inclined my head. EdGar and I had always enjoyed an exaggerated flirtation. They liked me; they were garrulous, gossips, always giving up as much as and a little more than they should. The dapper older men glanced side to side, raised eyebrows in theatrical alarm as if someone might swoop in and stop them speaking. That conspiratorialism was their shtick. They had probably been warned off me in the last few months, but they still treated me with a chatty courtesy I appreciated. I smiled but hesitated when I realised that despite their party faces, they seemed genuinely unhappy.
“I wouldn’t have thought it were...” “... possible,” EdGar said. “There’s things going on here...” “... that we don’t understand.”
“What about the rest of the Ambassadors?” I said.
We looked around the room. Many of their colleagues had arrived now. I saw EsMe in iridescent dresses; ArnOld fingering the tight collars wedged uncomfortably below their links; JasMin and HelEn debating complexly, each Ambassador interrupting the other, each half of each Ambassador finishing their doppel’s words. So many Ambassadors in one place made for a dreamish feel. Socketed into their necks and variously ornamental, according to taste, diodes in their circuited links staccattoed through colours in simultaneous pairs.
“Honestly?” said EdGar. “They’re all worried.” “To various degrees.” “Some of them think we’re...” “... exaggerating. RanDolph thinks it’ll all be good for us.” “To have a newcomer, to shake us up. But no one’s sanguine.”
“Where’s JoaQuin? And where’s Wyatt?”
“They’re bringing the new boy along. Together.” “Neither’s been letting the other out of their sight.”
Staff were making space in front of the entrance to the hall, preparing for JoaQuin, the Chair of the Ambassadors, for Wyatt the Bremen attache, and for the new Ambassador. There were people I didn’t recognise. I’d lost sight of the pilot, so couldn’t ask if they were crew, immigrants or temporaries.
At most of these balls the newly arrived—permanent or single-tour—would be surrounded by locals. They wouldn’t lack company, sexual or conversational. Their clothes and accoutrements, their augmens, would be like grails. What ’ware they had would be pirated, and for weeks the localnet would be twittering with exotic new algorithms. This time, no one cared about anything but the new Ambassador.
“What else arrived? Anything useful?” Ambassador JasMin was in earshot, and I made a point of asking them, rather than EdGar. JasMin didn’t like me so I spoke to them when I could to let them know they didn’t intimidate me. They didn’t answer and I walked, greeted Simmon, a security officer. We hadn’t been close for years, but we liked each other sincerely enough that there was little awkwardness, though I was present as a guest, and an out-of-favour one at that, while he was working. He shook my hand with his biorigged right limb, which he’d worn since a gun had burst on a target range and taken off his own flesh version.
I went through the crowd, talked to friends, watching the glimmer of augmens interact, hearing snatches of immer slang and turning to the immersers who spoke them with a word or two in the same dialect, or a hand held in the fingerlock that told them what ship I’d last served on, to their delight. I might touch their glasses, and I’d go on.
Mostly, like everyone else, I was watching for the new Ambassador.
AND THEN they came, in a moment that could only have been an anticlimax. It was Wyatt who opened the doors, more careful and hesitant than usual. JoaQuin smiled beside him, and I admired how well they hid the anxiety they must have felt. Conversation hushed. I was holding my breath.
There was some little commotion behind them, a moment of dispute between the figures who followed. The new Ambassador stepped forward past their guides, into Diplomacy Hall. That was a palpable moment.
One of the two men was tall and thin, with hair receding— a blinking, shyly smiling, sallow man. The other was stocky, muscular and more than a hand shorter. He grinned. He was looking around. He ran his hand through his hair. He wore augmens in his blood: I could see the shine of them around him. His companion seemed to have none. The shorter man had a Roman nose, the other a snub. Their skins were different colours, their eyes. They didn’t look like or at each other.
They stood, the new Ambassador, smiling in their very different ways. They stood there mooncalf and quite impossible.
KILOHOURS BEFORE, as we prepared for our travel, Scile came to some arrangement with his employers- cum-supervisors. I never made much effort to understand his academic world. So far as I could gather, he had arranged a very extended sabbatical, and technically his residence in Embassytown was part of a project minutely funded by his university. They were paying him a peppercorn retainer and keeping his access accounts live, with a view to ultimately publishing
Researchers had come to Embassytown before, particularly Bremen scientists fascinated by the Hosts’ biological contrivings: there were one or two still there, waiting for relief. But there hadn’t been outsider linguists on Arieka in living memory, not since the pioneers who had striven to crack Language, nearly three and a half megahours before.
“I can stand on their shoulders,” Scile told me. “They had to work out how it worked from scratch. Why we could understand the Ariekei but they couldn’t understand us. Now we know that.”
While we prepared to arrive in Embassytown on what he called our honeymoon, Scile searched the libraries in Charo City. With my help he tried to tap into immerser-lore about the place and its inhabitants, and finally when we arrived he hunted in our own archives in Embassytown, but he found nothing systematic on his topic. That made him happy.
“Why’s no one written on it before?” I asked him.
“No one comes here,” he said. “It’s too far. It’s—no offence—stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Lord, none taken.”
“And dangerous nowhere, as well. Plus Bremen red tape. And to be honest, none of it makes much sense, anyway.”
“The language?”
“Yes. Language.”
Embassytown had its own linguists, but most, carta-denied if they even bothered to apply, were scholars in the abstract. They learnt and taught Old and New French, Mandarin, Panarabic, spoke them to each other as exercises like others played chess. Some learnt exot languages, to the extent that physiology allowed. The local Pannegetch forgot their native languages when they learnt our Anglo-Ubiq, but five Kedis languages and three Shur’asi dialects were spoken in Embassytown, four and all of which respectively we could approximate.
Local linguists didn’t work on the language of the Hosts. Scile, though, was unaffected by our taboos.
HE WASN’T FROM Bremen, nor from any of its outposts, nor from another nation on Dagostin. Scile was from an urban moon, Sebastapolis, which I’d vaguely heard of. He grew up very polyglot. I was never quite sure which language, if any, he considered his first. While we travelled I was envious of the blitheness, the sheer uninterest with which he ignored his birth home.
Our route to Embassytown was roundabout. The ships we took were crewed by immersers from more places than I’d ever see. I knew the charts of Bremen’s crowded
Had I ship-hopped in other directions, I could have gone to regions of immer and everyday where Bremen was the fable. People get lost in the overlapping sets of knownspace. Those who serve on exot vessels, who learn to withstand the strange strains of their propulsion—of swallowdrives, overlight foldings, bansheetech—go even farther with less predictable trajectories, and become even more lost. It’s been this way for megahours, since women and men found the immer and we became
