Embassytown - China Mieville [76]
We watched trids and flats, news programs that after kilohours of trivialities now had to learn to report our own collapse. One channel sent an aeoli-wearing team with vespcams into the city. They were neither invited nor barred. Their reports were astonishing.
We were not used to seeing Ariekene streets, but there are new freedoms during a breakdown. The reporters edged into the city, past plaited ropes tethering gas-filled Host rooms, past buildings that shied away from them or rose on spindled limbs like witch-huts. Ariekei crossed our screens. They saw the reporters, stared and ran over sometimes like tottering horses. They asked questions in their double voices, but there were no Ambassadors to answer them. The reporters knew Language, translated for viewers.
“ ‘Where is EzRa?’ ” That was what the Hosts said.
The reporters weren’t the only Terre in the city. Their vespcams glimpsed men and women in Embassy suits moving among the skittish houses. They were routing cables and speakers—Terretech that looked jarring in that topography. They were extending a network of hailers and coms boxes. In return perhaps for our lives, the maintenance of our power, water, infrastructure, biorigging, they were getting ready to bring EzRa’s voice right into the city.
“We need EzRa now,” EdGar said. “They have to perform. That was our deal.”
“With them, or the Hosts?” I said.
“Yes. More EzRa, though. And that means we need Ez.”
He was drinking and drugging. More than once, he’d disappear at the times he was scheduled to speak Language to the Ariekei, leaving Ra speechless and waiting. I didn’t care if Ez killed himself, but that he’d take us with him if he did.
“They’re like normal Ambassadors in one way, right?” I said. “Recordings work? So build up a library of EzRa’s speeches, then let the fucker do what he wants. Let him drink himself dead.” They’d thought of that, but Ez would not comply. Even begged by Ra or threatened by Staff or guards, he would only speak with his Ambassador-colleague an hour or so at any one time. We could grab the odd snippet onto dat, but he was careful not to let them collect a store of EzRa’s Language.
“He knows he’d be redundant,” EdGar said. “This way we keep needing him.” Even in his decline and terror, Ez thought with ruthless strategy. I was impressed.
By vespcam, I saw the first times that EzRa’s voice was played into that strung-out city.
The buildings had been unhappy for days. They were rearing and breathing steam, purging themselves of the biorigged parasites they bred, that were Ariekene furniture. Look out from the Embassy, to where the city began, an organic vista like piled-up body parts, and the motion of the architecture was clear. The wrongness endemic.
The city twitched. It was infected. The Hosts had heard EzRa’s impossible voice, had taken energy from their zelles and let out waste, and in the exchange the chemistry of craving had been passed, and passed on again by the little beasts when they connected to buildings to power light and the business of life. Addiction had gone into the houses, which poor mindless things shook in endless withdrawal. The most afflicted sweated and bled. Their inhabitants rigged them crude ears, to hear EzRa speak, so the walls could get their fix.
EzRa spoke. They said anything in Language. Their amplified voice sounded through all the byways. Everywhere in the city Ariekei staggered and stopped. Their buildings staggered with them.
It disgusted me. My mouth twisted. Everything beyond Embassytown shuddered with relief. It moved through pipework, wires and tethers, to every corner of the grid, into the power stations stamping in a sudden wrong bliss. Withdrawal would start again within hours. By the edge of our zone we could feel it in the paving: a shaking as houses moved. We could track their biorhythms through our windows, could gauge