Embassytown - China Mieville [72]
“Straightaway we can see something’s wrong,” he said. “From how the Ariekes moves. Every time they talk to us, they taste our minds, and we’re alien. So it’s heady stuff. But if the two halves of an Ambassador aren’t … quite enmeshed enough? Not two random voices: close enough to speak Language and for them to get it. But wrong? Broken?” I said nothing.
“You know what Language is to them,” Bren said. “What they hear through the words. So, if they hear words they understand, they know are words, but it’s fractured? Ambassadors speak with empathic unity. That’s our job. What if that unity’s there and not-there?” He waited. “It’s impossible, is what. Right there in its form. And that is intoxicating. And they mainline it. It’s like a hallucination, a there-not-there. A contradiction that gets them high.
“Maybe not all of them. Every Host WilSon spoke to knew something was strange, and a few of them …” He shrugged. “Got drunk. On their words. Didn’t matter what WilSon said. Isn’t it a nice day; Please pass the tea; anything. The Hosts heard it and some of them got swoony and some of them wanted it again and again.
“Ambassadors are orators, and those to whom their oration happens are oratees. Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.”
Outside people ran through the streets in frightened carnival. There was the noise of fireworks. Bren refilled my glass.
“What happened to them?” I said.
“WilSon? They were quarantined, and they died.” He drank.
“Everyone respects me, but that can’t stop them hating me,” Bren said. “I understand that. They don’t like to see my wound.” He wrote his name in the air—his full name, seven letters: BrenDan. There’d been a time he was BrenDan, or more properly . Then his doppel had died, and he’d become BrenDan, . He couldn’t say his own name correctly.
BrenDan looked at me thoughtfully for a long time. He went to a desk. “Let me show you something.”
He threw me a shallow box. Inside were two links. His, and his doppel Dan’s. I examined the filigree circuits, the wires and contacts, the careful carved initials and silver leaves. Their clasps had been cut open. I looked at him and could see the tiny marks on his neck where his had been embedded.
“What are you thinking?” he said. “Are you thinking that I keep them so they’re close at hand? Are you thinking I hide them away, to try to forget them? Avice. If I’d thrown his away and kept mine, you’d think I was clinging to my dead identity, or resenting his death. If I threw them both away, you’d see me in denial. If I kept his but not mine you’d say I was refusing to let him go. There’s nothing I can do you won’t do that to. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it, it’s what we do. Whatever I do, it’ll be one story or another.”
(Later, the next but one time I was with him, because I did come back and after that he came to me, he said to me, “I look at that link and I hate him.” I said nothing. What could I say? We were sitting on the sofa in my rooms. They were nothing like as splendid as Bren’s. “I don’t know when it started,” he said. “For a long time I thought I hated him when he died, because he died, poor bastard. Now I think it might have started earlier. You mustn’t blame me.” He was suddenly plaintive. “I’m sure he hated me, too. It was neither of our faults.”)
“They must have suspected what would happen, you know,” Bren said. “The Ambassadors. It was always the oddballs who seemed to risk … unplaiting … just enough to make a few Ariekei oratees. Those were the ones they restrained. Other sorts of troublemakers went AWOL or native.”
“You think they knew?” I said. “And who went what?”
“They must have hoped EzRa were a drug,” he said. “So they’d affect one or two of the Hosts and not be usable. One in the eye for Bremen. They’ve all been very concerned about who was calling what shots, what agendas were being forced, since they heard EzRa were coming.”
“I know,” I said. “But Bremen must’ve known too, if this has happened before. Why would they send