by Embassytown
I recall episodes very well, but episodes, not a timeline. The most relevant times, the definitional ones. The rest of it’s disorganised in my head, and mostly I don’t mind. Here: one other time in my childhood, I was in the company of Hosts. One morning in the third monthling of July I was called to a meeting.
It was Dad Shemmi they sent to fetch me. He squeezed my shoulder as he pointed me in to one of the nursery’s scruffy paperwork-and-datspace-filled offices. It was Mum Solfer’s room, and I’d not been in it before. Mostly Terretech, though a boxy biorigged bin was quietly eating her rubbish. Solfer was older, kind, distracted, knew me by name, which she did not all my shiftsiblings. She beckoned me, obviously uneasy. She stood, glanced around as if for a sofa, which the room was without, sat again. Behind her desk with her—not unamusing, in retrospect, it was smallish and too cramped for them—was Dad Renshaw, a relatively new, thoughtful and teacherly shiftfather, who smiled at me; and to my astonishment the third person waiting for me was Bren.
It had been almost a year, nearly 25Kh, since Yohn’s accident, since I or any of us had returned to that house. I’d grown, of course, and more than many of my siblings, but as soon as I entered Bren smiled recognition. He looked unchanged. They might have been the same clothes he had on as before.
Mum shifted. Though she sat with the others on one side of the desk while I, on the stiffly adult chair to which she directed me, was on the other, the way she moved her eyebrows at me I felt suddenly that she and I were together in whatever this oddness was.
I’d be paid for this, she said (an uploading of no little size, it turned out); it was quite safe; it was an honour. She didn’t make very much sense. Dad Renshaw gently interrupted her. He turned to Bren and motioned for him to speak.
“You’re needed,” Bren said to me. “That’s all this is.” He opened his hands palm up, as if their emptiness were evidence of something. “The Hosts need you and again for some reason it’s ended up going through me. They’re trying to prepare something. They’re having a debate. A few of them are convinced they can make their point clearly by … by comparison.” He watched to see if I followed. “They’ve … sort of thought of one. But the events it describes haven’t happened. Do you understand what that means? They want to make it speakable. So they need to organise it. Quite precisely. It involves a human girl.” He smiled. “You see why I asked for you.” I suppose he didn’t know any other children.
Bren smiled at the way my mouth was moving. “You … want me to … perform a simile?” I said at last.
“It’s an honour!” Dad Renshaw said.
“It is an honour,” Bren said. “I can see you know that. ‘Perform’?” He wagged his head in a sort of well, yes and no way. “I won’t tell you lies. It’ll hurt. And it won’t be nice. But I promise you’ll be alright. I promise.” He leaned toward me. “There’ll be money in it for you, like your Mum was saying. And. Also. You’ll have the thanks of the Staff. And the Ambassadors.” Renshaw glanced up. I wasn’t so young as to not know what that gratitude was worth. I’d an idea of what I hoped to do when I was old enough, by then, and the goodwill of Staff was something I wanted very much.
I also said yes to the request because I thought it would take me into the Host city. It did not. The Hosts came to us, to a part of town to which I’d hardly ever been. I was taken there in a corvid—my first flight, but I was too nervous to enjoy it—escorted not by constables but Embassy SecStaff, their bodies subtly gnarled with augmens and tecs.
Bren escorted me, with no one else, no shiftparents, though he had no official role in Embassytown. (I didn’t know that then.) That was a time, though, before he withdrew from the last of such informal Staff-like roles. He tried to be kind to me. I remember we skirted Embassytown’s edges and I saw for the first time the scale of the enormous throats that delivered biorigging and supplies to us. They flexed, wet and warm ends of siphons extending kilometres beyond our boundaries. I saw other craft over the city: some biorigged, some old Terretech, some chimerical.
We came down in a neglected quarter that no one had been bothered to take off-grid. Though it was almost empty its streets were lit by lifelong neon and trid spectres dancing in midair, announcing restaurants long-since closed. In the ruins of one such, Hosts were waiting. Their simile, I had been warned, required me to be alone with them, so Bren gave me into their authority.
He shook his head at me as he did, as if we were agreeing that something was a little absurd. He whispered that it wouldn’t be long, and that he would be waiting.
What occurred in that crumbling once-dining room wasn’t by any means the worst thing I’ve ever suffered, or the most painful, or the most disgusting. It was quite bearable. It was, however, the least comprehensible event that had or has ever happened to me. I was surprised how much that upset me.
For a long time the Hosts didn’t pay attention to me, but performed precise mimes. They raised their giftwings, they stepped forward and back. I could smell their sweet smell. I was frightened. I’d been prepared: it was imperative for the sake of the simile that I act my part perfectly. They spoke. I understood only the very basics of what I heard, could pick out an occasional word. I listened for the overlapping whisper I’d been told meant she, and when I heard it I came forward and did what they wanted.
I know now to call what I did then disassociating. I watched it all, myself included. I was impatient for it to finish; I felt nothing growing, no special connection between me and the Hosts. I was only watching. While we performed the actions that were necessary, that would allow them to speak their analogy, I thought of Bren. He could of course no longer speak to the Hosts. What was happening had been organised by the Embassy, and I supposed Bren’s erstwhile colleagues, the Ambassadors, must have been glad for him to help organise it. I wonder if they were giving him something to do.
After I was done, in the youthmall, my friends demanded all details. We were roughnecks like most Embassytowner children are. “You were with the Hosts? That’s import, Avvy! Swear? Say it like a Host?”
“Say it like a Host,” I said, appropriately solemn for the oath.
“No way. What did they do?” I showed my bruises. I both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Eventually I enjoyed the telling and embellishing of it. It gave me status for days.
Other consequences were more important. Two days later, Dad Renshaw escorted me to Bren’s house. It was the first time I’d been there since Yohn’s accident. Bren smiled and welcomed me, and there within I met my first Ambassadors.
Their clothes were the most beautiful I’d seen. Their links glinted, the lights on them stuttering in time to the fields they generated. I was cowed. There were three of them, and the room was crowded. The more so as, behind them, moving side to side, whispering to Bren or one or other Ambassador, was an autom, computer in segmented body, the woman’s face it gave itself animated as it spoke. I could see the Ambassadors trying to be warm to me, a child, as Bren had tried, without having any practice at it.
An older woman said, “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” in an amazing, grand voice. “Come in. Sit. We wanted to thank you. We think you should hear how you’ve been canonised.”
The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time. “It’ll be shortened with use,” Bren told me. “Soon they’ll be saying you’re a girl ate what was given her.”
“What does it mean, sirs, ma’ams?”
They shook their heads, they moued. “It’s not really important, Avice,” one of them said. She whispered to the computer and I saw the created face nod. “And it wouldn’t be accurate anyway.” I asked again with another formulation, but they would say nothing more about it. They kept congratulating me on being in Language.
Twice during the re
st of my adolescence I heard myself, my simile, spoken: once by an Ambassador, once by a Host. Years, thousands of hours after I acted it, I finally had it sort-of explained to me. It was a crude rendering, of course, but it is I think more or less an expression intended to invoke surprise and irony, a kind of resentful fatalism.
I didn’t speak to Bren again the whole rest of my childhood and youth, but I found out he visited my shiftparents at least one other time. I’m sure it was my help with the simile, and Bren’s vague patronage, that helped get me past the exam board. I worked hard but was never an intellectual. I had what was needed for immersion, but no more than several others did, and less than some who didn’t pass. Very few cartas were granted, to civilians, or those of us with the aptitudes to traverse the immer out of sopor. There was no obvious reason that a few months later, after those tests, even with my facilities acknowledged, I should have been given, as I was, rights to de-world, into the out.
0.3
Each school year, the second monthling of December was given over to assessments. Most investigated what we’d learned from our lessons; a few others checked more recherché abilities. Not many of us scored particularly highly in these latter, in the various flairs prized elsewhere, in the out. In Embassytown we started from the wrong stock, we were told: we had the wrong mutagens, the wrong equipment; a lack of aspiration. Many children didn’t even sit the more arcane exams, but I was encouraged to. Which I suppose means my teachers and shiftparents had seen something in me.
I did perfectly fine in most things; well in rhetoric and some performative elements of literature, which pleased me, and in readings of poetry. But what I stood out in, it transpired, without knowing what it was I was doing, were certain activities the purposes of which I couldn’t divine. I stared at a query-screen of bizarre plasmings. I had to react to them in various ways. It took about an hour and it was well-designed, like a game, so I wasn’t bored. I proceeded to other tasks, none testing knowledge, but reactions, intuitions, inner-ear control, nervousness. What they gauged was potential skill at immersing.
The woman who ran the sessions, young and chic in smart clothes borrowed, bartered or begged from one of the Bremeni staff, in fashion in the out, went over my results with me, and told me what they meant. I could see she was not unimpressed. She stressed to me, not cruelly but to avoid any later upset, that this concluded nothing and was just stage one of many. But I knew as she explained this that I would become an immerser, and I did. I’d only started to feel the smallness of Embassytown by then, to grumble in claustrophobia, but with her readings came impatience.
I finagled, when I was old enough, invitations to Arrival Balls, and hobnobbed with women and men from the out. I enjoyed and envied the seeming insouciance with which they mentioned countries on other planets.
It was only kilohours or years later that I really understood how not-inevitable my trajectory had been. That many students with more aptitude than I hadn’t succeeded; that I truly might have failed to leave. My story was the cliché, but theirs was by far the more common, the more true. That contingency had made me feel sick, then, as if I might fail still, even though I was out.
Even people who’ve never immersed think they know—more or less, they might grant—what the immer is. They don’t. I had this argument once with Scile. It was the second conversation we ever had (the first was about language). He started in with his opinions, and I told him I wasn’t interested in hearing what the landstuck might think about immer. We lay in bed and he teased me as I went on about his ignorance.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “You don’t even believe what you’re saying; you’re too smart for this. You’re just spouting immerser bullshit. I could do this stuff in my sleep. ‘No one understands it like us, not the scientists, not the politicians, not the bloody public!’ It’s your favourite story, this. Keeps everyone out.”
He made me laugh with his impression. Still, I told him, still: the immer was indescribable. But he wouldn’t let me have that either. “You’re fooling no one with this stuff. You think I haven’t listened to how you talk? I know, I know, you’re not one for the gab, you’re just a floaker, blah blah. As if you don’t read your poetry, as if you take language for granted.” He shook his head. “Anyway, you’ll do me out a job with talk like that. ‘It’s beyond words,’ indeed. There’s no such thing.”
I put my hand over his mouth. That was just how it was, I told him. “Now, granted,” he continued through my fingers, performing the same teacherly tone, now muffled, “words can’t actually be referents, that I grant you, there’s the tragedy of language, but our asymptotic efforts at deploying them aren’t nothing, either.” Hush up, you, I told him. It’s all true, I said, I say it like a Host. “Well then,” he said, “I withdraw, in the face of truth.”
I’d studied the immer a long time, but my first moment of immersion had been as impossible to describe as I insisted. With the handful of other carta-passed new crew and emigrants, and Bremeni Embassy Staff who’d finished their commissions, I’d come by ketch to my vessel. My first commission was with the Wasp of Kolkata. It was quasi-autonomous, a cityship, immersing under the flag of itself, subcontracted by Dagostin for this run. I remember I stood with all the other greenhorns in the crow’s nest, Arieka a wall across the sky through which we moved, with beautiful care, toward our immersion point. Somewhere beneath the world’s static-seeming cloud was Embassytown.
The steersperson took us close to Wreck. It was hard to see. It looked at first like lines drawn across space, then was briefly, shabbily corporeal. It ebbed and flowed in solidity. It was many hundreds of metres across. It rotated, all its extrusions moving, each on its own schedule, its coagulated-teardrops-and-girder-filigree shape spinning complexly.
Wreck’s architecture was roughly similar to Wasp’s, but it was antiquated, and it seemed many times our dimensions. It was like an original of which we were a scale model, until abruptly it altered its planes and became small or far off. Occasionally it wasn’t there, and sometimes only just.
Officers, augmens glimmering under their skins, reminded us first-timers what it was we were about to do, of the dangers of the immer. This, Wreck, showed that and why Arieka was an outpost, so hard to reach, so underdeveloped, satelliteless after that first catastrophe.
I would have been professional. Yes I was about to immerse for the first time, but I would have done anything I was ordered and I think I’d have done it well. But the officers remembered what it was like to be a rookie, and they had us, the handful of new immersers, at a viewing place. Where we could react as we had to, the skills we’d practiced never a guarantee that the first time wouldn’t sicken you. Where we could take a moment with our awe and experience it however we experienced it. There are currents and storm fronts in the immer. There are in the immer stretches it takes tremendous skill and time to cross. Those were among the techniques I now knew, along with the somatic control, the mantric thoughtfulness and instrumentalised matter-of-factness that made me an immerser, allowed immersers to stay conscious and intentional when we immersed.
On a map, it’s not so many billions of kilometres from Dagostin or other hubs. But those Euclidean star charts are used only by cosmologists, by some exoterres whose physics we can’t work, by religious nomads adrift at excruciating sublux pace. I was scandalised to first see them—maps were discouraged on Embassytown—and anyway such charts are irrelevant to travellers like me.
Look instead at a map of the immer. Such a big and tidal quiddity. Pull it up, rotate it, check its projections. Examine that light phantom every way you can, and even allowing that it’s a flat or trid rendering of a topos that rebels against our accounting, the situation is visibly different.
The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where we live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on. Here in the
everyday, in light-decades and petametres, Dagostin is vastly more distant from Tarsk and Hodgson’s than from Arieka. But in the immer, Dagostin to Tarsk is a few hundred hours on a prevailing wind; Hodgson’s is in the centre of sedate and crowded deeps; and Arieka is very far from anything.
It’s beyond a convulsion where violent streams of immer roll against each other, where there are shallows, dangerous juts and matterbanks of everyday space in the always. It sits alone at the edge of known immer, so far as the immer can be known. Without expertise and bravery, and the skill of the immersers, no one could get to my world.
The stringency of the final exams I’d sat makes sense when you see those charts. Raw aptitude was hardly enough. Certainly there were politics of exclusion, too: of course Bremen wanted to keep careful control of us Embassytowners; but only the most skilled crew could safely come to Arieka in any case, or could leave it. Some of us were socketed to link us to ship routines, and immerware and augmens helped; but none of that was enough to make an immerser.
The way the officers explained it made it seem as if the ruins of the Pionier, which I had to stop calling Wreck now it was no longer a star to me but a coffin for colleagues, were a warning against carelessness. As a parable that was unfair. The Pionier had not been so horribly beached between states by officers or crew underestimating the immer: it was precisely care and respectful exploration that had destroyed it. Like other vessels across various tracta cognita in the early hours of it all, it had been lured. By what it had thought a message, an invitation.
When immernauts first breached the meniscus of everyday space, among the many phenomena that had astounded them was the fact that, even on their crude instruments, they had received signals from somewhere in the ur-space. Regular and resonant, clear evidence of sentience. They had tried to go to the sources. For a long time they’d thought it was lack of skill, neophyte immersion, that kept bringing their ships to disaster on those searches. Again and again they wrecked, bursting ruinously half-out of the immer into the corporeal manchmal.
