Embassytown

20

I WAS A TRADER AGAIN. I went with others in corvids to the country. Business. Now in this reign of EzCal, god-drug II, we could leave again.

MayBel was our speaker on this trip. They could say that name: .

In the weeks since I’d flown out last, the landscape had raggedly changed. By the jut of rocks there were skeletons, where biorigging had come to die. The meadows were torn up by the tracks of stampeding machines, the new routes of refugees into the city in search of the god-drug voice, and later refugees out, in that exodus we still didn’t understand. The city had been depleted, by more than the numbers of dead.

We came down where there were farmlands worked, newly, differently from before. A society was starting. It wasn’t strong. The farmers were addicts again, of a new drug, but it was better than being the mindless starvelings they had been. We had no choice but to be dealers.

We went with our datchips beyond the reach of the speakers. We found Ariekei who still thought EzRa was the ruler and voice of Embassytown, and had unaccountably been silent these past days. Despite MayBel’s articulacy it wasn’t clear they understood what had changed, until with eager giftwing fingers, they played the files, and heard the voice of EzCal.

I want more of the other one, a farmer said. It tried to remember the way we used to trade: the haggling Terre had taught the Ariekei when our predecessors first arrived. Clumsily it offered us more of the medical rigging it had grown if we would give it another of EzRa’s chips. We explained that we had none. Another, though, preferred the newcomer. It indicated several of its chewing beasts, which would defecate fuel and components: it would give us more than ever before, if we would give it more of this new EzCal.

Were those Ariekei who preferred EzCal more measured? Was there a calm, a focus to them, contrasting with a febrile air to those who still hankered for EzRa? Certainly, after ecstasy and before withdrawal, the composure between the Ariekei’s necessary fixes seemed easier for us than they had been before. This EzCal version of Language left the Ariekei clearer-headed, a little more like the Hosts we had grown up with.

We tried to intervene, to shape what structures were emerging. We tried to re-establish conduits for our necessaries. I imagined Scile dead in all the landscapes I passed—in the city, huddled where his aeoli had failed; in the first downs beyond.

We overflew desolate remnants of farms, vats dedicated by old agreements to the production of our foods: nutrient-rich pabulum; crops in Terre-air bubbles; food animals and sheets of meatcloth. Fallen and falling, there were parts though that were restorable. Our crews did what they could, coaxed airglands to fill chambers, restarted traumatised birth-pens. We found local Ariekene keepers, and with snips of EzCal’s speechifying we restored them to mindfulness and gave them delight, coaxed them back to the farmsteads to help us. They cured the buildings, fixed the cityward flow of what we needed. Cells of food jostled like corpuscles on their way to Embassytown.

With those peristalses of imports, we might have more or less ignored the city, now that its inhabitants weren’t attacking us anymore. We could have just broadcast the god-drug’s announcements to its convalescing boroughs to make its inhabitants pliant. We didn’t, of course. Most of us felt concern, even responsibility, for the biopolis. Nonetheless, we weren’t expecting what turned out to be the vigorous interventions of EzCal. Really, of Cal. Cal, and with him the other half of the god-drug, didn’t merely broadcast or make careful forays into the streets, to find a new Ariekei government: EzCal paraded.

The committee could have tried to stop them. Ez was our prisoner. When sometimes he tried—always obviously—to make his own plans, to turn a situation to an advantage, he was cackhanded. At first, mostly, he did as we told him; then he did what Cal told him. Cal disturbed me: his fever of importance. What we said was he was ours, that we decided what he did, and Ez with him, and it was true for a few days, until he’d remembered the minutiae of ruling.

“No, let’s not go slowly,” he said to us after that—to me, in fact, after I’d said that the city was still dangerous, and that with the systems we’d put in place we maybe didn’t need to deal too closely with it yet. “Oh yes we do,” he said.

EzCal’s recitations were quite different from EzRa’s. Cal put a transmitter in front of the Embassy, where he could be seen when he Languaged. He would turn up early for the broadcasts and wait, arms folded or on his hips, looking at the square, and to our surprise, it wasn’t only him who did so: Ez would be there, too. He barely spoke except during these performances, in Language, and if he did, his mumbles and monosyllables made you think he was barely with you. But he never made Cal wait.

Cal wouldn’t look at Ez except as he had to. It was easy to see he hated him. He found a way, though, to make himself into this new thing, using Ez as a tool.

All you who listen to me, ez/cal said. It was the third Utuday in ez the third monthling of October. I didn’t look at the feeds but I know what I’d have seen if I had: clutches of Ariekei throughout the city ringing the speakers and clinging to each other. I wasn’t aware I was listening to EzCal’s words until I reacted with shock to a promise I’d not known I was translating.

I will come and walk among you tomorrow, EzCal said. I swear I heard noises from the city when they did. Faintly, over the membranous walls. That reaction was a revolution of a kind. I’d never seen any Ariekes understand or pay attention to the specifics of what EzRa had said—their voice had been nothing but intoxicant. Where listeners had liked one banal or idiotic phrase over another, it was as abstract and meaningless a preference as that for a favourite colour. This was not the same. Some in the city, even tripping on EzCal’s voice, had understood the content of those words. I wished Bren had been there with me when that happened.

“What in hell are you doing?” I went and said to Cal. At first he didn’t seem to notice me. Then his expression went from bewilderment to irritation to uninterest in less than a second. He walked away, and Ez followed him, and Ez’s guards followed them both.

LIKE THE KING in a story, EzCal climbed up the barricades and down again into what had been our streets, and into a mass of hundreds of waiting Ariekei. They were motionless and silent. They moved out of EzCal’s way with little hoof-steps.

EzCal’s retinue of nervous men and women scrambled down the plastone-set rubbish and rubble behind them. No path was cleared for us; we had to weave very tentatively between the Hosts. There were plenty of us, viziers insisting that they were indispensable, I, MagDa and others from the committee after them and trying to issue orders or just watching, collating. I had a sense I couldn’t quite articulate that of course Cal, EzCal, had known that their words wouldn’t only fulfil and fuel Ariekei cravings, but would communicate specifics.

The effortlessness of it. EzRa’s audience had fugued as much at agricultural reports as at the narratives Ez had seemed or pretended to think caught them up. Now the stories Ez told had real audiences, but they weren’t his stories anymore. The Ariekei kept their fanwings flared, listening hard. Cal walked as if he and Ez would keep on to the edge of historic Embassytown and into the city. They had no aeoli, so this was pure theatre. Ez kept up with him.

Listeners, EzCal said. They were amplified by tiny point-microphones on their clothes. Cal hadn’t been looking at Ez, I’d have put money on it, but they spoke together. EzCal waited so long I might have expected the hold of their voice on the assembled to ebb. It had only been a single word, not even a clause, with the grammar that seemed particularly succulent to the Ariekei. But they waited.

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.”

YlSib returned, scraping decaying city-stuff off their clothes. “That’s true,” Bren said. “But it’s not true that no one cares anymore. You don’t know where we’re going: your company’s been requested.”

“What?” I had not thought that this infiltration was about me, that I was a task to be fulfilled. YlSib led me to a basement-analogue and ushered me in, into the biolit presence of Ariekei. “Avice Benner Cho,” YlSib said. They spoke my names perfectly simultaneously, at the same pitch, so though it was two voices it sounded to me like one.

The room smelt of Ariekei. There were several. They were making noises, speech and mutterings of thought. One approached me out of the half-dark and spoke a greeting. YlSib told me its name. I looked at its fanwing.

“Christ,” I said. “We’ve met.”

It had been a close companion of Surl Tesh-echer, , surl the best liar in Ariekei history. It was the Ariekes I’d once called Spanish Dancer. “Does it remember... ?”

“Of course it remembers, Avice,” Bren said. “Why do you think you’re here?”

BREN AND YLSIB gave to the gathered Ariekei a clutch of datchips. They took them quickly, their limbs and digits betraying agitation. “Do EzCal know you’re recording them?” I said.

“I hope not,” Bren said. “You’ve seen? They’re trying to do what Ez did when he was part of EzRa—make sure we can’t build up a stock of recordings to make them redundant.”

“But you have.”

“These are just their public recitations,” he said. “They can’t stop people tapping those, and why would they? They think because it’s been said, because it’s out there, the Hosts’ve heard it, and it’s lost its thing.”

I looked one by one around the other Ariekei there. There were other patterns on other fanwings I thought I had seen before. “Some of these were in Surl Tesh-echer’s group as well,” I said. I looked at Bren. “They were its friends.”

“Yes,” Bren said.

“What they can do is lie,” Bren said. “Not that any of them’s anything like as virtuoso as Surl Tesh-echer was. It was...” He shrugged. “A harbinger. On the edge of something.”

“Your husband was right,” YlSib said. “To stop it. In his terms he was right. It was changing everything.” There was a silence. “This lot have had to carry on without it since. It’s slow.” “They do what they can.”

Every Ariekes took a datchip, each to a different part of the room. Each in similar elegant motion draped its fanwing over it. Their membranes spread. They withdrew, hunched into sculptures, made the room a drug-house. With the volume very low, they ran the sounds. Responded instantly as I watched, trembling, judders of bio-ecstasy. I could see lights of speakers through taut fanwing skin, hear the muffled chirruping of audio: the soul of EzCal, or its spurious fabricated semblance.

“How the hell can those recordings still work?” I whispered. “They’ve already been heard.”

“Not by them,” Bren said. “They wait. Bloody willpower. They fold up their wings when they know EzCal’s going to speak. They were already doing it with EzRa. They make themselves hold out. They’re trying to go longer and longer without.”

It was hard to imagine that the shuddering figures represented a resistance to the reign of god-drug. Still. “They can take these now because they didn’t take them before,” Yl said.

One by slow one the Ariekei rose. They looked at me. A strange reminiscence. We seemed to pick up where we’d left off. Spanish Dancer came up to me: its companions circled me. They said the succession of sounds in Language that were me. I had not heard myself spoken for a long time.

They said me first as a fact. There was a girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. Then they began to deploy me as a simile. We now, Spanish Dancer said, when we take what is given in god-drug’s voice, we are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. The others responded.

“SURL TESH-ECHER was more than just the best liar, you know,” Bren said. “It was sort of a vanguard. It was never just about performing lies. Why would they be so interested in you, if that was all, Avice? How do lying and similes intersect?”

What other things in this world, one of the Ariekei was saying, are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her?

“It’s been hard,” Bren said. “They were all scattered by the war.” The war of not-enough drug. The war of Ez killed Ra. The war of the walking dead. “Now they’ve tracked each other down, they’re going to keep going. They didn’t worship Surl Tesh-echer. But it was sort of a figurehead.”

“Prophet,” Yl or Sib said.

“Why can’t you tell MagDa, and even Cal...” I said, then trailed off because of course the group in this room was a conspiracy. Striving to limit the power of the god-drug. Cal would try to sabotage it. I wished I didn’t believe that. Bren nodded, watching me think.

“Yeah,” said Bren. “Now, MagDa are different. But there’s only so much they’ll risk. They want to get out, now, and they can only see one way to do it, and that’s hanging on. They won’t risk anything else. They might even scupper it.”

“Scupper what? What are you trying to do?”

“Not me,” Bren said.

“All of you. You, you,” I said to YlSib, “these Hosts. What are you plural trying to do?” “MagDa’s way won’t work,” Bren said. “Just to stave things off. That’s why they won’t take on Cal. It’s not enough to try to keep everything going until the ship gets here. We have to change things.” While he spoke, the Ariekei moved around me like flotsam in a current, and they said the phrase I was and tried to make it into new things, to think of new things they could insist that it, I, my past, was like.

“EzCal’s not the only one we have to be careful of,” Bren said. “You have to keep this quiet.” I remembered the parting of Ariekei when Hasser had come and killed .

“You’re worried about other Ariekei,” I said.

“These speakers were dangerous before,” Bren said. “Scile was right about them, and so were their...” He shrugged and shook his head so I would know whatever phrase he used was inexact. “Ruling clique. And I don’t know where they are now, yet, but I bet EzCal have an idea. Or Cal does. They’ve done business before. Why do you think he’s so keen to get into the city?”

I’d thought Cal’s eagerness was newly visionary fervour. But back then, there in the Festival of Lies, Cal, and Pear Tree, looking at me. “Jesus Pharos.” Scile had watched too. A conspirator then, Scile would approve of EzCal now. Their priorities, like CalVin’s before them, were power and survival; Scile’s were always the city and its stasis. Those had overlapped once, but history had left Scile behind. Hence his hopeless walk.

“Cal might already have found his friends again,” Bren said. “This lot...” He indicated the room. “They were a threat once. You saw. Now...” He laughed. “Well, everything’s changed. But they might still be a threat. Different: but maybe even more. Cal might not know this group still exists. If he ever knew. But the Ariekei he worked with before do. So if he finds them, this lot here had better keep very quiet. So we have to, as well.”

“How are they a threat?” I said. “I never understood. Why are they doing this? Whatever it is they’re doing.”

Bren struggled. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know how to say.”

“You don’t know,” I said. He bobbed his head in a half-yes-half- no.

“How’s your Language, Avice?” said one of YlSib. They spoke to Spanish Dancer and it answered. I could follow some, and when I shook my head Yl or Sib would translate a few clauses.

It’s not good that we are this. We wish to be other than this. We’re like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her because we imbibe what is given to us by EzCal. There was a long silence. We want instead to be like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her in that we want to be... and then there was silence again, and Spanish Dancer shook its limbs.

“It tried to use your simile twice, contradictorily,” Sib said. “But it couldn’t quite manage.”

Now, Spanish Dancer went on, it’s worse. We didn’t expect this. It was a bad thing when we were made intoxicated and helpless by the god-drug’s words, lost ourselves, but now it’s different and worse. Now when the god-drug speaks we obey. Yes, it said that with modulations that meant nothing to me, but no matter how alien the Ariekene mental map, sense of self, I thought that must be truly terrible. I’d seen the crowds respond instantly to EzCal’s instructions, choiceless about it. We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey. We want Language to put to our use.

They resented their new druggy craving and their newer inability to disobey. This conclave could hardly be unique in that. But it dovetailed with what they had always wanted to achieve: their longtime striving for lies, to make Language mean what they wanted. That older desire seemed to make them execrate their new condition even more than other conscious Ariekei.

“We promised to bring you here,” Bren said. “Said it like a Host.” He smiled at the child’s oath. “They were adamant they had to see you. I better get you back before you’re missed, then YlSib will have to go on. Other drops. These people aren’t the only ones trying to find a different way.”

What a dangerous circuit, through rebel cells in the collapsed, regrowing city. I’d always stressed, as I’d had it stressed to me, how incommensurable Terre and Ariekene thinking were. But I thought about who it was had told me that, those many times. Staff, and Ambassadors with a monopoly on comprehension. It was giddying to feel suddenly that I was allowed and able to make any sense of Ariekene actions. What I saw there was dissent, and I understood it.

I saw only these liars, these fervent attempters to change their speech. Bren and YlSib might go from them to others trying to eradicate all their cravings and live Languageless; from there perhaps to those fighting to disobey EzCal’s casual orders; then to others who were maybe searching for chemical cures. I wasn’t even really participant on this trip, the first visit, though I was present and Bren trusted me. He hadn’t brought me out of camaraderie—I was there because I was a simile, and these dissidents wanted me for strategic purposes, as another group might request a piece of ’ware, or a chemical, or explosives.

Embassytown in its crisis was throwing up fervour. Give me three days, I thought, and I’d find people who believed that EzCal, or Ez, or Cal, was the messiah, or the devil, or both; that the Ambassadors were angels; or devils; that the Ariekei were; that the only hope was to leave the planet as fast we could; that we must never leave. So with the Ariekei, I thought, and felt hopeful and depressed at once. Language was incapable of formulating the uncertainties of monsters and gods common elsewhere, and I was abruptly convinced that these gatherings were the Ariekene cargo cults. Was I at a Ghost Dance? Bren and YlSib were patronising the far-fetched, millennial and desperate.

I watched Spanish Dancer struggle to express me, to make me mean things I’d never meant before, try to force similes into new shapes. We are like the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her because we... because like her we are... we are hurt... It circled me and stared at me, and tried to say ways it was like me.

“Why won’t MagDa’s plan work?” I said. “I know, I know, but... just say to me once why we can’t just keep going until the ship.”

Bren, Sib and Yl looked at each other, to see who would speak. “You’ve seen how EzCal’s acting.” It was Sib. “You think it’s safe for us to carry on like this?”

“And, among other things,” Bren said, sounding, if I’m honest, disappointed, “even if it did work, you saw what happened to the Ariekei when EzRa ended, without their... dose. So what about when the relief gets here? When we leave?” He indicated Spanish Dancer. “What happens then, to them?”

21

ANOTHER OF OUR FLYERS disappeared. It had been doing rounds of farmsteads close to the city, as per EzCal’s orders, asking for—insisting on—what we needed: it wouldn’t be hard for us to dismantle the speakers if what we required wasn’t forthcoming, and the Ariekene farmers knew that. The coms broke off and weren’t re-established. We released vespcams.

Squads were subduing the last independent zones on isolated floors of the Embassy, where squatter-chiefs and their groups had refused amnesty. I was out at a barricade, a mass of broken furniture, odds and sods of houses, unneeded machines; but coagulated here, unusually, not with plastone but a quick-setting polymer, a resin poured all over and set hard as brick and glass-clear. The detritus was visible, like rubbish floating in water, frozen in a moment. We weren’t at war anymore, and machines were cutting a V-trench walkway through the barrier, an excised wedge with perfect flat faces through the tough transparency and the crap within. The pass’s edges were randomly punctuated with sectioned debris.

I was with Simmon. We were watching the gusting staticky visions of vespcams on his handscreen. “What’s that?” I said. It was the lost corvid. It was dead. The ground around it was scorched. There were heaps that might be human bodies.

WE CAME FAST and armed over the wild, over paths made by Ariekei and their animals and zelles, perhaps by wild outsider humans, exiles from Embassytown, in outland farms. We hadn’t established contact with all of them. I was surprised by a brief and strong sense of loss for floaking, of all things. I tried to tell myself that this, what I was doing, was heir to that tough going-with-the-flow, but I was hardly taken in.

The airship was spread across the ground. We descended into a terrible aftermath. Eventually we went to work. The closest thing we had to a specialist took samples from what might be bite-marks or burn-marks on all the corpses. They were everywhere.

“Oh God,” said our investigator. There was Lo, of Ambassador LoGan. His chest was caved and cauterised. “That’s not a crash injury. That’s not a crash injury.”

Vizier Jaques was there, and the edge of his wound, his missing arm, was neither shorn clear nor burned, but a rip from which he’d bled out. He’d died in excruciation, it looked like, scrabbling for his flung-away limb. The microbes the group had brought inside them had started the job of decay, and the Ariekene landscape in which they worked made for chemical oddness, so the rot wasn’t like rot in Embassytown.

Everyone was dead. The expedition had included a rare Kedis functionary. A mature hermale I hadn’t known. “Oh Jesus, it’s Gorrin,” someone said. “The Kedis are going to be...”

We went slowly from body to body, putting off each as long as we could. The wind was cold as we picked through the remnants of our friends. We tried to gather them: some fell apart; others we wrapped to take home.

“Look.” We were trying to reconstruct what had happened, following the scraped earth, reading it, it and the dead become hieroglyphs. “This was brought down.” A hot toothed missile had burst into the flyer’s side.

“There are no predators like that...” someone started to say.

“But it came down slow enough for them to get out.” That was me. “They came out and then they were... they were hit outside.”

We found remnants of biorigging eggs, from a recent barter trip, smears of yolk and foetal machines. The crew had been returning. The aeoli we wore made our own voices loud in our ears, as if each of us was alone. Carrying our dead we flew with carronades ready, looking for the ranch where our compatriots had been. It was announced by smoke. Outlying dwellings were ruined, the nurseries mostly gone. There was one hutch that seemed still just alive, and in distress, but we had no idea how to provide it a coup de graˆce, and could only try to ignore its pain.

There were no Ariekene dead. The kraal was empty. Dust-coloured animals ran away, and our arrival sent up rag-paper scavengers, flocks that moved like thinking smoke.

Someone fired and we all dived for the floor shouting. The gun howled: it was of one of Embassytown’s treasures, an old banshee-tech gun cobbled into a form humans could use. The officer had shot it at nothing—a movement, a scuttling of tiny fauna. Ariekene young had been abandoned, and floated in a broth of dead. There were bodies of their elders. Hoofprints were everywhere. We set cams to follow what we thought might be trails.

Body-thick arteries emerged from the farm, entangled in the earth and the tube that went over the rockscape toward the city. The pipeline was burst. The matter of it was spewed by a sabotage blast, the ground a quag of dirt and amniotic fluids.

“What’s this?”

In a hollow were organic discards. Frameworks like splayed fish ribs; skin in webbing between tines; a nest of intricate bones. These were remnants of fanwings. We gathered the little trophies. Behind us we heard the distress call of a last building left alive.

We’d put speakers in the farms with which we’d made contact, and the ongoing supplies of EzCal’s voice should have guaranteed us what we needed, but we’d had trouble before. Now we knew why. We sent crews and cams along the supply pipes, and found other ruptures. We lost another flight, and then the officers we sent to find it.

EzCal went to the centre of the city to broadcast. Their journey there from Embassytown was as extreme in its pomp as we could do, then. There was pressure on those of us in the committee, still ostensibly Ez and Cal’s organisers, Ez’s jailers, indeed, to attend and wear smart clothes. Wyatt came with us. His reward for birthing EzCal was that he was freed, kept under watch but made committee. He was expert in crisis politics, and he wasn’t a Bremen agent anymore, or not just then. Whatever happened later we’d deal with later.

“If he could get away with a goddamn canopy, he would,” I said quietly to MagDa. The god-drug walked in the city, Ez looking down and unsmiling, Cal, his head still shaved in the style he now maintained, his stitches gone but new tattoos mimicking them on his scarred scalp, looking up, occasionally glancing at Ez with energy and hate. “They’d have us carrying them on our fucking shoulders.”

MagDa didn’t smile. We were in the middle of that daily promenade from Embassytown, behind EzCal, surrounded by Ariekei who followed their instructions and shouted sort-of cheers. Mag and Da were stricken. Wait, I wanted to say to them. It’s alright. There are others. There are people and Ariekei looking for ways out. I wouldn’t betray Bren, and I knew he was right: there was too much risk that MagDa might be unnerved by these plans.

“I don’t know...” said MagDa to me. “I don’t even know what we’ll do.” “When the ship comes.”

“We have to guard our resources,” Cal said, after their performance, looking at footage of ruined farms. EzCal insisted that the rations of Embassytowners be reduced. They ordered squads of constables to the nearest plantations, and to those that provided our most needed pabulum. The attacks were becoming more frequent. Each group of officers that went out was accompanied, as they had to be for communication with those they were sent to protect, by an Ambassador.

“It’ll be fine,” PorSha said to me, preparing. “It’s not the first time.” “We’re used to it.” “We had to go out to haggle, before, didn’t we?” “Out of the city.” “It’s the same.”

It wasn’t the same. Before, with Embassytown and the world collapsing, they, and all the better Ambassadors, had kept us alive with their desultory trades. This time they followed orders. I had originally thought that Cal would do as little as he could when he became part of god-drug II. I was used to being wrong.

EZCAL DID FIND Pear Tree, the erstwhile leader of that once-powerful Ariekene faction. Perhaps Cal had his own investigators. Not all the city-dwelling Embassytowner exiles would share Yl and Sib’s perspective: they might have enemies, of whom some were perhaps agents for EzCal.

What had happened was that during one of their speakings in the city plaza EzCal had been suddenly in the middle of a small group of Ariekei retracting and extruding their eyes and staring. EzCal hadn’t been afraid. One of the group had been Pear Tree.

It accompanied EzCal on their following performance, walking with them all the way from a meeting in Embassytown. There were other Ariekei with them, some closer to EzCal than any humans, Staff, committee or Ambassador. My memory was unreliable, but watching the trids—I played hookey from my accompanying duties—I suspected at least two others might have been among those that had stood aside to let Hasser murder . I held my breath: I was on a side in a secret war.

That time, EzCal didn’t speak for a while. They rationed their words. When they did, they announced that —Pear Tree—was chief of this township. That this area was chosen from all the scattered remnant parts of the city, to be EzCal’s node, and that its regent there was . EzCal couldn’t speak except as the god-drug, and the words they said were always compulsions. This wasn’t like a momentary order to raise gift-wings: it was a ruling, and when EzCal finished speaking, the Ariekei who had heard them remained ruled by . The Ariekei were very quiet, and then did not complain.

For all I knew might already have been head of whatever clutch of streets it frequented. EzCal might have changed nothing—except that by saying it, they changed it. There was now a collaboration, an allegiance, between Embassytown and this new heart of the city. I had just seen the tasks of Bren, YlSib and their comrades, get harder.

I think I had been avoiding thinking about what Cal, EzCal, really was, and were. Whether it was design, buffoonery or luck that underlay our new politics, I was not safe.

ARIEKI FROM the new township EzCal had inaugurated left the city with PorSha, KelSey and the constables. These were now joint operations. KelSey came back, but PorSha did not.

We had receivers and cams around all the farm grounds. They flagged us when anything beyond their expectation-algorithms occurred, which is how it was that all of us in the committee were buzzed instantly, and the footage relayed direct to our rooms, at the next attack.

Corvids headed out. They wouldn’t arrive in time, but we had to act, even pointlessly. I was with Bren. We scrolled as fast as we could back and forth through chaotic images. Scenes of tending, of interaction with farmhands. PorSha, a pair of tall diffident women, communicating necessities to the Ariekei. Convulsions as the tube passed goods that would be shat out in Embassytown. Snatches of conversation in Anglo-Ubiq. The time-counter skipped. This datspace was fritzing. “We need Ehrsul,” Bren said. “Do you ever... ?” I shook my head. A constable was standing with mud across her. She stared anxiously not at us but over our shoulders, attempting to report.

“Sergeant Tracer at...,” she said. There were violent noises. She watched something off-screen. “Under attack,” she said. “Groups of... hundreds, fucking hundreds...”

Her transmission ended, the picture spasmed and was replaced by a view rapidly diminishing as the cam flew up. Tracer was lying on her back, among human dead. She tugged off her aeoli mask, an unthinking spasm of dying fingers. Images strobed. A great company of Ariekei, moving quite unlike the farmhands. They galloped, they swung giftwings, they trailed blood, liquid drizzled from weapons, a spray of dust. None of them spoke—they shouted wordlessly, voicing only attack-meanings, without Language.

They beheaded a minor Staff-man I’d once known a bit. I held my mouth closed. One kicked him down, gripped him with its giftwing, another swung a blade worked out of some coralline stuff. They had biorigged weapons they turned on the farm walls. One Ariekes shot our women and men with a carbine, wielding the Terre weapon with surprising precision. We saw them murder Terre without weapons at all, send jags of their own bone into human innards, or yank masks away, suffocating our people in alien wind.

Bren sped up the footage. He brought us up to live shots. Carnage was ongoing. The officers were vastly outnumbered. They were trying to reach the corvid, and were taken down. PorSha was shouting Language to the attackers. Wait, wait, no more of these actions, they said. Please, we ask you not to do this— We lost that cam, and when it came back PorSha were dead. Bren cursed.

All the speakers we had placed in the farmland started suddenly to shout, in EzCal’s voice. The god-drug had found each other, here in Embassytown, and were yelling down the line. Stop! they said, and things stilled. I leaned towards the crude picture. The carnage, all the motionless Ariekei.

“Jesus,” I said at the numbers. I held up my hands. Bren said, “What are they doing?”

Stand still, the god-drug shouted across the kilometres. Come forward, stand in front of the dead Ambassador.

For seconds there was no motion. Then an Ariekes stepped out of the crowd, took careful hoof-steps into the cam’s view. The others watched it. Its back, its extended fanwing, stretched open, listening to the voice from the speaker, turning into and out of the light as it listened to EzCal’s voice.

There were no other fanwings in the crowd of killers.

“That’s a farmer,” it’s said. “It’s not one of them.”

A large Ariekes slapped two of its companions with its giftwing and pointed at the enthralled on-comer. It arced its back to display a wound. EzCal continued to speak.

“They saw the buildings hearing, and that one,” I said. “That’s why they stopped. Not because they had to.”

One by one at first, then countless at a time, the murder-squad of Ariekei arched their backs. I saw the quivering of scores of fanwing stubs. I heard Bren whisper, “God.” The Ariekei displayed their wounds. Some made wordless sounds I’m certain were of triumph.

“They know we can see them,” I said.

Following speechless giftwing-jabbed instructions from their larger comrade, self-mutilated Ariekei stood either side of the entranced farmhand, and held it. It didn’t even notice. Stop what you are doing, release your grips, we heard EzCal say. Their Language petered out. The farmer raised and opened its giftwing repeatedly, obeying the instruction not intended for it. Those it was intended for ignored it, did not hear it, kept hold of their quarry.

The big Ariekes tugged the biorigging-farmer’s fanwing. I winced. It twisted. Its victim screamed doubly and tried and failed to get away. Its tormentor’s giftwing moved like a human hand uprooting a plant. The fanwing wrenched free: roots of gristle and muscle parted and with a burst of blood came finally away, pulling fibres out of the quivering back, trailing them.

Fanwings are at least as sensitive as human eyes. The traumatised Ariekes opened its mouth and fell, stupefied with pain. It was dragged away. The deafener held up its grotesque dripping bouquet. It made a loud wordless noise. Triumph or rage.

EzCal were speaking again, I realised. They issued orders and were ignored.

22

THAT WAS THE START of open war. We called it the First Farm Massacre though it was the only one we then knew of—a horrible perspicacity. It took us days to understand what was coming.

That final mutilation, by one Ariekes of another, was a recruitment. If the victim survived the shock and pain, it was made another soldier, on the enemy side. “How does it receive orders?” I said, but no one could answer me. Perhaps there were no orders, only rage stripped of language. Can they think? If they can’t speak, can they think? Language for Ariekei was speech and thought at once. Wasn’t it?

We didn’t know whether to roll back our presence from the outlying farms or bolster it, so we tried both. More visceral pipelines blew. The pictures were the same in different settings: in a copse of trees like organs; in a dustbowl; in scree; each time a burst of flesh and a litter of ruined cargo. Our stores depleted.

Infrastructure wasn’t the only thing attacked. After the Farm Massacre the fanwingless swept into an encampment defended by other, hearing, Ariekei: this became the Cliff-Edge Incident. We had troops there with them equipped with rare out-tech, and they were able to shoot several of the attackers. But half our officers were killed by the time the marauders suddenly left, galvanised by some signal we couldn’t understand. Perhaps by an empathy to tides we couldn’t sense, like birds circling and become one organism.

We didn’t become inured to the footage. EzCal called the committee together, and brought , Pear Tree, with them. EzCal told us they were making changes in the way the city was administered, as if that might help. Cal talked about making allegiances against “bandits”. I tried to listen, to understand the shape of politics now. From Bren’s scorn I knew that where there wasn’t anarchy or secret renegacy in the city, there were strange comprador authorities like that of .

We had to witness absurd joint patrols. Under EzCal’s orders, our constables policed outlands beyond the city accompanied by Ariekei dragooned into militia. An Ambassador had to be present, of course, to transmit instructions, on what EzCal stressed was god-drug authority. They took weapon training: career bureaucrats attempted to transform themselves.

The missions disaggregated, failed, as orders relayed by disorientated Ambassadors were interpreted differently by Ariekei and Terre. The Ariekei were not even resentful, so far as I could see—and I knew now that there was such a thing as Ariekene resentment—only bewildered. The first three such patrols achieved nothing and the fourth was attacked. When we reached the site the rescue squad found our Terre people dead and their Ariekei colleagues mostly gone, inducted no doubt by brute surgery into the rebels. The joint patrols were ended.

“WHAT IF THEY don’t want to fight? Even after they’ve had their fanwing taken? Or what if they want to fight the ones that took their fanwing?” I, traitor, was at the secret liars’ club in the city, again, so Spanish Dancer’s comrades could consider me. They contemplated urgently. As urgently as Bren had brought me back through the city. Spanish Dancer itself wasn’t there.

“A fanwing isn’t just an ear,” Yl said. She and Sib looked at me. “It hears, yes.” “It’s the mind’s main doorway.” “More important than sight.” “Their physiology’s nothing like ours.” “If they’ve got no fanwing, they hear no sounds at all.” “And with no sound, they can’t hear their own speech.” “Which means an Ariekes can’t speak.” “So it can’t speak Language.”

Perhaps there was no sense of truth left for them, or thought. Those rebels must be a fractured community, without speech, if they were a community at all. Language, for the Ariekei, was truth: without it, what were they? An unsociety of psychopaths.

“So even if they didn’t want to be part of the rebellion,” I said, “with their fanwings taken, they’re...”

“Insane.” “Or something like it.” “Maybe some don’t take part.” “Maybe they drift. Get lost.” “Maybe they die.” “But they’re not what they were.” “It’s no surprise that most of them join.” “... The bandits.” YlSib smiled without humour at EzCal’s absurd terminology.

“They can’t all have been press-ganged,” I said. The key cadre of that army was surely those that had deafened themselves. That despairing, literally maddening act of revolt had perhaps been performed independently, risen up in hundreds of Ariekei; perhaps a gathering had agreed together, and in a mass act of self-inflicted agony, between EzRa’s meaningless pronouncements—because we realised these dissidents had been attacking us, if in more disorganised fashion, before the reign of god-drug II—had made themselves an organising core. There might be a room somewhere littered with rotting fanwings, the birthplace of this millennial mass.

Each trapped in itself. God knew how many of them, a strike-force of the lonely and lost. How did they move together? How did they coordinate their assaults? I thought again that they must be gusted by instinct and some deep-grammar of chaos: they could not plan. Maybe each strike wasn’t a careful raid but just a sharp edge of the random. I remembered, though, what had looked like interactions among the self-deafened during the First Farm Massacre, and was perturbed.

“They’ve started coming into the city in squads,” Sib said. It wasn’t a city, just tribes of junkies and thralls where a city had been. “What they used to do was kill the other Ariekei.” “If you’ve broken free from something like god-drug...” “... maybe they thought those who didn’t were disgusting.” But they weren’t killing them now: they were recruiting. YlSib made simultaneous plucking motions, twisting imagined fanwings from their anchorings.

I shuddered and turned it into a headshake, and told them I wanted to see Spanish Dancer, as if it was a friend. I wanted to understand it, to make sense of its strategy for emancipation. YlSib were pleased. They took me to the grotto under eaves fringed like fingers where the Ariekes lived. For quite a long time, we all sat silently.

A HAMLET OF houses in the suburbs, gently regrowing, were taken suddenly down with biorigged weapons of serious power, crossbred from existing strains. Informer Ariekei working with the god-drug told us that something terrible was coming.

All who live in the city and all who live in Embassytown must stand against these attackers, EzCal said, with beside them. No matter how assiduously the compelled Ariekei tried to obey them, those words were too nebulous to mean much. EzCal never spoke an intoxicating order making all Ariekei obey : they must have been afraid of unintended consequence.

I wanted to return, as often and for as long as I could, to the liars in the city straining to meet ’s challenge. I was trying to learn how to get there—the route and strategies for the route—but still could only go when YlSib and Bren came with me. After that dramatic attack on the remains of the city, Spanish Dancer and the other gathered Ariekei were distressed (I recognised it). One of their number had left them.

YlSib listened. “They argued with it.” “It told them...” “It said it was ashamed.” Bad enough when the first god-drug had pushed them into trips: so much worse now they could see their tripping selves made to obey. “It... oh.” “It plucked itself.”

“No,” I said.

It wasn’t just, I thought, the loss of their—what, friend?— to self-savagery, of mind as well as body, so it could not hear nor speak again, that must hurt them. They wanted to be a hope, against the revolutionary suicide of those that tore out their social mind with their fanwings, became nihilist revenge. Were there ranks among the Languageless? Were those that made themselves an aristocracy above those attack-recruited? I looked at Spanish Dancer’s many dark-point eyes, which had seen its companion tear its fanwing like trash, after their years of work, their project that had started long before this end of the world.

BY OUR BARRICADE gates, in rump street-markets, quickly tolerated, an economy of recycled necessities, people began to talk again about the relief. When it would come, where we would go, and what life would be like for Embassytowners exiled to Bremen.

Our now wild cameras inhabited the plains. Many broke down or their signals degraded. But some still got footage to us.

Some were a long way into country not punctuated even by farms, beyond the transport ducts. I heard rumours of certain footage before I saw it. I scorned the idea that it existed but was being kept from me—wasn’t I committee? But though it failed, I discovered that there had been an effort to do just that. I shouldn’t have been shocked. An internal split, a craven and conniving column reporting direct to the god-drug. There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex. There was no way they could contain these files: a day after the first stories about them started circulating, the rest of us got to see them.

A group of us uploaded them to committee datspace. Bren was agitated. I was taken aback by his impatience, that he so obviously had no idea if the whispers about what we were to see were true. I was so used to him knowing things he didn’t tell me. I teased him about it, in a rather brittle manner. We watched the cam’s memories. Plenty of kilometres away but hardly in another country. The viewpoint swept through narrows: I swayed to avoid overhangs the recorder had ducked days before. Some fool at the back said something like “Why are we watching this?”

Through a nook in rock the cam went to a valley of pumice-coloured earth, burred birdlike suddenly tree- then tower-high over the slope, focused where a river had been. We gasped. Someone swore.

There was an army. It marched in our direction. There were not hundreds of Ariekei but thousands, thousands.

I heard myself say Jesus, Jesus Christ. We knew now why the city seemed depleted. Pharotekton, I said.

The microphones were crappy but we heard the noise of the march, the percussion of hard feet walking not in time. The amputee Ariekei shouted. They must not even know, not even hear their own constant catcalls. Machines among them walked at the wordless correction of keepers. The Ariekei carried weapons. This was the only army on this world and it was marching on us.

The cam went close, and we saw thousands of stumps of thousands of fanwings. Every Ariekes there was a soldier, not obeying orders but trapped beyond society in soundless solipsism, unable to talk, hear, think, but still moving together in that mystery fashion, sharing purpose without speaking it. They couldn’t have a unified intent but we knew they did, and what it was, and that we were it.

23

AS WELL AS THE Languageless and the SM, for self-mutilated, at first we called the incoming army the Deaf. Embassytown’s human deaf objected hard to that; they were right and we were ashamed. Then someone named the attackers according to an antique language. It meant that same word, deaf, but rendered the Surdae any insult seemed diluted; particularly because, fast bastardised or misunderstood, the term became the Surd and then misprisioned into the Absurd. Hosts, coming to kill us for sins we’d committed, if at all, without intent.

Above all it was their discipline that was absurd, impossible, the way without words groups would peel off from the main slow body, coordinated into snatch squads that tore through strange country and took apart our rangers, or recruited new Ariekei troops by ripping their flesh. Eventually and abruptly transmissions to us ended, cams batted out of the air by breakdown, wind or the sudden irritation of the enemy. We sent more of course. Plans began.

As our spies gusted out to search, we were breaching old agreements and habits of isolation. The cams showed us the coast, the gently toxic sea. We had a country, on which the city sat, in which was Embassytown. We weren’t used to seeing that. I’d used cartographic ’ware in the immer, but not these charts. We had a continent. It would have been hard for me to trace the outlines of Embassytown, harder to draw the city, and I wouldn’t even have recognised the shape of the landmass on which we were such a tiny point. Now we needed them it wasn’t hard to break those taboos and pull up maps. They’d never been forbidden, as I’d seen in the out in some unsubtle theocracies: only inappropriate, and old politenesses were dead. Our cams uploaded directions so we could trace the Absurd.

Their few, their first, the pioneers had also learnt the specific violence to make unspeaking comrades of their victims. How had it been? They had spread out of the depleting city, claiming farmers, on past any urban gutwork into the wandergrounds of nomads, claiming the nomads, the gatherer-hunters of unneeded or escaped technology, building. Someone might one day write the history of that trek, the recruiting crusade.

There were more than all those stolen and violently cured rural addicts. I imagined these crazy figures emerging from wilderness like prophets; those distant Ariekei already alarmed or enraged at what they heard of their cousins in the city reduced to zombie-ecstatics or the craven desperate, might, even if far-off enough to have avoided the affliction, not have needed coercion to join the Absurd. Perhaps there’d been a while before the army went in with regular, remorseless violence, and instead there’d been debates about endeafening among the not-yet-recruited, in some settlements. Articulate, last-ever uses of speech to argue for its eradication.

I made Bren come with me into the city. It was easy to leave, though our borders were supposed to be controlled. Routes in and out weren’t hard to learn.

“They’ll be here within two weeks,” I said. He nodded.

“You see they’re all in prime instar?” Bren said. “They’re not protecting the old or looking after the young.”

The young, though, might soon enough be grateful to them. Even uncared for, a few in each Ariekene litter must survive, and when they emerged to their adult form, woke into Language, they would find a city purged of us. Without god-drug. The Absurd would martyr themselves to that future. They’d put themselves beyond the reach of any compromise or agreement.

We stuck to the safer sub-regions of the city. I found my way—my own, this time, leading Bren—to where Spanish Dancer and its friends practised lying, and I tried to help them find new ways to speak me.

“WE'RE FORMING an army,” Cal said. We were as disdainful as we could be at that. Gather many of you in the square and be ready to fight, EzCal broadcast to the Ariekei. They told them to put forward soldiers. They demanded volunteers. was the biggest aggregate of units with a name, and meant anything more than the largest exact number for which terminology existed, , 3072. translated usually as “countless”. EzCal were demanding as large a force as the Ariekei could give.

Cal waved his hand. Beside him, Ez was like a ventriloquist’s doll, existing only when he spoke, or was spoken through. Wyatt watched Ez like an anxious relative. I wondered how many Ariekene soldiers the god-drug would get, and whether the process of building that force would be violent. The natives in all the little villages left in the city, islands between zones of the deadly mindless, would try to obey, in various ways. They knew the Absurd were coming. The locals ruled or “ruled” or whatever by , those over which EzCal had given , aegis, would surely provide most of the soldiers.

“... one main force of Ariekei to guard the city, stationed at all the weak points we have, and there’ll be a couple of... well, of special squads prepared,” Cal said, at the committee meeting. I couldn’t listen to this, these desperations disguised as strategy. I couldn’t look at anyone else in the room. There was nothing we had that could hold off the oncoming army. When we were dismissed I got my stuff together slowly, and after a moment realised it was only I, Ez and Cal left in the room. I don’t know how that happened. I wouldn’t rush. I couldn’t look at them. I was their enemy, and I had secrets that were mutinous.

Cal slouched, looking tired. He looked shrunken, far off by the wall. A moment’s illusion and the chair seemed to dwarf him like a throne would a boy-king. Ez stood like a surly courtier. They must be waiting to practise their necessary proclamations.

“Do you miss my brother, Avice?” Cal said.

“Do I... ? Vin? I... Yes.” It was some way true. “Sometimes I do. Do you?”

Cal watched me from under his brow.

“Yes. I was angry with him. Before he died.” He paused. “I was angry with him before that, then worse after. Of course. But I miss him.”

I tried to work out if I could glean any advantage on any axis by keeping him talking, but I could think of nothing to say. “Please,” he said angrily, not to me. Ez looked up.

“I’ll...” Ez said, and walked out. It was the first word I’d heard him say for himself, for many days. Cal didn’t watch him go.

“Vin missed you,” he said.

“Did he?”

Whatever had happened to Cal, whatever he’d become, I was sure that he saw me as I saw him through a window of memories that included mornings, evenings together, nudity, of fucking, sometimes beautifully. What could I do but remember the last looks Vin had given me? I’d seen that need that could perhaps have been given another name, and that perhaps Cal resented. Because he thought his brother’s affections were a zero-sum, and that I’d stolen from him? Because he didn’t have it to give himself?

I, to my utmost shock, choked and had to close my eyes. A great big diffuse grief, not just for Vin, but some for him. I thought about the months I’d spent as CalVin’s lover. I tried to recall a time when both of them had moved with me at once. I could not. Had they both touched me at once, ever, or had it always been one, then some languid time later, as I’d imagined, assumed, the other? I looked at Cal. Had he merely tolerated his doppel’s desires, all that time?

I thought, Have you and I even been together?

“Waking without him. I don’t get used to it.” He spoke rapidly. “I’m not supposed to. Truth is there are times it’s not bad. The silence isn’t always unwelcome.” I looked away from his awful smile.

“Truth is, Avice, I can’t tell you if I miss him. That’s not true, I can tell you and I do, but it isn’t as clean a feeling as that. To have to say everything, like I do—or did... Well, it’s bad and it’s good and it’s bad. I’ve been to the retirement homes where cleaved are. Normal ones, not like Bren, making trouble. I don’t know, is that me now?”

He jerked his head at the door through which Ez had left. “That bastard, eh? It can be ugly how things go. I was going to say... I don’t know what I was going to say. I’m doing what I have to.”

“What is it you’re doing, Cal? Why d’you have to?” I said that though I’d not intended to respond, or involve myself in whatever this was. “We tried this once before, Cal; you made armies and it was a disaster...”

“Avice, please.” He shook his head, and hesitated, as if he was trying very hard to think how to communicate something. “It was joint patrols that didn’t work. You’ll see what we do now. This is different. Anyway, what would you rather? We can’t just leave them to come in... And haven’t you seen?” He gesticulated again after Ez. “I can make them do anything I want.”

“Well...”

“Well, anyway that’s not really the point. I do, we do want protections around the city, we need it, but that’s not the real point. The real point is the squads that go out. I’ve been thinking a lot.” He waved a hand at his throat, his voice. “About this. I’ve been thinking how to use it. I know why the first patrols went wrong: we just ordered them to patrol. That was much too vague. Tasks, though, that’s different. Specifics. With beginnings and endings.”

“What tasks are you going to set them, EzCal?” I said. The slip, calling Cal that, wasn’t deliberate.

“You’ll see. And you’ll be impressed, I think. I’m not operating like you think I am. I know what you think I am, Avice.”

I walked away. It was just unbearable.

I DIDN'T CAL, with Ez, inspect his Ariekene troops—what a pantomime. I heard he made MagDa his assistant, had them talk for him. EzCal couldn’t do it: it would have created a comedy of overwhelmed squaddies mindlessly attempting to obey every word, whether it was an order or not.

There were, in fact, —some thousands. An unprecedented gathering. Through MagDa, Cal organised them into ranks, and squadrons, and units, each with its own commander. There wasn’t as much of the chaos as I’d expected when our new defenders went to their outposts.

They weren’t enough. The Absurd army outnumbered them by several times. I didn’t yet understand—had ignored him telling me—that this warcraft and panicked pomp was a minor part of Cal’s intentions. I didn’t even notice that MagDa were gone for two days, alongside others, part of a squad I imagine EzCal gave some carefully chosen name. While they were, without knowing they were, I went again with YlSib to Spanish Dancer, as the army of Absurd approached. I’d had enough of inevitability. In the city, outside Embassytown, it felt, even illusorily, as if more than one outcome was possible.

EZCAL SUMMONED US to a lecture hall. I went to that meeting, as I did to all of them, feeling like a spy. Not wholly misleading. The committee was depleted. In steeply banking rows of chairs we looked down at EzCal in the centre. I sat by Southel and Simmon. MagDa was with EzCal, their faces scuffed with injuries. By them was , and there were other Hosts in corners.

“We’d like to start with a silence,” Cal said, “for officers Bayley and Kotus, who gave their lives on this mission, for the sake of Embassytown.” We waited. “Let’s make sure it wasn’t in vain. Bring them in.”

There was a commotion. We gasped and swore and drew back. What the guards entered and brought before us were enemies. Two deafened Absurd. They were held in cuffs. They eyed us, their eyes in polyp motion. Their legs and giftwings shook in constraints. They tested their tethers with cunning.

We watched them. Cal circled the captives, pointing out the injuries of the wilderness, the flanges of the ripped-out fanwing. He pointed at each thing he described with a long thin stick. He was like a picture of an ancient lecturer, in some pre-diaspora centre of learning. The attackers made noises as he rounded them. Calls that sounded like halloos, like calls to gods. and the other Ariekei in the room watched them and kept up their own constant movement, twitches in a disgust-echo of the prisoners’ strainings.

Our people had tracked a group of Absurd broken off from the main oncoming army to raid an isolated settlement. There’d been a fight. There’d been deaths on both sides. At last, Cal said, after unprecedented cooperation between the Terre and our Ariekene allies we’d subdued and taken these Absurd alive.

“We need to understand them,” Cal said. “So we can defeat them.”

We were here to take notes, to learn Languageless behaviour. By experiments before cams in sealed rooms; by interactions gbetween the Absurd and our allies, that would not be interactions but actions from and its coterie, and ignored by the Absurd; or if responded to in such ways that they were not discernible to us as reactions at all.

The solipsism of those that had torn out their own fanwings seemed impenetrable. Perhaps some on the committee believed Cal’s assertion that we were preparing to defeat them, but seeing him cajole —speaking through MagDa again to avoid the tedium of repeatedly enthralling the Ariekes ally—to speak to the Absurd, which they pointlessly attempted, making MagDa try it too, I think there must have been many who knew, as I did then, that his hope was to negotiate.

But they were thousands who’d closed all windows in and out of themselves, cut off Language, become monads full of murder. No knowledge we had could make much difference. With the scrags of Wyatt’s arsenal and Cal’s Ariekene force we might kill some, but the city was still shrinking, inhabitants dying, self-mutilating, running to nearby settlements where speakers would broadcast the god-drug voice. There were more Absurd than Ariekei that would fight by us.

MagDa spoke in Language; then one or other would say, “They can’t even fucking hear us,” while the Absurd snarled.

“So show them,” Cal said. “Make them understand.” And this exchange would continue and mutate, upsetting and pointless. The whole Ariekes would repeat its words: MagDa and the other Ambassadors would make gestures with their hands. Our enemies came closer. The Languageless pulled against their bonds. They watched their interlocutors, ignoring overtures and focusing on actions. I saw sudden shared moments of attention, responding to idiosyncrasies of ’s motion invisible to me.

The Absurd glared at each other. They made noises without knowing it. They got each other’s attention with spread-out eye-tines, made motions to indicate things to notice. To the extent that they could, they moved, taking up positions while Cal and Ez flashed up images on screens, played vibrations to them through the floor. They walked, triangulated, parted.

I didn’t say anything fast enough, but when they suddenly tried to attack an Ariekes guard I realised I’d known it was about to happen. They were subdued before they could use their own strapped bodies as ungainly bludgeons, but the synchronicity of their movements astounded me. It sent me back to my husband’s books.

“HOW DO YOU SAY ‘that’ in Language?” I asked Bren. “Like that one.” I pointed. “Which glass do you want? That one.”

“It would depend.” He looked at the glass by his counter. “Talking about that one, I might say...”

“No I don’t mean any specific one, but in general, that one.” Pointing. “Or that one.” Moving my hand. “Thatness.”

“There’s nothing.”

“No?”

“Of course not.”

“Thought so. So how would I distinguish that glass and that one and that one?” I tallied them with my finger.

“You’d say ‘the glass in front of the apple and the glass with a flaw in its base and the glass with a residue of wine left in it.’ You know this. What are you asking? They taught you these basics, didn’t they?”

“They did,” I said. I was quiet a while. “Years ago.” I spoke in years again, not kilohours. “But if you were translating an Ariekes saying, ‘The glass with the apple and the one with the wine,’ to me, you’d probably just say, ‘That glass and that one.’ Sometimes translation stops you understanding. I’m not fluent. Maybe that’s helping me right now.”

“Translation always stops you understanding,” he said. “What is it you’re thinking?”

“How many days before they get here?” I said. “Can you get hold of YlSib? And others? Any you can?” He narrowed his eyes but nodded. “We need to go. Get YlSib or whoever to contact Spanish Dancer and the others. I’ll—” I stopped. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know whether... Maybe I can tell Cal.”

“Tell me,” Bren said. “I thought you’d despaired.”

“I did too.”

“What, then? Tell me.”

I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.

Bren nodded, and listened to what I can’t call a plan—it was hunch and hope—and when I was done he said, “No, we can’t tell Cal.” He touched me under the chin, and put his arms around me, and for a moment I let him take my weight and it was lovely. “Of course we can’t.”

“But we’re trying to fix things,” I said. “You know EzCal aren’t stupid...”

“It’s not about whether they’re stupid,” he said. “It’s about who they are, and what they represent. Maybe Cal would see reason. Maybe. But I don’t think so, do you? Want to risk it, really?”

“If we go, he’ll find out.”

“Yes. And see you as an enemy. And he’ll be right. Don’t think he—they—won’t find time to try to stop us.”

“Alright then,” I said. “I’ll be an enemy.”

He smiled at me. “What else are we going to do, Avice?”

We turned arm-in-arm to look at the screen on which the captive Languageless tried to shuffle, alone in their room, watched by cams. It was a quiet moment for our banishing, as we got ready to exile ourselves. We saw the two Ariekei our rulers held moving not quite like two things unconnected, but according to something else; not a plan but a knowledge of each other; a community.

24

I WAS STILL OF some cultural interest. So was BrenDan, the free cleaved, troublemaker, licensed dissident. If we disappeared together people would notice. And we might already be watched. That was why the next time, the last time, I went into the city alone.

While the committee fretted and Cal took what power we’d had, Embassytown streets got on with things. Walking through my shrunken town with my aeoli and supplies, I was surprised to pass more than one outdoor party. Some shiftparents of the playing children saw me watching and caught my eye, and even the poignancy of that, of knowing together that this was a last game to keep those children occupied, didn’t detract from a moment’s pleasure.

There were constables on the streets but not much for them to do except wait for the war: they didn’t police with fervour. They didn’t clear out the proselytisers, the, I don’t know, Shakers, Quakers, Makers, Takers, each with their own theology damning or rescuing us. They weren’t treated, even the most brimstone of them, as threats or pests, but as performers. People teased them, while they remained doggedly devout.

I wanted to stop, to ask someone to join me at a cafe´ where they were giving away free drinks or accepting the little IOUs we proffered in polite charade. The usual lament: I may be some time. The wistfulness of we who are about to leave. I got out of Embassytown close to where Yohn and Simmon and the others and I had held our breath and where I’d touched a tether. I exited through the corridors of a border house, alone.

On my chart were marked various colonies of city Ariekei, each annotated, the latest information Bren could gather. 1: Heartland. . Loyal. To my left. 2: Status uncertain. 3: Contributed to troop but dispute with . 4: Communalistic? 5, and on. I knew the displayed boundaries were all porous. As the Absurd approached, those little polities got more insular, their between-fix politics and cultures more divergent, the streets that separated them much worse. I wasn’t at all safe.

The first few hundred metres altbrocks had ambled, I’d heard bird wings and been with insects. Now I was in the territories of local fauna, with at least two names: our vernacular; their markers in Language. I stood still for a dog-sized thing we called a browngun, which the Ariekei termed or depending on a taxonomic distinction we never understood. It crossed my path with an urchin frog-tongue gait. Overhead passed the scraps and biorigged machines, wild, or carrying Ariekei.

I could navigate immer but this geography nearly defeated me. It was dangerous in no-person’s-lands, and it would be more so at the settlements, where I’d be threatened not by the random rages of the mindless but by the guarding of borders. With this new tribalism inhabitants of different areas sometimes fought. More than once I had had to hunker beyond a house-bone or a trash pile, watching such violence.

My breath was short with fear. Around a convolute, half-hearing the diaphragmatic burr of this neighbourhood, I stopped abruptly. There were two men in front of me.

They saw me and raised rifles. I couldn’t see their faces through the visors of their aeoli. The incongruity of Terre figures right there stopped me for a dangerous moment but I moved, just before they fired, and bullets thumped into the ventricle or alley where I’d been. I ran. I heard them behind me. I shoved beneath underhangs, lost myself. I grit my teeth, my heart slamming.

I wasn’t panicked. My thoughts were precise. I turned fast at another noise. Someone human was reaching for me from a doorway like gills. I staggered back but he put his finger to his mask, in a shhh face, and beckoned. I went to him and he pulled me into a chamber. We sat, listening. I stared at him, but he wasn’t memorable in any way. I scanned him like I might decode him.

“Are you alright?” he whispered.

“Yes.” I started to say Who are you? or Who were they? but he shook his head. He listened again.

“Come with me,” he said at last. I tried to ask again who he was, but he still didn’t answer. He didn’t owe me any explanation, I supposed, after all. I let him lead me, creeping.

At the end of a long detour, Yl and Sib were waiting. They greeted him tersely. The three of them confabulated too quietly for me to hear. The man turned and raised his hand to me briefly as he left.

“His name’s Shonas,” Sib said. “He was a vizier once. He’s been in the city for about eight years.” We headed cautiously back toward my original intended route.

“Why’s he here?” I said. “And who shot at me?” A lintel arced to let us in.

“He came here after a breakdown between him and an Ambassador,” YlSib said. “It was a bit of a scandal. He disappeared. You were in immer probably. In the out.” “You wouldn’t remember.” As if. “The other two were DalTon.”

I don’t remember being surprised. Those dashing dissidents I’d assumed dead, cleaved, or incarcerated in that terrible infirmary. “They went away.” “They went weird.” “Shonas came into the city to stop them, and...” “... Well. He’s on our side.” “Against Ambassador DalTon.” “We hadn’t heard from those bastards for a long time until all this started, don’t know what they’ve been working on.” “They’re pigs in shit, now.” “They must love all this.” “They got wind of your plan.”

A parallel economy of narratives, counterfights and revenge. “How do they know what I’ve got planned?” I said.

“Word gets out.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Come on. Stories get out.” “They might not know anything except you’re coming to the city. Which would mean you have a plan.” “Which whatever it is they’re against.”

“Are they working with Cal? With EzCal?”

“What? Because they tried to stop you?” YlSib glanced at me. “Just because Cal would try to stop you too?” “It’s hardly the same thing.” “DalTon have their own reasons for everything.”

“Which are?” I said.

“Oh there are so many reasons out there,” YlSib said, exhaustedly. “Who can keep track of them all?” “Pick one.” “They aren’t your friend.” “Won’t that do?”

“No.”

“They’re tired of all of it.” “And you’re not.” “And you’re trying.” “How’s that?”

Dal and Ton, nihilist since the crisis and before. It was a vindication that they thought me worth attacking. Ask Cal if he’d rather Embassytown be destroyed or survive without him, he’d claim the latter and mean it: but he’d go to his grave, and all our graves, to stop me, when he knew my plan, because it would undermine him. DalTon wanted to stop me because I wanted to save the world. I’m sure it made much more and coherent sense to them, with their long, furious self-exile. There were kilohours of story there I’d never know. DalTon were against me, Cal was against me, DalTon were against Cal, Shonas was against DalTon, Shonas was for me but not against Cal, and so on. I never, in Embassytown, the immer or the out, had the constitution for intrigue. Floaking, I’d hoped, was a way around it. But politics finds you.

“How many are there?” I said. “Outcasts. In the city.”

Yl and Sib said nothing. My plans to save Embassytown were briefly part of what happened to DalTon and Shonas, and the drama of the revenge of the ex-Ambassador and their onetime vizier had happened to me. I was grateful to Shonas for my life.

“It’s on its way,” YlSib told me. “What do you call it? Spanish Dancer.”

“I know, it’s rude of me,” I said. “I’ll stop using that name.”

“Why?” “It doesn’t care and neither do we.”

The room was small. Windowless of course, illuminated by fronds that glowed.

“There’s power,” I said.

“No.” “The light’s emitted by a necrophage in the walls.”

“Come on,” I said. The building was dying and we were lit by that. I could only laugh.

I asked again, but YlSib wouldn’t tell me what had sent them hundreds of thousands of hours ago out of Embassytown, to live behind aeoli masks in that exile microculture. We waited. “More city-Hosts are leaving,” YlSib said. “And plenty of them are going to join the Absurd.” “There won’t be many left to guard, even if they’re prepared to.”

“They won’t have any choice. EzCal’ll order them to.”

“What’s your plan?” “What is it you want to do?”

“You know what,” I said. “Bren told you.” The truth was I didn’t know to explain it. When Spanish Dancer arrived, I said, “Look. I’ll show you.”

I remembered the way the captive Languageless had moved. The Absurd were closing in and there was no point waiting for Bren. With YlSib’s help, their careful translation, very slowly at first, we started. I, against every inclination I’d had for many years, had no choice but to take control.

I DON’T THINK urgency is a bacillus that can cross exotypes, but it was as if the Ariekei understood that something in me had changed. They and I fervently engaged. I remembered them in The Cravat, fascinated in me and all the other similes.

“You want to lie,” I said to Spanish Dancer. I spoke quickly: “Show me what you can do. How close are you? Let’s start again.” I spent hours listening to it and its group perform their little untruths, through YlSib’s translations. I made notes and strained to remember how had done what it had done. That seemed to me the key.

I’d talked about it with Bren. Often had wordplayed, eroding qualifying clauses until what was left was a sudden surprising lie. But that method, however well done, was a sideshow. ’s theoretical focus had been on me.

It had seen us—us similes made of Terre, not merely us similes—as key to some more fundamental and enabling not-truth. Its signature mendacity, spoken with dandy élan though only a word-trick, hinted at that shift born of contact. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.

Through a dissembling made of omitted clauses it laid out its manifesto. Before the humans came we didn’t speak: so we will, can, must speak through them. It made that falsity a true aspiration. , insisting on a certain might-be, changed what was. It had learnt to lie to insist on a truth.

“So,” I said to Spanish Dancer, and the companions that had joined it. “Let’s follow Surl Tesh-echer.” YlSib translated. The Ariekei reacted. “It pointed where to go. You know me. I’m the girl hurt in darkness who ate what was given to her. Tell me what I’m like, and we’ll get to what I am.”

I gave them their nicknames. Spanish Dancer, Toweller, Baptist, Duck. I’d say their names and point and even smile—you never know, you don’t know what they have or haven’t clocked. Their battery-beasts skipped about as we worked. All these Ariekei could lie, a bit. They were followers of the greatest liar in their history. I helped them leave things out, whisper clauses, with wilful misdescriptions.

Before the humans came. I had YlSib repeat ’s claim. The Ariekei failed: the lie code-jammed their minds. “What colour?” I’d say, holding up rags or plastic. They would bud and unbud their eyes.

After hours their attention went. Duck was shuddering, Toweller was humming and emitting piping sounds. I understood. We had no datchips. The Ariekei had to go to the street to wait for the loudspeakers. Inside, we couldn’t hear the broadcast but we felt the house quiver. Yl and Sib and I looked at each other, and I think we were all imagining our students stampeding to the nearest voice-point, perhaps fighting off the mindless, perhaps beating each other in their need, as EzCal spoke.

“How come you’re behind this?” I said to YlSib. “I mean, if it works, it changes things for you...”

“What do we lose?” “An expertise?” “And what’s gained? By everyone?” “What’s our expertise done for us?” They looked down again. Bren had told me he’d hated his doppel, with a quiet hate. The sight of YlSib’s exhaustion, how they didn’t look at each other, made me wonder if that was the condition of all Ambassadors.

When the Ariekei returned they were calm again. Continue, one said. I nodded exaggeratedly and said “Yes.” I said it again, slowly. What I was trying for was a break, a rupture, a move from before to after. A tipping point that, like all such, could only be a mystery.

“WHAT AM I LIKE? What’s like me?” YlSib rendered my question and the answers.

“You’re the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her.” “The scavengers that come to our houses’ latrines to feed are like the girl eating what was given to her.”

“Charming.” I willed them to strive for poetry. Closed my eyes. They asserted similarities. I didn’t let them stop. After quite a time their suggestions grew more interesting. They overreached: the conversation was full with stillborn similes.

“The rocks are like the girl who was hurt in the dark because...”

“The dead are like the girl who...”

“Young are like the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate...”

Finally and suddenly, Spanish Dancer spoke. “We’re trying to change things and it’s been a long time and through our patience knowing it’ll end we’re like the girl who ate what was given to her,” YlSib translated. “Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl, eating not what she wanted but what was given to her.”

I opened my mouth. The tall Ariekes leaned over me, multiple unblinking. “Oh, my God, it knows,” I said. “What I’m trying to do. Did you hear?”

“Yes.” “Yes.”

“It made me two different, contradictory things. Compared them to me.”

“Yes.” They were more cautious than me, but I smiled till they couldn’t not smile back.

WE BROKE OFF LATE, when the Ariekei grew so needy for the god-drug voice they couldn’t work anymore, withdrew into shaking confusion. I slept uncovered on the slightly giving floor, until Yl or Sib shook me awake and gave me some inadequate breakfast. I could tell by the translucence of the tower-skin that it was day again. My pupils were there, better: EzCal had given their morning broadcast.

YlSib told me EzCal had discovered I was gone. They were searching for me. Squads were in the city. “You aren’t just out alone anymore,” they said. “You’re on the run.” “You’re hiding.” They didn’t have to say One of us.

All day we worked at the inadequate similes of the Ariekei. It got me exhausted and impatient. As it grew dark I heard the moist opening of the room, and Bren came in. I took hold of him passionately, and he kissed me but held me back. I broke off when I saw what followed him. He had with him one of the Absurd.

“It’s been a bastard journey.” He laughed very shortly.

The thing was weak. Bren had it at the end of a rigid prod and shackles that coursed constantly with current. Otherwise it would easily have overcome him. The Languageless thing was wounded from that constant burning. Its giftwing was strapped to it, its legs were hobbled. I’d known this was the plan, but I couldn’t believe Bren had succeeded.

“Christ,” I said. “How did you do it? Oh, Jesus, look at it. This is horrible. You look like a torturer.”

“Yes it really is,” he said.

Spanish Dancer and the other Ariekei surrounded it. It strained and failed to reach for them. They tottered back, came forward, morbidly curious, it looked like.

“How is it in Embassytown?” I said.

“They’re afraid,” he said. “They probably think you and I are working for the enemy. Or they’re saying they do.”

“The Absurd?” I said. “That’s...”

“Absurd, yes.”

“It’s crazy.”

“You know how they are,” he said. People would say it even as they knew it made little sense. They were right to be afraid. The Absurd were coming.

“How did you get it?”

“In all the ways you can imagine,” Bren said. “False papers, bribery, misdirection, intimidation. Creeping at midnight. Violence. All that.”

“Now we can actually test things,” I said.

Bren took datchips from his bag. “Here,” he said. “This lot can have a bit of control over themselves. So you’re not totally beholden to the broadcasts. We can get them out of here.”

“Why exactly do you want them to lie?” Yl or Sib said. I stared at them. They hadn’t understood at all. They’d thrown their lot in with a plan just because it was a plan.

“It’s what the lying means,” Bren said to them. “Why do you think we’re leaving the city?” They shrugged.

“It’s about how symbols work for them,” I said. “I never thought we could shift that. But you know what made me change my mind? That there are already Ariekei who’ve done it.” I pointed at the captive. “They’ve managed to do what Surl Tesh-echer and Spanish Dancer and this lot have wanted to do for years. They’ve got new minds. And they’re using them to kill us.”

IT WAS THE freakish precision with which the Absurd coordinated attacks that had started me thinking. They were communicating: there was no other explanation for such efficient murder. Languageless, they still needed and made community, though they might not have known that’s what they were doing: each probably believed itself trapped in vengeful solitude even as the violence they committed together disproved it.

I’d seen them gesticulate. Their commandos or commanders indicating with their giftwings. The Absurd had invented pointing. With the point they’d conceived a that. They’d given the jag of the body, the out-thrust limb, power to refer. That that was the key. From it had followed other soundless words.

That. That? No, not that: that.

Each word of Language meant just what it meant. Polysemy or ambiguity were impossible and with them most tropes that made other languages languages at all. But thatness faces every way: it’s flexible because it’s empty, a universal equivalent. That always means and not that other, too. In their lonely silent way, the Absurd had made a semiotic revolution, and a new language.

It was base and present tense. But its initial single word was actually two: that and not-that. And from that tiny and primal vocabulary, the motor of that antithesis spun out other concepts: me, you, others.

The code they’d created was quite unlike the precise mapping they’d grown up knowing. But it was Language that was the anomaly: this new crude thing of flailing fingers and murderous stamping was closer by far to what we spoke, was at last cousin-tongue to those of sentients across the immer.

“We could never learn to speak Language,” I said. “We only ever pretended. Instead the Absurd have learnt to speak like us. The Ariekei in this room want to lie. That means thinking the world differently. Not referring: signifying. I thought that was impossible. But look.” I pointed at the thing that wanted to kill me. “That’s what they’ve done. Every time they point, they signify. So far the price is way too high. But now we know Ariekei can do it. And teaching this lot that without taking their wings means teaching them to lie.

“Similes start... transgressions. Because we can refer to anything. Even though in Language, everything’s literal. Everything is what it is, but still, I can be like the dead and the living and the stars and a desk and fish and anything. Surl Tesh-echer knew that was Language straining to... bust out of itself. To signify.” That’s why it had, with so strange a strategy, come at lying through us. I hadn’t brought Scile’s books with me but I’d gone over them many times, learnt from and argued with them, and I knew what I needed to. “I had to be hurt and fed to be speakable, because it had to be true. But what they say with me... That’s true because they make it.

“Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying. Just a route, though. But we can push them down it, even that last step, all the way.” It became clearer to me as I spoke. “To where the literal becomes...” I stopped. “Something else. If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else. We tell the truth best by becoming lies.”

Not paradoxes, I wanted to say; these weren’t paradoxes, they weren’t nonsense. “I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”