Embassytown

  “Ms. Benner Cho?” one said. “Sorry to disturb you. I believe, uh, is Ra here?” He stumbled over the lack of honorific.

  “Avice, where is he?”

  I knew that voice. “MagDa?” I said. I’d not seen them behind the escort.

  The Ambassador pushed their way to the front. “We need to talk to them.” “Urgently.”

  “Hello.” It was Ra, come up behind me. I didn’t turn.

  “Ra.” I thought they’d be furious, but Mag and Da looked just relieved to see him. Emotional. “There you are.” “You have to come back.”

  “You need protective custody, sir,” an officer said. MagDa seemed exasperated by that, in fact, but they didn’t interrupt. “For your safety. Until we’ve got things under control. Please come with us.”

  Ra stood up tall. The officer met his eye. Ra nodded to me, after a moment, and let them take him. I nodded back. I was vaguely disappointed in him.

  When they led him away they didn’t lock his hands together. They walked respectfully beside him, like what they said they were, a protective corps. It was a sort of courtesy, I suppose, though I don’t think anyone with a passing understanding of Embassytown politics wouldn’t have known he was more or less under arrest. I watched him go, to join Ez, and perhaps Wyatt, in what I was sure would be scrupulously well-kept rooms, locked and guarded from the outside.

  Formerly, 6

  IN ITS RELIGIOUS LAWS Embassytown was a cutting from Bremen. There was no established church, but as with many smaller colonies, its founders had included a reasonable minority of faithful. The Church of God Pharotekton was as close as we came to an official congregation. Its lighthouse towers jutted through Embassytown roofs, their beacons spinning, rotating spokes of light at night.

  There were other congregations: tiny synagogues; temples; mosques; churches, mustering a few score regulars. A handful of ultra-orthodox in each tradition stood firm against ungodly innovations, attempting to maintain religious calendars based on Bremen’s thirty-seven-hour days, or according to insane nostalgia on the supposed days and seasons of Terre.

  Like the Hosts, the Kedis of Embassytown had no gods: according to their professed faith the souls of their ancestors and of their unborn were united in a never-ending jealous war against them, the living, but they mostly displayed a far less bleak and embattled outlook than that theology would suggest. There were religious Shur’asi, but only dissidents: most were atheist, perhaps because apart from through accident, they didn’t die and were very rarely born.

  Embassytowners were free not to believe. I wasn’t used to thinking about evil.

  BEEHIVE'S NAME was , we gleaned from its conversations with other Hosts. I told CalVin, mangling the name with my monovoice, saying the Cut and Turn one after the other. “Can you find out when it’s competing at another Festival of Lies?” I said. “It’s a loyal fan of mine, and I’d like to . . . return the favour.”

  “You want to go . . .” “. . . to another festival?”

  “Yeah. Me and another couple of the similes.” It had occurred as a whim, mere curiosity about my observer, but having thought of it I could not let the idea go. When I’d mooted it to Hasser and a couple of the others, they’d been enthusiastic. “Do you think we could do that? Think you could get us in again?” It had been a while since we’d been summoned to any Languagefests, and though I was alone among them in being more intrigued by the lying than by my own deployment, the other Cravateers would hardly say no to any entry.

  CalVin did pursue this, though not with the best grace. I wondered at the time why they were indulging me at all. One or the other always behaved with surliness to me. The differences in their demeanours were tiny, but I was used to Ambassadors and could sense them. I thought that they were taking turns to be colder and warmer, in a variant of traditional police procedure.

  In The Cravat, conversations between the Hosts illuminated disagreements. They had camps, constituted by theories and arcane politics. Some seemed to love us—of course I shouldn’t use that word—as spectacle. Some rated our various merits: we called them the critics. The man who swims with the fishes is simple, one said. The girl who ate what was given to her is like more things. Valdik laughed but wasn’t happy to hear that the trope of him was trite. Beehive, which I started to call “Surl Tesh-echer”, a failure closer to its name, was the guru of another group. Champion liar.

  It had regular companions: Spanish Dancer; and one we called Spindle; and one Longjohn—it had a biorigged replacement hoof. Of what any of us understood it’s hard to approximate what they said in Anglo-Ubiq: think of people circling an exhibit in a gallery, staring at it, from time to time uttering a single word or short phrase, like “Incomplete”, or “Potential”, or “Intricacies of fact and uncertainties of expression”, and occasional longer opaque things.

  “ ‘The birds circle like the girl who ate what was put in front of her,’ ” Hasser translated. “ ‘The birds are like the girl who ate what was put in front of her and are like the man who swims with fishes and are like the split stone . . .’ ”

  The other Ariekei, those not of ’s party, loudly answered these garbled claims. They responded to the presence of and its companions with excitement or agitation. Contrariwise, , Spanish Dancer and the others didn’t acknowledge the critics at all, that I could tell. We called ’s group the Professors.

  stretched the logic of analogy—the birds were not like me, having eaten the food given to me, as far as most of the other Ariekei could see. “They think it’s being disrespectful when it says they are,” Hasser said. He looked unhappy. The birds are like the girl who ate what she was given, one of the Professors said again. It stuttered as it spoke, it mangled its words, had to stop and start and try again.

  AN EARLY winter day I came to The Cravat—still attending, I noted wryly—dirty with leaf-muck and cold dust from Embassytown alleys. Valdik was the only other simile there. He was uncomfortable with me, less talkative even than usual. I wondered if perhaps he’d had some bad news about his outside life, of which I knew and wanted to know nothing. We sat in silence that was not companionable.

  After one coffee I was ready to leave, when Shanita and Darius came in together. She was a taciturn simile I’d always sensed was a bit intimidated by me; he was frank and ingenuous, not very smart. They greeted me pleasantly enough.

  “Why was Scile here?” Darius said as he sat. I was aware of Valdik sitting still and not reacting.

  “Scile?” I said.

  “He was here again, earlier,” Darius said. “A Host was here. Being really weird. Your husband, not the Host. He walked around putting little . . .” He fingered the air for the words. “Little nuts and bolts on all the tables. Wouldn’t tell me why.”

  “Again? Here again?”

  He had come once before when I was not there, it seemed, late at night, with three Hosts present. Darius hadn’t seen it but Hasser had, and told him. That time Scile had been strangely dressed, in clothes all one colour. Shanita nodded at the anecdote. Scile had, she said, while Valdik said nothing, laid down the same objects that first time, too.

  “What’s that all about?” Darius said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I spoke carefully.

  I suspected from his stillness that Valdik had an idea, in fact, as I did, what this might have been. That Scile, by these unnatural attention-getting rituals, was trying to stick in the mind. Trying to be good to think with, to be suggestive. To become a simile.

  What the hell did he think he might mean? I thought, but corrected myself: that wouldn’t matter.

  A CORVID DROPPED us deep in the city, in astonishing rooms, catacombs in skin, alcoves full of house’s organs sutured in place.

  The hall was full of the interplaited cadences of Language. I’d never seen so many young, just woken into their third instar and Language. They matched their parents in size and shape, but they were children and you could tell by the colour of their bellies and the way they were given to s
waying. They were avid spectators while the liars tried to lie.

  Most of the competitors could only be silent, failing in their struggle to say something not true. I was with Hasser, Valdik and a few others chosen from among our regulars I don’t know how. We were chaperoned by ArnOld. They were there to perform and made it clear that they resented this babysitting duty. Hosts greeted them by their correct name: “”.

  Scile was with me. He was talking, tentatively, with my simile companions. It had been a fair time since he’d seen Language in its home; it was for him I’d asked for this: he knew it, had been shy with gratitude. We were not nearly so close as we’d been at the time of our first festival, and I think the present surprised him. I hadn’t heard of any more efforts to enLanguage himself. I’d said nothing about any of them to him.

  Before now the humans came. A Host, a lie-athlete, one of the Professors, I realised, was speaking.

  Before the humans came we were . . . and it stalled. One of its companions continued. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. A sensation went through the audience. It was followed by another speaker: Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much . . .

  I’d learnt enough to know this trick, a collaborative faux-mendacity: the last was repeating the previous sentence but dropping its voices to near nothing at the final clause. Of certain things was said, but so quietly the audience couldn’t hear it. It was showmanship, fakery, a crowd-pleaser, and the crowd were pleased.

  ArnOld stiffened and said together: “”.

  Beehive. It was swaying. Its giftwing circled, its fanwing stretched. It stepped up to the lying ground.

  THERE WERE two main ways the few Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. One was to go slow. They would try to conceive the untrue clause—near-impossible, their minds reacting allergically to such a counterfactual even unspoken, conceived without signification. Having prepared it mentally, however successfully or un-, they would pretend-forget it to themselves. Speak each of its constituent words at a certain speed, at a beat, separated, apart enough in the mind of a speaker that each was a distinct concept, utterable with and as its own meaning; but just sufficiently fast and rhythmic that to listeners, they accreted into a ponderous but comprehensible, and untrue, sentence. The liars I had thus far seen with any success were slow-liars.

  There was another technique. It was the more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of noises before the untruth of their totality stole a speaker’s ability to think them.

  opened its mouths.

  Before the humans came, it said in ornery staccato, we didn’t speak.

  There was a long quiet. And then a convulsion, a riot.

  I wished very much that I had any understanding of Ariekene body language. might have been exuding triumph, patience, or nothing. It hadn’t whispered the second half of any truth; or trudged sound-by-metronome-sound through a constructed-unconstructed sentence. What had said was unquestionably a lie.

  The audience reeled. I reeled.

  THE HOSTS woke in their third instar suddenly fluent, Language a direct function of their consciousness. “Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”

  “The evolution of trust . . .” I started to say.

  “There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers. “This Language is miraculous,” Scile had said. I was somehow repulsed by it, in fact. It was astonishing, given what Language needs to do, that the Ariekei had survived. That, I decided, was what Scile must have meant, so I agreed.

  If evolution was morality they would be unable to hear lies, too, like two-thirds of the fabular monkeys, but it’s more random and beautiful, so that was only the case for those few who managed to speak them, of their own little untruths. Unbacked by signifieds, the lies of Language were just noises to their own liar. Biology’s lazy: if mouths speak truth, why should ears discriminate between it and its opposite? When what was spoken was, definitionally, what was? And by this hole in adaptation, though or because they were not built to say them, the Hosts could understand lies. And either believe them—belief being a meaningless given—or, where the falsity was ostentatious and the point, experience them as some giddying impossible, the said unthinkable.

  It’s me who’s monomaniacal, here: it’s unfair to insinuate that all Hosts cared about was Language, but I can’t fail to do so. This is a true story I’m telling, but I am telling it, and that entails certain things. So: the Hosts cared about everything, but Language most of all.

  RADICAL AND cussed, got that lie out into the world, a vomit of phonemes, against its own mind.

  The public were rapturous. We’d witnessed a rare performance. I was delighted. Ambassador ArnOld was astonished. Hasser was bemused. Valdik and Scile were aghast.

  Latterday, 8

  KEDIS AND SHUR'ASI were being escorted to the Embassy. 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’. It had been a long time. I considered calling one. What does it matter now? I thought, but I didn’t do it.

  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one doing so, but I’d begun to prepare, for whatever it was. I was copying what data I thought precious, hiding treasured objects, packing essentials into a shoulder bag. I’d always been fascinated at how my body ran things sometimes. While I felt like I was agonising, my limbs did what was needed.

  Night would come without my noticing, and the aeoli-breath was still cool. Then at this crucial change-moment I remember there were night-bird noises and the gibbering of local animals. It wasn’t yet so late there was no traffic. I wasn’t tired at all. It was hard to make sense of the shots from Embassytown that I was watching. The newsware was still processing. A human commentator said, “We’re not sure what . . . we . . . we’re seeing something from the city . . . ah . . . movement from . . .”

  The figures in cam-view were Ariekei. The Ariekei were moving. On my screen and through my window, I saw corvids frantic in several directions in the air. I heard things. I was already leaning out of my house and I saw their source. The Hosts were coming out of their city into Embassytown.

  I RAN TO the interzone between Embassytown and the city. Lights came on as people woke to the noise, but though I was joined by more and more blinking citizens I didn’t feel part of anything. I passed under light globes whispering where moths touched them. Below arches I’d known all my life, and, tasting the thinning air, I knew I was only a street or two from the edge of the city. I was in Beckon Street, which swept downhill out of our enclave.

  It was an old part of Embassytow
n. There were plaster griffins at the edges of the eaves. Not far away, our architecture was overcome, the ivy that tugged it smothered by fronds of fleshmatter and Ariekene business. The biorigging probed plastone and brick in a rill of skin.

  The Hosts filled the road, jostling each other with odd motion. A single Host had grace but en masse they were a herd, in slow stampede. I’d never seen so many. I could hear the slide of their armour, the tap-tapping of thousands of their feet. Zelles scuttled.

  As they came into the human reach the streetlamps and the colours of our displays made them a psychedelia. Rumpled women and men in nightclothes lined the walkways, so the Ariekei entered Embassytown with us either side as if to greet them, as if this were a parade. Cameras darted overhead, little busybodies.

  There were Hosts in all their sentient stages, from the newly conscious to those about to slip into mindlessness. Hundreds of fanwings fluttered, and I wanted to be above looking down at that, a camouflage of shuddering colours. They passed me, I followed them.

  Many Terre watching could understand Language, but of course none of us could speak it. Some couldn’t restrain asking in Anglo-Ubiq: “What are you doing?” “Where are you going?” We trailed the Ariekei north, climbing the incline toward the Embassy, on the roadways and verges, crabgrass and our debris. Constables had arrived. They waved their arms as if moving us on, as if they were protecting our aging walls. They said things that had no meaning at all: “Come on now!” or “Move away there!”

  Human children had come to stare. I saw them play Ambassador, dueting nonsense noises and nodding wisely as if the Ariekei were responding. The Hosts took us a coiled route, amassing onlookers, cats and altfoxes bolting before the aliens. We came past the ruins.

  Several Ambassadors—RanDolph, MagDa, EdGar, I saw—emerged from the dark, constables and Staff around them. They shouted greetings, but the Hosts didn’t pause or acknowledge them.