Embassytown - China Mieville [85]
We showed our wares, voilà, like a peddler in the hills in old books. I played a datchip, and from it in Language EzRa said When my father died I was sad but there was a freedom in it too. The Hosts reared and said something. “They’ve got this one,” BenTham said. They’d played it many times, and it had no more effect: they at last heard it for its content, and they didn’t care about Ez’s father.
We offered other bits from his history, clichés of diplomacy, idle thoughts, weather reports. We gave them for free We are very happy about the increased opportunities for technical assistance, and tempted them with the first few phonemes of I broke my leg when I fell out of a tree.
“They’re asking if we have the one about unacceptable levels of wastage in the refinement industry,” Ben or Tham said. “They heard about it from neighbours.”
Husbanding carefully, we gave them enough to buy the biorigging we needed, and some expertise, some explanations. Doing so we spread the addiction, too: we knew that. We brought out pure product, EzRa speech, and these as-yet only half-affected outlanders would succumb.
I made a similar journey twice more after that first time. Soon afterward, another of our buoyant dirigible beasts didn’t return.
When at last our cams found it they reeled back to us footage and trid of it dead and strewn in burnt-out flesh and a slick of guts across the countryside. There drowned in it and shattered, all dead, were our people. Ambassador; navigator; technician; Staff.
I’d known Ambassador LeNa slightly, one of the crewmembers well. I held my mouth closed with my hands as we watched. We were all affected. We fetched back the bodies and honoured them as well as we could with new ceremonies. Our crews searched the mouldering wreckage.
“The ship wasn’t sick, I don’t think,” our investigator told us in committee. “I don’t know what happened.”
In Embassytown we did our best to stand in the way of warlordism, but we small band of ersatz organisers could only slow a degeneration toward that kind of rule. More Ambassadors were joining us, terrified into organisation, inspired by MagDa. Others of course remained useless. Two more killed themselves. Some deactivated their links.
Ez seemed … not calmer perhaps, but more broken, I thought, when I chaperoned him again. Delivering him finally to Ra, though, they argued even more viciously than before. “I can make things bad for you,” Ez kept shouting. “There are things I could say.”
When we went into the city, we had to pass the corpses of houses and Hosts. The death breakdown of biorigging designed and bred to be immortal contaminated the air with unexpected fumes. We heard more Ariekei fighting around speakers. Some of their dead died from the violence of the desperate; some, those without enough of the new sustenance they needed, just died; and in some places there were more organised brutalities, cadres exerting new kinds of control. The living grabbed what datchips we gave them: these were rewards for these new tough local organisers, in crude concert with which we were just managing to maintain a tenuous system.
One evening as we returned to Embassytown, I lagged behind my colleagues, shaking the mulch of rotting bridges from my boots. I looked back into the Ariekene city, and I saw two human women looking at me.
They were only there a second. They stood one to either side of an alley mouth, metres away, looking at me gravely, and then they were gone. I couldn’t have described them well, probably not even recognised them again, but I knew that they had had the same face.
It was only later, when things went wrong all over again and these new routines were made bullshit, that I realised I’d come to expect us to muddle through until the ship came and flew us all away.
One scheduled evening we could find neither Ez nor Ra at the time of their broadcast. Neither would answer our buzzes. That was like Ez, but it wasn’t like Ra.
Ez was in none of his preferred places. We searched the dangerous