Embassytown - China Mieville [104]
I was spare with all that, rationed it. We tended our aeoli. The poor things had been relocated, their fleshly tethers cut and cauterised, with as little trauma as possible, but they were suffering. We had no Terretech that could replace them, and our air-gardeners frantically protected the biomes of them and their companion things, which shaped currents, sustained our rough air dome. They strived to keep them safe, unhearing, charged by unaddictable technologies, as protected as possible from cross-contamination, but despite all efforts we knew we might not be able to keep our breath-machines from addiction or sickness, and no Host savants would help us now.
As the aeoli wheezed, so would we, and the Ariekei would breach our defences and walk in. When they’d finished with us we would lie with the dead’s traditional lassitude, and the Ariekei would prod us and ask us forlornly to speak like EzRa. Either they would all die, then, or new generations would be born and start their culture again. They would perhaps construct rituals around our and their parents’ bones.
These were the bad dreams we were having. It was into this landscape that god-drug EzCal arrived.
I’d left Bren and MagDa and others to the task of bullying and nurturing our last hope. I’d preferred to oversee other duties, the movement of supplies and weaponry. Despite knowing that Cal was waking, that he was being reintroduced to Ez, that they were making their first attempts, that they were sitting the Stadt test, that the results were being calculated, I didn’t ask what was happening. I even avoided Bren.
Rumours spread that something was being made, that an autom had been perfected that could speak Language, that the Ambassadors and their friends were preparing a miab, would risk immer, to escape. We didn’t leak the truth because it seemed too tentative. When EzCal did emerge into our newly nightmared town, I realised another reason we had said nothing: for the performance of it. A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?
I couldn’t avoid picking up information: when Cal was woken, when he was healed. Though I avoided what details I could, I knew before he and Ez emerged into the Embassy square that they would do so, and I was there ready. Everyone in Embassytown seemed to be there, in fact. There were even Kedis and Shur’asi. I saw Wyatt, flanked by security, to both guard and secure him. There were automa too, turingware struggling, so some of them expressed inappropriate bonhomie. I couldn’t see Ehrsul. It was only with my disappointment that I realised I’d been looking.
We were close enough to the borders of our shrunken town to hear the gusting of Ariekene attacks on the barriers, and the missiles and energies of repulses. Officers kept Embassytowners back from the Embassy’s entrance. It struck me that I must have chosen to cut myself off from what had been happening in the hospital so that I could experience this as nearly as possible a member of the crowd. I looked up at the other committee members, who were parting, and stepping forward was Cal, with Ez behind him.
“EzCal,” one of the official escort shouted, and Christ help me someone in the crowd took it up and it became, briefly, a chant.
Cal looked like something horrific, made worse in the moving glare of lights. His head was shaved, his scalp the palest part of his pale skin, the link on his neck shining. I think he was kept alert by some concoction of drugs: he moved in little insect bursts. His skull was crossed with dark sutures: big physical stitches, a crude technique, supposedly dictated by dwindling supplies of nanzymatic healers, but one that so exaggerated the spectacle I wondered how medically necessary it had really been. He stared into the crowd. He stared right at me, though I’m certain he didn’t see me.
Joel Rukowsi