Embassytown - China Mieville [117]
“What if they don’t want to fight? Even after they’ve had their fanwing taken? Or what if they want to fight the ones that took their fanwing?” I, traitor, was at the secret liars’ club in the city, again, so Spanish Dancer’s comrades could consider me. They contemplated urgently. As urgently as Bren had brought me back through the city. Spanish Dancer itself wasn’t there.
“A fanwing isn’t just an ear,” Yl said. She and Sib looked at me. “It hears, yes.” “It’s the mind’s main doorway.” “More important than sight.” “Their physiology’s nothing like ours.” “If they’ve got no fanwing, they hear no sounds at all.” “And with no sound, they can’t hear their own speech.” “Which means an Ariekes can’t speak.” “So it can’t speak Language.”
Perhaps there was no sense of truth left for them, or thought. Those rebels must be a fractured community, without speech, if they were a community at all. Language, for the Ariekei, was truth: without it, what were they? An unsociety of psychopaths.
“So even if they didn’t want to be part of the rebellion,” I said, “with their fanwings taken, they’re …”
“Insane.” “Or something like it.” “Maybe some don’t take part.” “Maybe they drift. Get lost.” “Maybe they die.” “But they’re not what they were.” “It’s no surprise that most of them join.” “… The bandits.” YlSib smiled without humour at EzCal’s absurd terminology.
“They can’t all have been press-ganged,” I said. The key cadre of that army was surely those that had deafened themselves. That despairing, literally maddening act of revolt had perhaps been performed independently, risen up in hundreds of Ariekei; perhaps a gathering had agreed together, and in a mass act of self-inflicted agony, between EzRa’s meaningless pronouncements—because we realised these dissidents had been attacking us, if in more disorganised fashion, before the reign of god-drug II—had made themselves an organising core. There might be a room somewhere littered with rotting fanwings, the birthplace of this millennial mass.
Each trapped in itself. God knew how many of them, a strike-force of the lonely and lost. How did they move together? How did they coordinate their assaults? I thought again that they must be gusted by instinct and some deep-grammar of chaos: they could not plan. Maybe each strike wasn’t a careful raid but just a sharp edge of the random. I remembered, though, what had looked like interactions among the self-deafened during the First Farm Massacre, and was perturbed.
“They’ve started coming into the city in squads,” Sib said. It wasn’t a city, just tribes of junkies and thralls where a city had been. “What they used to do was kill the other Ariekei.” “If you’ve broken free from something like god-drug …” “… maybe they thought those who didn’t were disgusting.” But they weren’t killing them now: they were recruiting. YlSib made simultaneous plucking motions, twisting imagined fanwings from their anchorings.
I shuddered and turned it into a headshake, and told them I wanted to see Spanish Dancer, as if it was a friend. I wanted to understand it, to make sense of its strategy for emancipation. YlSib were pleased. They took me to the grotto under eaves fringed like fingers where the Ariekes lived. For quite a long time, we all sat silently.
A hamlet of houses in the suburbs, gently regrowing, were taken suddenly down with biorigged weapons of serious power, crossbred from existing strains. Informer Ariekei working with the god-drug told us that something terrible was coming.
All who live in the city and all who live in Embassytown