Embassytown - China Mieville [49]
“Wyatt, calm down. Whatever’s going on, you can see Staff aren’t in any more control than you.” He must have known the Embassy had had no contact of any kind from the city, since that night. “The Hosts aren’t saying anything. I think …” I said carefully. “I think EzRa … or we … must have accidentally done something that offended them … badly …”
“Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.” He laughed and shook his head. “Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn’t lose our shit, did we? The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I’ve ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult’s intended, and when it’s a misunderstanding. Behind every Ku and Lono story, there’s … pilfering and cannon-fire. Believe me,” he added wryly. “It’s my job.” He made thieving-fingers motions. It was because he would say things like that that I liked him.
“There’s always argy-bargy, Avice,” he said, and leaned toward the screen. “Job like mine. I’ve not shown bad form, have I?” He said this suddenly, almost plaintively. “But this … Avice, there are limits. JoaQuin and MayBel and that lot—they need to remember what I represent.”
Bremen was a power, so always at war, with other countries on Dagostin, and on other worlds. What if enemies sent battleships in our direction? Kicked Bremen in the colonies? What, were we going to raise our rifles, our biorigged cannons, aim at the skies? Any comeback for a little genocide like that, which they could offhandedly commit, would have to come from Bremen itself, if it calculated it worth it. Melees in the vacuum of sometimes-space, or terrible strange firefights in the immer. That threat, and Arieka’s isolation in rough immer—and, though it went unspoken, our lack of importance—were the deterrents against attacks at that level. But there were other factors in Bremen’s martial calculations.
The Ariekei were not pacifist. They sometimes conducted obscure internecine murders and feuds, I had been told; and whatever Wyatt said, whatever the reasons, there had been violent confrontations, deaths, between our species, in the early years of contact. Protocols between us were very firm, and for generations, there’d been no trouble in relations. So it felt absurd to imagine the Ariekei, the city, ever turning against Embassytown. But we were some thousands, and they were many many times that, and they had weapons.
Wyatt was more than a bureaucrat. He represented Bremen, officially our protector; and as such, he must be armed. His staff were suspiciously athletic for office workers. It was well-known that there were weapon caches in Embassytown, to which Wyatt alone had access. The hidden silos were rumoured to contain firepower of a different magnitude from our own paltry guns. There for our benefit, of course, the claim was. Bremen officials arrived with the keys deep-coded in their augmens. It was impolitic and a little frightening of Wyatt to state so blatantly, even to me, an outsider of sorts and a friend of his, of sorts, that his staff were soldiers, with access to arms, and he their CO.
It was true that he was patient. He ignored Embassytown’s minor-to-moderate embezzlement when the miabs came, and every few years when Bremen taxes were collected. He encouraged his officers to mix with Staff and commoners, and even sanctioned the occasional