Embassytown

by China Miéville

  The MC was shouting the rules of the stand-off. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things, said again, and shucked its wings. Whatever alien feelings it was feeling, they looked to us like bravado. The two women of the Ambassador and that intricate big beast the Ariekes stared at each other. The Ambassador opened their mouths. Before they spoke, said, Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much.

  Ruckus. Before the humans came, the Host went on, and I knew what the lie would be, we didn’t speak.

  It said it clearly. There was a moment, then the Ariekei stuttered in their ecstasy of reception. Even the Terre knew that we had heard something extraordinary. There was noise everywhere. Some shouted argument. I saw jostling in the crowd.

  “Not true!” someone was shouting. “Not true!”

  Men and women were got suddenly, violently, out of someone else’s way. They screamed and parted. I could see the man coming, and it was Valdik.

  “Not true!” he said. He ran and shouted and brought a cudgel down on the ground, and I felt a spasming report. There was energy in his weapon. So much for security. He faced . Valdik shouted that it was not true. He raised his weapon. Eye-corals strained. People were running toward us. Valdik shouted, “Fucking snake!” watched him, its coral spreading wide as horns. I heard the bark of a weapon and Valdik went down, his club scorching the floor. Constables grabbed him. He was beaten down.

  “He went for a Host?” people were gasping.

  I could hear Valdik still shouting: “The devil! He’ll fucking destroy us! Don’t let it lie!”

  None of the Ariekei made a sound. The officers hauled Valdik upright finally, blood-smeared and ragged, hardly conscious. They began to drag him, his feet scratching on the floor, out of the grounds. Tens of seconds had passed since his attack. In that whole hall, I think I was the only person watching CalVin and their silent colleagues, one of the very few not staring at the battered would-be assassin being taken away.

  I saw Scile. He was with them, among the Ambassadors and Staff. That was it; that was where to look. They were looking not at Valdik but at , and beyond it at Pear Tree and its group of Ariekei. I was one of very few in that hall who saw what happened then.

  Pear Tree moved. From behind it stepped Hasser. He walked quickly. Even was still looking at Valdik. No constables saw Hasser coming, or were there to intervene. They were busy, suckers to the oldest feint. I moved.

  One of ’s eyebuds glimpsed something and the whole coral arced backward, to stare. I saw Spanish Dancer, heard it calling, its giftwing moving in alien distress. Hasser aimed a biorigged thing. A ceramic carapace, a pistolgrip that gripped him back. He fired. No one was there to stop him.

  He fired and the gun-animal opened its throat and howled. He blasted across the lying ground, spraying mud-coloured Host blood.

  It broke apart as it flew. Hasser didn’t stop firing. The assault tore ’s giftwing from its body. Its legs dyingly scuttled, so insectile it was appalling. It gushed from everywhere.

  Then Hasser was snatched out of my sight himself by a constable’s bullet. By the time screaming started again I was beside him. I trembled. I struggled for breath as if I were beyond the aeoli. Hasser stared without sight. I heard the rattle of scute from ’s posthumous fitting.

  Spanish Dancer traced shapes with its wings. Its colours flushed. I’d never before seen Ariekene grief. I looked at Pear Tree, which looked down at me. I ignored the commotion and all the wails in the room, and watched Pear Tree, and CalVin, and Scile. I remember I moaned every time I exhaled. They were looking at Hasser’s body without expression. They must have seen me.

  THAT IS HOW the most virtuoso liar of the Ariekei was murdered.

  The days after that were as you’d imagine. Chaos, fear, excitement. No Host had been harmed by an Embassytowner for hundreds of thousands of hours, for lifetimes. Suddenly we felt we existed on sufferance. Staff imposed a curfew, gave the constabulary and SecStaff extraordinary powers. In the out, I’d spent time in cities and colonies under dictatorships of various forms, and I knew that what we had was a quaint approximation of martial law; but for Embassytown it was unprecedented.

  I HAD SO MUCH sadness in me. I cried, only when I was alone. I was so sorry for Hasser, silly secret zealot; and for Valdik who I still believe never knew he’d been a distraction, and whose loyalty to Scile was such that, after that night, he went to his execution denying that anyone else had had any hand in his plan.

  So sorry for . I never knew what emotion would have been appropriate for an Ariekene loss, so I settled for sadness.

  For a day I turned off my buzz and did not answer when anyone came to my door. The second day I kept the buzz off, but I did answer the knocking. It was an autom I’d never seen before, a whirring anthropoid outline. I blinked and wondered who’d sent this thing and then I saw its face. Its screen was cruder than any I’d seen her rendered on before, but it was Ehrsul.

  “Avice,” she said. “Can I come in?”

  “Ehrsul, why’d you load yourself into . . . ?” I shook my head and stepped back for her to enter.

  “The usual one doesn’t have these.” She swung the thing’s arms like deadweight ropes.

  “Why do you need them?” I said. And Pharotekton bless her she grabbed hold of me, just as if I’d lost someone. She did not ask me anything. I hugged her right back, for a long time.

  I WENT BACK once more to The Cravat. Set my expression, walked a floaker walk. None of the similes were there, nor, I think, did any ever come back. I let my show drop. But the owner, a man whose name I had never bothered to learn, referring to him only by the vernacular slang handle we’d granted him that I now cannot remember, hurried up to me in agitation, as if I could help him. He told me that Ariekei were still coming: Spanish Dancer; one we’d known as Baptist; others of the Professors. They’d been staring at where the similes used to sit.

  “Surl Tesh-echer used to come here all the time,” I said. “Maybe they’re coming to be where their friend used to be.”

  The owner was terrified the Hosts would commit reprisal for ’s death. Most people were. I was not. I’d seen Pear Tree step aside for Hasser and say something to him on his way. I’d seen CalVin and the others waiting for that. had been murdered but it also had been executed, publicly, by its peers. For heresy, had been sentenced to Death by Human.

  Embassytown couldn’t know, and would not. The situation must be made to look to most people, and did, like a bloody mess, rather than the careful juridical moment it also was.

  Ariekei traditioners had decided they could not tolerate , would not brook its experiments. A lie was a performance; a simile was rhetoric: their synthesis, though, the first step in their becoming quite another trope, was sedition. I would never assume I understood the motivations of any exot, and I had grown up knowing the thinking of the Hosts was beyond me. Whatever drove the Ariekene powers to their brutal decision might, might not, be comparable to the calculations that had also gone on behind Embassy doors. The Ariekene resistance to these innovations might have been ethical, or aesthetic, or random. It might have been religious or a game. Or instrumental, an expression of some cool, cynical calculation, a power-jostling among cliques.

  I remembered Cal or Vin’s anxiety, when they’d told me that some of Scile’s ideas about made sense. The Ambassadors, as much as its Ariekene judges, had seen in it an approaching danger. I never thought CalVin saw whatever that coming badness was as my husband had, but where there’s commitment and dissent there might be change, and perhaps that was enough. There’d been a catastrophe on its way that, together, Ariekei and Terre had staved off. A problem they had solved.

  Who could I tell? If I could prove anything, so what? Not everyone would think any of this the slightest crime. And what would I bring on myself? I’d no idea how many of the Ambassadors knew, or if they would disapprove if they did, or what they would do to me if I complained. I can’t have been the only one who worked out what had happened. T
here were enough snatches of information. But Staff asserted horror and shock and stressed to Embassytowners that they had apologised to our Hosts, and that Hasser and Valdik had both been brought to justice. They unleashed harsh policing against the remnants of the Druman cult.

  Scile moved at last into the Embassy, became Staff. One day all his possessions were gone from my home. Among his flaws wasn’t cowardice. I think he was avoiding me; perhaps he wanted to spare me his rage.

  I NEVER STOPPED being appalled by the sentencing I’d seen. But months passed—and our months are long—and we were out of the doldrums, and Valdik and Hasser were long dead. I still wouldn’t speak to CalVin or Scile, but though I didn’t know which Staff and Ambassadors were complicit in what had happened I couldn’t spurn them all forever. I couldn’t live in Embassytown like that. It felt not like compromise but survival.

  Even CalVin and I came wordlessly to a way of being in the same room, if we so found ourselves. We might, I eventually came to accept, one day even exchange brief cool words.

  I remembered those elements in Scile, the little opacities that had always been present, that I’d always been intrigued by, that now seemed to have come to constitute all of him. I didn’t know what fears the rest of the complicit Staff had had of , but I thought they must have been political. I was never sure about Scile, though, for all that he was Staff too now, and had for a long time been of their party. For all his consummate manipulation of the credulous simile zealots. He worked as apparatchik, but I wondered if he really was a prophet.

  Many months after those horrible events, the first crisis, as Embassytown geared into a different kind of time, as the arrival of the next ship grew closer, as the time I’ve called “formerly” ended, the Hosts apparently made Scile a simile. I heard that from Ehrsul.

  She couldn’t find out exactly what he’d had to do. He was part of Language but I never heard him used and in various, I hoped untraceable, eavesdropping ways, I did try. By contrast the similes Hasser and Valdik, changed as they were by the events, were invigorated. It’s like the boy who was opened and closed again and is dead. It’s like the man who swam weekly with the fishes and is dead. The Ariekei found new uses for these new formulations.

  Ehrsul was a good friend to me in what was a pretty bleak time, though I wouldn’t risk telling her everything that I knew had happened. I told myself that I was just waiting. I was immerser. When the relief came, I’d go into the out, away from this place. Then the miab arrived, with details of what would be arriving next, and news of our impossible Ambassador.

  Wasn’t I going to stay to see what would happen? Everything

  after this was latterday, and it’s the only story remaining. Wasn’t I eager for Embassytown to change?

  Later, the scale of the crisis that unfolded made this, retrospectively, a guilty memory, but when first I realised that things were not going quite to plan, the first time I met EzRa at the Arrival Ball, when I sensed that they were spreading some unexpected chaos in Embassytown, it had made me happy.

  Part Four

  ADDICT

  9

  PEOPLE WANDERED through streets in a kind of utopian uncertainty, knowing that everything was different but unsure in what sort of place they lived now. Adults were talking and children playing games. “I’m minded to be careful,” I heard one man say, and I could have laughed in his face. Minded, are you? I could have said. Minded how? What will you do? How will you be careful?

  We’d always lived in a ghetto, in a city that didn’t belong to us but to beings far more powerful and strange. We’d lived among gods—little tiny gods but gods compared to us, considering what was at their and our disposal—and ignored the fact. Now they’d changed, and we had no way to understand that, and all we could do was wait. Embassytowners’ foolish discussions were as meaningless right then as the sounds of birds.

  Our news figures said things to me from screens and tridflats like: “The situation is being closely monitored.” We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after. I walked through the tiny Kedis district. The ruling troikas there had heard about the killing, knew enough Terre psychology that all our fears were rubbing off on them, and they were very anxious, too.

  I couldn’t persuade Ehrsul to come to join me in the agitation and rush of Embassytown main, in the hilltop districts where people massed, following rumours that taught them nothing, staring, powerless spectators, into the city moving as opaquely as ever but differently opaquely now. We could all see it. I went to her apartment. Ehrsul was subdued, but then we all were.

  She spiked me a coffee with one of the edgers many of us were taking. She moved backwards and forwards on her treads. Her mechanisms were smooth, but inevitably with that repetition tiny infelicitous noises in the machine of her became audible, then irritations.

  “Have you found anything out?” I said.

  “About what’s going on? Nothing. Nothing.”

  “What about on the . . . ?”

  “I said, nothing.” She made her face blink. “There’s all kinds of blather all over the nets, but if anyone out there understands what’s happened or knows what’s about to happen, they’re talking about it below what I can tap.”

  “EzRa?”

  “What about them? Do you think I’m just neglecting to tell you important bits? Christ.” I was embarrassed at her tone. “I don’t know where they are any more than you. I haven’t seen them since the party either.” I didn’t say that I’d seen Ra more recently. “Oh, there’s plenty of rumours: they’re in the out, they’re taking control, they’re preparing an invasion, they’re dead. Nothing I’d stake a rep on. If your channels to the Embassy haven’t netted anything, why would my pitiful little searchware?” We regarded each other.

  “Alright,” I said slowly. “Come with me . . .”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Avice,” she said, and her voice foreclosed argument. I was not, this one time, wholly disappointed at that.

  I WENT TO the coin wall. The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock. But I knocked, and Bren answered.

  I was looking down when he opened the door, to give myself a second. I raised my head to him. He looked much older to me, because his hair was grey. That was all, though: he was hardly collapsing. He recognised me. Before I met his eyes, I’m sure.

  “Avice,” he said. “Benner. Cho.”

  “Bren,” I said. We stared at each other, and eventually he made a sound between a sigh and a laugh, and I smiled if sadly and he stepped aside for me to enter the room I remembered so extraordinarily well, which hadn’t changed at all.

  He brought me a drink and I joked about the cordial he’d given me the first time I was there. He remembered the chant we’d used when spinning coins, and recited it to me, imperfectly. He said something or other, something that meant you went into the out, you’re an immerser! A congratulations. I felt like thanking him. We sat looking at each other. He was still thin, wore what could have been the same smart clothes I remembered.

  “So,” he said. “You’ve come here because the world’s ending.” A muted screen behind him played out the confusion of Embassytown.

  “Is it?” I said.

  “Oh I think so. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I think it’s the end of the world, yes.” He sat back. He looked comfortable. He drank and looked at me. “Yes I do. Everything you know’s finished. You know that, don’t you? Yes, I can see you do.” I saw his affection for me. “You impressed me,” he said. “Such an intense girl. I wanted to laugh. Even while you were looking after your poor friend. Who breathed Host air.”

  “Yohn.”

  “Anyway. Anyway.” He smiled. “It’s the end of the world and you’re here why? You think I can help?”

  “I think you can tell me things.”

  “Oh
believe me,” he said, “no one in that castle wants me to know anything. They keep me as out of it as they can these days. I’m not saying I’ve no ins at all—there are those who keep an old man in gossip—but you probably know at least as much as me.”

  “Who’s Oratees?” I said. He looked sharply up.

  “Oratees?” he said. “It really is? Oh. Well. Christ Pharotekton.” He smoothed down his shirt. “I did wonder. I thought maybe that must be it, but . . .” He shook his head. “But you doubt. You can hardly believe it, can you?”

  “Oratees isn’t a person,” Bren said. “They’re a thing. They’re junkies.”

  “Everything that could happen has happened sometime,” he said. He leaned towards me. “Where are the failed Ambassadors, d’you think, Avice?” It was so shocking a question that I held my breath.

  “If I put it to you outright, you wouldn’t imagine, would you, that every single one of the monozogs the Embassy raises is suited to Ambassadorial duties?” he said. “Of course not. Some doppels don’t take—don’t look enough like each other to be fixed, have quirks, can’t think enough alike, despite all the training. Whatever.

  “You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s just not thought. You know that doppels retire, when the other dies.” He raised his hands, slightly, indicating himself. “You’ve never been in the Embassy crèche, have you? There are those who never get out of it in the first place. If you’ve been grown and raised and trained for one job, and you can’t do it, what’s the profit in letting you out? That could only cause trouble.”

  Little rooms of rendered twins, mouldering. Slack and separate doppels gone bad, one whole, one like a melted image; or perhaps both wrong; or neither wrong in any physical way but with some bone-deep meanness; or just not able to do what they were born to.

  “And if you’re already out,” Bren said, “by the time you realise you hate your job or your doppel, or whatever? Well. Well.” He spoke gently, breaking something to me. “When he died, my . . . it was an accident. It’s not as if we were old. People knew us . . . me. I was much too young to disappear. They tried to entice me to the rest home of course. But they couldn’t force me. So what if my neighbours don’t like me? So what if they see something crippled? No one likes a cleaved showing off their injury. We’re stumps.” He smiled. “That’s what we are.