Embassytown

by China Miéville

  “ ‘Something.’ I can tell words are your business. Anyway we’re going to pretend that I didn’t hear you. Why would I inflict this little place . . .”

  “Oh stop it, really.” He smiled with only a little prickle in his voice. “You got out, yes, I know. You don’t mind it here half as much as you pretend to, Avice. You don’t like me that much, to come here if it was purgatory for you.” He smiled again. “Why would you mind it, anyway?”

  “You’re forgetting something. This isn’t the out. In Bremen they consider most of what we do here—biorigging aside, and that we get out of the good graces of you-know-who—thuggish field medicine. And that includes sex-tech. You do remember how kids get made? You and I don’t exactly . . .”

  He laughed. “Point,” he said. He took my hand. “Compatible everywhere but between sheets.”

  “Who said I wanted to do it between sheets?” I said. It was a joke, not a seduction.

  It all feels like prelude, now I reflect on it. The first time I saw exots of species I’d not grown up with was in a rowdy town on a tiny world we called Sebzi. I was introduced to a group of hive-things. I’ve no idea what they were, or from where their race originated. I’ve seen none of their kind since. One came forward on a pseudopod, leaned its hourglass body toward me and from a tiny snag-toothed ventricle said, in perfect Anglo-Ubiq, “Ms. Cho. It’s a pleasure.”

  Scile reacted to Kedis and Shur’asi and Pannegetch, I don’t doubt, with more aplomb than I had that time. He gave talks in Embassytown’s east, about his work and travels (I was impressed by how he was able to tell the truth but make his life sound coherent, precisely arced). A Kedis troika approached afterwards, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.

  He introduced himself to the Shur’asi shopkeeper we knew as Gusty—Scile ostentatiously and with pleasure told me its actual namestring—and cultivated a brief friendship. People were charmed to see them about town, Scile with a companionable arm around Gusty’s main trunk, the Shur’asi’s cilia scuttling it at Scile’s pace. They’d swap stories. “You go on about the immer,” Gusty would say. “Try travelling by whorl-drive. Blimey, that was a journey.” I was never able to decide if his mind really was as like ours as the shape of his anecdotes suggested. Certainly he performed our small talk well, even once mimicking the poor Anglo-Ubiq of a Kedis neighbour, in a complicated joke.

  Of course Scile wanted to meet the Ariekei. It was the Ariekei he studied nightly, when he stopped being social. It was they who eluded him.

  “I still can’t find out almost anything about them,” he said. “What they’re like, what they think, what they do, how they work. Even stuff written by Ambassadors describing their work, their, you know, their interactions with the Ariekei, it’s all . . . incredibly empty.” He looked at me as if he wanted something. “They know what to do,” he said, “but not what it is they’re doing.”

  It took me moments to make sense of his complaint. “It’s not the Ambassadors’ job to understand the Hosts,” I said.

  “So whose is it?”

  “It’s no one’s job to understand them.” I think that was when I first really saw the gap between us.

  By now we knew Gharda and Kayliegh and others, Staff and those close to them. I had become friends with Ehrsul. She teased me about my lack of profession (she, unlike most Embassytowners, had been au fait with the term “floaker” before I introduced it), and I teased her right back about the same thing. As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she’d never become anyone else’s property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.

  “It’s just Turingware,” Scile said when she wasn’t there, though he allowed that it was better such than he’d seen before. He was amused by how we related to her. I didn’t like his attitude, but he was as polite to her as if he did think her a person, so I didn’t pick a fight with him about it. The only real interest he ever showed in Ehrsul was when it occurred to him that, because she did not breathe, she would be able to go into the city. I told him the truth: that she said to me when I asked her about it that she never did or would, that I could not say why, and, given how she’d said it, I wasn’t minded to ask.

  She was sometimes asked to tinker with Embassytown’s artminds and automa, which would bring her into close contact with Staff: we were often at the same official soirées. I was there because I had uses, too. I’d been out more recently than any of my superiors: only a few Staff had ever left for official business to Bremen and returned. I was a source, could tell them about the recent politics and culture in Charo City.

  When I’d first left Embassytown, Dad Renshaw had taken me to one side—literally, he’d steered me to the edge of the room in which I was having a farewell party. I’d waited for fatherly homilies, spurious rumours about life in the out, but what he had told me was that if I ever came back, Embassytown would be very interested in information on the state of things in Bremen. It was so polite and matter-of-fact it took me a while to assure myself I’d been asked to spy. I was only amused, was all, at the unlikeliness. Then I was ruefully amused again when, thousands of hours later, back in Embassytown, I realised I was making myself useful just as I’d been asked to.

  Scile and I would have been objects of interest whatever we did—he, an intense and fascinated outsider, was a curio; I, part of Language, and a returned immerser, a minor celebrity. But purveying facts about Bremen as I did, I, a commoner, and my commoner husband were welcomed into Staff circles even more smoothly than we would otherwise have been. Our invitations continued after Embassytown’s little media stopped running interviews with and stories about the prodigal immerser.

  They approached me very soon after I returned. Not Ambassadors, of course, but some viziers and high-level muck-a-mucks, requesting my presence at a meeting where they said things so vague I didn’t parse their purpose for a minute, until abruptly I remembered Dad Renshaw’s intercession, and understood that the muted questions about some of the trends in Bremen and associated powers and possible attitudes to dependencies and their aspirations were requests for political intelligence. And that they were offering payment.

  That last seemed silly. I took no money for telling them what little I could. I waved into silence someone’s diplomatic explanations of their political concerns: it didn’t matter. I showed them newspipes, downloads, gave them perhaps a tiny sense of the balance of power in Bremen’s ruling Cosmopolitan Democratic party. Bremen’s wars, interventions and exigencies had never fascinated me, but perhaps to those more focused on them, what I told them might give insights into recent vicissitudes. Honestly I doubt any of it was stuff their artminds and analysts wouldn’t have predicted or guessed.

  It was hardly high espionage drama. A few days later I was introduced to Wyatt, then Bremen’s new man in Embassytown, whom my Staff interlocutors had mentioned to me in obliquely warning fashion. He immediately teased me about that earlier meeting. He asked if I had a camera in his bedroom, or something like that. I laughed. I liked it when we crossed paths. He gave me a personal number.

  It was in circles such as this, Embassytown society, that I met Ambassador CalVin and became their lover. One of the things they did for me was give Scile an opportunity to meet the Hosts.

  CalVin were tall, grey-skinned men, a little older than me, with a certain playfulness, and the charming arrogance of the best Ambassadors. They invited me, and, at my request, Scile, to functions, and would come in turn into the town with us, where an Ambassador walking the streets without a Staff retinue was uncommon enough to attract attention.

  “Ambassador,” Scile worked up courage to ask them, at first cautiously, “I have a question about your . . . exchanges with the Hosts.” And then into some minutely s
pecific, arcane enquiry. CalVin, earning at that time my gratitude, were patient, though their answers were doubtless disappointing.

  In CalVin’s company I saw, heard and intuited details about aspects of Embassytown life I never otherwise would have. I picked up on my lovers’ momentary references, hints and asides. They wouldn’t always answer me when I pressed them—they might say something about colleagues gone astray, or Ariekene factions, and then refuse to elaborate—but I learnt even just from overhearing.

  I asked them about Bren. “I don’t see him often,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to come to gatherings.”

  “I’d forgotten you’ve a connection with him,” CalVin said, both eyeing me, though in slightly different ways. “No, Bren’s rather self-exiled. Not that he’d ever leave, you understand.” “That wouldn’t fit with what he thinks he is, to the rest of us.” “And he had the chance. He could have left.” “After he was cleaved.” “Instead . . .” They laughed. “He’s sort of our licensed misery.” “He knows most of what goes on. And further afield, too—he knows things he really shouldn’t.” “You couldn’t call him loyal. But he’s useful.” “But you really couldn’t call him loyal, anymore, if he ever was.” Scile listened avidly to them.

  “What’s it like?” Scile asked me. “I mean, I’ve been with two people before and I’m sure you have too, but I don’t think that’s—”

  “No, Pharoi, no. Lord, you’re terrible. It’s not the same at all.” I was adamant at the time: now I have doubts.

  “Do they both concentrate on you?” he said. We giggled, he at the silly prurience, me at what felt almost like blasphemy.

  “No, it’s all very egalitarian. Cal, me and Vin, all in it together. Honestly, Scile, it’s not like I’m the only person an Ambassador’s ever—”

  “You’re the only one I’ve got access to, though.” By then I wasn’t sure that was true. “I thought homosex isn’t approved of,” he said.

  “Now you’re just showing off,” I said. “That’s not what they do together. Them or any of the Ambassadors. You know that. It’s . . . masturbation.” That was the common if scandalous description, and it made me feel like a kid to say it. “Imagine what it’s like when two Ambassadors get together.”

  Scile spent hours, many hours, listening to recordings of Ariekei speaking, watching trids and flats of encounters between them and the Ambassadors. I watched him mouth things to himself and write illegible notes, one-handedly input into his datspace. He learnt fast. That was no surprise to me. When at last CalVin invited us to an event at which the Hosts would be present, Scile understood Language pretty much perfectly.

  It was to be one of the discussions Ambassadors held with Hosts every few weeks. Interworld trade might come only every few thousand hours, but it was backed by and built on exhaustive, careful negotiation. With the arrival of each immership, terms agreed between Staff and Hosts (with the imprimatur of Bremen’s representative) were communicated, the vessel would leave with those details and Ariekene goods and tech, returning on its next round with whatever we had promised the Ariekei in return. They were patient.

  “There’s a reception,” one of CalVin told us. “Would you like to come?”

  We were not allowed into the actual negotiations, of course. Scile regretted this. “Why do you care?” I said. “It’ll be dull as hell. Trade talks? Really? How much of this, what do you want of that . . .”

  “I want to know, that’s exactly it. What is it they want? Do you even know what we exchange with them?”

  “Expertise, mostly. For AI and artminds and things. That they can’t make . . .”

  “I know, because of Language. But I’d love to hear how they relate to that tech, when they get hold of it.”

  An Ariekes couldn’t type into an artmind, of course: writing was incomprehensible to them. Oral input was no better: as far as any exopsych specialists could discern, the Hosts couldn’t ken interacting with a machine. The computer would speak back to them in what we heard as flawless vernacular, but to the Ariekei, with no sentience behind them, those words were just noises.

  So our designers had created computers that were eavesdroppers. We built them from the simple loudhailer- and telephone-animals the Ariekei biorigged. They could—though no one made sense of how—understand each other’s voices (and those of our Ambassadors) through speakers or even recorded: so long as what was or had been said had that sentience, a genuine mind speaking it, neither distance nor time degraded its compre-hensibility, its meaningness, what Scile had provocatively called the “soul”. We took those little mediators and upgraded, altered and sometimes ultimately replaced them with communication tech the Hosts could not have created. We routed their voices through artminds.

  The programs were designed to work between interlocutors, to create their own instructions by insinuation. The Ariekei spoke to each other as they always had, and if their conversations took certain theoretical turns, the ’ware would listen in, make calculations, alter production, perform automated tasks. Just what the Ariekei understood to be occurring was of course beyond me, but they knew, I was told, that we had given them something—they paid for it, after all.

  “And what do we get?” Scile said.

  CalVin indicated a chandelier above us, tugging itself with slow grace into the darker areas of the room, extruding and reabsorbing tendril-end lights. “Biorigged stuff, of course,” they said. “You know that.” “You’ve seen it in Bremen, too. A lot of our food. And some gems and bits and pieces.” Like most Embassytowners I was rather vague on the details of the barters they were describing. “And gold.”

  They were on duty, but CalVin hosted well, that first party. Scile stood by the table of delicacies, human and Ariekene, waiting. “Fraternising with the locals, at last?” Ehrsul had come quietly up behind me. She spoke suddenly, made me start and laugh.

  “He’s so well behaved,” I said, nodding in Scile’s direction.

  “Patient,” she said. “But then, you don’t have to be, you’ve already met the Hosts.”

  She was only passing through, she said, supposedly on some upgrading errand. She swivelled and rolled past Scile with a whispered word, and he greeted her and watched her go. “You know what CalVin told me?” he said quietly to me. He gestured with his glass towards Ehrsul’s retreating form. “She can speak it. It sounds flawless. All the Ambassadors know exactly what she’s saying. But if she tries it with the Hosts, they don’t get a word.” He met my eyes. “She’s not really speaking Language at all.”

  He continued his effort to cover his impatience—he was, at least, not rude about it. CalVin made sure to introduce him to those Staff and Ambassadors present he didn’t know. And of course, finally, when they arrived, with that usual shift in the room, to the Hosts.

  It was the first time for thousands of hours I’d seen them so close. There were four. Three were in prime, in their third instar, and their tall outlines quivered with whiskers. The last was in finis—its dotage. Its abdomen was massive and pendulous and its limbs spindled. It walked firmly but was mindless. Its siblings had brought it as a kind of charity. It followed them under instinct, by sight and chemical trail. It was an evolutionary strategy on Arieka shared by more than one phylum that an animal’s last incarnation was as a food store for the young. They could gnaw at the nutritional swathings of its abdomen for days without killing it. Our Hosts had done so, in their early history, but they had given the practice up generations before as, we inferred, a barbarism. They mourned when their fellows entered their penultimate form, when their minds died, and respectfully shepherded the ambulatory corpses till they fell apart.

  The undead thing bumped the table, upsetting wine and canapés, and HenRy, LoGan, CalVin and the other Ambassadors laughed politely as if at a joke.

  “Please,” CalVin said, and brought Scile forward, towards the honoured indigens. I could not read Scile’s face. “Scile Cho Baradjian, this is Speaker—” and then in Cut and Turn at once they said the lead H
ost’s name.

  It looked down at us from its jutting coralline extrusion, each random bud studded with an eye.

  “,” CalVin said, together. Only Ambassadors could speak Host names.

  Waving on a stalk-throat by its neck, its Cut-mouth terribly like human lips, the Host muttered: and at the level of our chests, where its body swelled, its Turn-mouth opened and coughed, emitting little rounded vowel sounds, tao dao thao.

  It wore the organs of tiny animals coiled about its neck. Something wound between its stiletto feet, a companion animal. One accompanied all the Ariekei but the brain-dead old-timer. It was the size of a baby, a grub-thing with stump legs and filigree antennae, its back punctuated with holes, some ringed with inlaid metal. Its locomotion was between a scamper and a convulsion. It was a zelle, a biorigged battery-beast, into which leads and wires could be slotted, and out of which, depending on what its owner fed it, different power would flow. The Ariekene city was full of such sources.

  stepped forward on four legs a little like a spider’s, long, too-jointed, dark-haired, and extended its wings: from its back its auditory fanwing, in many colours; from its front, from below its larger mouth, its limb of interaction and manipulation, its giftwing.

  We would like to shake your giftwing with our hands, CalVin said in Language, and Scile, his face still closed to me, only pursing his lips a tiny bit, held out his hand. The Host clasped my husband’s hand in a greeting that would have made no sense to it, and then it clasped mine.

  So Scile saw Language spoken. He listened. He asked quick questions of CalVin between their exchanges with the Host, which they, to my surprise, put up with.

  “What? Is he insinuating that you couldn’t agree . . . ?”

  “No, it’s . . .” “. . . more complicated than that.” “Hold on.”

  Then CalVin would speak together. “,” I heard them say at one point; they were saying please.

  “I got almost all of it,” Scile told me afterwards. He was very excited. “They shift tenses,” he said. “When they mentioned the negotiations they—the Ariekei, I mean—were in present discontinuous, but then they shifted into the elided past-present. That’s for, uh . . .” I knew what it was for, I assured him. He’d told me already. How could you not smile at him? I’d listened to him with affection, if not always with interest, over hundreds of hours.