Embassytown - China Mieville [77]
In the past, each few months at harvest- or weaning-time, we’d send aeolied Ambassadors and barter-crews out to where Ariekene shepherds of the biorig flocks would explain different ’wares, these machines half-designed, half-born to chance, what each did and how. Now, the Ariekei neglected their out-of-city lands. Biorigging still entered the city, and we could see by the convulsions of the enormous throats that stretched kilometres to the foodgrounds that pabulum was still coming in, too. And that, with reverse peristalsis, addiction was being passed out.
“This world’s dying,” I said. “How can they let it go like this?”
We saw no attempts at self-treatment, no struggles. No Ariekene heroes. Ambassadors could converse with them in the hours after they’d had a hit of EzRa’s voice, when they seemed to humans lucid, but only to make the shortest of plans, for scant hours ahead.
“What do you think they should be doing?” MagDa was one of the few Ambassadors working to usher in change. I’d joined them. I was trying to be part of this new team. I knew MagDa and Simmon, scientists like Southel. Mostly though it was people new to me. “There’s no equilibrium possible.” “This is chance. A cosmic balls-up.” MagDa hadn’t equalised. I saw broken veins beneath the eyes of one and one only, and new lines beside the mouth of the other. “This is just a glitch between two evolutions,” they said. “How would they accommodate it?” “This doesn’t mean anything.” “They’ll listen themselves to death before they’ll try to change.”
The Hosts had always been incomprehensible. In that one sense, nothing had altered.
The upper floors of the Embassy had become a moral ruin. A little farther down, I saw Mag and Da cajole the Ariekei who came, force them to focus just long enough that we could be sure they’d understood our requests for materials and expertise. And in return, what was it MagDa offered?
Have it say about colour, I thought I heard one Host say.
It will, MagDa said. You will bring us the tool-animals before tomorrow and we will make sure it describes every colour of the walls.
“We keep going through colours for them,” Mag said to me.
“They’re loving it,” Da said. “But eventually …” “… the piquancy of it’s going to wear off.”
After this exchange I made new sense of EzRa’s little speeches to the city. Someone would generally translate. Some nodded to logic. Others were random sentences, or statements of preference or condition. I’m tired, subject-verb-object like children’s grammars. What I’d previously thought whims of subject I realised might be gifts for particular Ariekene listeners, in return for this or that favour. Economies and politics.
In the Embassy corridors, Ra, that impossible not-doppel, joined MagDa and me. Mag and Da kissed him. His presence meant we were approached by people desperate for some kind of intercession. He was as kind to them as he could be. I’d seen too many messiahs thrown up by Embassytown. “How long do we have to go on?” one distraught woman asked him.
“Until the relief,” he said. So many hundreds of thousands of hours, scratching out an interstitial living while the Hosts hankered for EzRa’s sounds.
“Then what?” the woman said. “Then what? Do we leave?”
No one answered. I saw MagDa’s faces. I thought of what life would be, for them, in the out.
Reliefs had arrived on catastrophised worlds before. No communications could warn; there’s no outracing an immer ship. No crew could know what they’d see when their doors opened. There were famous cases of trade vessels emerging from immer to find charnel grounds on once-established colonies. Or disease, or mass insanity. I wondered how it would be for our incoming captain to emerge in our orbit, as close as she or he dared to the Ariekene pharos. If we were lucky, that ship would find a populace desperate to become refugees.
MagDa in the out? CalVin? Or even Mag and Da and Cal and Vin? What would they do? And they were among the most collected of the Ambassadors. By then most others were falling, to various degrees,