Embassytown - China Mieville [106]
PART SEVEN
THE LANGUAGELESS
20
I was a trader again. I went with others in corvids to the country. Business. Now in this reign of EzCal, god-drug II, we could leave again.
MayBel was our speaker on this trip. They could say that name: .
In the weeks since I’d flown out last, the landscape had raggedly changed. By the jut of rocks there were skeletons, where biorigging had come to die. The meadows were torn up by the tracks of stampeding machines, the new routes of refugees into the city in search of the god-drug voice, and later refugees out, in that exodus we still didn’t understand. The city had been depleted, by more than the numbers of dead.
We came down where there were farmlands worked, newly, differently from before. A society was starting. It wasn’t strong. The farmers were addicts again, of a new drug, but it was better than being the mindless starvelings they had been. We had no choice but to be dealers.
We went with our datchips beyond the reach of the speakers. We found Ariekei who still thought EzRa was the ruler and voice of Embassytown, and had unaccountably been silent these past days. Despite MayBel’s articulacy it wasn’t clear they understood what had changed, until with eager giftwing fingers, they played the files, and heard the voice of EzCal.
I want more of the other one, a farmer said. It tried to remember the way we used to trade, the haggling Terre had taught the Ariekei when our predecessors first arrived. Clumsily it offered us more of the medical rigging it had grown if we would give it another of EzRa’s chips. We explained that we had none. Another, though, preferred the newcomer. It indicated several of its chewing beasts, which would defecate fuel and components: it would give us more than ever before, if we would give it more of this new EzCal.
Were those Ariekei who preferred EzCal more measured? Was there a calm, a focus to them, contrasting with a febrile air to those who still hankered for EzRa? Certainly, after ecstasy and before withdrawal, the composure between the Ariekei’s necessary fixes seemed easier for us than they had been before. This EzCal version of Language left the Ariekei clearer-headed, a little more like the Hosts we had grown up with.
We tried to intervene, to shape what structures were emerging. We tried to reestablish conduits for our necessaries. I imagined Scile dead in all the landscapes I passed—in the city, huddled where his aeoli had failed; in the first downs beyond.
We overflew desolate remnants of farms, vats dedicated by old agreements to the production of our foods: nutrient-rich pabulum; crops in Terre-air bubbles; food animals and sheets of meatcloth. Fallen and falling, there were parts though that were restorable. Our crews did what they could, coaxed airglands to fill chambers, restarted traumatised birth-pens. We found local Ariekene keepers, and with snips of EzCal’s speechifying we restored them to mindfulness and gave them delight, coaxed them back to the farmsteads to help us. They cured the buildings, fixed the cityward flow of what we needed. Cells of food jostled like corpuscles on their way to Embassytown.
With those peristalses of imports, we might have more or less ignored the city, now that its inhabitants weren’t attacking us anymore. We could have just broadcast the god-drug’s announcements to its convalescing boroughs to make its inhabitants pliant. We didn’t, of course. Most of us felt concern, even responsibility, for the biopolis. Nonetheless, we weren’t expecting what turned out to be the vigorous interventions of EzCal. Really, of Cal. Cal, and with him the other half of the god-drug, didn’t merely broadcast or make careful forays into the streets, to find a new Ariekei government: EzCal paraded.
The committee