China Miéville

by Embassytown

  The Pionier was a casualty of that time, before explorers had understood that the pulses were put out by lighthouses. They were not invitations. What the ships had striven toward were warnings to stay away.

  So there are lighthouses throughout the immer. Not every dangerous zone is marked by the beacons, but many are. They are, it seems, at least as old as this universe, which isn’t the first there’s been. The prayer so often muttered before immersion is one of thanks to those unknown who placed them. Gracious Pharotekton watch over us now.

  I didn’t see the Ariekene Pharos that first time out, but thousands of hours later. To be precise I’ve never seen it, of course, nor could I; that would require light and reflection and other physics that are meaningless there. But I’ve seen representations, rendered by ships’ windows.

  The ’ware in those portholes depicts the immer and everything in it in terms useful to crew. I’ve seen pharos like complex clots, like crosshatching, contoured and shaped into information. When I returned to Embassytown the captain, in what I think was a gift to me, had the screens run tropeware: as we approached gnarls of immer into the dangerous buffetings that surround Arieka, I saw a beam in the fractal black, a pointing arm of light as a lamp seemed to turn. And when the pharos came into view, floating in the middle of the unplace, it was a brick lighthouse topped with bronze and glass.

  I told him about these things when I met him, and Scile, who would later be my husband, wanted me to describe my first immersion. He’d been through immer, of course—he wasn’t indigene to the world on which we slept together—but as a passenger of modest income and no particular immunities, he’d remained in sopor. Though he had, he told me, once paid to be woken a little early, so he could experience immersion. (I’d heard of people doing that. A crew shouldn’t allow it, and surely only would in shallow shallows.) Scile had been violently immersick.

  What could I tell him? Protected by the everyday-field, that first time the Wasp splashed through and immersed it wasn’t even as if I had immer against my skin. Truth was you could say I’d felt more directly connected to the immer as a trainee in Embassytown, when I’d socketed to a scope that worked on the immer like the flat bottom of a glass pushed down on water. I’d seen right into it then, up close, and that had changed me. Don’t ask me to describe that, I’d have said.

  The Wasp went in hard. I was inexperienced but I could easily grit through the nausea that, despite my training, I felt. Even cosseted in that manchmal-field I felt all the tugs of strange velocity, as we moved in what were not really directions, and the misleading gravity bubble we’d brought with us did its best. But I was much too anxious not to disgrace myself to give in to awe. That came only later, after our indulgence was ended, after we’d been put to initial frantic duties and then after those were finished, when we’d reached a cruising depth of immersion.

  What we do, what we can do—immersers—is not just keep ourselves stable, sentient and healthy in the immer, stay able to walk and think, eat, defecate, obey and give orders, make decisions, judge immerstuff, the paradata that approximate distances and conditions, without being crippled with always-sick. Though that’s not nothing. It isn’t only that we have, some say (and some refute), a certain flatness of imagination that keeps the immer from basilisking us out of usefulness. We’ve learned its caprices, to travel it, but knowledge can always be learnt.

  Ships while still in the manchmal—Terre ones, I mean, I’ve never been on any exot vessels that abjure the immer and I know nothing about the ways they move—are heavy boxes full of people and stuff. Immerse, into the immer, where the translations of their ungainly lines have purpose, and they’re gestalts of which we’re part, each of us a function. Yes, we’re a crew working together like any crew, but more. The engines take us out of the sometimes, but it’s we who do the taking, too; it’s we who push the ship as well as it that pulls us. It’s us tacking and involuting through the ur-space, the shifts in it we call tides. Civilians, even those awake not puking or weeping, can’t do that. The fact is a lot of the bullshit we tell you about the immer is true. We’re still playing you, when we tell you: the story dramatises, even without lying.

  “This is the third universe,” I told Scile. “There’ve been two others before this. Right?” I didn’t know how much civilians knew: this stuff had become my common sense. “Each one was born different. It had its own laws—in the first one they reckon light was about twice as fast as it is here now. Each one was born and grew and got old and collapsed. Three different sometimes. But below all that, or around it, or whatever, there’s only ever been one immer, one always.”

  He did know all that, it turned out. But to be told these everyday facts by an immerser made them something new, and he listened like a boy.

  We were in a bad hotel on the outskirts of Pellucias, a small city popular with tourists because of the gorgeous magmafalls it straddles. It’s the capital of a small country on a world the name of which I don’t remember. In the everyday, it’s not in our galaxy, it’s off somewhere light-aeons away, but it and Dagostin are close neighbours via the immer.

  By then I was seasoned enough. I’d been to many places. I was between commissions, when I met Scile, spending a couple of local weeks on self-granted shore leave before I went for another job. I was picking up rumours—of new immertech, exploration, dubious missions. The hotel bar was full of immersers and other port life, travellers recovering, and, this time, academics. I was pretty familiar with all but the last of these types. In the lobby was an ad for a course in The Healing Power of Story, at which I made rude noises. A trid of turning and altering words floated the corridors, welcoming guests to the inaugural meeting of the Gold and Silver Circuits Board; to a convocation of Shur’asi philosopher-bureaucrats; to CHEL, the Conference of Human Exoterre Linguists.

  I was drunk in the bar with a bunch of temporary stopover friends, all now thoroughly hazy memories. We were being obnoxious. I went from halfheartedly flirting with a bartender to mocking a table of scholars from CHEL, no less drunk or boisterous than we. We’d eavesdropped on them, then told them with immerser swagger that they didn’t know anything about life or even languages in the out, and so on.

  “Go on then, ask me something,” I said to Scile. That was the first thing I ever said to him. I know exactly how I’d have looked: leaning back in my high chair, turned so resting my back against the bar top, my head back so I could look down at him. I was surely pointing at him with both hands and smiling a bit pinch-mouthed so as to not yet give him any satisfaction. Scile was the least gone at his table, and he was refereeing the teasing on both sides. “I know all about weird languages,” I told him. “More than any of you buggers. I’m from Embassytown.”

  When he believed me, I’ve never seen a man so astonished, so delighted. He didn’t stop playing but he looked at me very differently, the more when he discovered none of my companions were my compatriots. I was the only Embassytowner, and Scile loved it.

  It wasn’t just his attention I liked: I was pleased with how this compact, tough-looking guy fenced with me, and kept everyone raucously amused while asking questions with actual content. We stumbled off after a while and spent a night and a day trying to enjoy sex together, sleeping, trying again, several times, with good-humoured lack of success. After that over breakfast he badgered and blandished and begged me; and I, pretending disdain and having a lovely time, acquiesced, and let him take me, tired but, as I teased him, not sore enough, to the conference.

  He presented me to his colleagues. The CHEL was for the Terre study of all exot languages, but it was those generally considered most strange that fascinated its members. I saw slapdash temporary trids advertising sessions on cross-cultural chromatophore signalling, on touch communication among the unseeing Burdhan, and on me.

  “I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?” said one young woman to me, apropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes
in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.”

  I noticed my own trid in the background. Embassytowner guest! On life among the Ariekei. “That’s wrong,” I told the conference organisers, “they’re Hosts.” But they told me: “Only to you.”

  Scile’s colleagues were eager to talk to me: no one there had met Embassytowners before. Nor Hosts, of course.

  “They’re still quarantined,” I told them, “but in any case they’ve never asked about coming out. We don’t even know if they could take immersion.”

  I was willing to be a curio but I disappointed them. I’d warned Scile I would. The discussion became vague and sociological when they realised that I wouldn’t be able to tell them almost anything about Language.

  “I hardly understand any,” I said. “We only learn a tiny bit, except Staff and Ambassadors.”

  One participant pulled up some recordings of Hosts speaking, and ran through some vocabulary. I was pleased to be able to nuance a couple of the definitions, but honestly there were at least two people in the room who understood Language better than I did.

  Instead I told them stories of life in the outpost. They didn’t know about the aeoli, the air-sculpting that kept a breathable dome over Embassytown. A few had seen some bits of exported biorigging, but I could talk them through the out-of-date trids they had of the vaster infrastructure, the herds of houses, time-lapse of a young bridge maturing from its pontoon-cell to link city regions for no reasons I could give. Scile asked me about religion, and I told him that so far as I knew the Hosts had none. I mentioned the Festivals of Lies. Scile was not the only one who wanted to pursue that. “But I thought they couldn’t,” someone said.

  “That’s sort of the point,” I said. “To strive for the impossible.”

  “What’re they like, those festivals?” I laughed and said I’d no clue, had never been to one, of course, had never been into the Host city.

  They began to debate Language among themselves. Wondering how to repay their hospitality in anecdote, I told what had happened to me in the abandoned restaurant. They were attentive all over again. Scile stared with his manic precision. “You were in a simile?” they said.

  “I am a simile,” I said.

  “You’re a story?”

  I was glad to be able to give Scile something. He and his colleagues were more excited at my having been similed than I was.

  Sometimes I teased Scile that he only wanted me for my Hosts’ language, or because I’m part of a vocabulary.

  He’d finished the bulk of his research. It was a comparative study of a particular set of phonemes, in several different languages—and not all of one species, or one world, which made little sense to me.

  “What are you looking for?” I said.

  “Oh, secrets,” he said. “You know. Essences. Inherentnesses.”

  “Bravo on that ugly word. And?”

  “And there aren’t any.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

  “That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

  “Bravo again.” I toasted him.

  We stayed together in that hotel much longer than either of us had planned, and then I, having no plans and no commission, sought work on the vessel taking him a trade route home. I was experienced and well-referenced, and getting the job wasn’t hard. It was only a short trip, 400 hours or some such. When I realised how bad was Scile’s reaction to immersion I was very touched that he chose not to travel in sopor that first time together. It was a pointless gesture—he endured my shifts in lonely nausea, and despite meds could hardly even speak to me when I was off duty. But even irritated at his condition, I was touched.

  From what I gathered, it wouldn’t have taken very much for him to tidy up his last few chapters, the charts, sound files and trids. But Scile suddenly announced to me that he was not going to hand in his thesis.

  “You’ve done all that work and you won’t jump the last hoop?” I said.

  “Sod it,” he said, flamboyantly unconcerned. He made me laugh. “The revolution stalled!”

  “My poor failed radical.”

  “Yeah. Well. I was bored.”

  “But, hold on,” I tried to say, more or less, “but are you serious? Surely it would be worth—”

  “It’s done, it’s old news, forget it. I have other research projects anyway, simile. What are you like?” He bowed at that bad joke, clicked his fingers and moved us, thematically, on. He kept asking about Embassytown. His intensity was exciting, but he diluted it with enough self-mockery that I believed his sometimes obsessive demeanour was partly performance.

  We didn’t stay long in his parochial university town. He said he’d follow me and pester me until I gave in and took him I-knew-where. I didn’t believe any of this, but when I got my next commission he took transit with me, as a passenger.

  Once on that trip, when we were in shallow, calm immer, I brought Scile out of sopor to see a school of the immer predators we call hai. I’ve spoken to captains and scientists who don’t believe them to be anything like life, only aggregates of immer, their attacks and jackknife precision just the jostles of an immer chaos in which our manchmal brains can’t learn to see the deep random. Myself, I’ve always thought them monsters. Scile, fortified with drugs, and I watched our assertion-charges shake the immer and send the hai darting.

  When we emerged wherever we emerged, wherever our vessel had delivery or pickup, Scile would register at local libraries, picking at old research and starting his new project. Where there were sights we saw them. We shared beds but fairly quickly we gave up on sex.

  He learnt languages wherever we were, with his ferocious concentration, slang if he already knew the formal vocabulary. I’d travelled far more than he had, but I spoke and read only Anglo-Ubiq. I was pleased by his company, often amused, always interested. I tested him, taking jobs that hauled us through immer for hundreds of hours at a time, nothing cruelly long but long enough. He finally passed, according to my unclear emotional accounting, when I realised that I wasn’t only watching to see if he’d stay, but was hoping he wouldn’t leave.

  We were married on Dagostin, in Bremen, in Charo City, to where I’d sent my childish letters. I told myself, and it was true, that it was important for me to emerge in my capital port sometimes. Even at the dragged-out pace of interworld letter-exchanges, Scile had corresponded with local researchers; and I, never a loner, had contacts and the quick intense friendships that come and go among immersers; so we knew we’d have a reasonable turnout. There in my national capital, which most Embassytowners never saw, I could register with the union, download savings into my main account, amass news of Bremen jurisdiction. The flat I owned was in an unfashionable but pleasant part of the city. Around my house I rarely saw anyone accoutremented with the silly luxury tech imported from Embassytown.

  Being married under local law would make it easier for Scile to visit any of Bremen’s provinces or holdings. I responded for a long time to his pestering fascination, never the joke he at first pretended, with the information that I’d no intention of returning to Embassytown. But I think by the time we married I was ready to give him the gift of taking him to my first home.

  It wasn’t wholly straightforward: Bremen controlled entry to some of its territories almost as carefully as it did egress. We were intending to disembark there, so I wasn’t just signing up on a merchant run. At Transit House, perplexed officials sent me up a chain of authority. I’d expected that but I was mildly surprised at how high, if my reading of office furniture as evidence wasn’t on the fritz, the buck-passing went.

  “You want to go back to Embassytown?” a woman who must presumably have been only a rung or two down from the boss said. “You have to realise that’s … unusual.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me.”

  “You miss home?”

  “Hardly,” I told her. “The things w
e do for love.” I sighed theatrically but she didn’t want to play. “It’s not as if I relish the idea of being stuck so far from the hub.” She met my look and did not respond.

  She asked me what I planned to do on Arieka, in Embassytown. I told her the truth—to floak, I said. That didn’t amuse her either. To whom would I be reporting on arrival? I told her no one—I was no one’s subordinate there, I was a civilian. She reminded me that Embassytown was a Bremen port. Where had I been since entering the out? Everywhere, she stressed, and who could remember that? I had to go through my cartas and all my old dat-swipes, though she must have known that at plenty of places such formalities of arrival were slapdash. She read my list, including terminuses and brief stops I didn’t remember at all. She asked me questions about the local politics of one or two at which I could only smile, so ill-equipped was I to answer; and she stared at me as I burbled.

  I wasn’t sure what she suspected me of. Ultimately, as a carta-carrying Embassytown native immerser, crewing and vouching for my fiancé, it only took tenacity to get him the rights to entry, and me to reentry. Scile had been preparing for his work there, reading, listening to recordings, watching what few trids and vids there are. He’d even decided on what the title of his book would be.

  “One shift only,” I told him. “We’re only going until the next relief.” In Charo City, in a cathedral to Christ Uploaded, which to my surprise he asked for, I married Scile according to Bremen law, in the second degree, registering as a nonconnubial love-match, and I took him to Embassytown.

  PART ONE