Sotted and maudlin, Ez began to badmouth Ra. “That lanky shit,” he muttered as we followed him through semiautonomous zones policed by their own incompetent constables. “Coattailing me, then coming the big I-am.” Ra was the only person in Embassytown who shared Ez’s colloquialisms and accent. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? Easy for him to play the nice boy when, with... he can...” Cheap lamps flickered above us, new stars. “I shouldn’t...” Ez said. “I’m tired, and I want to stop this... and I want Ra to leave me alone.”
I said, “Ez, I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“Please stop calling me that! Fucking stupid, stupid... It’s...”
I knew his former name. He was the man who had been Joel Rukowsi. I looked at him in the rubbish-specked hall. I wouldn’t call him Rukowsi, or Joel, and when I repeated his name Ez he slumped and accepted it.
Simmon and I rescued him from the fights he provoked. When it was time eventually for him and Ra to perform their dawn chorus, the first speech of the day, he insulted us as we led him back up through the changed building, through new fiefdoms, embryonic slums, where new ways of living were incubating. At the chamber I reached for the door, and Ez halted me with a touch and without speaking asked me for a moment. That was the only time that night I felt anything from him other than scorn. He closed his eyes. He sighed and his face went back to drunk and ornery.
“Come on then, you bastard,” he shouted, and shoved open the door. Ra and MagDa were waiting. They disentangled while Ez mocked them.
We watched EzRa fight. When Ez made some prurient cruel comment about MagDa, Ra shouted at him.
“What do you think you are?” Ez laughed back. “What do you think this is? ‘You leave her out of this!’? Are you serious?” Even I had to bite back a bit of laughter at that unexpected imitation, and Ra seemed a little shamefaced.
“Here,” said Ez later, as sound engineers and bioriggers prepared him for broadcast. Ra read the paper Ez handed him.
“Not going to go over that stuff from yesterday?” Ra said. His voice was suddenly and surprisingly neutral.
“No,” said Ez. “I want to keep on. I think I left it at a good moment, let’s keep things going.” They don’t care! I wanted to shout. You could describe the fucking carpet, the effect would be the same.
Ra asked questions about cadence and timing, wrote notes in the margin. Ez had no copy: he’d memorised what he wanted to say. When they spoke I wasn’t looking at them but over the city, and it twitched as the first hit of language came, as EzRa continued with their stories of Ez’s youth.
13
CYNICALLY, WHO WERE WE? Not many, a gathering of no ones, floakers, dissident Staff, a handful of precious Ambassadors. But our numbers were growing, and our edicts weren’t completely ignored. Embassytowners had begun to do as we suggested, asked, or ordered.
We—MagDa above all—worked hard at our few Ariekei contacts. We worked hard full stop, too hard for me to feel just then whatever it was I ultimately probably would, from Ez’s abuse, from reading Ehrsul’s letter. MagDa even persuaded some of the most contained and coherent Ariekei into the corridors of the Embassy, not simply on eager pilgrimage to EzRa, but on new business. She might reward them with a snip of unheard recording of EzRa, one of our rare stolen buggings.
“Some of them know this is a problem,” said Mag. “The Ariekei. You can tell.”
“Some of them,” said Da. “... there’s some kind of debate, some kind of...” “Some of them want to be cured.”
Like fucking fungus, rumours spread. Our cams still gusted through the city. Some were intercepted by the antibodies the houses secreted, which came up like segmented predators. But when their investigations left them satisfied that the cams were no threat, they left them unmolested. The footage taught us more about our Hosts’ city than we had ever known: too late. And every little half-seen movement, everything we saw out there, the what-and-where of which we couldn’t identify or clarify, gave traction to stories about missing secrets, fifth columns, Staff self-exiled, old grudges.
In the farmlands, huge flocks of biorigging spawned in irregular harvests. Foods and tech came from those stretches by biotic ways. Addiction was chemicaclass="underline" there was a slow stream of it from the city to the kraals and the rural Ariekei. They began to neglect their charges and come to the city, for the sound they suddenly needed without ever having heard. Their deserted manors grew sick, wheezing and hungry. Herds of rigged equipment, medical tech and building tools, girdered and rhino-sized spinners of protein and polymer foundations, went feral.
When their shepherds reached the city there was no one to meet them. The country Ariekei saw their worst-afflicted compatriots lying by speakers and starving to death, waiting for the next sentence. Their bodies lay unhonoured. If the buildings around them were still healthy enough their dog-sized animalculae would break the corpses down: if not, the slower processes of internal rot would smear them gradually into the road.
Fights were common. Withdrawal and Ariekene need meant aggression. The afflicted would tear into things on sudden searches for EzRa’s Language. A less affected Ariekes, usually from the country, might frill its fanwing in formal pugnacity, but the more addicted had no time for traditional displays and would simply hurl themselves hooves and giftwings at their startled opponents. Once I saw footage of EzRa’s broadcast start in the middle of such a battle. The combatants slumped against each other immediately and coiled together as if in affection, still bleeding their blood.
“Things are getting worse again,” Da said. We were going to infect the entire planet.
“That’s not the only thing we have to contend with.” It was Bren.
He stood in the doorway. A suspiciously perfect pose, all framed. “Hello Avice Benner Cho,” he said.
I rose. I shook my head at him. “You prodigal bastard,” I said.
“Prodigal?” he said.
“Where have you been?”
“Prodigal extravagant?” he said. “Or penitent?” A little cautiously, he smiled at me. I didn’t quite smile at him for a minute, but then, fuck it, yes I did.
“HOW DID YOU get in here?” someone said, so newly promoted by circumstance that they added “Who are you?” to hisses of embarrassment. Ra shook Bren’s hand and tried to welcome him. Bren waved him away.
“It’s not just these Ariekene refugees we have to contend with,” Bren said. “Though they’ll certainly complicate matters.” He spoke with monotone authority. “There are other things.”
Of course he couldn’t speak Language since his doppel had died, but there were some Ariekei—you might sentimentally and misleadingly call them old friends—that came to his house and told him things.
“Do you think none of them want this to change?” Bren said.
“No, we know,” Mag said, but he continued.
“You think there are no Hosts who are horrified? They’re thinking through a fug, true, but some of them are still thinking. You know what they call EzRa? The god-drug.”
After a silence I said carefully, “That is a kenning.”
“No,” Bren said. He glanced around the room, gauging who knew that old term for the compound trope. “It’s not like a bone-house, Avice.” He thumped his chest, his bone-house. “It’s more straightforward. It’s just truth.”
“Huh,” someone said shakily, “that’s religion for you...”
“No it is not,” Bren said. “Gods are gods and drugs are drugs but here, here, there’s a city not only of the addicted but of... a sort of faithful.”