Embassytown - China Mieville [80]
I mustn’t give the impression that it was healthy. Embassytown was violently dying. When we citynauts returned it was to streets that weren’t safe. Constables escorted us. We couldn’t punish those determined to party their way to the end of the world. Besides, all of us sometimes went to their convivials. (I wondered if I’d meet Scile at any: I never did.) The curfew was unforgiving, though. Constables even left some dead, their bodies censored by pixellation on our news channels. There were fights in Embassytown, and assaults, and murders. There were suicides.
There are fashions in suicide, and some of ours were dramatic and melancholy. More than one person took what was known as the Oates Road, strapping on a mask to breathe and simply walking out of Embassytown, and on, out of sight and into the city; even, some stories had it, out beyond it; to let what would, happen. But the most common choice for those oppressed to death by the new times was hanging. According to what protocols I’ve no idea, news editors decided that those mostly bloodless bodies could be shown without digital disguise. We grew used to shots of dangling dead.
The news didn’t report the suicides of Ambassadors.
MagDa showed me footage of the bodies of Hen and Ry, lying entangled on their bed, intertwined by the spasms caused by poison.
“Where are ShelBy?” I said. ShelBy and HenRy had been together.
“Gone,” MagDa said.
“They’ll turn up,” Mag said. Da said: “Dead.” “HenRy won’t be the last.” “They won’t be able to hide this sort of thing much longer.” “In fact, given the population size …” “… the rate’s higher than average.” “We’re killing ourselves more than others.”
“Well,” I said. All business. “I suppose it’s no wonder.”
“No, it’s not, is it?” MagDa said. “It really isn’t.” “Is it any wonder?”
We dragooned some of Embassytown’s transient machines, uploading what ’ware we could to make them less stupid. Still they were unfit for all but basic tasks.
Ehrsul would still not answer my buzzes, or, I learned, anyone’s. I realised how many days it was since I’d seen her, was ashamed and abruptly fearful. I went to her apartment. Alone: I wasn’t the only one from the new Staff who knew her, but if any of the worst outcomes I suddenly pictured were true, I could only bear to find out, to find her, on my own.
But she opened her door to my knocking almost immediately. “Ehrsul?” I said. “Ehrsul?”
She greeted me with her usual sardonic humour, as if her name hadn’t been a question. I could not understand. She asked me how I’d been, said something about her work. I let her blather awhile, getting me a drink. When I asked her what she’d been doing, where she’d been, why she hadn’t responded to my messages, she ignored me.
“What’s going on?” I said. I demanded to know what she made of our catastrophe. I asked, and her avatar-face simply froze, flickered, and came back, and she continued her meaningless tasks and directionless wit. She said nothing to my question at all.
“Come with me,” I said. I asked her to join MagDa and me. I asked her to come with me into the city. But whenever I mooted anything that would mean her leaving her room, the same stuttering fugue occurred. She would skip a moment, then continue as if I’d said nothing, and talk about something outdated or irrelevant.
“It’s either a fuckup of some kind or she’s doing it deliberately,” a harried Embassy ’waregener told me later, when I described it to her. You think? I was about to respond, but she clarified: it might be an autom equivalent of a child singing I can’t hear you, with fingers in its ears.
When I left Ehrsul’s, I saw a letter in front of her door, opened and discarded. She didn’t acknowledge it, even as I bent very slowly to pick it up, right in front of her, looking at her the whole time.
Dear Ehrsul, it read. I’m worried about you. Of course what’s going on’s got us all terrified, but I’m concerned … and so on. Ehrsul waited while I read. What must my expression have been? I was holding my