The Ariekei were hurling things: rubbish, rock, glass. They each gripped the door in turn, frustrated by its mechanism. They were shouting in Language. EzRa’s voice. Where is it? “This lot are the weakest,” Bren said. “They’re too far gone to be satisfied with what we give them now.” We were increasingly parsimonious with the recorded god-drug. “They know there are Terre here, must think they’re holding EzRa’s voice, on datchip or something. Don’t look like that. This isn’t about logic. They’re desperate.”
Vespcams gathered. We watched their feeds. What do you feel, witnessing the end? In my case it wasn’t despair but disbelief and shock, endlessly. There, stepped into red mud by the hooves of the Ariekei, was a Terre body. A pulped man. I wasn’t the only one who cried out at that sight.
The cams darted closer. One was slapped from the air by an irate giftwing. Constables touched their weapons but what, would we attack the Ariekei? We couldn’t retaliate. We didn’t know what that would invoke.
Officers reached the rear of the buildings, made surreptitious entrances, got the terrified inhabitants away. We watched in split visuals: them with their charges; the Hosts clamouring as they attacked the house. There was more motion. Ariekei newcomers were approaching.
“There,” said Bren. He wasn’t surprised by what he saw.
There were four or five new arrivals. I thought they were coming to join the attack on the house, but to my great shock they shoved in a wedge into the crowd of Ariekei with their giftwings whipping. They reared and slammed hooves into their fellows, shattering carapaces. The fight was fast and brutal.
Ariekene blood sprayed, and there were the calls of Hosts in pain. “Look.” I pointed. The cameras flitted and gave me another moment’s view of some of the new attackers. “Do you see?” They were without fanwings. They had only stumps, flesh rags. Bren hissed.
The traumatised human inhabitants made it to our flyer, joined us watching that new fight. The attackers killed one of the other Ariekei. Seeing it die made me think of Beehive. The Host lay there red with hoofprints in familiar gore: its attacker had slipped in what remained of the Terre man.
“So... we have Ariekene protectors, now?” I said.
“No,” Bren said. “That’s not what you just saw.”
WE MOVED the last people from the edges of Embassytown, into blocks we could guard with constables and rapidly inducted militia. Some holdouts we forced to leave. Ariekei gathered at the ends of streets and watched their human neighbours go. We timed a broadcast of EzRa to coincide with our evacuation: the double-voice called and the Ariekei reeled and stampeded to the speakers and left us alone.
Between the ruining city and the centre of Embassytown was a deserted zone: our buildings, our houses without men and women in them, valuables taken and only the shoddy and dispensable left behind. I helped supervise the exodus. Afterwards, in the thin air at the edge of the aeoli breath, I walked through half-empty rooms.
Power was still connected. In some places screens and flats had been left on, and newscasters talked to me, describing the very removals that had left them alone, interviewing Mag and Da, who nodded sternly and insisted that this was necessary, temporarily. I sat in empty homes and watched my friends dissemble. I picked up books and trinkets and put them down again.
Ehrsul’s rooms were in this zone. I stood outside them, and after a long time I buzzed her. I rang her doorbell. It was the first time I’d tried her in a long time. She didn’t answer.
The Ariekei began to move into the emptied streets. A vanguard of their most desperate. With their pining battery-animals, and followed by slow carrion-eaters they would have bothered to kill as pests before, the Hosts searched the houses, too. They pressed with incomprehension and care at computers, their random ministrations running no-longer-relevant programs, cleaning rooms, working out finances, playing games, organising the minutiae of those missing. The Ariekei found no Language to listen to. The absence of their drug didn’t wean them off it: there was no cold turkey for them; EzRa’s speech had insinuated too deep into them for that. Instead, more of the weakest of them just began to die. Among the Terre, Ambassador SidNey committed suicide.
“Avice.” Bren buzzed me. “Can you come to my house?”
HE WAS WAITING for me. Two women were with him. They were older than me but not old. One was by the window, one by Bren’s chair. They watched me as I entered. No one spoke.
They were identical. They were doppels. I could discern no differences. They weren’t just doppels, they were equalised. I was looking at an Ambassador, an Ambassador I did not recognise. And that, I knew, wasn’t possible.
“Yes,” Bren said to me. He laughed minutely at my face. “I need to talk to you,” he said. “I need you to keep quiet about something. Well, about...”
One of the women came towards me. She held out her hand.
“Avice Benner Cho,” she said.
“Obviously this is a shock,” her doppel said.
“Oh no,” I said finally. “A shock? Please.”
“Avice.” Bren said. “Avice, this is Yl.” I learnt the spelling later. It sounded like ill. “And this is Sib.”
Their faces exactly those of each other, heavy and shrewd, but they wore different clothes. Yl was in red, Sib in grey. I shook my head. They both wore little aeoli, unhooked and resting in our Embassytown air.
“I saw you,” I remembered. “Once, in...” I pointed at the city.
“Probably,” said Sib.
“I don’t remember,” said Yl.
“Avice,” Bren said. “YlSib are here to... They’re how I know what’s going on.”
YlSib—what an ugly name. I knew as he said it that they’d once been Ambassador SibYl, and that this recomposition was part of their rebellion. “YlSib live in the city,” Bren said gently. Of course they did. He’d hinted to me of such hidden. I realised he was saying my name.
“Avice. Avice.”
“Why me, Bren?” I said. I said it quietly enough that it was as if intimate, though Yl and Sib could hear me. “Why am I here? Where’s MagDa, where are the others?”
“No,” he said. He and Sib and Yl glanced at each other. “Too much bad blood. History. YlSib and that lot were on opposite sides for a long time. Some things don’t change. But you’re different. And I need your help.”
I was staring into something opened up. Fractures, renegades, guerrilla Ambassadors, unquiet cleaved. What the hell else was out there? Who? Scile? Shiftfather Christmas? Back came stupid tales, now not so stupid. I remembered unanswered questions, I wondered who’d gone from Embassytown, who’d turned their backs on it, over years, and I wondered why.
“Embassytown’s dying,” Yl said. She gestured at the window, and Sib at the soundless wallscreen. The worst, most Language-starved Ariekei were coming. They shambled in unnatural bursts like toys. Troops of the collapsing, falling apart variously, claiming our streets without intent, with only oratees’ despair, but killing as they came, us and each other. We could no longer walk the outermost of our streets: there were too many attacks, too much Ariekene rage.
Cams showed those in their dotage instar wandering with pendulous food-bellies, some stumbling by their random ways into Embassytown. No Ariekei tended them. It was shocking. There were rumours that in periods between EzRa-word highs some Ariekei were eating these unstruggling elders, as evolution intended but their culture had abjured.