anything,” he said. “I just knew … how he was feeling, what to say. I don’t know if it was that thing made it easier, or what.”
The researchers had teased apart the filigrees that enmeshed it into Ra’s mind with disentangler techzymes. Its nanotendrils dangled from it like thin hair, twitched in my hand in vain search for neuro-matter. It mimicked the theta, beta, alpha, delta and other waves detected from its companion piece in Joel Rukowsi, coordinated the two feeds into impossible phase. Whatever the brain-states, the output would seem shared.
“It’s an amp, too,” Southel told us. “A stimulant. Pumps the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Emp centres.” She took the thing away and learnt it, tried to uncover what it was and did, to take it apart and build another. MagDa spent hours with her, focused her energies on the project.
“They’re up to something,” Bren said to me. “MagDa. You can see they’ve had an idea.”
Ez never said he’d help us, but we didn’t give him any choice, and his only resistance lay in sulking. He would obey us.
“Will you do it?” I said to Bren that night. I spoke quietly. He looked away. It was at these times that I felt we could speak, when he was naked and I watched the night lights of the city now made carnival with biofires glaze him through his windows, his aging athlete’s body.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’m too old, too stuck. I don’t even think I could. I know there aren’t many choices. I wouldn’t be any good at it: I’d say the wrong thing the wrong way. Whoever does this needs very very much to want to live, and I don’t, enough. Don’t be offended. I’ve no death wish but nor do I have the necessary … verve.
“Yes, I know. Ez is Cut, it has to be a Turn-speaker. Well, we can always go to the Ambassadors and find someone desperate enough to cut themselves off from their doppel. That might not be so hard now. I’ll lay you money …” He laughed at that, at how silly money had become. “I’ll bet there are some new cleaved for us to pick from. And some’ll be Turn. But you know, anyway, who we’re going to choose.” He turned to me. “It has to be Cal.”
Neither of us spoke. I didn’t even look at him.
“What do we know about Ez and Ra? They weren’t doppels. But maybe what they did share was important. Hate. We’re not training a new Ambassador, we’re distilling a drug. We have to replicate every ingredient we know about. We need the Turn to hate the Cut. A voice tearing itself apart. Alright, Ez came and ruined the world. So, sure, why wouldn’t the Ambassadors hate him? Why wouldn’t I?” He smiled at me, beautifully. “But I’m tired of this place and I don’t hate Joel Rukowsi enough, Avice. We need someone who does. Cal hasn’t just lost his world, he lost his doppel. He hates Ez enough. Me, I’d be weak tea. My question is, do you think Cal knows he’ll do it, yet?”
Probably, I thought. He must know what his duty would be: to become symbiont with the man who had destroyed his history, future and brother.
Before he went into