Embassytown - China Mieville [81]
I didn’t recognise the name at the letter’s end. I saw from the way it fluttered, minutely, when I bent to put it back on the floor, that my fingers were shaking. How many best friends had she collected? Maybe I was her uptown version, linked to Staff. Perhaps each of us had a niche. Perhaps all of us had been afraid for her.
Thinking about her made me think also of CalVin, of whatever pointless actions they were performing, and of Scile, from whom I had still heard nothing. I buzzed Bren, repeatedly, but to my infuriation and concern he didn’t answer. I went back to his house but no one came to the door.
I don’t think I’d understood what Ra dealt with until I was on Ez duty. We could of course have simply held a gun to Ez’s head, but when we threatened too hard, he threatened us back, and his behaviour was so unpredictable we had to take seriously the possibility that he’d refuse to speak, and damn us all, out of spite. So instead we chaperoned him everywhere, at once jailers, companions and foils. That way when it was time for him to perform, he could make our lives hard, and we could let him kick us around, until, sulkily, he acquiesced.
Security was always in at least twos. I asked to join Simmon. When I met him he gripped my right hand in greeting with his left. I stared. The right arm he’d worn for years, an Ariekene biorigged contrivance of imprecise colour and texture but exactly mimicking Terre morphology, was gone. The sleeve of his jacket was neatly pinned.
“It was addicted,” he said. “When I was charging it it must’ve …” He had used a zelle, like the Hosts and their city. “It was sort of spasming. It tried to grow ears,” he said. “I cut it off. It was still trying to listen, even lying there on the floor.”
Ez was in EzRa’s Embassy chambers. He was drunk and wheedling, excoriating Ra for cowardice and conspiracy, calling MagDa filthy names. Nasty but no nastier than many arguments I’d heard. Ra was what surprised me. He stood differently than I’d seen him do before. He whom we often mocked for his taciturnity spat back epithets.
“Make sure he’s ready to speak when he gets back,” Ra said to us. Ez gesticulated an obscenity at him.
“Can I at least go to a party? Or will you bastards try to keep me even from that?” Ez moaned as we followed him to the venue in the Embassy’s lower floors. We stood watch, policed the drink he took, though we’d never seen excess seem to alter his abilities to speak Language. We watched him fuck and argue. The glints on his link puttered frantically, hunting for and not finding its pair, striving to boost a connection Ez was avoiding.
I could say it was depressing, that party, like a walk through purgatory, we at the end of the world rutting into oblivion and drugging ourselves idiot to autogenerated rhythms and a hammer of lights through smoke. Perhaps to those participating it was joyful. It didn’t hold Ez’s interest. I was as impassive as a soldier.
Ez took us to what had been an office equipment warehouse in the middle floors of the Embassy and was now an ersatz bar. He drank until I intervened, which made him delighted because then he could denounce me. The only people in this peculiar thrown-together place were ex-Staff and one or two Ambassadors. They showed no concern that he was risking our world with every glass.
“Your friends,” I whispered, and shook my head. He met my eyes quite unmoved by the disgust.
Embassytowners had taken over the lower floors of the Embassy, looking for safety. Those levels had become back-alleys. Men and women, nurseries and shiftparents reconfigured cupboards and spilled out of meeting rooms, turning architecture inside out. We went walking through these night streets made of corridors, where lights not broken had been reprogrammed into diurnal rhythms and house-numbers were chalked on inside doors by which people leaned and talked while children played games past their bedtime. Embassytown had come inside.
Sotted and maudlin, Ez began to badmouth Ra. “That