Embassytown

25

WE HEARD STRANGE SOUNDS, and saw vessels rising, heading out of Embassytown and the city. Most were corvids crossbred of biorigging and bloodless tech. There were spiny church-sized hulks among them, older than Embassytown.

“I can’t believe they got those things up,” I said.

“They’re not as fierce as they look,” Bren said. “They were survey ships once. It’s all theatre. Even with the, whisper it, Bremen arsenal, we don’t have a hope.”

Bren had once, with his doppel, been party to hidden arrangements. They’d debriefed spies and double- and triple-agents. “Wyatt was clever,” he said. “He did exactly the right amount and kind of not talking about what he had access to to make it scary. But it was nothing.”

The fleet lumbered away on their doomed sorties. Taking off my aeoli in the sealed air-breathing room, seeing the Ariekei wait for me, I was exhausted, and had to close my eyes.

OUR OWN FLIGHT from the city was complicated: between four Terre and the Ariekei we were able to push and pull our Absurd prisoner with us, but not easily. It had berserker strength. We had to administer charges to it often, and tug it hurting from the punishment.

“Let’s leave it,” said Yl.

“Can’t,” said Bren. He was the most assiduous of us in trying to communicate with it, whenever we stopped. He got nowhere. It hardly looked at him, focused its enraged attention on the addicted Ariekei.

“They’re going into battle,” Bren said, indicating the sky. “It’s pointless but I respect them for it a bit. EzCal are going to fight.” Efforts at negotiation were stillborn and the Absurd came closer. Refugee Terre from arable outposts were trekking to Embassytown. The journey overwhelmed many of them, and left their bodies to degrade from within in suits and biorigging, into mulch that wouldn’t fertilise this soil. “EzCal are wondering if they can just fight their way out of all this.” As if pugnacity could outweigh the simplicity of numbers.

“I’ll give them this,” Bren said. “EzCal will be on the field. It was Ez who insisted. The bloody convivials are over. Back home it’s... bad.” I’d left only a few tens of hours ago, but now it was the day after the parties. Poor Embassytown.

WE TOOK EVASIVE ways but there were too many of us to be really secretive. We relied on the chaos that Embassytown and the city were accelerating in each other. We crawled through tunnels between bones, and waited and shocked our captive into stupor when we saw patrols of Ariekei, humans, or both, clearing the streets, shooting the mindless.

It was difficult, peering across skin plateaus to where constables of our race and Ariekei enforced a brutal order. YlSib had repeatedly to whisper You must be quiet to Spanish Dancer and its companions. I made frantic arm movements to hush them, which of course they didn’t understand. More flyers went over our heads. We hid from regiments on the way to the front.

I kept up efforts to teach. We tried to shield our Ariekene companions from the sounds of the speakers when EzCal’s (now prerecorded) utterings began—we holed up and they listened instead to the datchips we’d brought, dosing themselves in small triumph, defeating the tyranny of god-drug’s rhythms while their fellow-citizens stampeded for the voice. I don’t know how they kept track of which chip each of them had heard and was therefore spent to them.

Our prisoner could see what they were doing, as they hunched, fanwings spread. I imagine that it looked with disgust. Certainly it strained in its shackles.

We quickly had our catechism. I drew it from what Spanish Dancer had said. I whispered it in Anglo-Ubiq; YlSib spoke it in Language. Bren, I saw, mouthed the simile of me that he’d first spoken a long time ago.

“You’re trying to change things,” I said. YlSib repeated in Language. “You want change like the girl who ate what was anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her: they’re like me. You’re like that girl who ate. You are the girl who ate. You’re like the girl. You are the girl. And so are the others, who aren’t like you.”

The first time YlSib moved from you are like to you are the Ariekei started very visibly. That succulently strange lie you are, born out of the truth, you are like, that they’d already asserted. And its contradiction, too, their enemies as like me as they were. We showed them how their own arguments came close to making liars of them.

ADDICTED VEHICLES galloped by us into the wilderness. In the morning YlSib took us to a transporter. It was blunt and ugly but full of breathable air. We rode an unseen pillow of vented particles following the tracks of the Embassytown-and-city troops.

In empty suburbs were scattered gangs of zelles, their Ariekei dead, looking forlornly for things to power. Bren drove our mongrel conveyance. It was nowhere near as fast as the military craft that had gone out, but it exceeded our walking pace, punted on its way by swinging side-limbs like gondoliers’ poles. Through hollowed-out window-eyes I watched the city recede. At first there were outskirt dwellings and warehouses descending into muck, but they ended and the sky came down to meet us.

We raised dust. Spined bushes shuffled out of our way, so paths opened for us in the fields, stretching for many metres ahead then began to fracture, to branch off in the possible directions we might take. The Ariekene battery-beasts moved around my legs. Behind us the shrubs crawled back to their previous positions. The city was a line of towers, rotund halls like unplanted bulbs. It receded.

I looked at it a long time. I shielded my eyes as if that made for magic binoculars, but I couldn’t see through it to the smoke or Terre towerblocks of Embassytown. I wondered if there were travellers among the Ariekei, and where if anywhere were other cities from which and to where they might go. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know.

The zelles grew restive before their owners: they were less able to fight their addiction. Over the hours, the Ariekei huddled as low as their intricate bulks allowed against the pipes and lights in the vehicle. One by one they enfolded their fanwings over datchips.

YOU ARE LIKE the girl, you are the girl. They are like the girl, they are the girl.

“,” YlSib said to them: Repeat it.

We are like the girl, the Ariekei said. You are the girl, YlSib said, and the Ariekei scuttled, an excitement that pleased me. They couldn’t do it but understood, in some alien abstract, what they were trying to do. The girl... some said, and some... we... or... us... or... it’s like... Poor YlSib, poor Spanish. I was relentless.

“What’s that?” I’d seen something scatter a trail kilometres behind us. There was another motion mark, to the west, and soon overhead was another tiny gusting machine. A very few other transports followed us, got closer and visible. A many-wheeled cart on liquid suspension; a truck all Terretech but for biorigged weapons; one-person centaurs, headless equine frames at the front of each of which sat an aeolied woman or man. A glider climbed thermals. Bren stopped us. YlSib got out as the exodus approached.

Other vehicles slowed too. Other drivers and pilots peered out of their windows. Behind me, hidden in our machine, the Absurd hissed, unhearing its own self. The escapees were like YlSib: city exiles. Runaway Staff, I imagined, as well as those not fleeing such grandiose pasts. The glider landed and Shonas leaned out. I wondered where DalTon were. The city-dwellers were wary, but they mostly knew each other, greeted each other and swapped brief information about the Absurd, and the Embassytown and city forces.

When we drove on again, we did so together in a little entourage. The glider overhead signalled to us with its wings and wing-lights. “Tell Spanish to come here,” I said to YlSib. “Tell it what I say.” I pointed out of the chariot’s eyes. Spanish and upward at the machine above us,” I, then YlSib, said. Sometimes when I spoke for the Ariekei, I unthinkingly mimicked the precision of Language as translated into Anglo-Ubiq. “The vessel overhead, the colours on its wings, the way they move—it’s telling us things. It’s talking to us.”

Spanish Dancer looked with some of its eyes at the plane, with some of them at YlSib, and with one at me. I stared at that eye. YlSib’ve told you, but do you know it’s me speaking? I thought.

“It doesn’t understand,” Yl or Sib said. “It can tell I’m not lying, I think, but it can tell that the plane’s not talking to us either.”

“But it is,” I said.

WHEN DAWN CAME we veered, to avoid EzCal’s force, to bypass the camp.

“Come on, come on,” Bren said to himself. We were desperate to reach the Absurd before the combined troops did. “They’re in no hurry,” said Bren. “We’ll overtake them. They don’t want to fight anyway—they’re going to try to negotiate.”

“The problem is,” I said, “they can’t.”

I could still see the glider. The other craft were behind, close enough for us to wave at their drivers. By midmorning gas-trees filled the plateau ahead, a canopy of thousands of house-size fleshbags bobbing in breezes, straining at the ground. One by one the other craft peeled away from behind us. “Hey,” I said.

“They can’t come through here,” Bren said. Only the three centaurs were with us now. YlSib looked nervously at each other.

“Bren,” said one. “They’re little, we’re not.” “We can’t go through here either.” “Not secretly.” “We’ll leave tracks...”

“Have you not been listening?” he said. He yanked at the controls and if anything accelerated. “We don’t have any time. We have to get there fast. So please get to work. You should be teaching. Because it isn’t enough for us to get there: we have a job to do when we do.”

But it was impossible to concentrate as we approached the forest. Some of the trees moved weakly out of our way, hauled by roots, but most were too slow. I braced. The carriage’s jutting legs scythed through rope trunks. In our passing trees soared straight up, dangling their broken tethers. We left a line of them accelerating skyward as we cut into the woodland. Through the rear windows I saw the centaurs carrying their riders over the coiled stumps we left behind. There wasn’t much debris: it had flown away.

“Beyond this forest and then a few kilometres,” Bren said, voice shaking with our motion. “That’s where the armies are.”

Bloated treetops buffeted each other above. There were darks and shadows of layered variety around us, in which, I abruptly thought, there might be anything: Ariekene ruins, such impossible things. In our wake was a wedge of sky into which the dislodged trees rose in strict formation until they reached wind and scattered. It was because of that gap in the forest that I saw the plane twisting in dogfight turns.

“Something’s happening,” I said. We craned to see it curve up and the weapons below its nose flare, against another, attacking flyer.

“Fucking Pharotekton damn,” Bren said.

We couldn’t hide. Wherever we veered we’d announce our route in soaring trees, so we did nothing but try to increase our speed, the centaur-riders jabbing rifles behind us. Detonations sounded and from the tops of explosion clouds bobbed trees and their ragged remains tugging tails of smoke-matter and vegetation.

Shonas, in his glider, fired. For a moment I thought we were being chased down by his enemy DalTon, that I was collateral in someone else’s drama, but the attacker flew jack-knifes no human could have piloted. EzCal had ordered an Ariekene vessel to take us, to stop us reaching the army they must realise was our destination.

The centaurs scattered into bladdery undergrowth. I heard YlSib jabbering Language. They were telling Spanish Dancer what was happening.

“Maybe I can...” Bren said, and I wondered what plan he had. The glider caromed across our field of vision into the ground, burst in a splash of rising trees. Yl and Sib howled to see Shonas’s death.

I hadn’t believed, not really, that EzCal would spare a craft for this, for us, now. I screamed and the ground under us burst.

I WOKE TO NOISE. I coughed and cried out and looked into the many eyes of an Ariekes. Above it I saw our ripped-up chassis letting the sky and swaying vegetation through. Beside me was the motionless face of another Ariekes, dead. I thought for moments I was dying. I pulled my aeoli mask up, as the living Ariekes tugged me with its giftwing and pulled me from the overturned vehicle, through a big rip.

It wasn’t many seconds since we’d been wrecked, I realised. I stumbled and leaned on Spanish Dancer. We were in a crater, edged by vegetation stretching up on frayed stems.

There was more than one Ariekene dead. The living were hauling out of the hollow, dragging Bren and Yl and Sib with them. The Absurd stumbled disoriented, and one of the wounded Ariekei shoved it, sent it towards us, jabbed its giftwing in our direction. We heard a gasp, and up from the forest at the edges of our brutal clearing went another tree, this one dangling a tangled man, one of the centaur outriders, whose mount had thrown him. He clung, but he was tiny-high very fast, and whatever had snared him gave and he abruptly fell, without a cry I could hear as the plant kept rising. We didn’t see him land but he couldn’t have lived.

I stumbled over wrecked biorigging. By the time the murderous flyer was back above the bombsite it would have seen no life. We watched it from our hide a few metres of forest in. It circled several times and headed out, toward the Languageless army.

26

“WE HAVE TO WALK,” Bren said. “A couple of days, maybe. We have to get through the forest.” The Embassytown army were ahead, but we knew they would delay engaging, and we still hoped to reach the attackers before them. Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to. Every couple of hours we stopped on our limping, blistered way, and repeated a lesson or tried a new one. Neither the Ariekei nor their batteries seemed to tire. I don’t know if or how they mourned their companions. Even our captive tramped before us stolidly, subdued by the environs or the attack or something.

Bren guided us with some handheld tech. I was conscious of the forest’s darkness, coloured by the bruisey flora. The wood was full of noises. Things of radial and spiral form moved around us. We bewildered the animals—we didn’t read as predators to the prey nor vice versa, and they were neither afraid of nor threatening to us. They watched us quizzically, those with eyes. Once one of the Ariekei said something dangerous was near us. A , big as a room, opening and closing its teeth. It would surely have attacked the Ariekei had they been alone, but its confusion at the sight of us aliens, uncoded in its instinct, stilled it, so we saved them.

They’d rescued a clutch of the datchips, but not all. They would have to husband them. One by one, as they had to, the Ariekei took themselves into the privacy of the wood and listened hard to EzCal’s voice, catching us up, a little high but clearer-headed.

We kept on into the evening, and the forest got sparse, until it was tree-flecked grassland under the glimmer of Wreck. We granted ourselves a little sleep: mostly, though, my priority was to teach.

YOU ARE LIKE the girl, you are the girl.

“Sweet Jesus,” I said. “Just fucking say it.” Their urgency, in fact, I’m as certain as I can be, was at least as great as mine.

“YlSib,” I said. “Ask them this. Do they know who I am?” Language. The Ariekei murmured. She’s the girl who was... I interrupted. “Really know, I mean. Do they know what a girl is? They know I’m a simile, but do they know that the girl is me? What do they think you are, YlSib? How many?”

“You know what she’s asking,” Bren said. “Tallying Mystery.” Did the Ariekei think an Ambassador one person or two? Staff had always told us it was a pointless, untranslatable, impolite question.

“I’m sorry but I need them to understand that you’re two people because I need them to understand that I’m one. That these bloody squawks I make are language. That I’m talking to them.” The Ariekei watched one meat-presence emitting noises more quickly and loudly than usual to the others.

After a silence Bren said, “It’s never been something Ambassadors have been exactly keen to make clear.”

“Make it clear,” I said. “Ambassadors don’t get to be the only real people anymore.”

I don’t believe we could have overturned generations of Ariekene thinking, even with so avant-garde a group as this, had they not known somewhere, to some degree, that each of us was a thinking thing. Spanish and its comrades responded at first as if of course, so what; then slowly as YlSib pressed the point many times, with growing fascination, confusion, or what might be anger or fear. At last I saw what I hoped was a fitting sense of revelation.

She is speaking, YlSib said to them. The girl who ate what was given to her. Like I speak to you.

“Yes,” I said, as the Ariekei stared. “Yes.”

Language was the unit of Ariekene thought and truth: asserting my sentience in it YlSib made a powerful claim. They told them that I was speaking, and Language insisted then that there must be other kinds of language than Language.

“Make them say it,” I said. “That what I’m doing is speaking.”

Spanish Dancer said it. The human in blue is speaking. The others listened. They struggled, but one by one managed to repeat it.

“They believe it,” I said. This was where it began to change.

“Translate,” I said to YlSib. “You know me,” I said to the Ariekei. “I’m the girl who ate, etcetera. I’m like you, and you’re like me, and I’m like you. I am you.” One of them shouted. Something was happening. It spread among them. Spanish Dancer stared at me.

“Avice,” said Bren in warning.

“Tell them what I say,” I said. I looked at Spanish. I met its almost-eyes as urgently as if I were talking to a human. “Tell it. I waited for things to be better, Spanish, so I’m like you. I am you. I took what was given to me, so I’m like the others. I am them.” I shone a torch on myself. “I glow in the night, I’m like the moon. I am the moon.” I lay down. “They know how we sleep, yeah? I’m so tired I lie as still as the dead, I’m like the dead. I’m so tired I am dead. See?”

The Ariekei were staggering. Their fanwings flared, folded and opened. They reached for me with their giftwings, making Bren gasp, but they didn’t touch me. They said words and noises.

“What’s happening?” Yl or Sib said.

“Don’t stop translating,” I said. “Don’t you dare.” The Ariekei sounded together, a moment’s horrible choir. They retracted their eyes. “Don’t stop. I’m the girl who ate blah blah. What have you said with me all this time? Everything you said’s like me is me. You’ve already done it. It’s all just things in terms of other things.” I stood before Spanish Dancer. “Tell it its name. Say: There were humans a long time ago who wore clothes that were black and red like your markings. Spanish dancers.” I heard YlSib neologise “” .“I can’t speak your name in Language, so I gave you a new one. Spanish Dancer. You’re like, you are a Spanish dancer.”

One by quick one the Ariekei shouted then went silent. Their eyes stayed in. They swayed. No one spoke for a long time.

“What’ve you done?” whispered Sib. “You’ve driven them mad.”

“Good,” I said. “We’re insane, to them: we tell the truth with lies.”

Like sped-up film of plants in the sun, Spanish’s eye-coral at last budded. It started to speak and said two trickles of gibberish. It stopped and waited and started again. Yl and Sib and Bren translated but I didn’t need them. Spanish Dancer spoke slowly, as if it was listening hard to everything it said.

You are the girl who ate. I’m . I’m like you and I am you. Someone human gasped. Spanish craned its eye-coral and stared at its own fanwing. Two eyes came back to look at me. I have markings. I’m a Spanish dancer. I didn’t take my eyes off it. I’m like you, waiting for change. The Spanish dancer is the girl who was hurt in darkness.

“Yes,” I whispered, and YlSib said “,” Yes.

Other Ariekei were speaking. We are the girl who was hurt.

We were like the girl...

We are the girl...

“Tell them their names,” I said. “You move like a Terre bird: you’re Duck. You drip liquid from your Cut-mouth, so you’re Baptist. Explain that, YlSib, can you? Tell them, tell them the city’s a heart...”

I’m like the liquid-dripping man, I am him...

With the boisterous astonishment of revelation they pressed the similes by which I’d named them on until they were lies, telling a truth they’d never been able to before. They spoke metaphors.

“God,” Yl said.

“Jesus Christ Pharotekton,” said Bren.

“God,” said Sib.

The Ariekei spoke to each other. You’re the Spanish dancer. I could have wept.

“Jesus Christ, Avice, you did it.” Bren hugged me for a long time. YlSib hugged me. I held onto them all. “You did it.” We listened to the Ariekene new speakers call each other things in unprecedented formulations.

There were two poor bewildered remnants that could not, no matter what I said, that stared at their companions uncomprehending. But the others spoke in new ways. I’m not as I’ve ever been, Spanish Dancer told us.

MUCH LATER, when we’d been hours in our camp, I took a datchip, slowly, mindful of how long it had been since a fix, and played it. It was EzCal saying something about the shape of their clothes. Those two still unchanged, Dub and Rooftop I’d called them, which hadn’t shifted with the others, responded with the usual addict fervour to the sounds.

None of the others did. I looked at the Ariekei and they at us. They took slow steps, at last, in all directions. I don’t feel... one said. I am, I am not...

“Play another,” Bren said. EzCal spoke thinly to us about some other nonsense. The Ariekei looked at each other. I am not... another said.

I picked up another and made EzCal mutter the importance of maintaining medical supplies, and still only those two reacted. The others listened with nothing more than curiosity. I tried more, and while Dub and Rooftop stiffened the altered Ariekei made querying noises at EzCal’s ridiculous expositions.

“What happened?” YlSib stuttered. “Something’s happened to them.”

Yes. Something in the new language. New thinking. They were signifying now—there, elision, slippage between word and referent, with which they could play. They had room to think new conceptions.

I threw the chips to them, laughing, and they began to go through them. Our clearing was filled with overlapping voices of Ez and Cal.

“We changed Language,” I said. A sudden change—it couldn’t undo. “There’s nothing to... intoxicate them.” There only ever had been because it was impossible, a single split thinkingness of the world: embedded contradiction. If language, thought and world were separated, as they just had been, there was no succulence, no titillating impossible. No mystery. Where Language had been there was only language: signifying sound, to do things with and to.

The Ariekei sifted the datchips, listening with disbelief at how they heard what they heard. That’s what I think. Spanish Dancer remained bent, but its eyes looked up at me. Perhaps it knew now, in ways it could not have done before, that what it heard from me were words. It listened.

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and Spanish Dancer cooed and, harmonising with itself, said: “"

27

ONE BY ONE as the night went on the Ariekei withdrew, and one by one they began to make terrible sounds. I fretted about the noise, but what could we do? Spanish Dancer, Baptist, Duck, Toweller, all but Dub and Rooftop, which looked on without a scrap of comprehension, went through what sounded like agonies. They didn’t all call out or scream, but all of them in different ways seemed as if they were dying.

YlSib was alarmed, but seemed neither Bren nor I were surprised by what we heard: the noise of old ways coming off in scabs. Pangs of something finishing, and of birth. Everything changes now: I thought that very explicitly, each word. I thought: Now they’re seeing things.

In the beginning was each word of Language, sound isomor-phic with some Real: not a thought, not really, only self-expressed worldness, speaking itself through the Ariekei. Language had always been redundant: it had only ever been the world. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

“Shouldn’t we... ?” Yl said, and had nothing with which to finish it.

The said was now not-as-it-is. What they spoke now weren’t things or moments anymore but the thoughts of them, pointings-at; meaning no longer a flat facet of essence; signs ripped from what they signed. It took the lie to do that. With that spiral of assertion-abnegation came quiddities, and the Ariekei became themselves. They were worldsick, as meanings yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.

No wonder it made them sick. They were like new vampires, retaining memories while they sloughed off lives. They’d never be cured. They went quiet one by one, and not because their crisis ended. They were in a new world. It was the world we live in.

“YOU HAVE TO show the others,” I said to Spanish Dancer. Rudely interrupted its birth. It deserved a different passage but we had no time. It listened in its queasy awe and newness. “The deaf ones. You can talk to them. They think they’re beyond language at all, but you, you can show them what they’ve done.” Language was never possible. We never spoke in one voice.

In the sun, we saw figures kilometres off. Humans rattling slowly towards us. Small ships went overhead, heading back toward the city. “Look,” Bren said. “That one’s wounded.”

As we got closer we could see that there weren’t many Terre, maybe thirty or forty, hauling equipment or urging on slapdash-looking biorigging, rocking in cars. We saw them see us, and for a moment they seemed to be preparing weapons. Then they calmed.

“They must have seen this lot first,” Bren said of the Ariekei with us. “Thought it was an attack. But with us here they think we’re an Embassytown squad. They’re plantation staff.” Wilderness dwellers who had only now cleared their homesteads and outland farmfactories. They’d been in the path of the Language-less army and lost their nerve as the Absurd came at their lands killing all the humans they met and tearing their houses to the ground, murdering or recruiting the country Ariekei alongside which the Terre had lived.

More boats went overhead. They would probably not look long enough to see the Ariekei in our party, or that we were heading in the wrong direction. In fact they wouldn’t notice us at all: they were busy returning to the city. Several of the vessels, I could see, were bleeding.

Spanish Dancer whispered, called the humans things it couldn’t have called them before. It was paying close attention, as it had for hours, to our captive.

We avoided the refugees. “Depending how fast the Absurd are going,” Bren said, “we’ll reach them tomorrow or the next day. Probably the next day—what is that, Muhamday, Ioday?” None of us had any idea.

“What about the Embassytowners?”

“We’ve avoided them. I think we went past them. They’ll still be stationed. Especially—” He pointed at the sky. “You saw the boats. The scouts’ve been wounded. EzCal knows they can’t win. They’ll have Ariekei and Terre at the front trying to negotiate.”

“Yeah, they’re not going to succeed, though,” Yl said.

“They won’t,” Bren said. “How can they? They don’t think the same at all.”

“Spanish understands what we have to do,” I said. “Have you seen how it’s being with the captive? It knows they are thinking the same, now. That they’re both thinking.”

IT WAS A VERY new ecosystem to us, there with the sparse trees, where we watched Spanish and the other Ariekei work. Here the key predator was not the , with its big, nearly immobile body and limbs that could reach fast and far through trees, but fast that hunted by night. Vaguely related to the Ariekei themselves, the rear two limbs of the bipedal were ferocious weapons, as, of a more manipulable kind, was the arm that corresponded to the giftwing. fanwings were immobile. They peered through the dark with eyes attuned to motion. They were social hunters. They worked in concert to corral the dog-sized prey-animals of the plain.

We were too large for them to come for us, but they still watched. Flying things skittered at our torches: burrowing eaters of phosphorescent rot, used to honing in on glowing ground, emerged and gnawed confused at the pooled light.

We didn’t take the leash off our prisoner—we didn’t trust it or know how to decide if it became trustable. But we’d been treating it with less fear for days, and did so with even less now. The new ex-Host liars regarded it, and whispered to each other in words they’d used countless times, that now did very different things. By early morning something was changing. The Ariekei were circling the captive. It wasn’t gasping or lunging at them, or at me, or Bren or YlSib: it was watching us, and watching the other Ariekei.

28

SPANISH DANCER and our captive circled. The others ringed them. Every few seconds one of the two would shove out its giftwing like a knife-fighter looking for an opening. It would sketch out some outline in the air: there would be a pause and the other would follow suit. Spanish’s fanwing frilled open and shut. The Languageless’s stub trembled.

The gesticulations were information, motion telegrams. Talking. They didn’t understand each other but they knew there was something to understand. And that was liberation. When they did make communication—something ridiculous, Spanish throwing a pulpy bud then pointing into the muttering wildlife where it lay, and the Absurd picking it up—their euphoria, even alien, was palpable.

Signifying Spanish could speak through gesture now. For our captive that no longer had a name, perhaps the strangeness was greater. It had thought that without words, it had no language. Its comrades communicated with each other, never knowing they did, not across the chasm with untorn Ariekei; and mostly what they expressed to each other was the very hopelessness that made them believe they were incommunicado.

But in the panic of the attack and our escape, it had understood shove-and-point instructions to flee. It had watched Bren, YlSib and me speak and listen to each other with gestures for stress and clarity. The rest of the Absurd army never had to reflect on these behaviours. Spanish had learnt it could speak without speaking: the Absurd had learnt that it could speak, and listen, at all.

“They were yanking it around,” Bren said. “It was impossible for it not to know what they meant: they were shoving it and pointing the same way. They madeit obey them. Maybe you need violence for language to take.”

“Bren,” I said. “That’s crap. We were all running the same way. We were all trying to get out. We had the same intentions. That’s how it knew what we were doing.”

He shook his head. Formally, he said, “Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.”

“Bullshit. It’s cooperation.” Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren’t as contradictory as they sounded.

“Look,” I said. Pointed above the horizon. There was smoke, stains in the sky.

“IT CAN’T BE,” Bren said, as if to himself, as we moved as fast as we could. “They were going to wait.” He said it more than once. When specks appeared far off on the lichened downs, we pretended that there were many things they might be, until we came too close to deny that they were bodies.

We looked down an incline to the aftermath of war. Thousands of metres of remains. I was breathing very hard, through my aeoli, in horror. At this distance the specificities of carnage were hard to gauge. I was trying to estimate Terre versus Absurd, but the death was too tangled. In any case, many of the Ariekene corpses I saw must be EzCal’s forces, like the humans with which they lay.

We led our not-quite-captive. It was in its collar but we hadn’t shocked it for kilometres. Spanish Dancer drummed its hoofs. It looked at me and opened its mouths. It pointed at the ruination. It opened and closed its mouths and said to me: “”

“Yes.”

“.”

“Yes. Too late.” We had not taught it that.

“.”

STRUNG OUT, artificially, druggedly alert, there was an unpleasant drag to my senses, as if things I saw or heard left residue when I turned from them. My aeoli mask in a rare reminder of its biorigged life shifted, uncomfortable at the smell of the dead. Everywhere were men and women burst open. There were Ariekei dead with fanwings and without, strewn together. Innards evolved on opposite ends of space alloyed in compound decay. There were corpse-fires and rubbish.

Wrecks. The aftermath was scored by lines of char culminated in craters, where fliers had come down. Bren sifted through junk, hands wrapped in rags. I copied him. It wasn’t quite so hard as I’d expected.

This had all happened perhaps two days before. These scenes made me careful and cold. I didn’t look too close at the faces of the scores of Embassytowner dead. I was too certain I’d see one I knew. Picking through remnants between those smoke pillars I tried to learn the history of the fight. There were many more Embassytown-and-city dead than Absurd. Fighters lay mid-action, in mouldering stasis, hands and giftwings and weapons still on each other. We read these corpse dioramas for the stories of their creation.

“They have corvids,” I said. Strategising without speech, the Absurd were driving biorigged weapons. “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus it’s an army, I mean it’s an army.”

Shockingly few combatants were left alive. A few mortally wounded Ariekei cycled their legs in the air, craning eyes. One cried out in Language, telling us that it was wounded. Spanish Dancer touched its giftwing. The Absurd moribund were dying with too much focus to notice us. On some I saw the bleed from fanwings newly excised—there were new recruits to that force even among the dying.

Pinioned under Ariekene dead was a woman still just alive, her broken aeoli wheezing oxygen into her. She looked at Bren and me as we tried to calm her and ask her, “What happened here?” But she only stared, terrified or air-starved out of speech. At last we laid her back down and gave her water. We couldn’t move her; her aeoli was dying. We found two others alive: one man couldn’t be woken; the other was conscious only of his impending death. All we got from him was that the Absurd had come.

Bren indicated ripped uniforms. “These are specialists.” He pointed at runnels out of the battlefield. “This wasn’t... These were outriders, this was a guard group, around something, that came in first.”

“The negotiators,” I said. He nodded slowly at me.

“Of course, yes. The negotiators. This was supposed to be a bloody parley. They gave it a try. My God.” He looked at the remnants around us. “The Languageless didn’t even slow.”

“And now they’re heading for the rest.” For the main mass of the Terre-Ariekei army.

WE HAD TO double back. We took an abandoned vehicle, cleaned the mess of war out of it. We sped along the cut through the marks of thousands of hooves. I was pressed against the Ariekei. Spanish and Baptist were crowding around the Absurd. They were sketching marks in the air, and the captive, if I could still describe it so, was doing the same.

It wasn’t long before we saw a line of figures. Bren stiffened. I knew how weak our plan was, but we had no choice. “It’s alright,” I said. “They’re Terre.”

A big, dirty derelict band, dressed like penitents, a trudging little town. There were children among them. They looked at us through their masks. They were as intense as monks, too. Some backed away, muttered among themselves. A few temporary leaders came closer, and a few soldiers, refugee from that ruination, in scorched uniforms.

The Ariekei stayed back. They kept the self-deafened close, disguised its injury. The humans told us they’d run from the depredations of the Absurd, from pioneer homesteads and bio-rigging farms. This was everyone running: they’d found each other. Been joined by the AWOL and soldiers from defeated units. They were behind their attackers now, were following them to the city, like those prey-fish that seek safety in their predator’s wake. They had no plans, only the vague sense that this might keep them alive a few days longer. Their passage in the tracks of the enemy was a despairing homage to their own defeat.

A militia-man told us, “We were with Ariekei. Leaders. The most eloquent, I suppose. There to communicate. We were there to protect them, the negotiators, give them space, time, when they were trying to get through to...” The soldiers had been instructed to do whatever was necessary while the Ariekene speakers struggled to make the Absurd understand them. “They were trying to talk to them.”

“How?” I said.

“No how.” I thought he’d said know-how and didn’t understand.

“There was no how,” he said. “We wondered. We could see the Absurd coming; they had fliers and weapons and vehicles, and there were thousands of them. We wondered what it was the Ariekei were planning. What they’d cooked up. It was only, Jesus... They got ready by listening to EzCal on datchip. A couple of us in the unit understand Language...” He paused at that inadvertent present tense. “... They told me what EzCal was saying, in the recordings. ‘You must make them understand.’ Again and again. In all different ways. ‘You must speak to them so they understand you.’” The man shook his head. “That’s what they got high on. When the Absurd came, they shouted at them through loudspeakers.”

“But they’re deaf,” I said. He shrugged. The wind sent his greasy hair rippling from under his battered helmet.

“We sent some of them out to meet... the enemy... close. Their plan must have been... Well, the Absurd just came through them. To us.” There’d been no plan at all. I looked at Bren. There’d been no secret strategy: only the knowledge of what had to happen, with no idea how.

“They tried to do it by fiat,” Bren said. The god-drug had hoped their ineluctable instructions would carry this. What despairing deity.

“Jesus,” I said. “Do you think they thought it would work?” There were a lot of dead back there. “Where are the rest of your army?” I said. “EzCal’s army?”

The man shook his head. “Most of them... us... never wanted to fight,” he said. “They wanted to beg. But they can’t even. Beg. Can’t make them hear. They’re retreating back to the city. Getting behind the blockades.” He shook his head slowly. “Those won’t stop them,” he said. There was nothing between the Absurd army and the city, and Embassytown.

The refugees watched us go. Told us it was in the wrong direction and shrugged when we ignored them. They gestured goodbye and good luck with a kind of dead politeness, a strange courtesy. At the edges of the mass, those most monkish ones watched us with hostility I’m certain most of them couldn’t have explained.

We travelled in their hoof-churnings, and stalked the Absurd from just beyond their sight. From thickets, from behind rises. It rained. We sprayed muck. It didn’t seem to get very dark that night; it was as if the stars and Wreck were shining unnaturally, so I could lean against Spanish Dancer and watch it sketch hand signs with the Ariekes that was no longer a prisoner, and I could see the grey landscape.

When dawn came, there were a few cams around us, gadding spastically. Intel-gatherers for the army, still transmitting. Our sound and motion attracted them, and they paced with us in a flitting corona. I looked straight into the lens of one, through the air to someone watching in Embassytown.

We could hear the Absurd, now. They were just one segment of landscape over. The cams swarmed suddenly away, over flora and geography. A corvid flew close overhead on some frantic wartime job, and we had to hope it had not seen us, that we wouldn’t be eradicated, so close.

THERE WERE NO secret ways we could ensure a smaller group of Absurd would find us, no ways we could split one section of their expedition from the others. Each Languageless thought itself alone, though we knew that wasn’t true. The closest this huge vengeful mass would have to generals would be its unspeaking vanguard. We passed their flank, hidden by landscape, and made our way to a place they’d find us.

Finally, stinking in our suits, we left the vehicle. I was strongly conscious of what a scene we must have been. Four Terre. Me at the front. Behind me Bren, tense and ready. The marks of the journey had made YlSib easy to tell apart. They stood beside each other, each with a weapon poised.

The Ariekei. Ranged in a curve around us, as if they made up our group’s fanwing. Spanish Dancer was closest to me, and watched me with several of its eyes.

At the centre of the group stood the untethered Languageless. The thing that was no longer our enemy looked from one to another of its Ariekene companions. It made a motion with its giftwing. One by one most of the other Ariekei responded in a similar way. It made me a bit breathless to see.

There were two that didn’t. Dub and Rooftop watched the motions of their companions. Nothing they could understand was occurring.

Spanish Dancer said to me: “.” I stared a while, and at last nodded. “You will,” I said. “We will. They will.”

“,” it said. Two noises came out of it that meant nothing to me. It said something rapidly in Language, and its companions, and Yl and Sib and Bren looked up sharply. tried again. “,” it said to me. I was silent. What could I say?

THE FIRST OF the Absurd came. Fliers squalled over the country, must have seen us, but perhaps decided that we were too nothing to be blown away. A loose, fast-moving posse of tireless Absurd became visible, moving toward us. We braced. Someone said something about the plan.

Those at the front of the army, the groups a kilometre or so ahead of the main force, saw us. They stampeded up the scree and at us, pointing giftwings, directing segments of their own crowd, which peeled off into wedge-shapes, flanked us, in the unsaid strategy they thought merely rage. I could hear their hoofbeats. Then I could see the shades of their skins, the craned forks of their eyes, the flanges of their fanwing stubs, as they raised weapons.

“Now,” someone said, and I truly couldn’t say if it was me.

Spanish said something too quiet for me to quite hear, that I don’t think was in Language. It walked forward with the other leaders of its revolutionary group and the Absurd came with them. It went farther, stepped out and raised its giftwing and the stalk of its fanwing, so its injury was plain. It waved them like standards. It announced its status—I’m one of you—and urged its comrades to stop, gestured to all the incomers, wait, wait, wait, wait.

The Absurd army didn’t slow at all. I felt sick. “Courage,” Bren said, in French. I did not smile. The inchoate motion language the fanwingless spoke was camouflaged by shared purpose. From their untidy ranks came a shot.

“Jesus,” I said. Spanish Dancer, , spoke with its voice and hands as its once-fellows approached to murder or brutalise it. I wondered what would happen to it if it were deafened now, now that language was different for it. Spanish’s and the Absurd’s motions registered to the enemy as little as windblown plants.

They’re not ignoring, I thought. They don’t know. They didn’t know that these minds weren’t like the others they’d finished or changed, how could they? I dug among our packs.

“Show your fanwings!” I shouted to Spanish. “Show them you can hear!” YlSib began to translate, but Spanish was already unfurling, and the others were copying it, except for Dub and Rooftop, who did so only when Spanish told them to in Language. Another missile came close. “Tell Dub and Rooftop to get in front,” I said.

I made a datchip play, and the thin voice of EzCal exhorted us to something or other. But every one of the Ariekei had already heard that speech so did not react to it, and I cursed and threw it away.

“Oh,” said Bren. He understood. I fumbled again while the Absurd came close enough that I could hear their murder-croons. I spilled a handful of chips and finally got another to sound. EzCal said, We are going to tell you what it is that you must do...

We Terre heard it as sound. Spanish Dancer and the others heard it too, now, as sound: they just cocked their fanwings quizzically. But Dub and Rooftop were still addicts. They snapped upright, shuddered so elementally it was as if gravity took them toward the source of the voice. They glazed.

“Yes,” said Bren.

I played another. Dub and Rooftop were swaying, recovering from EzCal’s first words; jerked giddily they were caught up again. Rooftop shouted at what was, I realised, EzCal’s descriptions of trees.

Our self-defeaned Ariekes kept waving at the others, and Spanish and the others mimicked it, their own fanwings opening and closing, and in the middle of them all Dub and Rooftop lost themselves. I kept the sound going. “,” said Spanish, and I could think how horrible the sight of that powerless staggering must be to it, reminding it what it had been, making it watch its friends suffering in compulsion, but I wouldn’t cease.

As the first of the Absurd crested our rise and came towards us, weapons up, first one, then more, then many, hesitated. I pressed another chip and heard Bren say yes.

Every army has one soldier at its very front. A big Ariekes, its Cut- and Turn-mouths open as if it were howling, picking its feet high as it came for us. I was holding out a datchip as if it might stop it. Its eyes spread in all directions, one for each of us, watching Spanish, and the Ariekes that had been our captive jerking its arms as the Absurd did to each other, and Dub and Rooftop stumbling. If I was thinking anything I was praying. It was very close.

Abruptly the soldier stopped. It lowered its sputtering mace. It involuted its eyes, opened them again and watched us. I was still playing EzCal’s voice. It wasn’t the only motionless one, now. As if I were merciless, I made Dub and Rooftop dance their addiction. The Absurd gripped each other, gestured or stood still, watching.

“Don’t stop,” said Bren.

“,” said Spanish, and Bren said again, “Don’t.”

“What... ?” said Sib.

“What is it?” said Yl.

The army of hopeless and enraged had been driven to murder by their memories of addiction, and the sight of their compatriots made craven to the words of an interloper species. That degradation was the horizon of their despair. I’d made them see the motions of their ex-selves hearing their god-drug— there was no mistaking that tarantella—but that other Ariekei had fanwings unfurled, could hear, but were unaffected.

There wasn’t supposed to be such a thing as uncertainty in the minds of the Absurd. Its sudden arrival arrested them. Our ex-captive waved its giftwing and its stump. Stop, it was saying, and many in the army that faced us knew that it was saying so, and were stunned to know that they knew it.

Poor Rooftop, I thought, poor Dub. Ariekene dust coiled around me and I blinked. Thank God they never learnt to lie. We’d needed real addicts, to prove that the others were free, and the rage of the Absurd therefore misdirected. I kept Dub and Rooftop moving. I made them sick on god-drug. Spanish Dancer watched them, fanned its fanwing. I was shouting.

INFORMATION MOVED desperately slowly among the Absurd— even their quickest thinkers still had only a tenuous understanding that they could transmit information. What they said to each other at first with their waving and upheld limbs was simple: Don’t attack. Following that: Something is happening.

The information was discombobulated with distance, moving backwards through the rank. At the front, gestures got close to: They can hear but are not addicted. Farther back, ranks of the Absurd told those behind them simply: Stop.

“,” said Spanish. Our Deaf went to the front of the army, and Spanish went with it. With the Absurd generals watching, the two of them—ostentatiously, in wing signs and sigils scraped in the earth, ideograms that startled me—started to talk.

THERE WERE MANY many hours, two days and nights of frustration and silences, while the army waited. Hesitated. Individuals kept coming up from the ranks to see what was happening. Every one that did was astonished: unaddicted Ariekei; Terre waiting respectfully; the process of slow dawning between hearing and Absurd, as we still questionably called them; scrawls in dirt.

Those with a little knowledge became agents of patience among the others. We could see their influence, by whatever gestural persuasions, when, toward the end of the second day, human refugees approached from the army’s flank, easily killable, but the fanwingless didn’t assault them.

The Terre must have realised that the Absurd had stopped, wondered at the strange calm and come to find its source, and the Languageless had let them. The refugees set up camp a way away from us, and watched.

It took a time before the boundary of comprehension between Absurd and ’s group, the New Hearing, was more fully breached, but nothing like so long as I’d once have expected. We weren’t teaching the deafened to communicate: we were showing them they already could, and did. It wasn’t incremental but revelatory; and revelations, though hard-won, are viral.

“We need EzCal here,” I said.

“They won’t come if they know what’s happened,” Bren said. “If they know that they’ve lost.”

Even if it means the end of the war? But I knew he was right. “Well then we can’t tell them the truth. We see any vespcams we smash them. They can’t know what’s happened.”

TOWELLER AND BAPTIST understood the mission we gave them. They wouldn’t have done a few days before. They returned to the city in a flyer with the Absurd.

“They know what they have to do?” I said to Spanish Dancer.

“.” They’d sneak back in the wounded ship, take on the roles of loyal addict-soldiers, bringing news of a breakthrough. They’d tell EzCal that the Absurd had stopped, were just waiting, and that the god-drug and their entourage must come. It couldn’t occur to EzCal that they were being lied to. That was what we were relying on. How could it? They would, after all, hear it from Ariekei, in what they would think was Language. Say it like a Host.

“They know what to do when EzCal speaks to them?”

“.” They knew to seem as if it swept them over.

“They know to ask for them to speak, if too long goes by without?”

“.” They knew to mimic the addiction. They knew what they had to do.

The two different tribes of post-Language Ariekei shared symbols. The human refugees made no attempt to come closer. “Did we do it?” I said.

Surrounded by semiosis, Dub at last juddered and abruptly achieved change and withdrawal, apropos of nothing I saw, gasping and speaking newly. Its companions watched its unexpected transcendence or fall. Rooftop, though, couldn’t reach it. It dosed itself with the last of the datchips. It was the only addict left among us.

I don’t know what the parameters of friendship were among the Ariekei, but I think that they must all have been sad. And Rooftop, as its name was, must have been lonely. It watched the scratch-and-gesture conversations around it, and I thought that being surrounded by the changed must be, for it, like a mild hell. You did save us, I thought at it. Without you we’d have died. As if that could comfort it.

EVERY DAY Spanish told me of the progress. When I consider what it was that actually happened, what the Absurd and the New Hearing achieved, it took no time at all. I don’t know how many days of camping among these silent discussions it had been when I realised that there were cams watching us, eddying nervously in the wind. But I knew we were past ready.

“Jesus,” I said, and pointed them out to Bren. “Christ Pharotekton.” I stood below the cams, gesturing at them like newly expressive Ariekei, beckoning them.

They were scouts from a school around EzCal’s ship. It couldn’t be far: they’d come, following the directions and promises of Toweller and Baptist. Some vespcams seemed to want to shy away; others focused on us. It was too late for the god-drug to turn back now, block transmissions, pretend ignorance, even if they understood what they were seeing. The feeds from those little lenses were being watched not only in the oncoming ship, but by thousands of Embassytowners.

“Listen,” I shouted, and was aware of many Ariekene eyes on me. The lenses scudded, anxious midges, came a little lower. “Listen to me,” I said and grit my teeth in the wind. “Listen to me.”

“They must’ve been wondering what the delay was,” Bren said. “What was keeping the Absurd. How long have they been waiting? Hiding, waiting to die, wondering what’s the hold-up.”

“Listen,” I said. “Get them here. Get EzCal here now.” I pointed at Spanish Dancer, at the fanwingless to which it spoke, and first Spanish, then one by one all the hundreds of Absurd, pointed at me. The cams buzzed, changing positions, and I kept my eyes on one fixed point, as if the little swarm were one entity into whose eye I stared. “Get them here now. EzCal... Can you see me, EzCal?” I jabbed my hand. “Cal, get here now and bring your fucking sidekick with you.

“You get to live, so spread the word. Embassytown, can you hear me? You get to live. But you better get here and find out what you have to do, EzCal. Because there are some conditions.”

29

I’LL GIVE EZCAL THIS. When they didn’t speak, when they stood to look out over the ridge down kilometres of country and the camp-town of the Absurd, they looked epic. They didn’t deserve it.

They’d come to affect baroque: perhaps it was a comfort to some Embassytowners. There were trims of glitter on Cal’s clothes, a crest on his aeoli mask. Even Ez wore purple.

In silence their failings were transmuted, or camouflaged at least. Cal’s sneer passed for regal: Ez’s sulking a thoughtful reserve. They had a small entourage: people who had recently been my colleagues. Some greeted me and Bren when their flier landed. Simmon shook my hand. Southel had come, and MagDa. I couldn’t describe their expressions. Wyatt was with them, still guarded, it seemed, but consulted, great operator, prisoner-vizier. He didn’t meet my eye. Baptist and Toweller stepped down, back from Embassytown, greeted their companions. Greeted me. The Embassytowners watched them, in what must have been great shock. This journey hadn’t turned out as expected.

The officers who’d come had weapons. I know that if the situation had been a little different, EzCal might have tried to have them kill us, as they’d tried to kill us when we travelled. Now, though, the remnants of the Staff in their pointless retinue and the officers and even JasMin, who were there, wouldn’t let them. By now everyone in Embassytown had seen the incoming army, and my transmission, and everyone knew that we had stopped them. All Cal had for a last few hours was the pretence that he ruled.

Those Terre refugees had come closer day on day: they were mingling with us now, though mostly all they did was watch our interactions with the Absurd. Ez looked into the sky, and back across the distance toward Embassytown.

Much later I’d hear stories of his actions during my travels: how he’d contrived to test Cal’s patience; the plans for what could only be considered a coup, which Cal had crushed more in contempt than anger. Ez eyed us. I could see him calculating. Jesus do you never stop? I thought. I didn’t give a shit about his story. To Embassytown and the Languageless, Ez and Cal’s squabbles were vastly less important than that they were EzCal.

I stood with delegates from the Absurd army, twenty or thirty thrown up from the ranks. “So it’s you I’m talking to, is it, Avice Benner Cho?” Cal said coolly. “You speak for...” He indicated the fanwingless closest to me, our erstwhile captive.

“Theuth,” I said. “It goes by Theuth.”

“What do you mean ‘it goes by Theuth,’” he said. “It doesn’t go by anything....”

“We call it Theuth,” I said. “So that’s what it goes by. I’ll show you how to write that down. Or better, Theuth will.”

BAD ENOUGH to be defeated, isn’t it? Even now you’d try to take us out, Cal: me, Bren, the rest of us. Because the way we saved Embassytown means the end of your reign, as it has, look, ended; and even though your whole damn prefecture was a function of despair and collapse, you’d rather lose it on your terms than be saved on ours. That was what I wanted to say.

There were Absurd with Theuth and Spanish, those most adept at the generation of the ideogrammatic script they were inventing, the most intuitive at the reading and performing of gestures. It wasn’t a stable group. Even a few brave Ariekene addicts had arrived, too, come all the way from the city subsisting on pilfered datchips, to see the historic agreement, the change. Rooftop was there, playing its own sound files to itself in sadness. Human runaways squatted on overlooking ledges coloured with Ariekene mottled moulds, and watched the negotiations. They came and went as they wanted.

Cal, perhaps Ez too, tried to depict what was happening as protracted discussion. Really it was just a slow process of explaining facts, and receiving orders, in a nascent script. What took days was making sure the Absurd understood, and understanding what they wanted us to do about it.

You’ve no authority, I could have said to Cal. This is a surrender. You’d love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts. But you’re just here because I told the Absurd you were the one they’d have to tell what to do. And the humans watching, the refugees scowling under their cowls, are going to remember how it’s obvious that you don’t know what’s happening. You’re doing a lot of hanging around during this particular change of epoch, because you’re only a detail.

CAMS WENT EVERYWHERE. There were a proliferation of independent home-rigged kits, or those hijacked or gone rogue and uploading their feeds to whatever frequencies they could. Embassytown was watching on the other side of all the lenses.

At night the Ariekei surrounded my party. We asked them to: I still wasn’t certain EzCal wouldn’t attempt revenge.

“What’s going to happen?” MagDa said. They looked at me with wariness and respect.

“It’ll be different,” I said, “but we will be here. Now they

know they can be cured it changes everything. How is it in the city? And in Embassytown?”

Panic and expectancy. Among the Ariekei it was still mostly confusion. There was fighting between factions—they’d seemed united under EzCal’s proxy , and obeyed EzCal’s orders, but now they fought for reasons difficult to make sense of.

“We’ll—they’ll—do everything they can to spread this,” I said. “No more fixes necessary. We’re trying to work together. Theuth mostly speaks for the Languageless now. Spanish is talking to us—to YlSib, obviously, but it can even...” MagDa hadn’t seen Spanish and me in the evenings: talking, haltingly. “But I have to tell you something,” I said to her quietly. “I’ve heard how people are describing what this is, and it’s wrong. There is no cure. Spanish and the others... they might not be addicted anymore but they’re not cured: they’re changed. That’s what this is. I know it might sound the same, but do you understand that they can’t speak Language, anymore, MagDa? Anymore than you ever could.”

IT WAS A MORNING, very cloudless. In the lower lands around me, among the filamented undergrowth of the planet, I knew there were agents of script, disseminating the new skill, the concept of it, among the Absurd. Already there were deviant forms from those first suggested, dissident renditions of ideograms, specialist vocabulary created by the semiogenesis of scuff-and-point.

It wouldn’t be long before some Ariekene reader reproduced the ground-scratch writing in stain, on something they could hand over, rather than trying to remember and replicate it. Maybe we’d show them how. I imagined a pen held in a giftwing.

The leading cadre of the Absurd stood still. The Embassy-town entourage were as smart as they could manage in these circumstances. Various of the human refugees were watching. Theuth and Spanish stood close to me, looking at the cams.

Spanish attracted my attention with its giftwing. “” It spoke to me softly. I hesitated and it spoke again. “”

EzCal faced me. They looked like kings again. Ez’s face was blank: Cal’s was swollen with anger.

“Listen. Do you understand?” All the Embassytowners could hear me easily, but it was EzCal I was speaking to. “Do you understand how it’s going to be?

“The Absurd are coming back to the city, and so are we. We’ll set things up together. They’ll have some ideas. I tell you, if I were Kora-Saygiss, your little quisling, I’d be careful. It was smart of you not to let it come. We’ll work out the details. We’ll be there, in Embassytown.”

Until the relief. Everything’s different, forever, I thought. I glanced at my notes. “They were going to kill us because we were the source of god-drugs. They knew it was too late for them, they were lost, but they were going to make a totally new start for those after them if they got rid of the problem. Us. You understand how selfless they were? It wouldn’t help them. It was for their kids. This generation would either be deafened, dead or dying in withdrawal.

“But now they know the addicted can be cured.” I ignored MagDa’s stares and pointed at Spanish: it pointed back at me. “And if they can be cured then we’re an irrelevance. That is why we get to live. See? But they have to be cured. That’s the condition. Otherwise we’re still a sickness. And it takes time to cure oratees.” I gestured at Rooftop, still untouched by metaphor. Everyone looked at it. It looked back. “And there’s plenty of them. So your job is to keep them going in the meantime, EzCal, till they don’t need you anymore. Without you to tide them, the addicted’ll start to die. Too quick to be cured, or even deafened. So you have to keep them alive.”

“,” Spanish said. There were gasps from all the humans, who’d never heard it speak its doubled Anglo-Ubiq. Spanish was explaining again why the Absurd would have killed us all and mutilated their compatriots, and why they would now let us live. The Ariekei loved the Ariekei. That verb of ours was the only one that came close. It wasn’t flawless, but that’s in the way of translation. It was as much a truth as a lie. The New Hearing and the Absurd loved the addicted, and would cure them one of the two ways out, induct them into one group or the other.

“None of you have been ambassadors for a long time,” I said. “Who’ve you been speaking for but yourselves? And now you’re not a god or a fix or a functionary, EzCal—you’re a factory. The Ariekei have a need: you fulfil it. And believe me, the content’ll be policed.” Ez’s face didn’t move. Cal’s twisted. No chance to issue orders that could, literally, not be disobeyed. “The city’ll be full of Absurd. So if you try to stir things, put instructions in what you say, even restart the war, they’ll stop you. If we’re too much trouble to bother with, we’re gone. They don’t want to take the fanwings of all the addicted, deafen every single adult Ariekei in their cycle, now there’s another way: but they will if they think they have to. Do you see?”

There’s nothing else for you to do, I thought. You have no choice. Those officers, the ones you brought with you, will hold weapons to your heads and demand you speak Language if necessary. And I’ll be with them. Spanish and the Absurd would spread the two cures. Recourse to the knife wasn’t the existential catastrophe it had been for all those here, who’d thought it ended thought. It would never be relished, but for those who couldn’t get clean, it might be considered.

Every day, out of love for their afflicted fellows, the Ariekei would make EzCal speak. We were a temporary necessity. Cal looked so stricken I almost felt pity. It won’t be so bad. There were many ways we might live, until the ship came.

“Do you understand?” I said, to Cal, to EzCal, and to everyone listening, on the plateau and in Embassytown. I loved the sound of my voice that day. “You see why we’re even alive? You have a job to do.”

“,” Spanish Dancer said. Somewhere there was a series of human gasps, and I heard someone say, “No.”

Spanish spread its eye-coral. Ez looked up, Cal turned.

A figure came at us from higher on the hill. A dark-cloaked man. He was followed by a few frantic refugees, shouting. His cape gusted. Curious Absurd parted for him, watching what he was doing, and I shouted no but of course they didn’t hear. I gesticulated for them to close ranks, but they were new to Terre gestures, and I didn’t have time to make them understand.

The man pulled out a weapon. Through his stained old aeoli I could see it was Scile.

MY HUSBAND AIMED a fat pistol at me. We were all too slow to stop him.

Even as he came I stared and as I tried to think how to stop what he was going to do, somewhere below that I was working out where he’d gone, and how, and why, and what he was doing now. I stared at the nasty pouting mouth of the gun.

He changed his aim as he came, pointing at Bren and Spanish Dancer. I tried to push the Ariekes away, but Scile wasn’t aiming at it now but at Ez, and then at Cal, and Cal began to turn his eyes to me. Scile fired. Calls and screaming started in Terre and Ariekene voices, as in a plume of blood where energy took and opened him, Cal fell away, staring at me, and died.