Embassytown - China Mieville [98]
“Two strangers, two friends, just so bloody happened to get a score like that on the Stadt Empathy test? Christ Uploaded, are you stupid?” He shook his head and held up his hands in apology—he wasn’t trying to fight. “Listen. This didn’t just happen: this was done. Understand?” He pointed at Ez. “Scan that bastard’s head.”
His insinuation was that whatever he wanted to explain might change things, might give us a fingerhold of hope. If that was true, Ez must have known it too, but had done and said nothing. He’d pissed away even his own hope.
“Scan it,” Wyatt said. “You’ll see. He was made.” Made by Bremen. “My eyes only,” Wyatt said. “You might still be able to get the orders off my datspace, if you haven’t destroyed it. ‘Ez.’ Operative Joel Rukowsi. I’ll give you the passes.”
Rukowsi had had a certain facility, a predisposition for mental connection unachievable for most of us: but it was generalised, not directed. He wasn’t a twin: he had no close friends with whom he’d achieved any particular intuitive bond. They didn’t have language to give his talent an accurate name, so they misrepresented it calling it empathy. It wasn’t that he felt as others felt, though: his ability manifested in nasty parlour tricks.
He’d been an interrogator. Virtuoso—knowing when a subject would break, what to press for, what to promise, whether they were lying, how to make them stop lying. He was recruited young, and they’d honed his strange skills, with exercises, ways of focusing, and with more invasive methods, too. They’d left him different.
Some among our little group were murmuring, interrupting Wyatt. I clicked my fingers to shut them up. “What?” I said. I waved my hand at Wyatt, Go on. “They made him … what …? A mind reader?” Ez sat beyond our sound with his head down still. I wished the guards would hit him.
“Of course not,” Wyatt said. “Telepathy’s impossible. But with the right drugs, and implants and receivers, you can get brains into a certain phase. Enough. With a sensitive like him—” I sneered at that and Wyatt waited. “You know what I mean. There’s not many of them, but someone like him, when they’ve worked on him, and get him to train with someone else with the right hardware plugged in …” He tapped his head. “ ‘Ez’ there can make himself read like that person.” He waved his hand sine-wave style. “Same output. It’s related to linktech but it’s much stronger, works on heads bugger-all like each other, so long as one of them’s … Well, a quote sensitive unquote.
“At first they were thinking about totally other stuff, undercovers, for id-readers, get agents out of scans—mimic brainwaves and whatnot. Then something occurred to them. You know,” he continued slowly, “supposedly they once tried growing their own doppels? Back in Charo City? When the colony started.” He shook his head. “Didn’t go so well. Story goes they sink years into it, without any Ariekei to listen to to keep the skills up, with no sense of Embassytown on the ground—miabs being even less frequent then—and end up with … well, pairs of people who are dysfunctional in Bremen.” He indicated twoness with his hands. “And everywhere. Hardly reliable.
“But then here’s Rukowsi. The thinking was it might be a way to solve an old problem.”
The mystery of what it was the Hosts discerned in our Ambassadors’ voices remained unsolved: all that Charo City had ascertained was that after implants, augmens, chemicals and hundreds of hours of training, Joel Rukowsi and his fellow agent, linguist Coley Wren, codename Ra, had been able to score astonishingly on the Stadt scale.
No one had known whether it would sound like Language to the Ariekei—but Stadt was the only test anyone had for that, and the operatives looked, at least, to have passed. If in fact it hadn’t worked, if it had failed in the ways the paymasters had imagined it might possibly fail, if EzRa had spoken and elicited polite incomprehension, then nothing would have been lost. Two career agents would have a long and dull assignment, until the next Bremen-bound ship. But what