Embassytown

by China Miéville

  FESTIVALS

  Latterday, 4

  WE WERE ALL WATCHING the new Ambassador.

  Ez hunkered down into a slightly pugnacious pose. He opened and closed his fists. I could tell he enjoyed what he was doing. He looked up at the Hosts from below a gathered brow.

  Ra watched them sidelong. He pulled himself up, so tall and straight that he seemed to teeter slightly. The two of them were so absurdly distinct it was like a joke that erred in overdoing it. I was reminded of Laurel and Hardy, of Merlo and Rattleshape, of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

  When they were done speaking, a wave of something went through all of us in Diplomacy Hall so palpably it was as if it rippled the ivy. I turned to Ehrsul and raised my eyebrows. We all knew this had been momentous, but there were perhaps a full five seconds before any of us realised that anything bad had happened.

  THE HOSTS were swaying as if they were at sea. One spasmed its giftwing and its fanwing, another kept them unnaturally still. One opened and closed its membranes several times in neurotic repetition.

  Three were plugged into their zelles by flesh skeins that bled in chemicals or energy, and by I suppose feedback the untoward behaviour of the Hosts infected their battery-beasts. The little ambulatory generators staggered, emitted sounds unlike any I’d heard them make before.

  In very slow and unnerving unison, the Ariekei emerged from their trance. Their eye-corals drooped toward us, and at last focused. They straightened and unstiffened their legs, as if coming out of sleep.

  EzRa were frowning. They whispered to each other, and spoke again.

  Are the bodies and/or brains of our Hosts troubled by invading biological entities or an allergic reaction to an environmental factor? they said, I later learnt. That is they said, Has something happened to make you suboptimal? They said, Are you alright?

  Their words sounded as if Ez said some stuttering poem while Ra mimicked birds. As they spoke the Ariekei jerked again, again in that ugly simultaneity, the linked zelles snapping back with them. They were lost back to their glaze. This time one made a noise, a moan from its Cut-mouth.

  JoaQuin and MayBel conferred in agitation. MayBel approached the Ariekei. The Hosts came gradually again, very gradually, out of what had taken them. CalVin saw me. We stared at each other, across the room, for the first time in some time. I saw in their eyes nothing but fear.

  STAFF RALLIED, Ambassadors stepped in, bustled and led the Hosts away. As the Ariekei woke from whatever this was, they started declaiming, talking across each other, loud and chaotically. They were asking for the new Ambassador. Where is ? they kept saying. Where is ? I understood enough Language to know that.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, please,” one of JoaQuin said. Someone from Staff must have spoken to the musicians on duty, because their playing started again. I’d not even realised they had stopped. Waiters recirculated. I saw security officers going somewhere, Simmon among them, controlled but in obvious urgency.

  “Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen,” JoaQuin said. “Our guests, the Hosts, have been . . .” JoaQuin paused and conferred. “There’s been a small misunderstanding . . .” “. . . absolutely nothing to be concerned about . . .” I saw LoGan, CharLott, LuCy, AnDrew crowding the Hosts away. “Nothing at all important and entirely our own fault . . .” The two of them laughed. “We’re rectifying things now.” “There’s absolutely no reason to concern yourselves!” “The party continues. Please join us in raising your glasses.”

  Many locals were eager to be reassured. Newcomers and temporary guests didn’t know how concerned they should be. We raised our glasses.

  “To the captain and crew of the immership Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Response . . .” said JoaQuin, “. . . to our most welcome immigrants, new citizens . . .” “. . . and above all, to Ambassador EzRa. May they have a long and happy career here in Embassytown.” “To EzRa!”

  We all said it. The recipients of our toast raised their own drinks in reciprocation. They looked at the door through which the Hosts had been taken. It was to the credit of Staff that the party didn’t die. Within ten minutes most people were behaving more or less as they had been before.

  “What the fuck was that?” I said quietly to Gharda.

  “No bloody idea,” she said.

  I couldn’t see Scile. There were several Ambassadors still in the room, along with Staff. I approached EdGar, but to my shock they turned away from me. I said their name in such a way that they couldn’t pretend not to have heard, and they glanced and said, “Not now, Avice.”

  “You don’t even know what I want,” I said.

  “Really, Avice.” “Not now.” They interspersed their words with smiles of greeting to those who passed them.

  The crowd parted a moment and as if by plan revealed Cal or Vin. He still stared right at me. I was so startled I stopped moving. I couldn’t see my watcher’s doppel. The party concealed him again.

  Gharda reappeared, with the pilot on her arm. She saw me and hesitated, looked a query at me. I waved, by all means. It mattered not at all how much more travelled I was than my city’s rulers, how airily I’d given them knowledge, how eagerly they’d received it. As EdGar walked away, I was nothing. It was they and the other Ambassadors who would, in closed session, decide what had happened, and what would happen now. They made law.

  Formerly, 3

  A LONG TIME AGO I performed a strange unpleasant ritual in the shell of a restaurant. For that I was, Ambassadors and Staff had occasionally told me, feted by the Ariekei in my absence. That had meant nothing until the moment in the hall, at the festival, after the lying, when the Hosts discovered who I was.

  They spoke rapidly, craned their eye-corals. They spoke me every day, Scile told me afterwards. That was what they said to CalVin. I do not know, one Host said to CalVin, about me, how I did without her, how I thought what I needed to think.

  Her? This was the question that we called the Tallying Mystery: did the Hosts consider each Ambassador one mind, double-bodied people? And if so, did they think the rest of us half-things, irrelevances, machines? A city full of the Ambassadors’ marionettes? When they knew me as simile, they asked for me to come back, but I was never sure if I was guest, exhibit, or something else. When we went, the Hosts took care of us, whether or not they understood that we were people.

  I accepted their invitations because Scile could always come with me. A present to him, for which he was effusive, though I think he wanted to talk, to debrief, after the events more than I would. We would be ushered to the Hosts’ halls. There were usually Ambassadors and viziers and others there too, and these glimpses of secrets that had gone on all my life, the toing and froing of Staff in the Host city, were almost as disturbing to me as anything else that happened. I’d keep spotting Ambassadors walking flesh corridors in conversation with Ariekei, places I couldn’t imagine any human having a purpose.

  These events, to which they had no in, were titillations to most of my friends. “A festival? Of lies?” Gharda said at a party after the first one. “The Hosts asked for you?” They were all gathered around me demanding to know what the city was like, and I laughed because someone said That’s import! exactly as we had when we were children.

  My occasional presence in the city was troubling, I could tell, to the Ambassadors. They didn’t like seeing me there. This was their mystery. Staff debriefed me exhaustively after each of these trips, asking what I’d seen, what I’d understood.

  The second time I entered the city, into another hall with a crowd of Hosts, I was left near a collection of obscure objects and anaesthetised Ariekene animals, and with four other humans, enzymatic lights bowing in the curves of their aeoli helmets. Two were Ambassador LeNa, who ignored me. The other two were young men, commoners like me.

  “Hello,” said one. He smiled enthusiastically and I did not smile back. “I’m Hasser: I’m an example. Davyn’s a topic. You’re Avice, aren’t you? You’re a simile.”

  NEITHER THIS, nor any of the other time
s I went in, was an event the same as the first gathering I’d attended. They were more chaotic, and, I learnt, less focused. There had for a while been a vogue among the Hosts for what were, more or less, conventions. Celebrations of Language, with broader remits than just the rare lies. They would gather as many of us necessary constructed facts as they could in one place, as many enLanguaged elements as possible—animate, inanimate, sentient and not—and come to look at us, use and theorise us, without consensus. We sat polite through wheezing, stuttering, sung arguments around and about us. I found it less compelling than the devoted lying I’d first seen.

  I was lulled by the roar and whisper of the Cut- and the Turn-mouths, while Scile tried to translate. Hosts stamped back and forward, disagreeing in factions. Something like a polemic, I gathered, went on between those who thought me a useful figure of speech, and those who did not.

  It was a crippled, strange debate, I think. There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was—they would have asserted— like. But those critics of course couldn’t say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have them.

  “But . . .” said Scile. He was unhappy.

  “They must be in the back of their minds, those thoughts,” I said. “Is that why they’re angry? They’ve been denied them.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “One of them’s saying about you: ‘It’s a comparison, and . . . it is something new.’ I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

  “Alright, my love, just . . .”

  “Hey,” Scile whispered. “They’re using the other figures of speech.” He indicated our Embassytown companions, at whom the Hosts stared. He turned his head in surprise. “If I understand them . . . that man Hasser—he lied to us. He’s not an example: he’s a simile, like you.”

  Whatever the question marks over my efficacy, I must have had my uses: for the several weeks these events were in vogue, the Hosts kept bringing me back.

  SOMETHING SOURED between CalVin and me. For weeks during our sex I’d teased them that I could tell the difference in the way they touched me: they probably knew there was a little truth to it. When we’d first got together I’d been immaturely excited that I was sleeping with an Ambassador. But that rather performed giddiness didn’t last long.

  I remember the feel of them, the cool of their links in their necks, minimalist jewellery amplifying their thoughts into each other. I remember watching them touch each other—peculiar, unique erotics. Afterwards, I might grin salaciously when I distinguished them, but it was an edgy game. “Cal,” I would say, pointing at one, then the other. “Vin. Cal . . . Vin.” They might smile, might look away. I could sometimes, especially in the mornings, see differences. The marks of night-time—a face imprinted by a pillow, particular bags below eyes. CalVin never left long before ablutions, locking the door to the correction chamber and emerging with all those tiny differences effaced or copied.

  They didn’t like that I was being asked back to the conferences and conventions. But Staff would hardly turn down Host requests like that. Once one of CalVin told me in sudden fury, apropos of nothing I’d noticed, that Ambassadors had no bloody power at all, that the other Staff and viziers and the rest made all the bloody decisions, that he and his doppel had less say than anyone.

  I argued with them, now, sometimes. After one really unpleasant altercation I swear I did not start, Cal or Vin stayed for seconds in the doorway staring at me, with an expression I couldn’t read, while his doppel walked away. Perhaps I wouldn’t have liked it if they could immerse, I supposed. I doubted I would have cared, though.

  “It’s not the same,” I said to the one still there. “You speak Language. I am it.”

  THERE WERE HOSTS who favoured my simile above all others, and came to every event at which I was present. They extolled my uses, over all the allegories or rhetorical devices embedded in varying ways in men and women and other things present. “You have fans,” Scile said. These were my months of simile fame.

  I saw Hasser several other times; we would stand and wait while we were deployed in harsh arguments. There were Language dissidents, urging a reconception of what I and the other similes might have been. From the reactions of the other Hosts, this thought-experiment was in bad taste. After one such, I asked Scile if he’d heard the Hosts speak to Hasser, and if so what he was about.

  Scile understood Language as well as an Ambassador, but “I don’t know how you bloody things work,” he said. “I never see any relation between what you mean and what they’re talking about, what they compare you with and use you for. So are you asking what do they think with Hasser? I’ve no idea.”

  “That isn’t what I mean.”

  “You mean literally what does he mean?”

  “Right. Like, foundation-fact, like I mean girl who ate . . . well, you know.”

  Scile hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it was, is . . . what they said was it’s like the boy who was opened up and closed again.” We stared at each other.

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “Yes. I can’t be sure, so don’t . . . but, yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  In the corvid, being hauled back to Embassytown, I said to Hasser, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a simile?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Overheard, then?” He smiled. “It’s complicated. It’s something I think about a lot, being simile. But I don’t know how you feel about it . . . For some of us, if you’re . . . If you want to talk about this stuff,” and he sounded guarded but excited, “there are a few of us who think it’s important.”

  “Similes?” I said. “You, what, hang out?”

  Well. They knew other tropes and Language moments too, of course, he explained. But it was certain of the similes in particular who had found a community with each other. I despised them instantly he told me.

  “I don’t know how we missed you,” he said. “I know they say you, but how did the Hosts miss you for these events all this time? How did you miss us?”

  “I suppose being Language was never the main thing in my life,” I said. I think I accidentally showed my contempt. If I’d not learnt to immerse and hadn’t got into the out, I reminded myself, I might have spent my days in the bars and halls and drink houses where these similes gathered. It must be a strange kind of life and notoriety, but it was something. I wanted to apologise for showing my sneer. I asked him what it all meant to him. After an initial guardedness, he said, “To be part of it! Language.”

  Latterday, 5

  NONE OF US with any nous believed the party was really back to normal. “Ehrsul.” I whispered to her and made motions, but when, winding her long chassis precisely she pathed her way to me, it was to tell me she couldn’t hack any coms to work out what was happening.

  I found a couple of the last Ambassadors in the room, MagDa and EsMé. “What’s going on?” I said to them. “Hey. MagDa. Please.”

  “We have to . . .” one of EsMé said. “It’s . . .” “Everything’s under control.”

  “MagDa. What’s going on?”

  Mag and Da and Es and Mé looked as if they were going to say something. EsMé had never liked me, had a common Ambassador opinion of the returned outgoer, immerser, floaker, and so on, but still, they hesitated.

  To my great shock Scile appeared beside us. He met my eyes, either without emotion or hiding it. “MagDa,” he said. “You have to come and talk to Ra.”

  They nodded and I lost that moment. As the five of them walked away, I grabbed Scile’s arm. I kept my face impassive, and he looked back at me similarly. It hardly surprised me that he was closer to whatever was happening than I. He’d been working with Staff, he’d been in cahoots with Ambassadors. They’d always been so focused on using Language they weren�
��t used to learning about it, and as things had shifted in Embassytown, and it had become useful to think about such questions, they had, I understood, been fascinated with his theories. His work had made him useful. He had certainly been to more Staff functions than I had.

  “So?” I said. I was only slightly surprised at my brazen self. Floakers did what they had to. “What’s going on?”

  “Avvy,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Scile, do you know what’s happening?”

  “No. I don’t. I’d a . . . I really don’t. This isn’t what I expected.” Near us two people touched wine glasses like little bells. The musicians were drunk now and the music was veering. This was the single chance many locals would have to meet the immerser crew, and they were taking advantage. Seeing pairs and little groups leave the party, I remembered that borrowed sex appeal of immer. I’d benefited from it myself on my return: it had been a heady few weeks.

  “I have to go,” Scile said. “They need me.”

  Es took one of his arms, Mé the other. They surely knew relations were bad between Scile and me, and perhaps even why. I doubt they were sleeping with him. Scile’s assignations were brief and occasional. Though all Bremen marriages were legal in Embassytown, locals tended to invoke exclusive, property-based models. I was jealous of Scile, of course, but at what he’d become, and what secrets he knew.

  IT WAS HALF an hour to my flat. Ehrsul came with me. In a lot of countries I’ve been in the populace all have personal vehicles. All but the largest streets of Embassytown were too narrow, and often too steep, for that. There were altanimals and some biorigged carriages to take certain routes, which switched from wheels or treads to legs where necessary, but most people went on foot.

  Embassytown was a small and crowded place, our population growth limited by the edge of the aeoli breath. It was surrounded by the Host city, except at the very northern point, where Ariekene plains started. Semilegal urban growth was tolerated, jury-rigged rooms sutured to walls, looming over alleys like eaves, thrown up on roofs, always ready to be abandoned. Most Staff tacitly approved of such enterprising space-maximisation. Here and there were half-trained biorigged bits and pieces, some backstreet-crossbred with Terretech and holding together through luck, tended aspects of domesticity.