China Miéville

by Embassytown

  “Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.” He laughed and shook his head. “Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn’t lose our shit, did we? The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I’ve ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult’s intended, and when it’s a misunderstanding. Behind every Ku and Lono story, there’s … pilfering and cannon-fire. Believe me,” he added wryly. “It’s my job.” He made thieving-fingers motions. It was because he would say things like that that I liked him.

  “There’s always argy-bargy, Avice,” he said, and leaned toward the screen. “Job like mine. I’ve not shown bad form, have I?” He said this suddenly, almost plaintively. “But this … Avice, there are limits. JoaQuin and MayBel and that lot—they need to remember what I represent.”

  Bremen was a power, so always at war, with other countries on Dagostin, and on other worlds. What if enemies sent battleships in our direction? Kicked Bremen in the colonies? What, were we going to raise our rifles, our biorigged cannons, aim at the skies? Any comeback for a little genocide like that, which they could offhandedly commit, would have to come from Bremen itself, if it calculated it worth it. Melees in the vacuum of sometimes-space, or terrible strange firefights in the immer. That threat, and Arieka’s isolation in rough immer—and, though it went unspoken, our lack of importance—were the deterrents against attacks at that level. But there were other factors in Bremen’s martial calculations.

  The Ariekei were not pacifist. They sometimes conducted obscure internecine murders and feuds, I had been told; and whatever Wyatt said, whatever the reasons, there had been violent confrontations, deaths, between our species, in the early years of contact. Protocols between us were very firm, and for generations, there’d been no trouble in relations. So it felt absurd to imagine the Ariekei, the city, ever turning against Embassytown. But we were some thousands, and they were many many times that, and they had weapons.

  Wyatt was more than a bureaucrat. He represented Bremen, officially our protector; and as such, he must be armed. His staff were suspiciously athletic for office workers. It was well-known that there were weapon caches in Embassytown, to which Wyatt alone had access. The hidden silos were rumoured to contain firepower of a different magnitude from our own paltry guns. There for our benefit, of course, the claim was. Bremen officials arrived with the keys deep-coded in their augmens. It was impolitic and a little frightening of Wyatt to state so blatantly, even to me, an outsider of sorts and a friend of his, of sorts, that his staff were soldiers, with access to arms, and he their CO.

  It was true that he was patient. He ignored Embassytown’s minor-to-moderate embezzlement when the miabs came, and every few years when Bremen taxes were collected. He encouraged his officers to mix with Staff and commoners, and even sanctioned the occasional intermarriage. Like all colonial postings, his was a difficult job. With communication with his bosses so occasional, initiative and flexibility were vital. We’d had officious women and men in his post before, and it had made ugly politics. In return for his softly-softly stance Wyatt felt owed. That the Ambassadors were unfair.

  I liked Wyatt but he was naïve. He was Bremen’s man, when the lights went out. I understood that and what it meant, even if he did not.

  Formerly, 5

  Hosts would sometimes bob into view, alone or in small groups, zelles at their feet, walking their slowed-down scuttle through our alleyways. Who can say what their errands were? Perhaps they were sightseeing, or taking what, according to odd topographies, were shortcuts, into our quarter and out again. Some came deep into the aeoli breath, right into Embassytown neighbourhoods, and of these some were looking for the similes. These Ariekei were fans.

  Every few days one or two or a little conclave would arrive with dainty chitin steps. They would enter The Cravat, their fanwings twitching, wearing clothes for display—sashes fronded with fins and filigrees that each caught the wind with a particular sound, as distinct as garish colours.

  “Our public demands us,” someone said the first time I saw such an approach. Despite the faux-weary joke anyone could tell that this audience meant a great deal to the similes. The one time I persuaded Ehrsul to come with me, ostensibly to store up anecdotes so we could later laugh at my new acquaintances, the arrival of some Hosts seemed to discombobulate her. She ignored my whispers about the Ariekei, did not speak much except in brief polite non sequiturs. I’d been with her in Hosts’ company before, of course, but never in so informal a setting, never according to their unknown whims, not terms requested by Embassytown panjandrums. She never came back.

  The owners and regular clientele of The Cravat would courteously ignore the Hosts, which would murmur to each other. Their eye-corals would crane and the tines separate, looking us over as we looked back. Waiters and customers stepped smoothly around them. The Hosts would talk quietly as they examined us.

  “Says it’s looking for the one who balanced metal,” someone would translate. “That’s you, Burnham. Stand up, man! Make yourself known.” “They’re talking about your clothes, Sasha.” “That one says I’m more useful than you are—says he speaks me all the time.” “That’s not what it says, you cheeky sod …” So on. When the Hosts gathered around me, sometimes I had to suppress a moment of memory of child-me in that restaurant.

  I didn’t find it hard to recognise repeat visitors, by that configuration of eye-corals, those patterns on the fanwing. With the exhilaration of minor blasphemy we christened them according to these peculiarities: Stumpy, Croissant, Fiver. They, it seemed, recognised each of us as easily.

  We learnt the favourite similes of many. One of my own regular articulators was a tall Host with a vivid black-and-red fanwing, just enough like a flamenco dress for us to call it Spanish Dancer.

  “It does this brilliant thing,” Hasser said to me. He knew I was hardly fluent. “When it talks about you.” I could see him groping for nuances. “ ‘When we talk about talking,’ it says, ‘most of us are like the girl who ate what was given to her. But we might choose what we say with her.’ It’s virtuoso.” He shrugged at my expression and would have left it, but I made him explain.

  In the main my simile was used to describe a kind of making do. Spanish Dancer and its friends, though, by some odd rhetoric, by emphasis on a certain syllable, spoke me rather to imply potential change. That was the kind of panache that could get Hosts ecstatic. I had no idea whether many of them had always been so fascinated by language, or whether that obsession resulted from their interactions with the Ambassadors, and with us strange Languageless things.

  Scile always wanted details of what had happened, who had said what, which Hosts had been there. “It’s not fair,” I told him. “You won’t come with me, but you get annoyed if I can’t repeat every tedious thing anyone said?”

  “I wouldn’t be welcome and you know it.” That was true. “Why do you keep going if it’s so dull?”

  It was a reasonable question. The excitement with which the other similes reacted to the Host visitors, and the range, or its lack, of what they talked about when there were no Hosts there, irritated me, greatly, every time. I think I had, though, a sense that this was where things might occur, that this was important.

  There was a Host who often accompanied Spanish Dancer. It was squatter than most, its legs gnarled, its underbelly more pendulous, as it approached old age. For some reason I forget we named it Beehive.

  “I’ve seen it
before,” said Shanita. It spoke incessantly, and we listened, but it seemed a mixture of half-sentences. We could make no sense of what it said. I remembered where I knew it from: my first-ever journey into the city. It had competed at that Festival of Lies. It had been unusually able to misdescribe that untruth-target object. It had called the thing some wrong colour.

  “It’s a liar,” I said. I was clicking my fingers. “I’ve seen it before too.”

  “Hm,” said Valdik. He looked rather suspicious. “What’s it saying now?” Beehive was circling, watching us, scratching at the air with its giftwing.

  “ ‘Like this, like this,’ ” Hasser translated. He shook his head, I’ve no idea. “ ‘Like, they are, similar, different, not the same, the same.’ ”

  The Cravat wasn’t the only place we met, but it was by far the most common venue. Occasionally we might get together in a restaurant near the shopping districts, or the canalside benches of another parlour, but only when planned in advance and only from some vague sense of propriety, of not being hidebound. The Cravat, though, was where the Hosts had come to know they might find us, and being so found was very much the point.

  The similes thought of themselves as a salon of debate, but only a certain range of dissidence was permissible. Once a young man tried to engage us with arguments that turned from independence to seditionism, anti-Staffist stuff, and I had to intervene to save him from a beating.

  I took him outside. “Go,” I told him. A crowd of the similes were gathered, jeering, shouting at him to come back and try impugning the Ambassadors one more time.

  He said, “I thought they were supposed to be radicals.” He looked so forlorn I wanted to give him a hug.

  “That lot? Depends who you ask,” I said. “Yeah, they’d be traitors according to Bremen. But they’re more loyal to Staff than the Staff are.”

  Plebiscite politics were absurd in Embassytown. As if any of us could speak to Hosts! And for The Cravat crew, even ignoring the fact of Embassytown’s inevitable collapse in the event of their absence, without Ambassadors, who would speak these men and women so proud of being similes to the Hosts?

  Latterday, 7

  The Ariekei didn’t respond to any attempts at contact. In those incommunicado hours, I more than once considered buzzing CalVin, or Scile, to demand information: they would be more likely than anyone else I knew to have some. It wasn’t the confrontation that stopped me, but the conviction that I wouldn’t be able to shame or bully anything out of them.

  It was spring in Embassytown and the chill was dissipating. From high in the Embassy I looked over the roofscape of the city, to animalships and blinking architecture. Something was changing. A colour or its lack, a motion, a palsy.

  A corvid rose from an Embassy landing pad, moved through the sky to the city’s airspace, edged from place to place, hovering, looking for somewhere to land; defeated, it returned. The Ambassadors aboard must have sent messages down to the various housebodies they overflew, without response.

  There were probably still plenty of Embassytowners who didn’t yet know anything was wrong. The official press were loyal or inefficient. But there had been many people at that party, and stories were spreading.

  The sun still rose, and the shops sold things, and people went to work. It was a slow catastrophe.

  I called the number Ehrsul had given me, which she had extracted from a newly and imperfectly upgraded net, which she had told me was Ez’s. He—or whomever it was I’d called—didn’t answer. I kept swearing, as quietly as I could make myself, and tried again, again without result.

  Later I learnt that that day, in desperation, Ambassadors went into the city on foot. Pairs of desperate doppels accosted the Hosts they met, speaking Language at them through the transmitters of their aeoli helmets and receiving polite nonanswers, or incomprehension, or unhelpful intimations of disaster.

  Someone came to my house. I opened the door and it was Ra, standing there on my threshold. I stared at him in silence for long seconds.

  “You look surprised,” he said.

  “Understatement,” I said. I stepped aside for him. Ra kept taking his buzzer out and making as if to switch it off, then leaving it on. “They trying to reach you?” I said.

  “Only Wyatt,” he said.

  “Really? No one else? No Ambassadors? You’re not being followed?”

  “How are you?” he said. “I was thinking …” We sat for a long time on chairs facing each other. He looked over his shoulder, behind himself, more than once. There was nothing there but my wall.

  “Where’s Ez?” I said.

  He shrugged. “He’s gone out.”

  “Shouldn’t you be together?” He shrugged again. “In the Embassy? Look, Ra, how did you even get out? I’d have thought they’d have you on bloody lockdown.” If it had been me in charge, I would have incarcerated EzRa, to control the situation, or contain it, whatever the situation was. Perhaps they had tried. But if Ra was telling the truth, both the new Ambassador had got away.

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “You know. Needs must. I just wanted to … Had to split.” I had to laugh a second at that. There had to be quite a story there.

  “So,” I said eventually. “How do you like our little town?” He laughed in turn.

  “Jesus,” he said. As if he’d seen something good and unexpected. Outside, gulls sounded. They veered, headed constantly for the sea they glimpsed kilometres away, were turned back constantly by sculpted winds and aeoli breath. It was very rare that any broke out into the proper local air, and died.

  “You have to help me,” he said. “I need to know what’s going on.”

  “Are you joking?” I said. “What do you think I know? Jesus, this is a comedy of errors. What do you think I’ve been trying to find out, for God’s sake? Why have you come to me?”

  “I’ve spoken to everyone I could find who was at that party—”

  “Didn’t try very hard, did you, if you only just got to me …”

  “All the Staff, I mean, and other people from the Embassy. The higher-up ones wouldn’t say anything to me, and the rest … a couple of them told me to talk to you.”

  “Well, I don’t know why. I thought you were in the middle of it all, I thought you’d …”

  “Whoever up there does know something, they’re not telling me. Us. But these others, they just … They said you know people, Avice. Ambassadors. And that people tell you things.”

  I shook my head. “That’s just bloody outsider-chic,” I exhaled. “You thought you could go a roundabout way, get something through me? They’re just saying that because I’m immerser. And because I was sleeping with CalVin, for a while. But not for months. Local months, not Bremen months. My own damn husband’s a foreigner and he knows more than I, and he won’t even talk to me.” I stared at him. “You seriously telling me you’ve got no idea what’s happening? Does Wyatt know you’re here?”

  “No. He helped me slip away, but … And neither does Ez. It’s not their business.” He bit his lip. “Well, officially it is, I mean … I just wanted …” After a silence, Ra met my eye. He stood. “Look,” he said, all of a sudden calm. “I need to find out what’s going on. Wyatt is worse than useless. Ez’s trying to pull rank. We’ll see how far that gets him. And I hear you might know people who know things.” In that moment he seemed not like Ez’s luggage, but an officer and an agent of a colonial power.

  “Tell me,” I said at last. “What you do know. What’s been going on. What you’ve heard, suspect, anything.”

  The Hosts had come back. Two days of silence, and then they had been at the Embassy, a troupe of heavy presences swaying across a landing pod. “At least forty of them,” he said. “Christ knows how they fit into their vessel. They were asking for me and Ez.”

  The way he told it, the Ariekei had barely responded to Ambassadors’ questions and greetings. They demanded, repeatedly and with strange rudeness, to speak to EzRa.

  “I trained for this,” Ra said. �
��I’ve studied them, I’ve studied Language. You saw the first group meet us at the party? That wasn’t normal, was it? I knew it wasn’t. This was the same, only more. They were … agitated. Talking nonsense. I was there already, but then Ez came in and then they recognised us. Started saying: ‘Please, good evening Ambassador EzRa, please, please, yes.’ Like that.

  “Some of the others—like your friends CalVin—tried to get in our way. Telling us no. We’d said too much.” He shook his head. “And the Hosts are edging closer and closer. We’ve got nowhere to go, and they’re huge. It’s feeling … So we just … raised our voices and spoke Language. Ez and I. We said good evening. Told them it was an honour. And when we did—”

  When they spoke the same thing happened as had before, but this time to a larger little multitude. I might have been able to track down footage or trid of the occurrence—there must have been vespcams there—but Ra told me and I could easily imagine it. The crowd of Hosts stiffening; some staggering; maybe tumbling in carapace piles. Sounds, the double-calls of Ariekene distress, becoming something unfamiliar, counterpoints. Were they swooning? Their noises went up and down in complex relation to EzRa’s voice. “We tried to keep going,” Ra said. “To keep talking. But in the end Ez just petered out. So I did, too.” When they did, the Host in front rebudded open its eyes and craned them backward at its companions, without turning its body, and said to them: “I told you.”

  The Ariekei had staggered in the wood-walled stateroom, with the concrete of Embassytown beyond, and the sky dusted with birds in their air-cage. The Ambassadors and Staff were left standing half to attention and bewildered.