Embassytown - China Mieville [142]
I stood with delegates from the Absurd army, twenty or thirty thrown up from the ranks. “So it’s you I’m talking to, is it, Avice Benner Cho?” Cal said coolly. “You speak for …” He indicated the fanwingless closest to me, our erstwhile captive.
“Theuth,” I said. “It goes by Theuth.”
“What do you mean ‘it goes by Theuth,’ ” he said. “It doesn’t go by anything.…”
“We call it Theuth,” I said. “So that’s what it goes by. I’ll show you how to write that down. Or better, Theuth will.”
Bad enough to be defeated, isn’t it? Even now you’d try to take us out, Cal: me, Bren, the rest of us. Because the way we saved Embassytown means the end of your reign, as it has, look, ended; and even though your whole damn prefecture was a function of despair and collapse, you’d rather lose it on your terms than be saved on ours. That was what I wanted to say.
There were Absurd with Theuth and Spanish, those most adept at the generation of the ideogrammatic script they were inventing, the most intuitive at the reading and performing of gestures. It wasn’t a stable group. Even a few brave Ariekene addicts had arrived, too, come all the way from the city subsisting on pilfered datchips, to see the historic agreement, the change. Rooftop was there, playing its own sound files to itself in sadness. Human runaways squatted on overlooking ledges coloured with Ariekene mottled moulds, and watched the negotiations. They came and went as they wanted.
Cal, perhaps Ez too, tried to depict what was happening as protracted discussion. Really it was just a slow process of explaining facts, and receiving orders, in a nascent script. What took days was making sure the Absurd understood, and understanding what they wanted us to do about it.
You’ve no authority, I could have said to Cal. This is a surrender. You’d love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts. But you’re just here because I told the Absurd you were the one they’d have to tell what to do. And the humans watching, the refugees scowling under their cowls, are going to remember how it’s obvious that you don’t know what’s happening. You’re doing a lot of hanging around during this particular change of epoch, because you’re only a detail.
Cams went everywhere. There were a proliferation of independent home-rigged kits, or those hijacked or gone rogue and uploading their feeds to whatever frequencies they could. Embassytown was watching on the other side of all the lenses.
At night the Ariekei surrounded my party. We asked them to: I still wasn’t certain EzCal wouldn’t attempt revenge.
“What’s going to happen?” MagDa said. They looked at me with wariness and respect.
“It’ll be different,” I said, “but we will be here. Now they know they can be cured it changes everything. How is it in the city? And in Embassytown?”
Panic and expectancy. Among the Ariekei it was still mostly confusion. There was fighting between factions—they’d seemed united under EzCal’s proxy , and obeyed EzCal’s orders, but now they fought for reasons difficult to make sense of.
“We’ll—they’ll—do everything they can to spread this,” I said. “No more fixes necessary. We’re trying to work together. Theuth mostly speaks for the Languageless now. Spanish is talking to us—to YlSib, obviously, but it can even …” MagDa hadn’t seen Spanish and me in the evenings: talking, haltingly. “But I have to tell you something,” I said to her quietly. “I’ve heard how people are describing what this is, and it’s wrong. There is no cure. Spanish and the others … they might not be addicted anymore but they’re not cured: they’re changed. That’s what this is. I know it might sound the same, but do you understand that they can’t speak Language anymore, MagDa? Any more than you ever could.”
It was a morning, very cloudless. In the lower lands around me, among the filamented undergrowth of the planet, I knew there were agents of script, disseminating the new skill, the concept of it, among the Absurd. Already there were deviant forms from those first suggested, dissident