The newscasts’ little vespcams saw them. Midlevel Staff gathered troikas and quads from the Kedis community, a few Shur’asi think-captains. Vehicles arced over our roofs, antennas and the girders of our construction, over the white smoke from our chimneys. One shot recurred on the bulletins: a young Staff member swatting at the cam through which we saw. He must have been very tense to be so unprofessional. The newscasts, voice and text, were flummoxed. Perhaps to most locals there’d been no sense of crisis until this ingathering of our exots. The pods that took them to the Ambassadorial explanations flocked with birds, and fist-sized cams that rose and fell among them. Beyond Embassytown, the oddness of angles and movements that had touched the city seemed to be spreading. I BUZZED Ehrsul, RanDolph, Simmon, but could get through to no one. After a hesitation I tried Wyatt, but he didn’t answer either. My handset still contained Hasser’s number, and Valdik’s, and several other similes’.
