Embassytown (9 page)

“Hi,” he said. “I see you met my colleague.” He held out his hand.

“Your
colleague
? Yes, I met him.” I shook my head. JoaQuin were at Ez’s elbows, one on each side like elderly parents, and I nodded at them. “Your colleague. You really are just determined to scandalise us, Ez,” I said.

“Oh, please.
No
. Not at all, not at all.” He grinned an apology at the doppels escorting him. “It’s . . . well, I suppose it’s just a slightly different way of doing things.”

“And it’ll be invaluable,” said Joa, or Quin, heartily. The two spoke in turn. “You’re always telling us we’re too . . .” “. . . stuck in our ways, Avice. This will be . . .” “. . . good for us, and good for Embassytown.” One of them slapped Ez on the back. “Ambassador EzRa’s an outstanding linguist and bureaucrat.”

“You’re going to say they’re a ‘new broom,’ aren’t you, Ambassador?” I said.

JoaQuin laughed. “Why not?” “Why not indeed?” “That’s exactly what they are.”

W
E WERE RUDE
, Ehrsul and I. We’d stick together, whispering and showing off, at all these sorts of events. So when she waved a trid hand to attract my attention I joined her expecting to play. But when I reached her she said to me urgently, “Scile’s here.”

I didn’t look round. “Are you sure?”

“I never thought he’d come,” she said.

I said, “I don’t know what . . .” It was some time since I’d seen my husband. I didn’t want a scene. I bit a knuckle for a moment, stood up straighter. “He’s with CalVin, isn’t he?”

“Am I going to have to separate you two girls?” It was Ez again. He made me start. He’d extricated himself from JoaQuin’s anxious stewarding. He offered me a drink. He flexed something inside himself, and his augmens glimmered, changing the colour of his vague halo. I realised that with the help of his innard tech he might have been listening to us. I focused on him and tried not to look for Scile. Ez was shorter than me, and muscular. His hair was cut close.

“Ez, this is Ehrsul,” I said. To my astonishment he looked at her, said nothing and looked back at me. The rudeness made me gasp.

“Having a good time?” he said to me. I watched tiny lights move across his corneas. Ehrsul was moving away. I was going to go with her and blank him haughtily, but behind his back she flashed a quick display:
Stay
,
learn
.

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” I said to him quietly.

“What?” He was startled. “What? Your—”

“She’s not mine,” I said. He stared at me.

“The autom? I apologise. I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t me you owe that to.” He inclined his head.

“What are you monitoring?” I said to him after a silence. “I can see your displays.”

“It’s just habit. Temperature, air impurities, ambient noise. Mostly pointless. A few other things: I worked for years in situations that . . . well, I got used to checking for trid, cameras, ears, that sort of thing.” I raised an eyebrow. “And I tend to run translationware as a default.”

“No!” I said. “How exciting. Now, tell me the truth. Got ’ware in your ears? Are you running a soundtrack?”

He laughed. “No,” he said. “I grew out of that. I haven’t done that for . . . a good week or two.”

“Why are you running translation programs? You . . .” I put my arm on his and looked suddenly exaggeratedly stricken. “You
do speak
Language, don’t you? Oh dear, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”

He laughed again. “Oh, I can
get by
in Language, that’s not it.” More seriously: “But I don’t speak any of the Shur’asi or Kedis dialects, or . . .”

“Oh, you won’t find exots here tonight. Apart from Mine Host, obviously.” I was surprised he didn’t know this. Embassytown was a Bremen colony, under Bremen laws that restricted our few exots to guestworker status.

“What about you?” he said. “I don’t see augmens. So you speak Language?”

For a moment I really didn’t understand what he meant. “No. I let my sockets close up. I had a few bits and pieces once. They can be useful for immersion. And also,” I said, “yes, you know, I can see how a bit to help make sense of what the Hosts say is . . . useful. But I’ve seen them, they’re too . . . It’s intrusive.”

“That’s sort of the point,” he said.

“Right, and I can put up with that if it’s any use, but Language is beyond it,” I said. “Get them, when you hear a Host speak you get a whole eyeful or earful of nonsense.
Hello slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent
blah blah.” I raised an eyebrow. “It was pointless.”

Ez watched me. He knew I was lying. He must have known that the notion of using translationware for Language would be, to an Embassytowner, profoundly inappropriate. Not illegal, but an appalling impertinence. I didn’t even know quite why I had said all that.

“I’ve heard of you,” he said. I waited. If EzRa were even slightly good at their job they’d have prepared something personal to say to most of the people they might meet, tonight. What Ez said next, though, astonished me. “Ra reminded me where we’d heard your name. You’re in a simile, aren’t you? And I gather you’ve been to the city? Outside Embassytown.” Someone brushed past him. He didn’t stop looking at me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been there.”

“I’m sorry, I think I’ve . . . Sorry if I’ve . . . It’s not my business.”

“No, it’s just, I’m surprised.”

“Of course I’ve heard of you. We do our research, you know. There’s not many Embassytowners who’ve done what you’ve done.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt I don’t know what, to hear that I featured in the Bremen reports on Embassytown. I inclined a glass at Ez, said some goodbye, and went to find Ehrsul manoeuvring her chassis through the crowd.

“S
O WHAT'S THEIR STORY
?” I said. Ehrsul gave her display shoulders a shrug.

“Ez is a charmer, isn’t he?” she said. “Ra seems better but he’s shy.”

“Anything online?” She’d probably been trying to hack into data floating around.

“Not much,” she said. “It’s some kind of coup for Wyatt that they’re here. He’s crowing so hard hens everywhere are getting randy. That’s why the Staff are so tense. I decrypted the tail end of something . . . I’m pretty sure Staff made EzRa
sit a test
. I suppose, you know, it’s the first time in Christ-knows-how-long there’s been an Ambassador from the out, and they queried whether anyone who didn’t grow up speaking Language could possibly get the nuances. They must resent this appointment.”

“
They’re
all technically appointees too, don’t forget,” I said. It was something that rankled with Staff: on his arrival, Wyatt, like every attaché, had had to formally license all the Ambassadors to speak for Bremen. “Anyway, they can speak Language? EzRa?”

She shrugged again. “Wouldn’t be here if they’d failed,” she said.

Something happened in the room. A feeling, a moment when, conviviality notwithstanding, it was suddenly imperative to focus. It was like that every time the Hosts came into a room, as they had just come into Diplomacy Hall.

T
HE PARTYGOERS
tried not to be rude—as if it were possible for us to be rude to them, as if the Hosts considered politesse on axes that would make any sense to us. Nonetheless, most of us kept up our chitchat and did not ogle.

An exception was the crew, who stared frankly at the Ariekei they had never seen before. Across the room I saw my helmsman and I saw the expression on his face. Once I had heard a theory. It was an attempt to make sense of the fact that no matter how travelled people are, no matter how cosmopolitan, how biotically miscegenated their homes, they can’t be insouciant at the first sight of any exot race. The theory is that we’re hardwired with the Terre biome, that every glimpse of anything not descended from that original backwater home, our bodies know we should not ever see.

Formerly, 2

I
WASN'T SURE
how Embassytown would be for Scile. He can’t have been the first settler from the out to be brought back by a returnee, but I’d never known others.

I’d spent a long time on ships in the immer, or in ports on planets with diurnal durations inimical to humanity’s. My return was the first time for thousands of hours that I’d been able to dispense with circadian implants and settle into actual solar rhythms. Scile and I acclimatised to the nineteen-hour Ariekene days by traditional means, spending most of our time outside.

“I warned you,” I told him. “It’s a tiny place.”

Now I remember those days with real pleasure. Still. I kept telling Scile about my sacrifice in returning to that little place—to come back from the out! to funnel back down!—but I was happier than I’d imagined I would be when I emerged from the sealed train in the aeolian zone, and breathed Embassytown smells. It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

My early days back in Embassytown, with savings and an outsider, immerser chic. I swaggered. I was welcomed back in delight by those who’d known me, who had never thought to see me again, who’d doubted the news of my return in the preceding miab.

I wasn’t rich by any real standard, but my savings were in Bremen Eumarks. This was the foundation currency of Embassytown, of course, but one rarely seen: with thirty or more kilohours between visits from the metropole—more than an Embassytown year—our little economy was self-standing. In deference to the Eumark, like all Bremen’s colonies, our currency was called the Ersatz. All those Ersatzes were incommensurable, each its own and worthless beyond its polity’s bounds. That portion of my account I’d downloaded and had with me, a few months’ life in Bremen, was enough for me to live in Embassytown until the next relief, perhaps even the one after that. I don’t even think people much resented it—I’d earned my money in the out. I told people that what I was doing with it now was floaking. That was inaccurate—there being no commands for me to get away with minimally obeying, I was simply not working—but they were delighted with the immer slang. They seemed to consider my idleness my right.

Those of my shiftparents still working had a party for me, and I was a bit startled by how happy it made me to go back, to be in the nursery, to kiss and hug and shout and re-greet these kind men and women, some now disconcertingly old, some seeming unchanged. “I told you you’d come back!” Dad Shemmi kept saying as I danced with him. “I told you!” They unwrapped the Bremen gewgaws I’d brought them. “This is too much, my love!” Mum Quiller said of some bracelet with aesthetic augmens. The dads and mums were shyly welcoming to my husband. He stood with a game smile all evening in the streamer-decorated hall while I got drunk, and he answered the same questions about himself repeatedly.

A few of those I’d grown up with crossed paths with me again, like Simmon. Though I slightly expected to, I never saw Yohn. I made other friends, from unfamiliar strata. I was invited to Staff parties. Though these had not been my circles before I left, there hadn’t been room enough in little Embassytown for me, an immerser-in-training, not at least to get near them. People, Staff, Ambassadors I’d known by sight and reputation in those days were abruptly acquaintances, and more. Some that I had expected to meet, however, were gone.

“Where’s Oaten?” I asked about a man who had mouthpieced often for Staff on our Embassytown trid. “Where’s Dad Renshaw?” “Where are GaeNor?” about that elderly Ambassador, one of whom, when recruiting me to Language, had said “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” with a cadence so splendidly stilted it had become part of my internal idiolect, so whenever I introduced myself by my full name, a little
is it?
trailed the words in my head, in her voice. “Where’re DalTon?” I said, of the notorious Ambassador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learnt it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood.

Oaten had retired on his modest local riches. Renshaw had died. Young. I was sad at that. GaeNor had died, one then almost immediately the other, of linkshock and loss. DalTon, I gathered—after continuing dissidence and some hinted-at final impatience with their colleagues, some ostentatiously opaque Staff internecine strife—had disappeared or been disappeared. Intrigued, I prodded at that, but got nothing more. I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions about Ambassadors directly, rather improperly, but I could gauge how far to push it and when not to.

I have no doubt that this was fallacious, but it felt to me as if I was quicker, better at sarcasm, wittier, because of my time in the out. People were kind to Scile and fascinated by him. He was fascinated back. He’d been on several worlds but emerged into Embassytown as if through a door in a wall. He explored. Our status wasn’t a secret. Nonex marriages like ours were known of but rare in Embassytown, which made us a titillation. We were spending most of our time together, still, but gradually less, as he expanded his own circles.

“Careful,” I told Scile, after one party where a man called Ramir had flirted with him, using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics. I’d never known Scile show interest in men, but still. Homosex was a little bit illegal, I told him. Except for Ambassadors.