Embassytown - China Mieville [109]
“We should have called them OgMa, not EzCal,” Bren said. We looked at him for an explanation. “A god,” he said, “who did sort of the same thing.”
YlSib wore biorigged pistols. Bren and I had cruder weapons. YlSib moved with vastly more facility than the halting citynauts with whom I’d made earlier forays. They didn’t hesitate on the way to the edge where brickwork in ruins became biology. The air changed on our way. The way the currents went over me wasn’t like the wind in Embassytown. We were in a place full of new sounds. Small fauna claimed areas. Ariekei in the streets didn’t stop for us, though some raised eye-corals and stared. There were pools overhung by bladderwrackish polyps that dripped reactions into the liquid. I wondered if they were foundations, deliberate town-planning.
I looked down an avenue of marrowy trees to Embassytown. An Ariekes near us startled me, asked repeatedly in Language what we were doing. I raised my weapon but YlSib were speaking. I’m , they said. These are—and then they said something that wasn’t our names. They are coming with me. I’m going home. , YlSib said, and they put stress in their formulation by making it a personal. I, homegoer, was what they said, so I wondered if going home was a powerful thing to the Ariekei too.
“They know us,” said Yl. “These days some are too gone to remember, but if we meet any who can speak, we should be alright.” “Although,” Sib said, “I guess there might be new allegiances. Some of them might have …” “… reasons to not let us pass.”
In fact some Language we heard on that journey made little sense. Phrases spoken by wrecks of speakers out of nostalgia for meaning. YlSib led us finally to a shredded clearing. I gasped. There was a man waiting for us. He leaned below a column of metal that recurved over his head very like a streetlamp. He looked transplanted from an old flat image of a Terre town.
They nodded, muttered to Yl and Sib and Bren. They made sure I couldn’t hear them. The man reminded me of no one. He was nondescript and dark-skinned, in old clothes, an aeoli of a kind I didn’t recognise breathing into him. There was nothing I could have said about him. He left with YlSib and Bren came back to me.
“Who the fuck is that?” I said. “Is he cleaved?”
“No,” said Bren. He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe his brother’s dead by now, but I don’t think so. They just didn’t like each other very much.” Of course I knew this counterworld of exiles existed now, of misbehaving cleaved, Staff unstaffed, bad Ambassadors; but to see its doings astounded me. How had they kept going during the days of collapse, before god-drug II?
“Do you speak to any of the similes still?” Bren said.
“Jesus,” I said. “Why? Not really. I saw Darius at a bar, ages ago. We were both embarrassed. I mean Embassytown’s too small for me not to run into them sometimes, but it’s not as if we talk.”
“Do you know what they’re doing?”
“I don’t think there’s a ‘they,’ Bren. It’s all … disbanded. After what happened. Maybe some of them still meet … But that scene was ruined ages ago. After Hasser. Can you imagine now? No one cares about them anymore, including their speakers. Language …” I laughed. “It isn’t what it used to be.”
YlSib returned, scraping decaying city-stuff off their clothes. “That’s true,” Bren said. “But it’s not true that no one cares anymore. You don’t know where we’re going: your company’s been requested.”
“What?” I had not thought that this infiltration was about me, that I was a task to be fulfilled. YlSib led me to a basement-analogue and ushered me into the biolit presence of Ariekei. “Avice Benner Cho,” YlSib said. They spoke my names perfectly simultaneously, at the same pitch, so though it was two voices it sounded to me like one.
The room smelt of Ariekei. There were several. They were making noises, speech and mutterings of thought. One approached me out of the half-dark and spoke a greeting. YlSib told me its name. I looked at its fanwing.
“Christ,” I said. “We’ve met.”
It