Embassytown - China Mieville [30]
It was Language that he was there for, of course, but he wasn’t blinkered to other strangenesses. Ariekene biorigging astonished him. At the houses of friends, he would stare like an appraiser at their quasi-living artefacts, architectural filigrees, their occasional medical tweak, prostheses and similar. With me, he would stand at the edge of the aeolian breath, on balconies and viewbridges in Embassytown, watching the herds of power plants and factories graze. Yes, he was staring into the city at where Language was, but he was looking at the city itself as well. Once, he waved like a boy, and though the far-off things can’t have seen us, it seemed as if one station twitched its antennae in response.
Near the heart of Embassytown was the site of the first archive. The field of rubble could have been cleared but it had been left as it was for lifetimes, since it fell: over one and a half megahours, more than half a local century. Our early town-planners must have thought that humans need ruins. Children still came, as we had, sometimes, and the overgrown dereliction was busy with Terre animals and those local lives that could tolerate the air we breathed. They, too, Scile spent a long time watching.
“What’s that?” A red simian thing with a dog’s head, shinning up pipe.
“A fox, it’s called,” I said.
“Is it an altered?”
“I don’t know. Way back, if so.”
“What’s that?”
“A jackdaw.” “A stickleback-cat.” “A dog.” “Some indigene, I don’t know its name.”
“That’s not what we call a dog where I come from,” he’d say, or “Jack, daw,” carefully repeating names. It was unfamiliar indigenous Ariekene things that interested him most.
Once we spent hours in a very hot sun. We sat talking about things, then not talking, holding hands long enough and still enough that the animals and abflora forgot we were alive and treated us as landscape. Two creatures each the size of my forearm wrestled in the grass. “Look,” I said, quietly. “Shh.” Some way from the animals a clumsy little biped was edging away, its rear a fringe of blood.
“It’s injured,” Scile said.
“Not exactly.” Like every Embassytowner child, I knew what this was. “Look,” I said. “That’s the hunter.” A ferocious little altbrock, its black-and-white fur spattered. “What it’s fighting’s called a trunc. As is that thing running away. I know they look like different animals. You see how the tail end of that one over there’s all ragged? And the head of the one getting into it with the altbrock’s torn, too? That’s the brainhalf and that’s the meathalf of the same animal. They tear apart when the trunc’s attacked: the meathalf holds off any predators while the brain end runs off looking for a last chance to mate.”
“It doesn’t look anything like other local stuff,” Scile said. “But … I don’t think it’s Terre?” The meathalf of the trunc was winning, grinding the altbrock down. “Before it tore apart it would have had eight legs. There weren’t any octopodes on Terre, were there? Maybe underwater, but …”
“It’s not Terre or Ariekene,” I said. “It was brought in by accident kilohours ago, on a Kedis ship. They’re little gypsies. They must smell good or something: loads of things attack them. Even though if they then win, eating trunc-flesh makes them puke, or kills them. Poor little refugees.”
The brainhalf of the autotruncator was in the shadow of long-fallen stone and circuitry, watching the triumph of its erstwhile hind limbs. It teetered like a meerkat or a little dinosaur. The brainhalf had taken the trunc’s only eyes, and the meathalf circled in blind pugnacity, sniffing for more enemies from which to protect its escaped mind.
In an act of obscure sentimentality, Scile, with some effort, evaded the trunc meathalf’s claws—no small achievement, given that all it was driven to do by its remaining scrag-end thoughts was to fight—and brought it home. He kept it alive for several days. In the cage he rigged he put down food, and the trunc