Embassytown - China Mieville [82]
I said, “Ez, I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“Please stop calling me that! Fucking stupid, stupid … It’s …”
I knew his former name. He was the man who had been Joel Rukowsi. I looked at him in the rubbish-specked hall. I wouldn’t call him Rukowsi, or Joel, and when I repeated his name Ez he slumped and accepted it.
Simmon and I rescued him from the fights he provoked. When it was time eventually for him and Ra to perform their dawn chorus, the first speech of the day, he insulted us as we led him back up through the changed building, through new fiefdoms, embryonic slums, where new ways of living were incubating. At the chamber I reached for the door, and Ez halted me with a touch and without speaking asked me for a moment. That was the only time that night I felt anything from him other than scorn. He closed his eyes. He sighed and his face went back to drunk and ornery.
“Come on then, you bastard,” he shouted, and shoved open the door. Ra and MagDa were waiting. They disentangled while Ez mocked them.
We watched EzRa fight. When Ez made some prurient cruel comment about MagDa, Ra shouted at him.
“What do you think you are?” Ez laughed back. “What do you think this is? ‘You leave her out of this!’? Are you serious?” Even I had to bite back a bit of laughter at that unexpected imitation, and Ra seemed a little shamefaced.
“Here,” said Ez later, as sound engineers and bioriggers prepared him for broadcast. Ra read the paper Ez handed him.
“Not going to go over that stuff from yesterday?” Ra said. His voice was suddenly and surprisingly neutral.
“No,” said Ez. “I want to keep on. I think I left it at a good moment, let’s keep things going.” They don’t care! I wanted to shout. You could describe the fucking carpet, the effect would be the same.
Ra asked questions about cadence and timing, wrote notes in the margin. Ez had no copy: he’d memorised what he wanted to say. When they spoke I wasn’t looking at them but over the city, and it twitched as the first hit of Language came, as EzRa continued with their stories of Ez’s youth.
13
Cynically, who were we? Not many, a gathering of no ones, floakers, dissident Staff, a handful of precious Ambassadors. But our numbers were growing, and our edicts weren’t completely ignored. Embassytowners had begun to do as we suggested, asked, or ordered.
We—MagDa above all—worked hard at our few Ariekei contacts. We worked hard full stop, too hard for me to feel just then whatever it was I ultimately probably would, from Ez’s abuse, from reading Ehrsul’s letter. MagDa even persuaded some of the most contained and coherent Ariekei into the corridors of the Embassy, not simply on eager pilgrimage to EzRa, but on new business. She might reward them with a snip of unheard recording of EzRa, one of our rare stolen buggings.
“Some of them know this is a problem,” said Mag. “The Ariekei. You can tell.”
“Some of them,” said Da. “… there’s some kind of debate, some kind of …” “Some of them want to be cured.”
Like fucking fungus, rumours spread. Our cams still gusted through the city. Some were intercepted by the antibodies the houses secreted, which came up like segmented predators. But when their investigations left them satisfied that the cams were no threat, they left them unmolested. The footage taught us more about our Hosts’ city than we had ever known: too late. And every little half-seen movement, everything we saw out there the what-and-where of which we couldn’t identify or clarify, gave traction to stories about missing secrets, fifth columns, Staff self-exiled, old grudges.
In the farmlands, huge