by Embassytown
On that journey to Embassytown, Scile had had his sopor amended, spiked with gerons so he would age while under. It’s an affecting gesture, to ensure that the sleep of travel doesn’t keep you young while your working partner grows older.
In fact he didn’t spend all his time under. With the help of medicines and augmens, he spent a little of the journey awake and studying, where immer allowed, breaking off to retch or fend off panic with chemical prophylactics as necessary. “Listen to this,” he read to me. We were at the table, passing through very calm immer shallows. In deference to his always-sickness I was eating dried-up fruit, a nearly odourless food. “ ‘You are of course aware that every Man has two mouths or voices.’ In this”—he prodded what he was reading—“they have sex by singing to each other.” It was some antique book about a flat land.
“What’s the point of that nonsense?” I said.
“I’m looking for epigraphs,” he said. He tried other old stories. Looking for invented cousins to the Hosts, he showed me descriptions of Chorians and Tucans, Ithorians, Wess’har, invented double-tongued beasts. I couldn’t share his enthusiasms for these grotesques.
“I could have Proverbs 5:4,” he said, staring at his screen. I didn’t ask for an explanation: we used to joust like that sometimes. Instead I uploaded a Bible when I was alone, to find: “But in the end she’s bitter as wormwood, sharp as a sword with two mouths.”
The Hosts aren’t the only polyvocal exots. Apparently there are races who emit two, three or countless sounds simultaneously, to talk. The Hosts, the Ariekei, are comparatively simple. Their speech is an intertwining of two voices only, too complexly various to be pegged as “bass” or “treble.” Two sounds—they can’t speak either voice singly—inextricable by the chance coevolution of a vocalising ingestion mouth and what was once probably a specialised organ of alarm.
The first ACLers listened and recorded and understood them. “Today we heard them talk about a new building,” the bewildered figures on the old trid told Scile and me. “Today they were discussing their biowork.” “Today they were listing the names of stars.”
We saw Urich and Becker and their colleagues, neither of them yet famous at the time we spied on, mimicking the noises of the locals, repeating their sentences to them. “We know that’s a greeting. We know it is.” We watched a long-dead linguist play sounds to a waiting Ariekes. “We know they can hear,” she said. “We know they understand by hearing each other; we know that if one of its friends said exactly what I just played, they’d understand each other.” Her recording shook its head at us and Scile shook his.
Of the epiphany itself, there’s only Urich and Becker’s written testimony. In the way of these things, others from their party later denounced the record as misrepresentative, but it was the Urich-Becker manuscript that became the story. I’d seen the children’s version long ago. I remembered the picture of the moment; Urich’s features a delight to the caricaturist, him and subtler-faced Sura Becker both rendered with pop-eyed exaggeration, staring at a Host. I’d never read the unbowdlerised manuscript till Scile pulled it up for me.
We knew a great number of words and phrases [I read]. We knew the most important greeting: . We heard it every day and we repeated it every day—the latter without effect.
We programmed our voxware and had it speak the word repeatedly. And repeatedly the Ariekei ignored it. At last in frustration we looked at each other and screamed half the word each like a curse. By chance they were simultaneous. Urich yelled “suhaill,” Becker “jarr,” at once.
The Ariekes turned to us. It spoke. We didn’t need our ’ware to make sense of what it said.
It asked us who we were.
It asked what we were, and what we had said.
It had not understood us, but it had known that there was something to understand. Before, it had always heard the synthesised voices just as noise: but this time, even though our shouts were much less accurate than any ’ware renditions, it knew that we had tried to speak.
I’ve heard versions of that unlikely story many times. From that moment, or from whatever really happened, via misjudgements and wrong directions, within seventy-five kilohours, our predecessors understood the language’s strange nature.
“Is it unique?” I asked Scile once, and when he nodded I, for the first time, really felt astonishment at it, as if I were an outsider, too.
“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” he said. “Eh, nee, where. It isn’t about the sounds, you know. The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives.”
There are exots who speak without speaking. There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts. The Hosts are not like that. They’re empaths of another kind.
For humans, say red and it’s the reh and the eh and the duh combined, those phonemes in context, that communicate the colour. That’s the case whether I say it, or Scile does, or a Shur’asi, or a mindless program that has no sense that it’s speaking at all. That is not how it is for the Ariekei.
Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.
“If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.”
Hosts’ minds were inextricable from their doubled tongue. They couldn’t learn other languages, couldn’t conceive of their existence, or that the noises we made to each other were words at all. A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words. That was why those early ACL pioneers were confused. When their machines spoke, the Hosts heard only empty barks.
“There’s no other language that works like this,” Scile said. “ ‘The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself.’ ”
“Who was that?” I said. I could tell he was quoting. “I can’t remember. Some philosopher. It’s not true anyway and he knew it.”
“Or she.”
“Or she. It’s not true, not for the human voice. But the Ariekei … when they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got …” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to be Language. That’s why they make similes.”
“Like me,” I said.
“Like you but not just like you. They made similes long before you lot ever touched down. With anything they could get their hands on. Animals. Their wings. And that’s what that split rock’s for.”
“Split-and-fixed. That’s the point.”
“Well quite. They had to make it so they could say ‘It’s like the rock which was split and fixed.’ About whatever it is they say that about.”
“But they didn’t make as many similes, I thought. Before us.”
“No,” Scile said. “That is … No.”
“I can think things which aren’t there,” I said. “And so can they. Obviously. They must, to plan the similes in the first place.”
“Not … quite. They’ve no what-ifs,” he said. “At best, it must be like a pre-ghost in their heads. Everything in Language is a truth claim. So they need the similes to compare things to, to make true things that aren’t there yet, that they need to say. It might not be that they can think of it: maybe Language just demands it. That soul, that soul I was talking about’s what they hear in Ambassadors, too.”
Linguists invented notation like musical score for the interwoven streams of Hostspeak, named the two parts according to some lost reference the Cut and the Turn voices. Thei
r, our, human version of Language was more flexible than the original of which it was a crude phonetic copy. It could be sounded out by ’ware, it could be written, neither of which forms the Hosts, for which Language was speech spoken by a thinker thinking thoughts, could understand.
We can’t learn it, Scile said. All we can do’s teach ourselves something with the same noises, which works quite differently. We jury-rigged a methodology, as we had to. Our minds aren’t like theirs. We had to misunderstand Language to learn it.
When Urich and Becker spoke together with shared, intense feeling, one the Cut and the other the Turn, a flicker of meaning was transmitted, where zettabytes of ’ware had failed.
Of course they tried again, they and their colleagues practicing duets, words that meant hello or we would like to speak. We watched their recorded ghosts. We listened to them learn their lines. “Sounds flawless to me,” said Scile, and even I recognised phrases, but the Ariekei did not. “U and B had no shared mind,” Scile said. “No coherent thoughts behind each word.”
The Hosts didn’t react with quite the same blankness with which they had heard synthesised voices. They were uninterested in most, but listened hard to a few of these stuttering couples. They didn’t understand it, but they seemed to know that something was being said.
Linguists, singers, psychospecialists had investigated those pairs who had the most obvious impact. Scientists had striven to work out what they shared. That was how the Stadt Dyadic Empathy Test was created. Attain a certain threshold together on its steep curve of mutual understandingness, fire up machines to connect various brainwaves, synching and linking them, and a particular pair of humans might just be able to persuade the Ariekei that there was meaning to their noises.
Still, communication remained impossible for megahours after contact. It was a long time after those early revelations that researches into empathy got us anywhere. Very few pairs of people scored well on the Stadt scale, scored highly enough to mum a unified mind behind the Language they ventriloquised. That was the minimum it would take to speak across the species.
What the colony needed, someone had joked, were single people split in two. And to put it like that was to suggest a solution.
The first interlocutors with the Hosts were exhaustively trained monozygote twins. Few such siblings could make Language work any better than the rest of us, but those that could were a slightly larger minority than in any control group. They spoke it horribly, we now know, and there were innumerable misunderstandings between them and the Ariekei, but this meant trade, too, at last, and a struggling to learn.
In my life, I’d met one other pair of idents, non-Embassytowners I mean, in a port on Treony, a cold moon. They were dancers, they did an act. They were blood-born, of course, not made, but still. I was absolutely stunned by them. By how they looked like each other, but only so far. That their hair and clothes were not precisely the same, that they spoke in distinguishable voices, went to different parts of the room, talked to different people.
On Arieka, for lifetimes, the last two megahours, our representatives hadn’t been twins but doppels, cloned. It was the only viable way. They were bred in twos in the Ambassador-farm, tweaked to accentuate certain psychological qualities. Blood twins had long been outlawed.
A limited empathy might be taught and drugged and tech-linked in between two people, but that wouldn’t have been enough. The Ambassadors were created and brought up to be one, with unified minds. They had the same genes but much more: it was the minds those carefully nurtured genes made that the Hosts could hear. If you raised them right, taught them to think of themselves right, wired them with links, then they could speak Language, with close enough to one sentience that the Ariekei could understand it.
The Stadt test was still taken in the out, by students of the psyche and of languages. It had no practical use, now, though—we grew our own Ambassadors in Embassytown, and didn’t have to find each precious potential one among very young twins. As a way to source speakers of Language, the test was obsolete, I had thought.
Latterday, 2
“Please join me”—I couldn’t see who it was who spoke loudly, announcing the arrivals to Diplomacy Hall—“in welcoming Ambassador EzRa.”
They were immediately surrounded. In that moment I saw no close friends, had no one with whom to share my tension or conspiratorial look. I waited for EzRa to do the rounds. When they did, how they did so was another indicator of their strangeness. They must have known how it would seem to us. As JoaQuin and Wyatt introduced them to people, Ez and Ra separated, moved somewhat apart. They glanced at each other from time to time, like a couple, but there were soon metres between them: nothing like doppels, nothing like an Ambassador. Their links must work differently, I thought. I glanced at their little mechanisms. They each wore a distinct design. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Disguising their unease with functionaries’ aplomb, JoaQuin led Ez and Wyatt Ra.
Each half of the new Ambassador was at the centre of a curious crowd. This was the first chance most of us had had to meet them. But there were Staff and Ambassadors whose fascination for the newcomers had clearly outlasted their own initial meetings. LeNa, RanDolph and HenRy were laughing with Ez, the shorter man, while Ra looked bashful as AnDrew asked him questions, and MagDa, I realised, stayed close enough to touch his hands.
The party bustled about me. I caught sight of Ehrsul’s rendered eyes at last and winked as Ra approached me. Wyatt made an aaah noise, held out his hands, kissed my cheeks.
“Avice! Ra, this is Avice Benner Cho, one of Embassytown’s … Well, Avice is any number of things.” He bowed as if granting me something. “She’s one of our immersers. She’s spent a good deal of time in the out, and now she offers cosmopolitan expertise and an invaluable traveller’s eye.” I liked Wyatt and his little power plays. You might say we tended to twinkle at each other.
“Ra,” I said. A hesitation too short for him to notice, I think, and I held out my hand. I shouldn’t call him “Mr.” or “Squire”: legally he was not a man, but half of something. Had he been with Ez I’d have addressed them as “Ambassador.” I nodded at AnDrew, at Mag, at Da, who watched.
“Helmser Cho,” Ra said quietly. He after his own hesitation took my hand.
I laughed. “You’ve promoted me. And it’s Avice. Avice is fine.”
“Avice.”
We stood silent for a moment. He was tall and slim, pale, his hair dark and plaited. He seemed slightly anxious but he pulled himself together somewhat as we spoke.
“I admire you being able to immerse,” he said. “I never get used to it. Not that I’ve travelled a lot, but that’s partly why.”
I forget what I replied, but whatever it was, there was a silence after it. After a minute I said to him, “You’ll have to get better at it, you know. Small talk. That’s what your job is, from here on in.”
He smiled. “I’m not sure that’s quite fair,” he said.
“No,” I said. “There’s wine to drink and papers to sign, too.” He seemed delighted by that. “And for that you came all the way to Arieka,” I said. “For ever and ever.”
“Not for ever,” he said. “We’ll be here seventy, eighty kilohours. Until the next relief but one, I think. Then back to Bremen.”
I was astounded. My blather stopped. Of course I should not have been taken aback. An Ambassador leaving Embassytown. Nothing about this situation made sense. An Ambassador with somewhere else to return to was a contradiction in my terms.
Wyatt was muttering to Ra. MagDa smiled at me from behind them. I liked MagDa: they were one of the Ambassadors who hadn’t treated me differently since my falling out with CalVin.
“I’m from Bremen,” Ra told me. “I’d like to travel like you have.”
“Are you Cut or Turn?” I asked.
It was obvious he didn’t like the question. “Turn,” he said. He was older than I but not by very much.
“How did all this happen?” I said. “You and Ez?
It takes years.… How long have you been training?”
“Avice, really,” Wyatt said from behind Ra. “You’ll hear all about that—” He raised his eyebrows in a rebuke, but I raised mine back. There was a moment between him and Ra, before Ra spoke.
“We’d been friends a long time,” he said. “We got tested years ago. Kilohours, I mean. It was a random thing, part of an exhibition about the Stadt method.” He stopped as the noise in the room grew louder. Mag or Da said something, laughing, moved between me and Ra demanding the attention he politely turned on them.
“He’s tense,” I said to Wyatt quietly.
“I don’t think this is his favourite thing,” he said. “But then, would it be yours? Poor man’s in a zoo.”
“ ‘Poor man,’ ” I said. “Very, very strange to hear you speak of him like that.”
“Strange times.” We laughed over a swell of music. There was a strong smell of perfume and wine. We watched EzRa, who were not EzRa, not really, who were Ez and Ra, separated by metres. Ez was bantering with facility and pleasure. He caught my eye, excused himself to his interlocutors and approached.
“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.”