Embassytown - China Mieville [93]
No wonder EzRa couldn’t survive. The universe had had to correct itself. We sat in committee. “We have to close this place,” I said.
“Not now, Avice,” MagDa said.
“It’s monstrous.”
“Not now, Christ!” “There’s not going to be anything to close …” “… or any of us to close it, if we don’t bloody think.”
So, silence. Once every minute or so, someone around the table would look as if he or she was about to say something, but none of us had anything. Someone was sniffing as if they might cry.
MagDa whispered to each other. “Get what researchers you can in here,” they said at last. “Riggers, bios, medics, linguists …” “Anyone you can think of.” “This Ariekes.” “.” They looked at each other. “Do what you have to.” “Test it.” “Take it apart.”
They waited for dissent. There was none.
“Take it apart and see if you can find out what’s happening.” “Inside. In its bone-house.” They glanced at Bren and me. “When it hears EzRa.” “See if you can find out anything.” “Maybe we can synth it that way.”
Like that, by that leadership, we would murder a Host. Not even in self-defence but calculation. Embassytown became something new. I was in awe of Mag and Da for their bravery. It was a dreadful act. MagDa had known it had to come from them.
I don’t think any of us thought we’d discover in the Ariekes’s innards any secrets to its addiction, but we’d try. And, too, we were all going to die soon, and it was time for new paradigms, and MagDa gave us one. They took it on themselves to tell us what it meant to be at war. They gave us a dirty hope. It was one of the most selfless things I’ve ever seen.
16
The vivisection on the addict in the infirmary told us nothing.
Within days Embassytown knew that the committee had tried to stave off what was coming, to create a new EzRa, and had failed. Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
Mag and Da had us go to war. Too late, those of us not despairing put up barricades. We’d surrendered the edges of Embassytown. Now some streets in, we hauled out the contents of deserted houses, broke them up and threw them across our streets. Earthmovers cut trenches and piled up the ruins of our roads and the Ariekene earth below them into sloped revetments. We hardened them with plastone and concrete, stationed shooters to protect the remains of our town in the city, from Ariekei in need.
Buildings became gun-towers. We’d always had a few weapons, to which we added those taken from the Bremen caches, and engineers and riggers made new ordnance. We checked all our technology for biorigged components, destroyed it at any sign of addiction. We burned the tainted, squealing machines in autos-da-fé of heretic technology.
All this was too late, we knew. Ambassador EdGar hanged themselves. EdGar had been on the committee. Their suicides shocked us all over again. Ambassadors were suicide pioneers, and other Embassytowners copied them.
Men and women would suit up by the barriers at our borders, aeoli breathing into them, holding knives, clubs, guns they had made or bred. They’d trudge over our fortifications and into territory that had recently just been the street, was now badlands. They left us, swivelling at side streets, weapons out in manoeuvres copied from the forays of our constables and the Charo City-set policing dramas imported in the miabs. Sometimes, at the limits of our vision, the Ariekei would wait for them, by sickly indigenous buildings.
We didn’t try to stop these one-way explorers. I doubt they thought they would escape Embassytown’s fate by walking into bad air, into an exot city gone bad. I think they just wanted to do something. We called them the morituri. After the first few, little crowds began to come, to cheer them as they went.
The Ariekei were horrifying now. All were sick, and starving. They were thin, or strangely distended by hunger-gases;