There are fashions in suicide, and some of ours were dramatic and melancholy. More than one person took what was known as the Oates Road, strapping on a mask to breathe and simply walking out of Embassytown, and on, out of sight and into the city; even, some stories had it, out beyond it; to let what would, happen. But the most common choice for those oppressed to death by the new times was hanging. According to what protocols I’ve no idea, news editors decided that those mostly bloodless bodies could be shown without digital disguise. We grew used to shots of dangling dead.
The news didn’t report the suicides of Ambassadors.
MagDa showed me footage of the bodies of Hen and Ry, lying entangled on their bed, intertwined by the spasms caused by poison.
“Where are ShelBy?” I said. ShelBy and HenRy had been together.
“Gone,” MagDa said.
“They’ll turn up,” Mag said. Da said: “Dead.” “HenRy won’t be the last.” “They won’t be able to hide this sort of thing much longer.” “In fact, given the population size...” “... the rate’s higher than average.” “We’re killing ourselves more than others.”
“Well,” I said. All business. “I suppose it’s no wonder.”
“No, it’s not, is it?” MagDa said. “It really isn’t.” “Is it any wonder?”
WE DRAGOONED some of Embassytown’s transient machines, uploading what ’ware we could to make them less stupid. Still they were unfit for all but basic tasks.
Ehrsul would still not answer my buzzes, or, I learnt, anyone’s. I realised how many days it was since I’d seen her, was ashamed and abruptly fearful. I went to her apartment. Alone: I wasn’t the only one from the new Staff who knew her, but if any of the worst outcomes I suddenly pictured were true, I could only bear to find out, to find her, on my own.
But she opened her door to my knocking almost immediately. “Ehrsul?” I said. “Ehrsul?”
She greeted me with her usual sardonic humour, as if her name hadn’t been a question. I could not understand. She asked me how I’d been, said something about her work. I let her blather a while, getting me a drink. When I asked her what she’d been doing, where she’d been, why she hadn’t responded to my messages, she ignored me.
“What’s going on?” I said. I demanded to know what she made of our catastrophe. I asked, and her avatar-face simply froze, flickered, and came back, and she continued her meaningless tasks and directionless wit. She said nothing to my question at all.
“Come with me,” I said. I asked her to join MagDa and me. I asked her to come with me into the city. But whenever I mooted anything that would mean her leaving her room, the same stuttering fugue occurred. She would skip a moment, then continue as if I’d said nothing, and talk about something outdated or irrelevant.
“It’s either a fuckup of some kind or she’s doing it deliberately,” a harried Embassy ’waregener told me later, when I described it to her. You think? I was about to respond, but she clarified: it might be an autom equivalent of a child singing I can’t hear you, with fingers in its ears.
When I left Ehrsul’s, I saw a letter in front of her door, opened and discarded. She didn’t acknowledge it, even as I bent very slowly to pick it up, right in front of her, looking at her the whole time.
Dear Ehrsul, it read. I’m worried about you. Of course what’s going on’s got us all terrified, but I’m concerned... and so on. Ehrsul waited while I read. What must my expression have been? I was holding my breath, certainly. Her avatar stuttered in and out of focus until I was done.
I didn’t recognise the name at the letter’s end. I saw from the way it fluttered, minutely, when I bent to put it back on the floor, that my fingers were shaking. How many best friends had she collected? Maybe I was her uptown version, linked to Staff. Perhaps each of us had a niche. Perhaps all of us had been afraid for her.
Thinking about her made me think also of CalVin, of whatever pointless actions they were performing, and of Scile, from whom I had still heard nothing. I buzzed Bren, repeatedly, but to my infuriation and concern he didn’t answer. I went back to his house but no one came to the door.
I DON’T THINK I’d understood what Ra dealt with until I was on Ez duty. We could of course have simply held a gun to Ez’s head, but when we threatened too hard, he threatened us back, and his behaviour was so unpredictable we had to take seriously the possibility that he’d refuse to speak, and damn us all, out of spite. So instead we chaperoned him everywhere, at once jailers, companions and foils. That way when it was time for him to perform, he could make our lives hard, and we could let him kick us around, until, sulkily, he acquiesced.
Security was always in at least twos. I asked to join Simmon. When I met him he gripped my right hand in greeting with his left. I stared. The right arm he’d worn for years, an Ariekene biorigged contrivance of imprecise colour and texture but exactly mimicking Terre morphology, was gone. The sleeve of his jacket was neatly pinned.
“It was addicted,” he said. “When I was charging it it must’ve...” He had used a zelle, like the Hosts and their city. “It was sort of spasming. It tried to grow ears,” he said. “I cut it off. It was still trying to listen, even lying there on the floor.”.
Ez was in EzRa’s Embassy chambers. He was drunk and wheedling, excoriating Ra for cowardice and conspiracy, calling MagDa filthy names. Nasty but no nastier than many arguments I’d heard. Ra was what surprised me. He stood differently than I’d seen him do before. He whom we often mocked for his taciturnity spat back epithets.
“Make sure he’s ready to speak when he gets back,” Ra said to us. Ez gesticulated an obscenity at him.
“Can I at least go to a party? Or will you bastards try to keep me even from that?” Ez moaned as we followed him to the venue in the Embassy’s lower floors. We stood watch, policed the drink he took, though we’d never seen excess seem to alter his abilities to speak Language. We watched him fuck and argue. The glints on his link puttered frantically, hunting for and not finding its pair, striving to boost a connection Ez was avoiding.
I could say it was depressing, that party, like a walk through purgatory, we at the end of the world rutting into oblivion and drugging ourselves idiot to autogenerated rhythms and a hammer of lights through smoke. Perhaps to those participating it was joyful. It didn’t hold Ez’s interest. I was as impassive as a soldier.
Ez took us to what had been an office equipment warehouse in the middle floors of the Embassy and was now an ersatz bar. He drank until I intervened, which made him delighted because then he could denounce me. The only people in this peculiar thrown-together place were ex-Staff and one or two Ambassadors. They showed no concern that he was risking our world with every glass.
“Your friends,” I whispered, and shook my head. He met my eyes quite unmoved by the disgust.
Embassytowners had taken over the lower floors of the Embassy, looking for safety. Those levels had become back-alleys. Men and women, nurseries and shiftparents reconfigured cupboards and spilled out of meeting rooms, turning architecture inside-out. We went walking through these night streets made of corridors, where lights not broken had been reprogrammed into diurnal rhythms and house numbers were chalked on inside doors by which people leaned and talked while children played games past their bedtime. Embassytown had come inside.