Embassytown

  “Does it matter?” she had said at last, and I felt scolded. It had been rude and adolescent to raise the question of her personality, her apparent consciousness, of whether it was for my benefit. It was a tradition that none of the few automs whose behaviour was human enough to prompt the question would answer it.

  She was my best friend, and somewhat well known, oddity that she was. When I met her I was certain I had seen her before. I couldn’t place it, at first; then when I realised what I thought the situation had been I asked her abruptly (as if I could startle her): “What did they want you there for? At Bren’s place, ages ago, when the Ambassadors recited my simile to me? That was you, wasn’t it? Remember?”

  “Avice,” she had said, gently reproving, and made her face shake as if disappointed. That was all I ever got from her on the matter and I didn’t push it.

  We huddled together by the indoor ivy and watched little cams flit around the room, recording. Decorative biorigging shed colours from carapaces.

  “Have you met them, then?” Ehrsul said. “The esteemed intake for whom we wait? I haven’t.”

  That surprised me. Ehrsul had no job, wasn’t under the obligation of any tithe, but as a computer she was valuable to Staff, and often acted for them. I would have said the same about me—that my inside-outside status had been useful to them—until I fell from favour. I’d have expected Ehrsul to be part of whatever discussions had been ongoing, but since the new Ambassador had arrived, apparently, the Staff had retreated into clique.

  “There’s tussling,” Ehrsul said. “That’s what I’ve heard.” People told Ehrsul things: perhaps it was because she wasn’t human, but was almost. I think she also tapped into the localnet, broke encryption on enough snips to be a good source of information to friends. “People are worried. Though I gather some have rather taken a shine . . . Watch MagDa. And now Wyatt’s been insisting on getting involved.”

  “Wyatt?”

  “He’s been citing old laws, trying to brief the Ambassador alone, thank you very much. That sort of thing.”

  Wyatt, the Bremen representative, had arrived with his small staff on the previous trade vessel, to relieve Chettenham, his predecessor. He was scheduled to leave in one more tour’s time. Bremen had established Embassytown somewhat more than two megahours ago. We were all juridically Bremeni: protectees. But the Ambassadors who governed formally in Bremen’s name were born here, of course, as were Staff and we who made up their canton. Wyatt, Chettenham and other attachés on their lengthy postings relied on Staff for trade information, for suggestions, for access to Hosts and tech. It was rare for them to issue orders other than “Carry on.” They were advisors to Staff, too, useful for gauging the politics in the capital. I was intrigued that Wyatt was now interpreting his remit in so muscular a fashion.

  This was the first time in living memory that an Ambassador had arrived from the out. Had the party not forced their hands—the ship was leaving and the ball couldn’t be delayed— I suspected the Staff would have tried to quarantine the new arrivals longer, and continued with whatever their intrigues were.

  “CalVin’s here,” Ehrsul warned quietly, her displayed face glancing over my shoulder. I did not look round. She looked at me and made a little what? face, telling me without words that she’d still like to know what had happened there, sometime. I shook my head.

  Yanna Southel, Embassytown’s senior research scientist, arrived, and with her an Ambassador. I whispered to Ehrsul, “Good, it’s EdGar. Time to schmooze. I’ll report back in a bit.” I made it slowly through the crowd into the Ambassador’s orbit. There in the middle of laughter and buffeted a little by those dancing, I raised my glass and made EdGar face me.

  “Ambassador,” I said. They smiled. “So,” I said. “Are we ready?”

  “Christ Pharos no,” said Ed or Gar. “You ask as if I should know what’s going on, Avice,” said the other. I inclined my head. EdGar and I had always enjoyed an exaggerated flirtation. They liked me; they were garrulous, gossips, always giving up as much as and a little more than they should. The dapper older men glanced side to side, raised eyebrows in theatrical alarm as if someone might swoop in and stop them speaking. That conspiratorialism was their shtick. They had probably been warned off me in the last few months, but they still treated me with a chatty courtesy I appreciated. I smiled but hesitated when I realised that despite their party faces, they seemed genuinely unhappy.

  “I wouldn’t have thought it were . . .” “. . . possible,” EdGar said. “There’s things going on here . . .” “. . . that we don’t understand.”

  “What about the rest of the Ambassadors?” I said.

  We looked around the room. Many of their colleagues had arrived now. I saw EsMé in iridescent dresses; ArnOld fingering the tight collars wedged uncomfortably below their links; JasMin and HelEn debating complexly, each Ambassador interrupting the other, each half of each Ambassador finishing their doppel’s words. So many Ambassadors in one place made for a dreamish feel. Socketed into their necks and variously ornamental, according to taste, diodes in their circuited links staccattoed through colours in simultaneous pairs.

  “Honestly?” said EdGar. “They’re all worried.” “To various degrees.” “Some of them think we’re . . .” “. . . exaggerating. RanDolph thinks it’ll all be good for us.” “To have a newcomer, to shake us up. But no one’s sanguine.”

  “Where’s JoaQuin? And where’s Wyatt?”

  “They’re bringing the new boy along. Together.” “Neither’s been letting the other out of their sight.”

  Staff were making space in front of the entrance to the hall, preparing for JoaQuin, the Chair of the Ambassadors, for Wyatt the Bremen attaché, and for the new Ambassador. There were people I didn’t recognise. I’d lost sight of the pilot, so couldn’t ask if they were crew, immigrants or temporaries.

  At most of these balls the newly arrived—permanent or single-tour—would be surrounded by locals. They wouldn’t lack company, sexual or conversational. Their clothes and accoutrements, their augmens, would be like grails. What ’ware they had would be pirated, and for weeks the localnet would be twittering with exotic new algorithms. This time, no one cared about anything but the new Ambassador.

  “What else arrived? Anything useful?” Ambassador JasMin was in earshot, and I made a point of asking them, rather than EdGar. JasMin didn’t like me so I spoke to them when I could to let them know they didn’t intimidate me. They didn’t answer and I walked, greeted Simmon, a security officer. We hadn’t been close for years, but we liked each other sincerely enough that there was little awkwardness, though I was present as a guest, and an out-of-favour one at that, while he was working. He shook my hand with his biorigged right limb, which he’d worn since a gun had burst on a target range and taken off his own flesh version.

  I went through the crowd, talked to friends, watching the glimmer of augmens interact, hearing snatches of immer slang and turning to the immersers who spoke them with a word or two in the same dialect, or a hand held in the fingerlock that told them what ship I’d last served on, to their delight. I might touch their glasses, and I’d go on.

  Mostly, like everyone else, I was watching for the new Ambassador.

  AND THEN they came, in a moment that could only have been an anticlimax. It was Wyatt who opened the doors, more careful and hesitant than usual. JoaQuin smiled beside him, and I admired how well they hid the anxiety they must have felt. Conversation hushed. I was holding my breath.

  There was some little commotion behind them, a moment of dispute between the figures who followed. The new Ambassador stepped forward past their guides, into Diplomacy Hall. That was a palpable moment.

  One of the two men was tall and thin, with hair receding— a blinking, shyly smiling, sallow man. The other was stocky, muscular and more than a hand shorter. He grinned. He was looking around. He ran his hand through his hair. He wore augmens in his blood: I could see the shine of them around him. His companion seemed
to have none. The shorter man had a Roman nose, the other a snub. Their skins were different colours, their eyes. They didn’t look like or at each other.

  They stood, the new Ambassador, smiling in their very different ways. They stood there mooncalf and quite impossible.

  Formerly, 1

  KILOHOURS BEFORE, as we prepared for our travel, Scile came to some arrangement with his employers-cum-supervisors. I never made much effort to understand his academic world. So far as I could gather, he had arranged a very extended sabbatical, and technically his residence in Embassytown was part of a project minutely funded by his university. They were paying him a peppercorn retainer and keeping his access accounts live, with a view to ultimately publishing Forked Tongues: The SocioPsychoLinguistics of the Ariekei.

  Researchers had come to Embassytown before, particularly Bremen scientists fascinated by the Hosts’ biological contrivings: there were one or two still there, waiting for relief. But there hadn’t been outsider linguists on Arieka in living memory, not since the pioneers who had striven to crack Language, nearly three and a half megahours before.

  “I can stand on their shoulders,” Scile told me. “They had to work out how it worked from scratch. Why we could understand the Ariekei but they couldn’t understand us. Now we know that.”

  While we prepared to arrive in Embassytown on what he called our honeymoon, Scile searched the libraries in Charo City. With my help he tried to tap into immerser-lore about the place and its inhabitants, and finally when we arrived he hunted in our own archives in Embassytown, but he found nothing systematic on his topic. That made him happy.

  “Why’s no one written on it before?” I asked him.

  “No one comes here,” he said. “It’s too far. It’s—no offence—stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Lord, none taken.”

  “And dangerous nowhere, as well. Plus Bremen red tape. And to be honest, none of it makes much sense, anyway.”

  “The language?”

  “Yes. Language.”

  Embassytown had its own linguists, but most, carta-denied if they even bothered to apply, were scholars in the abstract. They learnt and taught Old and New French, Mandarin, Panarabic, spoke them to each other as exercises like others played chess. Some learnt exot languages, to the extent that physiology allowed. The local Pannegetch forgot their native languages when they learnt our Anglo-Ubiq, but five Kedis languages and three Shur’asi dialects were spoken in Embassytown, four and all of which respectively we could approximate.

  Local linguists didn’t work on the language of the Hosts. Scile, though, was unaffected by our taboos.

  HE WASN’T FROM Bremen, nor from any of its outposts, nor from another nation on Dagostin. Scile was from an urban moon, Sebastapolis, which I’d vaguely heard of. He grew up very polyglot. I was never quite sure which language, if any, he considered his first. While we travelled I was envious of the blitheness, the sheer uninterest with which he ignored his birth home.

  Our route to Embassytown was roundabout. The ships we took were crewed by immersers from more places than I’d ever see. I knew the charts of Bremen’s crowded immer cognita, could once have told you the names of nations on many of its core worlds, and some of those I served with on my way home were from none of them. There were Terre from regions so far off that they teased, telling me the name of their world was Fata Morgana, or Fiddler’s Green.

  Had I ship-hopped in other directions, I could have gone to regions of immer and everyday where Bremen was the fable. People get lost in the overlapping sets of knownspace. Those who serve on exot vessels, who learn to withstand the strange strains of their propulsion—of swallowdrives, overlight foldings, bansheetech—go even farther with less predictable trajectories, and become even more lost. It’s been this way for megahours, since women and men found the immer and we becameHomo diaspora.

  Scile’s fascination with the Hosts’ language was always a bit of a titillation to me. I don’t know if, as an outsider not only to Embassytown but to Bremen space itself, he could appreciate the frisson he produced in me every time he said “Ariekei” instead of the respectful “Hosts,” every time he parsed their sentences and told me what they meant. I’m sure it’s some kind of irony or something that it was through my foreign husband’s researches that I learnt most of what I know about the language of the city in a ghetto of which I was born.

  ACL—ACCELERATED CONTACT LINGUISTICS—was, Scile told me, a speciality crossbred from pedagogics, receptivity, programming and cryptography. It was used by the scholarexplorers of Bremen’s pioneer ships to effect very fast communication with indigenes they encountered or which encountered them.

  In the logs of those early journeys, the excitement of the ACLers is moving. On continents, on worlds vivid and drab, they record first moments of understanding with menageries of exots. Tactile languages, bioluminescent words, all varieties of sounds that organisms can make. Dialects comprehensible only as palimpsests of references to everything already said, or in which adjectives are rude and verbs unholy. I’ve seen the trid diary of an ACLer barricaded in his cabin, whose vessel has been boarded by what we didn’t then know as Corscans—it was first contact. He’s afraid, as he should be, of the huge things battering at his door, but he’s recording his excitement at having just understood the tonal structures of their speech.

  When the ACLers and the crews came to Arieka, there started more than 250 kilohours of bewilderment. It wasn’t that the Host language is particularly difficult to understand, or changeable, or excessively various. There were startlingly few Hosts on Arieka, scattered around the one city, and all spoke the same language. With the linguists’ earware and drives it wasn’t hard to amass a database of sound-words (the newcomers thought of them as words, though where they divided one from the next of the Ariekei, might not recognise fissures). The scholars made pretty quick sense of syntax. Like all exot languages it had its share of astonishments. But there was nothing so alien that it trumped the ACLers or their machines.

  The Hosts were patient, seemed intrigued by and, insofar as anyone could tell through their polite opacity, welcoming to their guests. They had no access to immer, nor exotic drives or even sublux engines; they never left their atmosphere, but they were otherwise advanced. They manipulated life with astonishing finesse, and they seemed unsurprised that there was sentience elsewhere.

  The Hosts did not learn our Anglo-Ubiq. Did not seem to try. But within a few thousand hours, Terre linguists could understand much of what the Hosts said, and synthesised responses and questions in the one Ariekene language. The phonetic structure of the sentences they had their machines speak—the tonal shifts, the vowels and the rhythm of consonants— were precise, accurate to the very limits of testing.

  The Hosts listened, and did not understand a single sound.

  “HOW MANY OF YOU get away?” Scile asked me.

  “You make it sound like a prison-break,” I said.

  “Well, come on. As I recall, you’ve said to me more than once that you made it out. As I recall you may have told me that, ahem, you’d never go back.” He looked a sly look.

  “Touché,” I said. We were about to start on the last leg to Embassytown.

  “So how many of you?”

  “Not a whole lot. You mean immersers?”

  “I mean anyone.”

  I shrugged. “A couple of non-immersers must get cartas every so often. Not that many people bother applying, even if you do pass the tests.”

  “You in touch with any of your classmates?”

  “Classmates? You mean the immersers in my batch, who left with me? Hardly.” I made finger motions to indicate our dispersal. “Anyway. There were only three others. We weren’t close.” Even had the practicalities of miab-hauled letters not made it near impossible, I wouldn’t have tried and nor would they. A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn’t expecting any
of them to return.

  On that journey to Embassytown, Scile had had his sopor amended, spiked with gerons so he would age while under. It’s an affecting gesture, to ensure that the sleep of travel doesn’t keep you young while your working partner grows older.

  In fact he didn’t spend all his time under. With the help of medicines and augmens, he spent a little of the journey awake and studying, where immer allowed, breaking off to retch or fend off panic with chemical prophylactics as necessary. “Listen to this,” he read to me. We were at the table, passing through very calm immer shallows. In deference to his always-sickness I was eating dried-up fruit, a nearly odourless food. “ ‘You are of course aware that every Man has two mouths or voices.’ In this”—he prodded what he was reading—“they have sex by singing to each other.” It was some antique book about a flat land.

  “What’s the point of that nonsense?” I said.

  “I’m looking for epigraphs,” he said. He tried other old stories. Looking for invented cousins to the Hosts, he showed me descriptions of Chorians and Tucans, Ithorians, Wess’har, invented double-tongued beasts. I couldn’t share his enthusiasms for these grotesques.

  “I could have Proverbs 5:4,” he said, staring at his screen. I didn’t ask for an explanation: we used to joust like that sometimes. Instead I uploaded a Bible when I was alone, to find: “But in the end she’s bitter as wormwood, sharp as a sword with two mouths.”

  The Hosts aren’t the only polyvocal exots. Apparently there are races who emit two, three or countless sounds simultaneously, to talk. The Hosts, the Ariekei, are comparatively simple. Their speech is an intertwining of two voices only, too complexly various to be pegged as “bass” or “treble.” Two sounds—they can’t speak either voice singly—inextricable by the chance co-evolution of a vocalising ingestion mouth and what was once probably a specialised organ of alarm.

  The first ACLers listened and recorded and understood them. “Today we heard them talk about a new building,” the bewildered figures on the old trid told Scile and me. “Today they were discussing their bio-work.” “Today they were listing the names of stars.”