Embassytown - China Mieville [123]
“Tell me,” Bren said. “I thought you’d despaired.”
“I did too.”
“What, then? Tell me.”
I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.
Bren nodded, and listened to what I can’t call a plan—it was hunch and hope—and when I was done he said, “No, we can’t tell Cal.” He touched me under the chin, and put his arms around me, and for a moment I let him take my weight and it was lovely. “Of course we can’t.”
“But we’re trying to fix things,” I said. “You know EzCal aren’t stupid …”
“It’s not about whether they’re stupid,” he said. “It’s about who they are, and what they represent. Maybe Cal would see reason. Maybe. But I don’t think so, do you? Want to risk it, really?”
“If we go, he’ll find out.”
“Yes. And see you as an enemy. And he’ll be right. Don’t think he—they—won’t find time to try to stop us.”
“Alright then,” I said. “I’ll be an enemy.”
He smiled at me. “What else are we going to do, Avice?”
We turned arm-in-arm to look at the screen on which the captive Languageless tried to shuffle, alone in their room, watched by cams. It was a quiet moment for our banishing, as we got ready to exile ourselves. We saw the two Ariekei our rulers held moving not quite like two things unconnected, but according to something else; not a plan but a knowledge of each other; a community.
24
I was still of some cultural interest. So was BrenDan, the free cleaved, troublemaker, licensed dissident. If we disappeared together people would notice. And we might already be watched. That was why the next time, the last time, I went into the city alone.
While the committee fretted and Cal took what power we’d had, Embassytown streets got on with things. Walking through my shrunken town with my aeoli and supplies, I was surprised to pass more than one outdoor party. Some shiftparents of the playing children saw me watching and caught my eye, and even the poignancy of that, of knowing together that this was a last game to keep those children occupied, didn’t detract from a moment’s pleasure.
There were constables on the streets but not much for them to do except wait for the war: they didn’t police with fervour. They didn’t clear out the proselytisers, the, I don’t know, Shakers, Quakers, Makers, Takers, each with their own theology damning or rescuing us. They weren’t treated, even the most brimstone of them, as threats or pests, but as performers. People teased them, while they remained doggedly devout.
I wanted to stop, to ask someone to join me at a café where they were giving away free drinks or accepting the little IOUs we proffered in polite charade. The usual lament: I may be some time. The wistfulness of we who are about to leave. I got out of Embassytown close to where Yohn and Simmon and the others and I had held our breath and where I’d touched a tether. I exited through the corridors of a border house, alone.
On my chart were marked various colonies of city Ariekei, each annotated, the latest information Bren could gather. 1: Heartland. . Loyal. To my left. 2: Status uncertain. 3: contributed to troop but dispute with . 4: communalistic? 5, and on. I knew the displayed boundaries were all porous. As the Absurd approached, those little polities got more insular, their between-fix politics and cultures more divergent, the streets that separated them much worse. I wasn’t at all safe.
The first few hundred metres altbrocks had ambled, I’d heard bird wings and been with insects. Now I was in the territories of local fauna, with at least two names: our vernacular; their markers in Language. I stood still for a dog-sized thing we called a brown-gun, which the Ariekei termed or depending on a taxonomic distinction we never understood. It crossed my path with urchin frog-tongue gait. Overhead passed the scraps and biorigged machines, wild, or carrying Ariekei.