Embassytown - China Mieville [115]
For all I knew might already have been head of whatever clutch of streets it frequented. EzCal might have changed nothing—except that by saying it, they changed it. There was now a collaboration, an allegiance, between Embassytown and this new heart of the city. I had just seen the tasks of Bren, YlSib and their comrades, get harder.
I think I had been avoiding thinking about what Cal, EzCal, really was, and were. Whether it was design, buffoonery or luck that underlay our new politics, I was not safe.
Ariekei from the new township EzCal had inaugurated left the city with PorSha, KelSey and the constables. These were now joint operations. KelSey came back, but PorSha did not.
We had receivers and cams around all the farm grounds. They flagged us when anything beyond their expectation-algorithms occurred, which is how it was that all of us in the committee were buzzed instantly, and the footage relayed direct to our rooms, at the next attack.
Corvids headed out. They wouldn’t arrive in time, but we had to act, even pointlessly. I was with Bren. We scrolled as fast as we could back and forth through chaotic images. Scenes of tending, of interaction with farmhands. PorSha, a pair of tall diffident women, communicating necessities to the Ariekei. Convulsions as the tube passed goods that would be shat out in Embassytown. Snatches of conversation in Anglo-Ubiq. The time-counter skipped. This datspace was fritzing. “We need Ehrsul,” Bren said. “Do you ever …?” I shook my head. A constable was standing with mud across her. She stared anxiously not at us but over our shoulders, attempting to report.
“Sergeant Tracer at …” she said. There were violent noises. She watched something offscreen. “Under attack,” she said. “Groups of … hundreds, fucking hundreds …”
Her transmission ended, the picture spasmed and was replaced by a view rapidly diminishing as the cam flew up. Tracer was lying on her back, among human dead. She tugged off her aeoli mask, an unthinking spasm of dying fingers. Images strobed. A great company of Ariekei, moving quite unlike the farmhands. They galloped, they swung giftwings, they trailed blood, liquid drizzled from weapons, a spray of dust. None of them spoke—they shouted wordlessly, voicing only attack-meanings, without Language.
They beheaded a minor Staff-man I’d once known a bit. I held my mouth closed. One kicked him down, gripped him with its giftwing, another swung a blade worked out of some coralline stuff. They had biorigged weapons they turned on the farm walls. One Ariekes shot our women and men with a carbine, wielding the Terre weapon with surprising precision. We saw them murder Terre without weapons at all, send jags of their own bone into human innards, or yank masks away, suffocating our people in alien wind.
Bren sped up the footage. He brought us up to live shots. Carnage was ongoing. The officers were vastly outnumbered. They were trying to reach the corvid, and were taken down. PorSha was shouting Language to the attackers. Wait, wait, no more of these actions, they said. Please, we ask you not to do this—We lost that cam, and when it came back PorSha were dead. Bren cursed.
All the speakers we had placed in the farmland started suddenly to shout, in EzCal’s voice. The god-drug had found each other, here in Embassytown, and were yelling down the line. Stop! they said, and things stilled. I leaned toward the crude picture. The carnage, all the motionless Ariekei.
“Jesus,” I said at the numbers. I held up my hands. Bren said, “What are they doing?”
Stand still, the god-drug shouted across the kilometres. Come forward, stand in front of the dead Ambassador.
For seconds there was no motion. Then an Ariekes stepped out of the crowd, took careful hoof-steps into the cam’s view. The others watched it. Its back, its extended fanwing, stretched open, listening to the voice from the speaker, turning into and out of the light as it listened to EzCal’s voice.
There were no other fanwings in