Embassytown - China Mieville [88]
Ariekene blood sprayed, and there were the calls of Hosts in pain. “Look.” I pointed. The cameras flitted and gave me another moment’s view of some of the new attackers. “Do you see?” They were without fanwings. They had only stumps, flesh rags. Bren hissed.
The traumatised human inhabitants made it to our flyer, joined us watching that new fight. The attackers killed one of the other Ariekei. Seeing it die made me think of Beehive. The Host lay there red with hoofprints in familiar gore: its attacker had slipped in what remained of the Terre man.
“So … we have Ariekene protectors, now?” I said.
“No,” Bren said. “That’s not what you just saw.”
We moved the last people from the edges of Embassytown, into blocks we could guard with constables and rapidly inducted militia. Some holdouts we forced to leave. Ariekei gathered at the ends of streets and watched their human neighbours go. We timed a broadcast of EzRa to coincide with our evacuation: the double-voice called and the Ariekei reeled and stampeded to the speakers and left us alone.
Between the ruining city and the centre of Embassytown was a deserted zone: our buildings, our houses without men and women in them, valuables taken and only the shoddy and dispensable left behind. I helped supervise the exodus. Afterwards, in the thin air at the edge of the aeoli breath, I walked through half-empty rooms.
Power was still connected. In some places screens and flats had been left on, and newscasters talked to me, describing the very removals that had left them alone, interviewing Mag and Da, who nodded sternly and insisted that this was necessary, temporarily. I sat in empty homes and watched my friends dissemble. I picked up books and trinkets and put them down again.
Ehrsul’s rooms were in this zone. I stood outside them, and after a long time I buzzed her. I rang her doorbell. It was the first time I’d tried her in a long time. She didn’t answer.
The Ariekei began to move into the emptied streets. A vanguard of their most desperate. With their pining battery-animals, and followed by slow carrion-eaters they would have bothered to kill as pests before, the Hosts searched the houses, too. They pressed with incomprehension and care at computers, their random ministrations running no-longer-relevant programs, cleaning rooms, working out finances, playing games, organising the minutiae of those missing. The Ariekei found no Language to listen to. The absence of their drug didn’t wean them of it: there was no cold turkey for them; EzRa’s speech had insinuated too deep into them for that. Instead, more of the weakest of them just began to die. Among the Terre, Ambassador SidNey committed suicide.
“Avice.” Bren buzzed me. “Can you come to my house?”
He was waiting for me. Two women were with him. They were older than I but not old. One was by the window, one by Bren’s chair. They watched me as I entered. No one spoke.
They were identical. They were doppels. I could discern no differences. They weren’t just doppels, they were equalised. I was looking at an Ambassador, an Ambassador I did not recognise. And that, I knew, wasn’t possible.
“Yes,” Bren said to me. He laughed minutely at my face. “I need to talk to you,” he said. “I need you to keep quiet about something. Well, about …”
One of the women came toward me. She held out her hand.
“Avice Benner Cho,” she said.
“Obviously this is a shock,” her doppel said.
“Oh no,” I said finally. “A shock? Please.”
“Avice.” Bren said. “Avice, this is Yl.” I learnt the spelling later. It sounded like ill. “And this is Sib.”
Their faces exactly those of each other, heavy and shrewd, but they wore different clothes. Yl was in red, Sib in grey. I shook my head. They both wore little aeoli, unhooked and resting in our Embassytown air.
“I saw you.” I remembered. “Once, in …” I pointed at the city.
“Probably,” said Sib.
“I don’t remember,