Embassytown - China Mieville [91]
“Got your message, Ambassador,” he said to MagDa. “I’m still not sure I can … I …” He looked at us. He saw the cowed Ariekes with us.
“We’re in martial times, Officer,” MagDa said. “You don’t really think …” “… that the old laws apply.” “Let us in.”
Inside, uniformed staff met us and made us welcome. Their anxiety was palpable but muted compared to everyone else’s. There was a pretend normality in those secret halls: it was the only place I’d been for weeks where rhythms didn’t seem utterly sideswiped by the crisis.
Carers went with drugs and charts in and out of rooms. I got the sense that this crew would continue with these day-to-day activities until word-starved Ariekei broke through their doors and killed them. I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.
The infirmary was infirmary and asylum and jail for failed Ambassadors. “As if it would work every time you tried to make two people into one,” Bren whispered to me, in scorn.
Ambassadors were bred in waves: we passed rooms of men and women all the same generation. First through the corridor of the middle-aged, incarcerated failures more than half a megahour old, staring at the cams and at the one-way glass that kept us invisible. I saw doppels in separated chambers, unlinked I suppose or linked loosely enough that the wall between them caused no discomfort. Looking into room after room I saw faces twice, twice, twice.
Some cells were empty and windowless and spare, some opulent with fabrics, looking out over Embassytown and the city. There were inmates secured or limited by electronic tags, even straps. Mostly the infirm, as one of the doctors who guided us called them, said nothing, but one of those buckled in constraints screamed inventive filth at us. How she knew we were passing beyond the opaque glass I don’t know. We saw her mouth move, and the doctor pressed a button that for a few seconds let us hear her. I disliked him for it a great deal.
Everything was clean. There were flowers. Wherever possible over double-rooms was the printed name of those inside, with honorific: Ambassador HerOt, Ambassador JusTin, Ambassador DagNey.
Some had simply never had the empathy they’d needed, to pretend to share a mind, had only ever been two people who looked the same, despite training, drugs, the link and coercions. Many were insane to different degrees. Even if they had facility with Language, they’d been left unstable, resentful, melancholic. Dangerous. There were those who’d been made mad through cleavage. Who hadn’t, as Bren had, been able to survive the death of a doppel. They were broken half-people.
There was a huge variety of the failed. Many more than there were Ambassadors. I was horrified at these numbers. I never knew, I told myself. We were too civilised to end them: hence this polite prison where we waited for them to die. I knew enough Terre history to assume that some of these failed must be counted so because of political refusals. I was reading every nameplate we passed, and I realised it was for names I recognised, like DalTon—those of dissidents of whom only bad citizens like me spoke. No sign.
Past an extreme section, men and women older than my shiftparents baying like animals and those talking with careful civility on coms to their carers, or to no one. “Christ,” I said, “Christ Pharotekton.”
In its withdrawal, unthinkingly defecated. It realised what it had done and said something in shame: the action was as taboo for the Hosts as for us.
I think the doctors deliberately took us a long way to our destination, a room where we could hold our auditions. So we were voyeurs on chamber after chamber. We passed walls painted in brighter colours, where screens were uploaded