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.You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go.There are reasons to be careful in this quadrant, but there are reasons to come — to pass through, en route somewhere else.”“They’ll come,” MagDa said.“Bremen.” “To see how they’re doing.” “Ez and Ra, I mean.To check on them.” They looked at each other.“We might not have so long to wait.” “As we’d thought.”“More than five bloody days is too long, now,” someone said.“We’re at the end.”“Yes but.”“What if we—”Wyatt was a clever man who had misplayed his hand, and was trying to salvage something: his life, at least.He’d told us everything, and not out of despair as it might seem, but as a gamble, a strategy.We looked at the glass that separated us from Ez.Ez raised his eyes to ours, to all of ours, as if he knew we stared.18GROUPS OF ARIEKEI were on their rooftops, between dead buildings, roaming in armed gangs: all strategies to protect themselves from the mutilated rampagers.Ariekei dead were everywhere, and here and there the remnants of Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Terre, dragged by Ariekene murderers for reasons beyond our reason.Packs of zelles wandered, hungry for food and EzRa’s speech, deserted by their erstwhile owners and gone incompetently feral.It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition, so not war at all really but something more pathological.In each holdout, a few Ariekei tried to be the things they remembered.But they could concentrate only for hours at a time, before the equivalents of delirium tremens overtook them.Their companions would whisper words they’d heard EzRa say to whichever of their company was succumbing, trying to imitate the Ambassador’s timbre.They were just words, just clauses.Sometimes those convulsing would return to half-mindfulness: enough to remember that something needed rebuilding.Between those remnant settlements were the truly mindless that didn’t even know that they shook when they did, and only hunted for food and for the voice of EzRa, and were hunted by each other.The self-mutilated, though, were suddenly rarer.I wondered if they were dying.In places we had to haul our barriers back, abandon sections of Embassytown to the oratees.At the same time, there was an unexpected exodus of Hosts — we still called them that, sometimes, in unpleasant humour — from the city.Ariekei in small but growing numbers found the mouths and orifices where industrial guts linked the city to the meadows of biorigging and wild country.They followed them out.“Do they think they’ll find EzRa out there?” We didn’t know where they were going, or why.I thought perhaps they simply couldn’t bear to live any more in a slaughterhouse of architecture, amid what had been their compatriots.Perhaps their need for quiet deaths was stronger than their need for EzRa’s voice.I tried not to experience too much relief, or even hope, at that notion, at the possibility that more would leave; but, cautiously, I felt some.WE EXHUMED Ra.I didn’t see it.We thanked Christ that he’d not been cremated or rendered biomass.It was MagDa who’d saved his body: he’d had no faith, but his family’s listed tradition was Unitarian Shalomic, which abjured those usual local methods, and in an effort at respect MagDa had had him interred in a small graveyard for those of such heresies.We waited like parents-to-be while doctors worked with the schematics Wyatt provided.They removed from Ra’s dead head the implant, the hidden booster of his ordinary-seeming link.It was the size of my thumb, sheathed in organics, though it was all Terretech.It made me wonder if, had the Bremeni designers used Ariekene biorigging, the implants themselves would have become infected like the Hosts, and the thing that let Ez and Ra be EzRa would have become hooked on their voice.What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.THE COMMITTEE dragooned scientists from wherever they still worked: the stumps of hospitals; rogue-ministering in the streets; of course from the infirmary.We begged and forced others to start work again.Southel, our scientific overseer, organised the researches
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