Embassytown - China Mieville [75]
I wandered Embassytown while civil servants took pills to stay awake and worked out plans to keep us alive. I bumped more than once into older friends: Gharda; Simmon, the guard. He had nothing to guard. He was terrified: his biorigged prosthesis seemed sick.
Staff too lowly had no idea what to do, and those too high were crippled by the loss of everything. So were all those Ambassadors who told people that it was the viziers’ faults, that they would never themselves have let things come to this, that it had always been Staff who were the real powers and who had let everyone down. No one listened to that fairytale anymore.
It was ignored people who’d done the same thing for years who changed themselves for the sake of Embassytown, and changed Embassytown. Our bureaucratic feudalism of expertise became a remorseless meritocracy. Even a few Ambassadors proved themselves. Rarely the ones I’d have guessed. That’s true but a trite observation.
One of the first of the new leadership’s achievements was the defeat of Wyatt’s insurgency. Simmon was key to that little war. He told me about it afterward, invigorated again. “You saw how suddenly all Wyatt’s lot got moving? They were opening the arsenals. I guess whatever’s going on triggered some bloody Bremen emergency protocol. That’s what all that chaos was, a few days ago.”
I’d not noticed whatever uprising of our overpower’s representatives he was talking about. There was plenty of chaos enough.
“We got wind of it—never mind how—and we were ready for them. But we had to take risks.” He was drawing the plan, the actions, in schema, with his hand in the air. “We could probably just have preempted them, you know? But that Bremen tech they’ve got—we reckoned it had to be pretty damn useful. So we waited and went in after they’d opened the silos. We had a few officers placed with them—it’s not as if we hadn’t been preparing for this before. We took them with only a few casualties, and we got the weapons. Although honestly, they’re not as useful as we’d hoped. Still.
“They didn’t put up much fight. It’s only Wyatt who was the problem. We’ve put him away. Incommunicado. There are bound to be Bremen agents still out there, and we have to make sure he can’t get codes or instructions or whatever to them.” I didn’t tell him I hadn’t noticed the drama. Even ignorant of it as I’d been, I was galvanised, hearing of it.
Ra, the diffident half of our cataclysmic Ambassador, was allowed his solitude and whatever his little projects were; Ez was allowed his louche collapse. But they were on orders, and they were guarded. They had duties. They were what kept us alive.
“A city of brainwashed,” EdGar said to me. “Stronger than us, armed. We need them hospitable.”
There was no thinking or strategy from the Hosts in those first days. I who was so used to glossing all their strangeness with special pleading—it’s some Ariekene thing, we wouldn’t understand—was aghast to become convinced that they were not indulging any inhuman strategy, but mindless addict need. At first crowds of Ariekei were gathered permanently outside the Embassy. When they became agitated and their demands particularly insistent, every few hours, EzRa would be fetched, would appear at the entrance, and in flawless Language say something—anything at all—amplified to carry, to the crowd’s obvious stoned relief.
The second time EzRa said to them We are happy to see you and look forward to learning together, the oratees reacted without quite the degree of bliss they’d shown previously. The third time they were unhappy, until EzRa announced