Listeners, EzCal said. Do you understand me?
The Ariekei told them yes.
Raise your giftwings, EzCal said, and the Ariekei did. Shake them, they said, and again, immediately, the Ariekei did.
I’d never seen anything like this. None of the watching Terre looked anything but stunned. If Ez was excited or surprised he showed no sign of it at all. He just looked out at all these addict-obedient. Raise your giftwings to listen, EzCal said. Listen.
They said the city was ill, that it must be healed, that there was very much to do, that there were plenty of hearers in the city who were still dangerous or endangered, or both, but that things would be better now. To the Ariekei, these political platitudes, in this voice, might be revelations. They listened, and they were transported.
I didn’t see any pleasure in Cal’s expression. The grim strain of his face, the muscles clenching—it looked to me as if he had no choice but to do and be this, now. Listen, EzCal said, and the Ariekei listened harder. The walls strained. The windows sighed.
WHEN THEY REGREW the city the Ariekei changed it. In this rebooted version the houses segmented into smaller dwellings and were interspersed with pillars like sweating trees. Of course there were still towers, still factories and hangars for the nurturing of young and of biorigging, to process the new chemicals the Ariekei and their buildings emitted when they listened to EzCal. But the housescape we overlooked took on a more higgledy-piggledy aspect. The streets seemed steeper than they had been, and more various: the chitin gables, the conquistador-helmet curves newly intricate.
The old halls were still there, and that architecture revived enough by EzCal’s voice to fail to die, but not quite to rise. The tracts of decayed city between new village-like neighbourhoods were dangerous. The prowling grounds of animals and of Ariekei so far gone they’d never fully woken. They would crowd isolated loudhailers during announcements and gain enough from EzCal’s voice to give them aggressive need, but not enough to give them mind.
“We’ll clear them out, when we can,” Cal said. In the meantime the city was scattered fiefdoms, with each of which we tried to establish protocols. I found out something of their specifics—“that one’s run by a little coalition of the not-very dependent; that one’s too risky to go into right now; the Ariekes running that place there, around the minaret, it was a functionary before the fall”—from Bren. Bren learnt them from YlSib.
“MagDa won’t push you on it,” Bren said to me. “But...” Bren saw the expression on my face. “You can see what’s going on,” he said finally. “They’re not running things now, they’re not in a position to close the infirmary...”
“You think they would if they could?”
“I don’t know and just now I don’t care. Cal certainly won’t. You saw what happened when EzCal spoke. If MagDa needs to know anything you know, please tell them. We need them clued in. They’re smart, they must know the sort of source you’re getting information from, but they won’t ask. They have plans, I’m sure. They’ve been spending time in Southel’s lab. Have you seen them talking to her?”
It wasn’t as part of an official group, committee business, that I went back into the city, when I did. I went with Bren, to meet his friends again: YlSib, that secret rogue Ambassador.
OUR AIR-SHAPING was weak enough now that we had to wear aeoli within what had recently been Embassytown streets. So far as we could Bren and I were careful to avoid vespcams, though I knew if we were seen we’d only be a rumour among many. We stationed ourselves in the ruins. From a balcony in an apartment where children had lived (I trod over the debris of toys) we saw EzCal go again among crowds of Ariekei that listened and obeyed their instructions.
“Next time they’re going to head into the city,” said Sib. I hadn’t heard YlSib enter. “So...” Sib pointed out of the window at EzCal. “Language works differently with this one.”
“We should have called them OgMa, not EzCal” Bren said. We looked at him for an explanation. “A god,” he said, “who did sort of the same thing.”
YlSib wore biorigged pistols. Bren and I had cruder weapons. YlSib moved with vastly more facility than the halting citynauts with whom I’d made earlier forays. They didn’t hesitate on the way to where brickwork in ruins became biology. The air changed on our way. The way the currents went over me wasn’t like the wind in Embassytown. We were in a place full of new sounds. Small fauna claimed areas. Ariekei in the streets didn’t stop for us, though some raised eye-corals and stared. There were pools overhung by bladderwrackish polyps that dripped reactions into the liquid. I wondered if they were foundations, deliberate town planning.
I looked down an avenue of marrowy-trees to Embassytown. An Ariekes near us startled me, asked repeatedly in Language what we were doing. I raised my weapon but YlSib were speaking. I’m 
, they said. These are— and then they said something yl that wasn’t our names. They are coming with me. I’m going home. 
, YlSib said, and they put stress in their formulation by making it a personal. I, homegoer, was what they said, so I wondered if going home was a powerful thing to the Ariekei too.
“They know us,” said Yl. “These days some are too gone to remember, but if we meet any who can speak, we should be alright.” “Although,” Sib said, “I guess there might be new allegiances. Some of them might have...” “... reasons to not let us pass.”
In fact some Language we heard on that journey made little sense. Phrases spoken by wrecks of speakers out of nostalgia for meaning. YlSib led us finally to a shredded clearing. I gasped. There was a man waiting for us. He leaned below a column of metal that recurved over his head very like a streetlamp. He looked transplanted from an old flat image of a Terre town.
They nodded, muttered to Yl and Sib and Bren. They made sure I couldn’t hear them. The man reminded me of no one. He was nondescript and dark-skinned, in old clothes, an aeoli of a kind I didn’t recognise breathing into him. There was nothing I could have said about him. He left with YlSib and Bren came back to me.
“Who the fuck is that?” I said. “Is he cleaved?”
“No,” said Bren. He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe his brother’s dead by now, but I don’t think so. They just didn’t like each other very much.” Of course I knew this counterworld of exiles existed now, of misbehaving cleaved, Staff unstaffed, bad Ambassadors; but to see its doings astounded me. How had they kept going during the days of collapse, before god-drug II?
“Do you speak to any of the similes still?” Bren said.
“Jesus,” I said. “Why? Not really. I saw Darius at a bar, ages ago. We were both embarrassed. I mean Embassytown’s too small for me not to run into them sometimes, but it’s not as if we talk.”
“Do you know what they’re doing?”
“I don’t think there’s a ‘they’, Bren. It’s all... disbanded. After what happened. Maybe some of them still meet... But that scene was ruined ages ago. After Hasser. Can you imagine now? No one cares about them anymore, including their speakers. Language...” I laughed. “It isn’t what it used to be.”