Embassytown - China Mieville [71]
“So,” he said. “You’ve come here because the world’s ending.” A muted screen behind him played out the confusion of Embassytown.
“Is it?” I said.
“Oh I think so. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“I think it’s the end of the world, yes.” He sat back. He looked comfortable. He drank and looked at me. “Yes I do. Everything you know’s finished. You know that, don’t you? Yes, I can see you do.” I saw his affection for me. “You impressed me,” he said. “Such an intense girl. I wanted to laugh. Even while you were looking after your poor friend. Who breathed Host air.”
“Yohn.”
“Anyway. Anyway.” He smiled. “It’s the end of the world and you’re here why? You think I can help?”
“I think you can tell me things.”
“Oh believe me,” he said, “no one in that castle wants me to know anything. They keep me as out of it as they can these days. I’m not saying I’ve no ins at all—there are those who keep an old man in gossip—but you probably know at least as much as me.”
“Who’s Oratees?” I said. He looked sharply up.
“Oratees?” he said. “It really is? Oh. Well. Christ Pharotekton,” he said. He smoothed down his shirt. “I did wonder. I thought maybe that must be it, but …” He shook his head. “But you doubt. You can hardly believe it, can you?
“Oratees isn’t a person,” Bren said. “They’re a thing. They’re junkies.”
“Everything that could happen has happened sometime,” he said. He leaned toward me. “Where are the failed Ambassadors, d’you think, Avice?” It was so shocking a question that I held my breath.
“If I put it to you outright, you wouldn’t imagine, would you, that every single one of the monozogs the Embassy raises is suited to Ambassadorial duties?” he said. “Of course not. Some doppels don’t take—don’t look enough like each other to be fixed, have quirks, can’t think enough alike, despite all the training. Whatever.
“You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s just not thought. You know that doppels retire, when the other dies.” He raised his hands, slightly, indicating himself. “You’ve never been in the Embassy crèche, have you? There are those who never get out of it in the first place. If you’ve been grown and raised and trained for one job, and you can’t do it, what’s the profit in letting you out? That could only cause trouble.”
Little rooms of rendered twins, mouldering. Slack and separate doppels gone bad, one whole, one like a melted image; or perhaps both wrong; or neither wrong in any physical way but with some bone-deep meanness; or just not able to do what they were born to.
“And if you’re already out,” Bren said, “by the time you realise you hate your job or your doppel, or whatever? Well. Well.” He spoke gently, breaking something to me. “When he died, my … it was an accident. It’s not as if we were old. People knew us … me. I was much too young to disappear. They tried to entice me to the rest home of course. But they couldn’t force me. So what if my neighbours don’t like me? So what if they see something crippled? No one likes a cleaved showing off their injury. We’re stumps.” He smiled. “That’s what we are.
“There are trainees who can never speak Language. I don’t know why. Just can’t speak in time no matter how they practice. That’s simple: you don’t let them go. But there are harder cases. They might look like any other pair. It’s happened before, to varying degrees. We had a colleague, when I was training. WilSon. Whatever joined-up mind it was behind their Language, for the Hosts to understand, it must have been a little out. A tiny bit. Nothing I could hear, but the Hosts … well.
“We were doing exams. We’d been tested by other Ambassadors and Staff, and in our last practical we had to speak to a Host. It was waiting. I don’t know what it thought it was doing,