THERE WAS A HOST who often accompanied Spanish Dancer. It was squatter than most, its legs gnarled, its underbelly more pendulous, as it approached old age. For some reason I forget we named it Beehive.
“I’ve seen it before,” said Shanita. It spoke incessantly, and we listened, but it seemed a mixture of half-sentences. We could make no sense of what it said. I remembered where I knew it from: my first-ever journey into the city. It had competed at that Festival of Lies. It had been unusually able to misdescribe that untruth-target object. It had called the thing some wrong colour.
“It’s a liar,” I said. I was clicking my fingers. “I’ve seen it before too.”
“Hm,” said Valdik. He looked rather suspicious. “What’s it saying now?” Beehive was circling, watching us, scratching at the air with its giftwing.
“ ‘Like this, like this,’ ” Hasser translated. He shook his head, I’ve no idea. “ ‘Like, they are, similar, different, not the same, the same.’ ”
The Cravat wasn’t the only place we met, but it was by far the most common venue. Occasionally we might get together in a restaurant near the shopping districts, or the canalside benches of another parlour, but only when planned in advance and only from some vague sense of propriety, of not being hidebound. The Cravat, though, was where the Hosts had come to know they might find us, and being so found was very much the point.
The similes thought of themselves as a salon of debate, but only a certain range of dissidence was permissible. Once a young man tried to engage us with arguments that turned from independence to seditionism, anti-Staffist stuff, and I had to intervene to save him from a beating.
I took him outside. “Go,” I told him. A crowd of the similes were gathered, jeering, shouting at him to come back and try impugning the Ambassadors one more time.
He said, “I thought they were supposed to be radicals.” He looked so forlorn I wanted to give him a hug.
“That lot? Depends who you ask,” I said. “Yeah, they’d be traitors according to Bremen. But they’re more loyal to Staff than the Staff are.”
Plebiscite politics were absurd in Embassytown. As if any of us could speak to Hosts! And for The Cravat crew, even ignoring the fact of Embassytown’s inevitable collapse in the event of their absence, without Ambassadors, who would speak these men and women so proud of being similes to the Hosts?
Latterday, 7
THE ARIEKEI didn’t respond to any attempts at contact. In those incommunicado hours, I more than once considered buzzing CalVin, or Scile, to demand information: they would be more likely than anyone else I knew to have some. It wasn’t the confrontation that stopped me, but the conviction that I wouldn’t be able to shame or bully anything out of them.
It was a spring in Embassytown and the chill was dissipating. From high in the Embassy I looked over the roofscape of the city, to animalships and blinking architecture. Something was changing. A colour or its lack, a motion, a palsy.
A corvid rose from an Embassy landing pad, moved through the sky to the city’s airspace, edged from place to place, hovering, looking for somewhere to land; defeated, it returned. The Ambassadors aboard must have sent messages down to the various housebodies they overflew, without response.
There were probably still plenty of Embassytowners who didn’t yet know anything was wrong. The official press were loyal or inefficient. But there had been many people at that party, and stories were spreading.
THE SUN still rose, and the shops sold things, and people went to work. It was a slow catastrophe.
I called the number Ehrsul had given me, which she had extracted from a newly and imperfectly upgraded net, which she had told me was Ez’s. He—or whomever it was I’d called—didn’t answer. I kept swearing, as quietly as I could make myself, and tried again, again without result.
Later I learnt that that day, in desperation, Ambassadors went into the city on foot. Pairs of desperate doppels accosted the Hosts they met, speaking Language at them through the transmitters of their aeoli helmets and receiving polite non-answers, or incomprehension, or unhelpful intimations of disaster.
Someone came to my house. I opened the door and it was Ra, standing there on my threshold. I stared at him in silence for long seconds.
“You look surprised,” he said.
“Understatement,” I said. I stepped aside for him. Ra kept taking his buzzer out and making as if to switch it off, then leaving it on. “They trying to reach you?” I said.
“Only Wyatt,” he said.
“Really? No one else? No Ambassadors? You not being followed?”
“How are you?” he said. “I was thinking...” We sat for a long time on chairs facing each other. He looked over his shoulder, behind himself, more than once. There was nothing there but my wall.
“Where’s Ez?” I said.
He shrugged. “He’s gone out.”
“Shouldn’t you be together?” He shrugged again. “In the Embassy? Look, Ra, how did you even get out? I’d have thought they’d have you on bloody lockdown.” If it had been me in charge, I would have incarcerated EzRa, to control the situation, or contain it, whatever the situation was. Perhaps they had tried. But if Ra was telling the truth, both the new Ambassador had got away.
“Yeah, well,” he said. “You know. Needs must. I just wanted to... Had to split.” I had to laugh a second at that. There had to be quite a story there.
“So,” I said eventually. “How do you like our little town?” He laughed in turn.
“Jesus,” he said. As if he’d seen something good and unexpected. Outside, gulls sounded. They veered, headed constantly for the sea they glimpsed kilometres away, were turned back constantly by sculpted winds and aeoli breath. It was very rare that any broke out into the proper local air, and died.
“You have to help me,” he said. “I need to know what’s going on.”
“Are you joking?” I said. “What do you think I know? Jesus, this is a comedy of errors. What do you think I’ve been trying to find out, for God’s sake? Why have you come to me?”
“I’ve spoken to everyone I could find who was at that party—”
“Didn’t try very hard, did you, if you only just got to me...”
“All the Staff, I mean, and other people from the Embassy. The higher-up ones wouldn’t say anything to me, and the rest... A couple of them told me to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t know why. I thought you were in the middle of it all, I thought you’d...”
“Whoever up there does know something, they’re not telling me. Us. But these others, they just... They said you know people, Avice. Ambassadors. And that people tell you things.”
I shook my head. “That’s just bloody outsider-chic,” I exhaled. “You thought you could go a roundabout way, get something through me? They’re just saying that because I’m immerser. And because I was sleeping with CalVin, for a while. But not for months. Local months, not Bremen months. My own damn husband’s a foreigner and he knows more than me, and he won’t even talk to me.” I stared at him. “You seriously telling me you’ve got no idea what’s happening? Does Wyatt know you’re here?”
“No. He helped me slip away, but... And neither does Ez. It’s not their business.” He bit his lip. “Well, officially it is, I mean... I just wanted...” After a silence, Ra met my eye. He stood. “Look,” he said, all of a sudden calm. “I need to find out what’s going on. Wyatt is worse than useless. Ez’s trying to pull rank. We’ll see how far that gets him. And I hear you might know people who know things.” In that moment he seemed not like Ez’s luggage, but an officer and an agent of a colonial power.