Embassytown - China Mieville [97]
Where there was the new breed without their fanwings, they were bunkered down in ruins, touching each other’s skins, and pointing. If they caught our cams they destroyed them. They hunted the oratees.
There were Ariekei not so far gone as the addict-living-dead, nor so enraged as the marauders: in biorigging nurseries or their skeletons, they talked frantically in Language so fast Bren found it hard to follow. “I’ve not heard talk like that,” he said. “Things are changing.”
They were trying to live. They shouted for EzRa’s voice, and built encampments around the speakers that had been silent for days, now. They cleaned them like totems. They tended what few young survived, and protected the postsentient oldsters, also addicted, though they didn’t know it. We saw a standoff between a tiny group of these at least residually civilised, and the walking ruins, who looked at the mindless elders and made mouth-moves of hunger.
On my own I watched other things. Grubbing through bordercam footage from the night we found Vin—no one knew I was doing it—I found at last a few seconds of my husband, on his walk, out of Embassytown. One more change of shot after abrupt change, and I was watching him descending one of our lower barricades.
He glanced up at what must have been another cam, the stream from which I couldn’t find, so I never saw his expression full-on. I could tell it was Scile, though. He went, not walking slowly nor with obvious depression. He walked into the dangerous street like someone exploring, in those seconds I saw, before the signal stuttered, and there was just the street and he was gone.
During the weeks of his incarceration, Wyatt, Bremen’s redundant man, had repeatedly demanded to talk to us. At first, in a nebulous sense of due process, the committee had agreed. All he’d done was shout in panicked bullying, denounced us. We stopped coming.
Some people speculated that he had managed to send an emergency flare to Bremen: even if he had, and even if it was well programmed, it would be months before it reached them, and months again until they sent any response through the immer. Too late for us to be saved, even as mutineers.
I didn’t think much about it when MagDa first told me Wyatt was demanding to see us again. We’d been keeping him in solitary, in case of those imagined other Bremen agents in Embassytown to whom he might give orders. “He’s finally heard about Ra,” Mag said. “He knows he’s dead.” Incommunicado or not, I was surprised it had taken so long for word to get to him. “You should hear this, actually.” We watched the feed from Wyatt’s cell.
“Listen to me!” He addressed the cameras carefully. “I can stop this. Listen! How long has Ra been dead, you idiots? How can I help if you won’t tell me what’s happening? Bring me to Ez. You want to rule, you can rule, be a republic, I don’t care, I don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want, but if you want there to be an Embassytown at all then for God’s sake let me out of here. I can stop this. You have to take me to Ez.”
We’d seen him wheedling, and blustering, but this was new.
At our perimeter, oratees and their Ariekei enemies came at us incessantly. At the start of what looked like our last defence campaign, MagDa, Bren, the best of the committee and I went to see Wyatt.
Embassytown Jail was still staffed by a few guards who, out of helplessness as much as duty, didn’t disappear. Wyatt had refused to explain anything to us until we took him with us—under guard—to see Ez. We watched the half-Ambassador in his cell, in a dirty prison uniform. “What did you think?” Wyatt muttered. He was speaking to us while he stared at Ez. “How did you think that worked?” he said. He nodded and added, “Hello, Avice.”
“Wyatt,” I said. I didn