Embassytown - China Mieville [54]
“Avice, where is he?”
I knew that voice. “MagDa?” I said. I’d not seen them behind the escort.
The Ambassador pushed their way to the front. “We need to talk to them.”
“Urgently.”
“Hello.” It was Ra, come up behind me. I didn’t turn.
“Ra.” I thought they’d be furious, but Mag and Da looked just relieved to see him. Emotional. “There you are.” “You have to come back.”
“You need protective custody, sir,” an officer said. MagDa seemed exasperated by that, in fact, but they didn’t interrupt. “For your safety. Until we’ve got things under control. Please come with us.”
Ra stood up tall. The officer met his eye. Ra nodded to me, after a moment, and let them take him. I nodded back. I was vaguely disappointed in him.
When they led him away they didn’t lock his hands together. They walked respectfully beside him, like what they said they were, a protective corps. It was a sort of courtesy, I suppose, though I don’t think anyone with a passing understanding of Embassytown politics wouldn’t have known he was more or less under arrest. I watched him go, to join Ez, and perhaps Wyatt, in what I was sure would be scrupulously well-kept rooms, locked and guarded from the outside.
Formerly, 6
In its religious laws Embassytown was a cutting from Bremen. There was no established church, but as with many smaller colonies, its founders had included a reasonable minority of faithful. The Church of God Pharotekton was as close as we came to an official congregation. It lighthouse towers jutted through Embassytown roofs, their beacons spinning, rotating spokes of light at night.
There were other congregations: tiny synagogues; temples; mosques; churches, mustering a few score regulars. A handful of ultra-orthodox in each tradition stood firm against ungodly innovations, attempting to maintain religious calendars based on Bremen’s thirty-seven-hour days, or according to insane nostalgia on the supposed days and seasons of Terre.
Like the Hosts, the Kedis of Embassytown had no gods: according to their professed faith the souls of their ancestors and of their unborn were united in a never-ending jealous war against them, the living, but they mostly displayed a far less bleak and embattled outlook than that theology would suggest. There were religious Shur’asi, but only dissidents: most were atheist, perhaps because apart from through accident, they didn’t die and were very rarely born.
Embassytowners were free not to believe. I wasn’t used to thinking about evil.
Beehive’s name was , we gleaned from its conversations with other Hosts. I told CalVin, mangling the name with my monovoice, saying the Cut and Turn one after the other. “Can you find out when it’s competing at another Festival of Lies?” I said. “It’s a loyal fan of mine, and I’d like to … return the favour.”
“You want to go …” “… to another festival?”
“Yeah. Me and another couple of the similes.” It had occurred as a whim, mere curiosity about my observer, but having thought of it I could not let the idea go. When I’d mooted it to Hasser and a couple of the others, they’d been enthusiastic. “Do you think we could do that? Think you could get us in again?” It had been a while since we’d been summoned to any Languagefests, and though I was alone among them in being more intrigued by the lying than by my own deployment, the other Cravateers would hardly say no to any entry.
CalVin did pursue this, though not with the best grace. I wondered at the time why they were indulging me at all. One or the other always behaved with surliness to me. The differences in their demeanours were tiny, but I was used to Ambassadors and could sense them. I thought that they were taking turns to be colder and warmer, in a variant of traditional police procedure.
In The Cravat, conversations between the Hosts illuminated disagreements. They had camps, constituted by theories and arcane politics. Some seemed to love us—of course I shouldn’t use that word—as spectacle. Some rated our various merits: we called them the critics.