Embassytown

by China Miéville

  “Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible, Avice?” he said. “Im, poss, ih, bul. It makes no sense. They don’t have polysemy. Words don’t signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language? How do their numbers work? It makes no sense. And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There’s not one mind behind Language when they speak it . . .”

  “They’re not twins, love,” I said.

  “Whatever. You’re right. Clones. Doppels. The Ariekei think they’re hearing one mind, but they’re not.” I raised one eyebrow and he said, “No they’re not. It’s like we can only talk to them because of a mutual misunderstanding. What we call their words aren’t words: they don’t, you know, signify. And what they call our minds aren’t minds at all.” He didn’t laugh when I did. “You have to wonder,” he said. “Don’t you? What it is they do—Staff I mean—to make two people think they’re one.”

  “Yeah but they’re not two,” I said. “That’s the point about Ambassadors. That’s where your whole theory falls down.”

  “But they could have been. Should have been. So what did they do?”

  Unlike monozygots’, even doppels’ fingerprints were moulded and made identical. On principle. Every evening and morning Ambassadors corrected. Artmind microsurgery found whatever tiny marks and abrasions each half of each pair had uniquely picked up over the preceding day or night, and if they couldn’t be eradicated, they were replicated in the untouched half. Scile meant that, and more. He wanted to see the children: young doppels in the crèche. He could still scandalise me with stuff like that. Not that such requests got responses. He wanted to watch how they were raised.

  STAFF AND AMBASSADORS went into the city regularly, but only the young or gauche would ask for details. As naughty children we hacked communications and found pictures and reports we thought were secret (that of course weren’t very), that gave us insinuations of what occurred.

  “Sometimes,” CalVin told us, “they call us in for what we call moots. They chant—not words, or words we don’t know.” “And when they’re done, one by one we take a turn, singing to them.”

  “What’s it for?” I asked, and simultaneously CalVin replied, “We don’t know,” and smiled.

  Everyone was in his or her best again, for another event. Very different from any previous. I wore a dress studded with oxblood jade. Scile wore a tuxedo and white rose. The flyer that came for us was a biorigged mongrel, Ariekene breed-techniques but its quasi-living interior tailored to Terre needs, and piloted by our artminds.

  It had been a huge shock to us when CalVin had told us we could accompany them. This wasn’t a party in the Embassy. We were going into the Host city, to a Festival of Lies.

  I’d spent thousands of hours in the immer. I’d been to ports on tens of countries on tens of worlds, had even experienced that travellers’ shock we floakers called the retour, when after preparations for the alterity of a new world, one walks a quite inhuman capital and stares at intricate indigens, and starts to suspect that one has been there before. Still, the night Scile and I dressed to go into the city, I was nervous as I had not been since I left Arieka.

  I watched through boat windows as we flew over the ivy and roofs of my little ghetto city. I breathed out when we crossed over the zone where the architecture went from the brick and ivied wood of my youth to the polymers and biorigged flesh of the Hosts, from alley-tangles to street-analogues of other topographies. Building-things were coming down and being replaced. Construction sites like combined slaughterhouses, puppy farms and quarries.

  There were about twenty of us: five Ambassadors, a handful of Staff, and we two. Scile and I smiled at each other through our masks and breathed in the exhalations of our little portable aeoli. Quickly, very quickly, we were touched down on a roof, and followed our companions out and down and into an edifice, in the city.

  A complex, many-chambered place the angles of which astonished me. Everyone who had ever talked about my poise would have laughed to see me literally stagger backwards in that room. Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs. A kind Staff member steered Scile and me. Our party walked without Ariekene chaperone. I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart. I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them. More than I’d ever seen.

  The rooms were alive, cells rainbowing as we entered. Ariekei were speaking in turn, and the Ambassadors sung in alien politeness. Through a swallowing corridor, several Hosts in their final instars milled in dignified mindlessness. A bridge whistled to us.

  For the first time in my life I saw Host young: steaming nutrient broths effervesced with elvers. Further off was the fightcrèche, where the savage little second instars played with and killed each other. In a hall crisscrossed with walkways on tendons and platforms on muscular limbs were hundreds of Ariekei, giftwings extended, fanwings pretty with inks and natural pigments, gathered for the Festival of Lies.

  FOR HOSTS, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.

  Our Ambassadors, though, were human. They could lie as well in Language as in our own language, to the Hosts’ unending delight. These eisteddfods of mendacity had not existed—how could they?—before we Terre came. The Festivals of Lies had occurred almost as long as Embassytown had existed: they were one of our first gifts to the Hosts. I’d heard of them, but never expected to see one.

  Our Ambassadors went among the hundreds of whickering Ariekei. Staff, Scile and I—we who couldn’t speak here—watched. The room was punctured with ventricles: I could hear it breathing.

  “They’re welcoming us,” Scile told me, listening to all the voices. More. “It’s saying that, uh, they’ll see, I think, miracles, now. He’s asking our first something to step forward. It’s a compound, wait, uh . . .” He sounded tense. “Our first liar.”

  “How do they make that word?” I said.

  “Oh you know,” he said. “Sayer-of-things-that-are-not, that sort of thing.”

  Furniture was extruding in the room as it self-organised into a vague amphitheatre. Ambassador MayBel, elderly, stylish women, stood before an Ariekes, which raised what looked like a big fibre-trailing fungus in its giftwing. It inserted the dangles into the sockets of the zelle jigging by its legs, and the mushroom-thing made a sound and glowed quickly changing colours, cycling to a nacreous blue.

  The Host spoke. “It says: ‘describe it,’ ” Scile whispered. MayBel answered, May in the Cut, Bel the Turn voice.

  The Ariekei stepped up and down, a sudden unanimity. A tense excitement. They tottered and chattered.

  “What did they say?” I said. “MayBel? What did they—?”

  Scile looked as if in disbelief at me. “They’re saying ‘It’s red.’ ”

  MayBel bowed. The Ariekene hubbub continued while Ambassador LeRoy took their place. The Ariekes stroked its zelle, and the object attached to it changed shape and colour, altered into a great green teardrop. “Describe it,” Scile translated again.

  LeRoy glanced at each other and began. “They said: ‘It’s a bird,’ ” Scile said. The Ariekei muttered. The noun was shorthand for a local winged form, as well as meaning our Embassytown birds. LeRoy spoke again and several Ariekei shouted, out of control. “LeRoy says it’s flying away,” Scile said into my helmet. I swear I saw Hosts crane their eye-corals up as if the lifeless plasm might have taken off. Le and Roy spoke together again. “They say . . .” Scile frowned as he followed. “They say it’s become a wheel,” he said, over the strange pandemonium of the audience.

  One at a time every Ambassador lied. The Hosts grew boisterous in a fashion I’d never seen, then to my alarm seemed in
toxicated, literally lie-drunk. Scile was tense. The room was whispering, echoing the furore of its inhabitants.

  It was CalVin’s turn. They declaimed. “ ‘And the walls are disappearing,’ ” Scile translated. “ ‘And the ivy of Embassytown is winding about our legs . . .” Hosts examined their limbs. “. . . and the room’s turning to metal and I’m growing larger and the room and I are becoming one.’ ”

  That’s enough, I thought, and someone must have agreed, and whispered to CalVin. They bowed and stepped away.

  The Ariekei slowly calmed. I thought it was over. But then, as we stared, a few Host came forward.

  “It’s a sport,” said Cal, or Vin, who approached, sweating, as they saw my surprise. “An extreme sport,” said the other. “For— oh for years now, they’ve been trying to mimic us.” “A few are getting not-too-bad at it.” I watched.

  “What colour is it?” the Ariekes holding the target object asked the competitors, as it had the Terre. One by one each Host would try to lie.

  Most could not. They emitted croons and clickings that were effort.

  “Red,” Scile translated. The bulb was red, and the speaker double-whined in what I presumed was disappointment. “Blue,” said another, also truthfully; the object changed each time. “Green.” “Black.” Some made noises that were only noises, clicks and wheezes of failure, not words at all.

  Every tiniest success was celebrated. When the object was a yellow, the Host trying to lie, an Ariekes with a scissor-shape on its fanwing, shuddered and retracted several of its eyes, gathered itself, and in its two voices said a word that would have translated as something like “yellow-beige.” It was hardly a dramatic untruth, but the crowd were rapturous at it.

  A group of Hosts approached us. “Avice,” Cal or Vin said politely. “This is . . .” and they started to say names.

  I never saw the point of these niceties between the likes of me and Ariekei. Understanding only Language-speakers to have minds, they must have thought it odd when Ambassadors carefully introduced them to speechless amputated half-things. As if an Ariekes insisted on one politely saying hello to its battery animal.

  So I thought, but it didn’t turn out that way. The Ariekei shook my hand with their giftwings when CalVin asked them to. They had cool dry skin. I shut my mouth to obscure whatever emotion was rising in me (I’m still not sure what it was). The Ariekei registered something as the Ambassadors told them my name. They spoke, and Scile quickly translated into my ear.

  “They’re saying: ‘This?’ ” he told me. “ ‘This is the one?’ ”

  Latterday, 3

  THERE ARE WAYS to tell Hosts apart. There’s the fingerprint-unique patterning on each fanwing (any observation of this fact was generally followed by the tedious mention of the fact that Embassytown was the only place where Terre fingerprints were not all unique). There are subtleties of carapace shading, of spines on limbs, of eye-antler shape. These days I rarely bothered to pay attention, nor with a few exceptions did I learn the names of the Ariekei I met. So I couldn’t say if during that first or any later visit to the city, I had previously met any of the Host delegation that joined us all those kilohours later, in Diplomacy Hall, to greet EzRa, the impossible new Ambassador.

  So far as I could tell all were in middle age, in their third instar, and therefore sentient. Some wore sashes indicating incomprehensible (to me) rank or predilections; some were studded with ugly little jewels where their chitin was thick. The most senior of the Ambassadors, MayBel and JoaQuin, were walking them slowly through the room, giving each of them a glass of champagne—carefully rigged to be palatable to them. The Hosts held them daintily and sipped with their Cut mouths. I saw Ez watch them.

  “Ra’s coming,” Ehrsul said.

  “What do we call him?” I said. “What are he and Ez to each other? They’re not doppels.”

  Wherever in the room he was, and with whom, Scile, I knew, would be as tense at the strangeness of all this as I. Ez and Ra approached each other, changing how they held themselves, getting into another mode.

  How could it have happened?

  All those structures in place, for all those thousands of hours, years. Embassytown years, the years I grew up with, long months named in silly nostalgia for an antique calendar, each many dozen-day weeks long. For almost an Embassytown century, since Embassytown was born, structures had been in place. Clone farms had been run; careful and unique child rearing had raised doppels into Ambassadors, with the skills of governance they would need. It was all under Bremen’s aegis of course: they were our home power; our public buildings all displayed clocks and calendars in Charo City time. But so far out here in the immer, everything should have been under Staff control.

  CalVin once told me that Bremen’s original expectations of Arieka’s reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been over-optimistic. Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly. More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras or particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences. Was that enough? In any case, no colony is ever wound down.

  How and why had Charo City trained this impossible Ambassador? I’d heard, like we all had, the story of the experiment and the freak result, the empathy reading spiking off the Stadt scale. But even if these two random friends did have such a connection, for whatever contingent psychic reason, why would they become Ambassadors?

  “Wyatt’s excited,” Ehrsul said.

  “They all are.” Gharda had approached, her music shift over, her instrument folded away. “Why wouldn’t they be?” she said.

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” Augmens relayed JoaQuin’s voices to hidden speakers. JoaQuin and MayBel went into encomia to their Ariekene guests. When that was done, they welcomed the new Ambassador.

  I’d been to comings-out when Ambassadors came of age (strange, arrogant, charming young doppels greeting the crowd). But this of course was nothing like those appointments.

  JoaQuin said, “This is an extraordinary time. We find ourselves with the task . . .” “. . . the enviable task, the strange task . . .” “. . . of coming up with a new kind of welcome. Perhaps some of you had heard that we have a new Ambassador?” Polite laughs. “We’ve spent a good deal of time with them over the last few days . . .” “. . . got to know them, and they us.” “These are unusual times.” Hear hear, said RanDolph. “It’s a privilege to be here, at an event I hope you will indulge us . . .” “. . . if we describe as history. This is an historic moment.” “Ladies and gentlemen . . .” “. . . Hosts . . .” “. . . all our guests. It’s our very great pleasure to welcome to Embassytown . . .” “. . . Ambassador EzRa.”

  As the applause died, JoaQuin turned to the Hosts who stood beside them, and said our new Ambassador’s name accurately, in Language. “,” they said. The Hosts craned their eye-corals.

  “Thank you, Ambassador JoaQuin,” Ez said. He conferred quietly with Ra. “It’s a great pleasure to be here,” Ez continued. He said a few standard, gracious things. I was watching the other Ambassadors. Ra’s self-introduction was brief, little more than his own name.

  “We want to stress what an honour this is for us,” Ez said. “Embassytown’s one of the most important outposts of Bremen, and a vibrant community in its own right. We’re more grateful than we can say for your wonderful welcome. We look forward to becoming a part of the Embassytown community, working together for its future, and working together for Bremen’s.” There was applause of course. Ez waited.

  “We look forward to working with you,” Ra said. Some Staff and Ambassadors were trying to hide nervousness. Some, I thought, eagerness.

  “We realise that you must have questions,” Ez said. “Please don’t be shy about them. We realise we’re an . . . anomaly, for now . . .” He smiled. “We’re happy to talk about it, though to be honest we don’t r
eally know why or how we can do what we do, either. We’re a mystery to us as well as to you.” The laugh he waited for and got was brief. “Now we’d like to do something we’ve trained very long and hard to do. We are an Ambassador— I’m very proud to say that—and we have a job to do. What we would like to do is to greet our gracious Hosts.” This applause seemed genuine.

  The vespcams swarmed and wallscreens showed images, from scores of angles, of Ez and Ra coming together, ushered by their new colleagues toward the Hosts. The Ariekei stood in a semicircle. I’ve no idea what their conception was of what was happening. If nothing else, they knew that this was an Ambassador and that it was called .

  EzRa conferred together like any other Ambassador did, whispering, preparing their words. The Hosts craned their eyes. Every Terre in the room seemed to lean in, to hold her or his breath. With great theatre, EzRa turned and spoke Language.

  EZ WAS THE CUT, Ra the Turn. They spoke well, beautifully. I had heard enough of it to tell that. Their accent was good, their timing good. Their voices were well suited. They said to the Hosts that it was an honour to meet them. , they said. Good greetings.

  That was the moment everything changed. EzRa looked at each other, smiled. Their first official pronouncement. If it hadn’t been an absurd faux pas I think we would all have clapped. I’m sure many people hadn’t really thought them capable.

  We were busy listening to them speak, and gauging their abilities. We didn’t notice everything change. I don’t think any of us at that moment noticed the reactions of the Hosts.

  Part Two