Embassytown - China Mieville [59]
“.”
spoke again. The Language-fluent among us meant what it said was quickly communicated.
EzRa, it said. Talk.
EzRa will speak to us or we will make it speak.
“You can’t do this,” someone from Staff or Ambassadorial ranks shouted, and someone else answered, “What can we do?” EzRa looked at each other and murmured a preparation. Ez sighed; Ra’s face remained set.
Friends, they said. Ez said “curish” and Ra “loah”—friends. There was a snap of Ariekei thoraxes and limbs.
Friends, we thank you for this visit, EzRa said, and the Ariekei reeled, buffeting me. Friends, we thank you for this greeting, EzRa said, and the ecstasy went on.
Ra continued to mutter for instants but Ez had gone silent, so Language decomposed. The Hosts hubbubbed. Some flailed their giftwings and wrapped themselves within them, some entwined them with others’.
shouted speak and spoke again. They said pleasantries, emptinesses, polite variants of Hello, hello.
The Ariekei concentrated, as if asleep or digesting. Around the plaza I saw hundreds of Embassytowners, and soundless hovering cams.
“You stupid, stupid bastards,” someone said on the Embassy steps. The words were as ignored as the ivy. Everyone was looking at the Hosts. They were coming back from whatever it was had happened to them.
Good, said one. It wasn’t . Good. It turned. did so, too. The Ariekei all turned back the way they had come.
“Wait! Wait!” It was MagDa. “Pharos!” “We have to …” One of them gestured to Ez and Ra: Don’t speak again. MagDa conferred and shouted in Language. We must speak, they said.
Whether out of pity, courtesy, curiosity or whatever, and other leaders, if that’s what they were, of the gathering craned their eye-corals, twisted them backward, looking behind them. I heard someone say, “Put it down, Officer. Christ, man …”
We have much to discuss, MagDa said. Please join us. May we ask you to enter?
Constables and SecStaff came through the crowd. “Go.” One stood before me. She held a stubby gun. She spoke to me rapidly, the same spiel she was giving everyone. “Please clear the streets. We’re trying to bring this under control. Please.”
Like everyone else, I obeyed my orders slowly. The Ariekei had arrived in strange coherence. Now most of them straggled away at random, leaving their scent and unique marks in the dirt. An urgent-faced boy in a constable’s uniform whispered to me to please fuck off right now, and I sped up a little. The Ambassadors were trying to usher a few Hosts, those who’d hesitated, into the Embassy. They didn’t seem to be succeeding.
PART THREE
LIKE AS NOT
Formerly, 7
After the festival, Scile disappeared. He wouldn’t answer my buzzes, or did so only with terse comments and promises to return. Wherever he was he might be blanking me, but he had conferred, I suspected, with unlikely people. I was with Valdik and Shanita a day after the festival when Valdik was buzzed; when he’d answered he shut up and glanced at me with wide-open eyes. I had been abruptly sure that Scile was on the line.
After a couple of days my husband came back to our rooms and we had the fight that had been simmering for a long time. As with most such, the specifics are uninteresting and largely beside the point. He was surly, and pissy, and made little quips about how I passed my time, barbs at least as anxious as they were nasty, not that I was in the mood to care about that. I’d had enough of his recent predilection for gnomic pronouncements, and his bad temper.
“Who do you think arranged that trip, Scile?” I shouted. He wouldn’t answer or look at me, and I didn’t put my hand on my hips or gesticulate, I folded my arms and leaned back and stared down my face at him like I had the first time I’d met him. “Some people might think thanks were in order, not days of this sulky shit. What makes you think you can behave like this? Where did you fucking go?”
He made some reference that made it clear he had been with Ambassadors. I stopped abruptly at that, halfway through a riposte. What in immer? I remember thinking. Who buggers off to high-level