Embassytown

by China Miéville

  “It isn’t fair what you’re doing to Valdik,” I told Scile, on one of his rare visits to what had been our home.

  “He’s not a fucking child, Avice,” Scile said. He was collecting clothes and notes. He did not look at me as he rummaged. “He decides what he wants.”

  WALKING NEAR the ruins I was handed a flyer on cheap nantech paper that flashed a trid as I unfolded it. It made me start: it was Valdik’s face, apple-sized, in my hand.

  DRUMAN, it said, ON THE BATTLE AGAINST THE LIE. A time and place, not The Cravat but a little hall. With it brought to my attention, I noticed details of that and similar meetings guerrilla-coded into wallscreens, hacked nuisance trids. I went. I’d thought I’d find Scile, but no. I stayed at the back of the room.

  Valdik wore a projector, and trids of him appeared throughout the temple, random and staticky. At the front of the room I saw Shanita, Darius, Hasser and other similes and tropes. Valdik preached. He was still a middling speaker. I don’t know how this mediocrity amassed a following—something about the doldrums. He expounded religiose foolishness—“two voices but one truth, because what is the truth but dual, bifurcated, not in conflict but two forms of one truth” and so forth.

  The place wasn’t a quarter full. It contained indulgent friends, the curious, refugees from other cults. A convocation of the hopeless and bored. When I got home, Scile was speaking down the line. He smiled an unconvincing greeting at me as I came in, turned so that I couldn’t hear him nor see his mouth move. I wondered whether, if Valdik were removed from this self-appointed office, with what I was convinced was Scile’s instrument confiscated, his mania would dissipate.

  “What should we do?” CalVin said. “These meetings aren’t illegal.”

  “You can do anything you want.”

  “Well . . .” “We could have Druman taken for Administrative Detention . . .” “. . . but do you really want that?”

  “Yes!” I said, but of course I didn’t, and of course they wouldn’t do it.

  “Listen,” they said. “Don’t worry.” “We’ll watch Scile.” “We’ll keep him safe.” That they did, though neither in the way, nor from what, I’d assumed.

  Formerly, 9

  SOMEONE RELEASED a viral ’ware into the vagrant automa of Embassytown that gave them Valdik’s mania. It made them preachers in his new church. Their eloquence depended on the sophistication of their processors: most were little more than ecstatics, but a few were sudden theologians. They ambled as they always had but now accosted us and exhorted us to defend prelapsarian language, Language, we poor sinners (the rhetoric was kitsch), doomed forever ourselves to speak with a deep structure of lie but at least granted service to the double-tongue of truth, and more like that.

  Patches were programmed and released and did their job but the infection was tenacious, and for weeks these tramp priests proselytised us, their catechisms changing as their ’ware degraded and threw up protestant, variant sects. “We are the stewards of the angels,” I was told by one machine that staggered like a supplicant. “We are the stewards of the speaking angels, of God’s language.” The virus shut down when its resultant theories strayed too far from emergent Drumanian orthodoxy.

  I asked Ehrsul if she was concerned, if she’d felt the tickling of virtual germs. She dismissed the other automa as mental weaklings and told me that yes, though she’d felt it, she’d hardly been in danger herself. Of course Valdik and his radical similes were suspected, but no one could prove who had programmed it, and though it was a nuisance that was all it ultimately was.

  I knew Scile didn’t have the expertise to program, or I’d have thought it his doing.

  WHEN I WENT back to The Cravat, now, I did so for socially diagnostic reasons. Many previous regulars no longer drank there: alienated by Valdik’s vatic pronouncements, they set up refusenik simile salons. Others had taken their place. I went to hear Valdik speak, out of what I told myself was a pornography of doomed causes, and maybe to listen for grounds to demand some intervention. He hymned the Ambassadors (in his model, interceding hierophants); expressed gratitude at being simile, truths, Language in flesh.

  was there, with Spanish Dancer and others, at the last of Valdik’s gatherings I went to. The Host had amassed more followers, too, so I thought it must be improving its technique, a better and better liar. They watched each other. Valdik glowered. I didn’t know if the Hosts felt his hostility. Hasser was there—one of the few who retained friends on both sides of the emergent simile split. He acknowledged me, his face displaying an emotion for which I’ve no name; it reminded me of my own. An unease, is as close as I can get to it.

  “Aren’t you worried?” I asked Ehrsul.

  “I told you,” she said, “I’m immune.”

  “No I mean . . . what do you reckon? Do you ever think about it? I mean, does it ever make you feel anything one way or the other, that some of the Hosts are learning . . . well, can talk their way around truth, now?” She said nothing, so I said: “Can lie.”

  We were in a bar in one of Embassytown’s shopping streets. Ehrsul in her minor notoriety was being glanced at by slightly moneyed youth. We spoke quietly under music and the clatter of glasses. Ehrsul did not answer me. “Something’s changing. Which may or may not be a good thing,” I said finally.

  She looked at me with a projected face that, by design or a coincidence of ambiguous stimuli-responses in her ’ware, was inscrutable. She said nothing. I grew more and more uncomfortable in that enigmatic silence, until I talked about something else, to which she responded as normal, with all the exaggerated intimacies of our friendship.

  It never meant that much to me one way or the other that I was simile; I didn’t care what Valdik preached. It’s Scile, I said to myself: but no, though I was worried for him that wasn’t all. I never really knew what else it was.

  “SO WHAT’S being done?” I asked CalVin. Even the Ambassadors were concerned, now, I gathered. The new philosophy couldn’t have had more than a score or two of serious devotees, but fervour unnerved us in Embassytown. The Hosts must surely have picked up some atmosphere: I’d seen more Ariekei than usual in the aeolian breath of our quarter.

  “We’re talking to the Hosts,” CalVin said. “We’re going to organise . . .” “. . . a festival.” “Here, in Embassytown.” “To stress that it’s theirs too, to speak in.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. I’d never heard of an Ariekene event in Embassytown. “But is that supposed to . . . What are you doing about Valdik?”

  One of CalVin stared at me, the other looked away. I was angry and I tried to work out with whom. Scile was ensconced somewhere, with radical similes or the Staff, and would never respond to me now, and that seemed to concern no one. There I was, between cliques and secrets. I couldn’t tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

  “It’s the doldrums, Avvy,” Ehrsul said to me later. “This is what happens. You’re talking as if it’s end-time. I think . . .” She paused. “You’re upset because of Scile. You care about him, and he’s gone from you.” She stumbled exactly like someone who thought would.

  ARIEKEI REPRESENTATIVES came in flyers, to plan this hybrid festival. I was often in the Embassy, floaking, and I came to know them all. One tall and thickset Ariekes had a mark on its fanwing like a bird in a canopy of leaf, so I called it Pear Tree.

  “This is what we need,” CalVin said. “We’re all too tense.” “There’ll be a parade, and stalls and games for Terre . . .” “. . . and a Festival of Lies for the Hosts.”

  “What about Valdik?” I said again. “And what about Scile?”

  “Valdik’s nothing.” “Scile we’ve not seen for a couple of weeks.”

  “So where is he . . . ?”

  “Don’t worry.” “It’ll be okay.” “Honestly, this event’ll put paid to a lot of these problems.”

  I thought it was absolutely absurd. No one agreed with me. In all my life I’ve never felt so alone.

  The festival was to take place in a p
iazza near the southern edge of Embassytown. It was christened the Licence Party: a pun on Lies and Sense, I was told. I never got what the “sense” referred to. Signs went up displaying that idiot name, and a necessary explanation.

  VALDIK LIVED in Embassytown’s east. There was a balcony in front of his door overlooking a leisure canal, and a garden full of flowers and birds, altbirds, local fauna.

  “Avice,” he said, slowly, when he opened the door to me. If he was surprised he hid it.

  “Valdik,” I said. “Can you help me? I need to find Scile.”

  His relief was visible. “Is everything alright . . . ?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “No. I just . . . I haven’t seen him for days . . .” My hesitation was real, though my main reason for being there was not Scile, but to assess Valdik and his theology. He let me in and I saw the trappings of his new beliefs. Papers everywhere, all the crazy cabbala and misplaced rigour of a sect.

  “Me neither,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I think he’s still with CalVin and the others.”

  “They haven’t seen him for weeks,” I said.

  “No, they were with him a few days ago.” That silenced me. “He was at The Cravat and they came for him,” Valdik said.

  “When?” I said. “Who?”

  “CalVin and some Staff.”

  “CalVin?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Valdik didn’t sound like a prophet. I had to leave: I could hardly focus on his beliefs at that moment.

  WHEN FINALLY CalVin next said they had time to see me, I was careful to be good company. We ate together. They spoke mostly about the Licence Party. One day, one night, half another day. CalVin emerged from their ablutions equalised. Their accrued blemishes were gone or replicated. I said nothing.

  I watched them sleep, watched their skins take on differential marks from cotton and the unconscious motion of their hands. When one or other would half-wake, I would be waiting. I would try to murmur-talk to them: gauge what Cal or Vin said. It was strange, trying to do something I’d not known could even occur to me.

  He on my left, I decided, at last, murmured my name with a care I recognised, smiled with something really warm. It was desperately hard to tell with only these night-fuddled moments. But he on my left, I decided at last, Cal or Vin, was the one who liked me more. I put my fingers to his lips, made him wake without sound. He opened his eyes.

  “Cal,” I whispered. “Or Vin. Tell me. I know he won’t.” I indicated the sleeping other. “I know you’ve seen Scile. I know. Where is he? What’s happening?”

  I saw my mistake. I saw it the instant I moved my hands.

  “You,” he said, and though he was quiet I could hear his outrage. That I’d try to find out secrets, and that I’d do so by this blasphemy. My expression was frozen in misplaced intimacy. “How dare you . . .”

  I cursed. He sat up. His doppel shifted.

  “You have some bastard nerve, Avice,” the man I’d woken said. “How dare you. If we’ve seen Scile it’s not your business . . .”

  “He’s my husband!”

  “It’s not your business. We’re taking care of things. Like you begged us to. And you come here and treat us . . . like this . . . do this . . . ?”

  Beside us the newly woken doppel was rising. I looked at him and felt shame. How could I have mis-seen it? There it was, that thing I’d thought I detected in his brother.

  “You thought he was me . . . ?” he said. I saw hurt, and other emotions.

  “How could you?” he said. His doppel added: “. . . do this?”

  The raging one stood, sheets puddling on the floor. “Get out,” he said. “Leave. You are damned . . . fucking lucky we don’t pursue this.”

  “I can’t believe you did that,” said the other quietly.

  “This is over,” the standing one, Cal or Vin, said, and his doppel, the man I should have woken, looked up at him, looked at me, shook his head, turned away. I left the room having ruined my own plan.

  On my way home, through the night, I cursed myself. I passed a little tour of Ariekei murmuring in Language as they looked like curators at our lamplit dwellings.

  Formerly, 10

  AT VARIOUS FAIRS and events in Embassytown, I’d been asked to tell stories of the immer. I’d shown trids and images of my hours in the out, supposedly for children, though there were always many adults in the audience. The immer was and is full of renegades and refugees. They emerge where they can and do what they can get away with. I’d tell the stories. I had transported most things to most places: jewellery; immer-miserable livestock; payloads of organic garbage to a trash planet-state run by pirates. I’d save the best for the end, a changing display of the pharos that marks the edge of the known always: here, right beside Arieka. I’d show it through various filters, culminating in the tropeware that made it a lighthouse, a beacon in murk.

  “See? That’s what you see. That’s right here. Beyond us there’s nothing charted. We live at the end of the light.” I was amazed at how addictive the spook and thrill was. My presence wasn’t requested this time, for the Licence Party.

  “What happened between you and CalVin?” Ehrsul asked me. I didn’t tell her, or anyone.

  THE MICROCLIMATES over the city and those over Embassytown were rigged according to a complex algorithm I’d never bothered to decode. I was always vaguely charmed by planets in thrall to their tilt, with seasons that were more or less predictable. In Embassytown, I noticed particular weathers, of course, but didn’t ever expect them.

  It grew warm. It was apparently time for us to have a summer.

  I went to the Licence Party alone. When I realised that she was expecting us to go together I had to tell Ehrsul no. From her silence I know I hurt her, or spurred the subroutine of her Turingware that manifested as if that were so. But I couldn’t be there with anyone. I wasn’t punishing her—because this had not been Ehrsul’s only silence recently—but I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this was a last chapter.

  THERE WERE game rooms, food halls, massage houses, places for sex; and there were zones designed for our Hosts. They came in large numbers, informed by their networks, the tech like town criers that we had helped to automate. I’d never seen so many Hosts in Embassytown.

  Fortune-tellers and performers were on the streets. Trid caricatures of passersby flashed in and out of existence. We came in through security: Terretech detectors of metals and energy flows, and biorigged proscenia that snuffled as we came through, tasting for the telltales of weapon compounds. There were constables in the crowd.

  With night the humans and Kedis grew more drunk or drugged. Children ran on frenetic missions. Automa wandered in. I saw a pod of adolescent Shur’asi, a lone Pannegetch casting dice. The Hosts spectated as we played our shovepenny games. They looked with tourist fascination, listened to the songs our singers sung, titillated by our harmonics. I couldn’t find Scile.

  I don’t think the Ariekei ever empathised with our predilection for symmetry and hinge-points: solstices, noon. But the Licence Party was ours as well as theirs, and the Festival of Lies started at midnight.

  The marquee was the size of a cathedral: in places the biorigged skin hadn’t finished growing, and decorative gauze or plastic were woven over the holes. There was theatrical seating for Terre around the arena, and standing places for exots and for the Hosts. I saw people I knew. They shouted my name. I saw Hasser, and he raised his hand. He looked afraid. He was gone too fast for me to reach him. By the main performance space was a large group of Ambassadors. CalVin was there, and CharLott, JoaQuin and MagDa and JasMin and others, conferring with Staff. Ariekei were near them, one or two I recognised. Pear Tree, and others that perhaps I might call leaders. Beyond them performers waited, Host and Ariekei.

  was there, with Spanish Dancer and the others of its entourage. It wasn’t hard to recognise.

  There was a hush, whispered Terre excitement w
hen the lights went down and a few coloured illuminations fired. In a strong, projected doubled voice, Ambassador CharLott stepped into the centre of the spectators, spoke Language. A translator shouted to us locals theatrically, “ ‘It’s raining in here,’ the Ambassador says! ‘It’s raining liquor on us!’ ”

  It sounded as though they were trying to excite Embassytowners with these feeble falsities as if we were Host, and I thought it absurd. But, over the delighted noises of the Ariekei looking up to find the rain that wasn’t there, came the shrieks of Terre, my neighbours yelling delight at each new untruth from the Ambassador. As if none of them could lie.

  I reached the front as CharLott came to the end of their set. Other Ambassadors performed. They were building an arc for the listeners, I realised. For us. Here were lies that were a comic interlude, here a ratcheting-up of tension, here a moving moment.

  When after long heady minutes they were done, Hosts stepped up in their place. Each Ariekes spoke only one or two short lies. Most did it by verbal trickery like a whispered final clause. Each success was marked with Terre cheers and Ariekene approval. Many competitors stumbled and said something true. The Host audience responded with what could have been scorn or could have been pity.

  I stand, I don’t stand.

  This before me is not red.

  stepped forward at last, for a scheduled confrontation. Opposite it was an Ambassador, LuCy, moving like pugilists, swinging their arms as if limbering. I realised I was surprised, that when I’d read about this contest I had thought it would be CalVin representing Embassytown. Ambassador and Host squared. This was some blasphemy, I thought. Who could have allowed this? There was cheering, but I heard a man beside me, as if channelling my opinion, muttering, “This is not right.”

  Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things, said.