Embassytown - China Mieville [119]
23
As well as the Languageless and the SM, for self-mutilated, at first we called the incoming army the Deaf. Embassytown’s human deaf objected hard to that; they were right and we were ashamed. Then someone named the attackers according to an antique language. It meant that same word, deaf, but rendered the Surdae any insult seemed diluted; particularly because, fast bastardised or misunderstood, the term became the Surd and then misprisioned into the Absurd. Hosts, coming to kill us for sins we’d committed, if at all, without intent.
Above all it was their discipline that was absurd, impossible, the way without words groups would peel off from the main slow body, coordinated into snatch squads that tore through strange country and took apart our rangers, or recruited new Ariekei troops by ripping their flesh. Eventually and abruptly transmissions to us ended, cams batted out of the air by breakdown, wind or the sudden irritation of the enemy. We sent more of course. Plans began.
As our spies gusted out to search, we were breaching old agreements and habits of isolation. The cams showed us the coast, the gently toxic sea. We had a country, on which the city sat, in which was Embassytown. We weren’t used to seeing that. I’d used cartographic ’ware in the immer but not these charts. We had a continent. It would have been hard for me to trace the outlines of Embassytown, harder to draw the city, and I wouldn’t even have recognised the shape of the landmass on which we were such a tiny point. Now we needed them it wasn’t hard to break those taboos and pull up maps. They’d never been forbidden, as I’d seen in the out in some unsubtle theocracies: only inappropriate, and old politenesses were dead. Our cams uploaded directions so we could trace the Absurd.
Their few, their first, the pioneers had also learnt the specific violence to make unspeaking comrades of their victims. How had it been? They had spread out of the depleting city, claiming farmers, on past any urban gutwork into the wandergrounds of nomads, claiming the nomads, the gatherer-hunters of unneeded or escaped technology, building. Someone might one day write the history of that trek, the recruiting crusade.
There were more than all those stolen and violently cured rural addicts. I imagined these crazy crazying figures emerging from wilderness like prophets; those distant Ariekei already alarmed or enraged at what they heard of their cousins in the city reduced to zombie-ecstatics or the craven desperate, might, even if far-off enough to have avoided the affliction, not have needed coercion to join the Absurd. Perhaps there’d been a while before the army went in with regular, remorseless violence, and instead there’d been debates about endeafening among the not-yet-recruited, in some settlements. Articulate, last-ever uses of speech to argue for its eradication.
I made Bren come with me into the city. It was easy to leave, though our borders were supposed to be controlled. Routes in and out weren’t hard to learn.
“They’ll be here within two weeks,” I said. He nodded.
“You see they’re all in prime instar?” Bren said. “They’re not protecting the old or looking after the young.”
The young, though, might soon enough be grateful to them. Even uncared for, a few in each Ariekene litter must survive, and when they emerged to their adult form, woke into Language, they would find a city purged of us. Without god-drug. The Absurd would martyr themselves to that future. They’d put themselves beyond the reach of any compromise or agreement.
We stuck to the safer sub-regions of the city. I found my way—my own, this time, leading Bren—to where Spanish Dancer and its friends practiced lying, and I tried to help them find new ways to speak me.
“We’re forming an army,” Cal said. We were as disdainful