Embassytown - China Mieville [92]
In a large room, we asked to pay attention. One by one the doctors brought in what they thought the most likely candidates, all of them under guard.
Those who’d never mastered Language were no good to us, nor those too unstable. But some pairs held almost all their lives had been incarcerated for nothing but that there was something lacking when they spoke Language, a component we couldn’t detect. Many of them retained a startling degree of sanity. Those were the people we tried.
An aging duo stood before us, men without any easy Ambassador arrogance. Instead they seemed inadequate to the courtesy we gave them. They were named XerXes. The Ariekes entranced them: they’d seen no Hosts for years. “They could once speak Language,” a doctor told us, “then suddenly they stopped being able to. We don’t know why.”
XerXes had a polite and uninquisitive affect. “Do you remember Language, Ambassador XerXes?” Da said.
“What a question!” “What a question!” XerXes said. “We’re an Ambassador.” “We’re an Ambassador.”
“Would you greet our guest for us?”
They looked out of the window. Sectors of the city were listless and discoloured in withdrawal, overrun by wens.
“Greet them?” said XerXes. “Greet them?”
They muttered together. They prepared, lengthily, whispering, nodding. We got impatient. They spoke. Classic words, that even I knew well.
“,” they said. It’s pleasing to greet you and have you here.
The Ariekes snapped its eye-coral up. I thought, because I wanted to, that it was like the motion Ariekei made when they heard EzRa speak. peered slowly around the room.
It was just looking because there had been a new noise in the room. It might have reacted the same had I dropped a glass. It lost interest. XerXes spoke again, something like, Would you speak now to me? The Ariekes ignored them and XerXes spoke again and their voice fell apart, degraded, the Cut and Turn each saying half of a different entreaty. It wasn’t pleasant.
I don’t quite believe there was no Language in it. I think there was something, a remnant, in what the Ariekes heard. I’ve thought back to what I saw, to the way it moved, and I don’t believe in fact it was exactly as it would have been to random noise. It made no difference, wasn’t enough, but there was, I think, in XerXes and I don’t know how many others, the ghost of Language.
Ambassador XerXes were taken back to their rooms. They went tamely. One looked at us with I swear apology as he shuffled to his imprisonment.
Others: older first; younger; then, appallingly, two sets of adolescents desperate to please us. Some were equalised and dressed the same; some were not. A pair about my age, FeyRis, attempted cold defiance, but still tried desperately to speak Language when we asked them to. stared at them and recognised something, but not enough. FeyRis were the first of our candidates to curse us as they were taken—dragged—away.
I stared at MagDa. I liked them, I admired them. They’d known about this.
We met seventeen Ambassadors. Twelve sounded to me as if they were speaking Language. Nine seemed to have some kind of an effect on the Ariekes. Three times I wondered if we had found what YlSib had hoped we might, what we were looking for, to take EzRa’s place and keep Embassytown alive. But whatever they had wasn’t enough.
If EzRa’s Language was a drug, I thought, perhaps some other Ambassador’s, one day, would be a poison. We played one of the last datchips. It slumped and shuddered at EzRa’s meanderings about the biggest tree Ez had ever climbed. There was nothing in the infirmary that could help us.
“You can’t replicate that,” a doctor said. “These …” She indicated the imprisoned mistakes beyond our room. “They have imperfections. That’s not what there was in EzRa. Two random people should not be able to speak Language.