Embassytown - China Mieville [94]
Sometimes the Hosts left us energy, fuel, miraculously untainted biorigging. We gave them the food or medicines they were no longer able to make. We promised them EzRa’s voice, which was all they begged for. Whatever inklings they had about how lies worked, about the nature of our promise, they showed no suspicion. They waited hopelessly. Often they dispersed only when driven away by their less-controlled siblings.
The most desperate oratees, incapable of planning, would come full tilt at the barricades, leap far and fast up them, grabbing with giftwings, shouting in Language. We repelled them. We killed them when we had to. I’ve seen Ariekei shot, blown apart by explosives, burnt by the caustic sputum of biorigging, cut with blades. When anyone killed their first Ariekes, a life of conditioned respect would break: gunners would weep. The second time not.
Animals infiltrated the lost streets. Altbrocks, foxes, monkeys moving curiously down wheel-ruts. Truncators climbed drainpipes and worried at loosening windows. Once in a while some depressive guard would shoot one and the beasts would scatter, but it quickly became bad luck to kill a Terre beast. It became instead a sport to take out the fluttering, tottering, strangely walking Ariekene animals that also came. No one was sure whether truncs, neither Terre nor indigene, were targets or not, and they were left alone.
We avoided thinking about our inadequate stocks of food, of energy, of the stuff we needed. A narrative went up with our walls of torn-up rubbish, of last stands and resistance, the onslaught of hordes. It helped. In the evenings, people gathered in the little neighbourhoods left to us. I was surprised at what gave us comfort. Artists plumbed our archives, digital archaeology, back millions of hours, to the antediasporan age. They pulled up corroded ancient fictions to screen.
“These ones are Georgian or Roman, I gather,” one organiser told me. “They talk early Anglo, though.” Men and women bled of colour, in clumsy symbolism, fortified in a house and fighting grossly sick figures. Colour came back, and protagonists were in an edifice full of products, and sicker enemies than before relentlessly came for them. We read the story as ours, of course.
We knew the Ariekei would breach our defences. They entered the houses that edged our zone, found their ways to rear and side doors, large windows, to holes. Some came out of the front doors into our streets and tore apart what they found. Those with remnants of memory tried to get to the Embassy. They came at night. They were like monsters in the dark, like figures from children’s books.
There were other dangers: there were human bandits. A rumour circulated that one group of criminals included Kedis and Shur’asi, as well as Terre. There was no evidence. Still, when, by what was certainly human action, a Shur’asi was found dead by our main barricade, the excuse was whispered that it had been part of that predatory gang. They only died by violence or mishap, and for that race the death—every Shur’asi death—was an abomination as epic as the Fall.
Not all the Ariekene corpses we cleared were killed by us, nor by the random brutality of other afflicted Hosts. Some were destroyed with what seemed a more deliberate alien savagery.
“That’s those we saw,” Bren told me. “Without their fanwings. We’re worrying about the addicts, but we need to think about them, too.”
“Where are YlSib?” I said.
“They’re not lunatics, you know,” he said. “There are ways of being in the city. Yl, Sib … and others. You know ambassading doesn’t always take.”
“That place has to close, Bren. Christ. Those people can’t be