said.
The MC was shouting the rules of the stand-off. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things, said again, and shucked its wings. Whatever alien feelings it was feeling, they looked to us like bravado. The two women of the Ambassador and that intricate big beast the Ariekes stared at each other. The Ambassador opened their mouths. Before they spoke, said, Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much.
Ruckus. Before the humans came, the Host went on, and I knew what the lie would be, we didn’t speak.
It said it clearly. There was a moment, then the Ariekei stuttered in their ecstasy of reception. Even the Terre knew that we had heard something extraordinary. There was noise everywhere. Some shouted argument. I saw jostling in the crowd.
“Not true!” someone was shouting. “Not true!”
Men and women were got suddenly, violently, out of someone else’s way. They screamed and parted. I could see the man coming, and it was Valdik.
“Not true!” he said. He ran and shouted and brought a cudgel down on the ground, and I felt a spasming report. There was energy in his weapon. So much for security. He faced . Valdik shouted that it was not true. He raised his weapon. Eye-corals strained. People were running toward us. Valdik shouted, “Fucking snake!” watched him, its coral spreading wide as horns. I heard the bark of a weapon and Valdik went down, his club scorching the floor. Constables grabbed him. He was beaten down.
“He went for a Host?” people were gasping.
I could hear Valdik still shouting: “The devil! He’ll fucking destroy us! Don’t let it lie!”
None of the Ariekei made a sound. The officers hauled Valdik upright finally, blood-smeared and ragged, hardly conscious. They began to drag him, his feet scratching on the floor, out of the grounds. Tens of seconds had passed since his attack. In that whole hall, I think I was the only person watching CalVin and their silent colleagues, one of the very few not staring at the battered would-be assassin being taken away.
I saw Scile. He was with them, among the Ambassadors and Staff. That was it; that was where to look. They were looking not at Valdik but at , and beyond it at Pear Tree and its group of Ariekei. I was one of very few in that hall who saw what happened then.
Pear Tree moved. From behind it stepped Hasser. He walked quickly. Even was still looking at Valdik. No constables saw Hasser coming, or were there to intervene. They were busy, suckers to the oldest feint. I moved.
One of ’s eyebuds glimpsed something and the whole coral arced backward, to stare. I saw Spanish Dancer, heard it calling, its giftwing moving in alien distress. Hasser aimed a biorigged thing. A ceramic carapace, a pistolgrip that gripped him back. He fired. No one was there to stop him.
He fired and the gun-animal opened its throat and howled. He blasted across the lying ground, spraying mud-coloured Host blood.
It broke apart as it flew. Hasser didn’t stop firing. The assault tore ’s giftwing from its body. Its legs dyingly scuttled, so insectile it was appalling. It gushed from everywhere.
Then Hasser was snatched out of my sight himself by a constable’s bullet. By the time screaming started again I was beside him. I trembled. I struggled for breath as if I were beyond the aeoli. Hasser stared without sight. I heard the rattle of scute from ’s posthumous fitting.
Spanish Dancer traced shapes with its wings. Its colours flushed. I’d never before seen Ariekene grief. I looked at Pear Tree, which looked down at me. I ignored the commotion and all the wails in the room, and watched Pear Tree, and CalVin, and Scile. I remember I moaned every time I exhaled. They were looking at Hasser’s body without expression. They must have seen me.
THAT IS HOW the most virtuoso liar of the Ariekei was murdered.
The days after that were as you’d imagine. Chaos, fear, excitement. No Host had been harmed by an Embassytowner for hundreds of thousands of hours, for lifetimes. Suddenly we felt we existed on sufferance. Staff imposed a curfew, gave the constabulary and SecStaff extraordinary powers. In the out, I’d spent time in cities and colonies under dictatorships of various forms, and I knew that what we had was a quaint approximation of martial law; but for Embassytown it was unprecedented.
I HAD SO MUCH sadness in me. I cried, only when I was alone. I was so sorry for Hasser, silly secret zealot; and for Valdik who I still believe never knew he’d been a distraction, and whose loyalty to Scile was such that, after that night, he went to his execution denying that anyone else had had any hand in his plan.
So sorry for . I never knew what emotion would have been appropriate for an Ariekene loss, so I settled for sadness.
For a day I turned off my buzz and did not answer when anyone came to my door. The second day I kept the buzz off, but I did answer the knocking. It was an autom I’d never seen before, a whirring anthropoid outline. I blinked and wondered who’d sent this thing and then I saw its face. Its screen was cruder than any I’d seen her rendered on before, but it was Ehrsul.
“Avice,” she said. “Can I come in?”
“Ehrsul, why’d you load yourself into... ?” I shook my head and stepped back for her to enter.
“The usual one doesn’t have these.” She swung the thing’s arms like deadweight ropes.
“Why do you need them?” I said. And Pharotekton bless her she grabbed hold of me, just as if I’d lost someone. She did not ask me anything. I hugged her right back, for a long time.
I WENT BACK once more to The Cravat. Set my expression, walked a floaker walk. None of the similes were there, nor, I think, did any ever come back. I let my show drop. But the owner, a man whose name I had never bothered to learn, referring to him only by the vernacular slang handle we’d granted him that I now cannot remember, hurried up to me in agitation, as if I could help him. He told me that Ariekei were still coming: Spanish Dancer; one we’d known as Baptist; others of the Professors. They’d been staring at where the similes used to sit.
“Surl Tesh-echer used to come here all the time,” I said. “Maybe they’re coming to be where their friend used to be.”
The owner was terrified the Hosts would commit reprisal for ’s death. Most people were. I was not. I’d seen Pear Tree step aside for Hasser and say something to him on his way. I’d seen CalVin and the others waiting for that. had been murdered but it also had been executed, publicly, by its peers. For heresy, had been sentenced to Death by Human.
Embassytown couldn’t know, and would not. The situation must be made to look to most people, and did, like a bloody mess, rather than the careful juridical moment it also was.
Ariekei traditioners had decided they could not tolerate , would not brook its experiments. A lie was a performance; a simile was rhetoric: their synthesis, though, the first step in their becoming quite another trope, was sedition. I would never assume I understood the motivations of any exot, and I had grown up knowing the thinking of the Hosts was beyond me. Whatever drove the Ariekene powers to their brutal decision might, might not, be comparable to the calculations that had also gone on behind Embassy doors. The Ariekene resistance to these innovations might have been ethical, or aesthetic, or random. It might have been religious or a game. Or instrumental, an expression of some cool, cynical calculation, a power-jostling among cliques.