Embassytown

I recall episodes very well, but episodes, not a timeline. The most relevant times, the definitional ones. The rest of it’s disorganised in my head, and mostly I don’t mind. Here: one other time in my childhood, I was in the company of Hosts. One morning in the third monthling of July I was called to a meeting.

It was Dad Shemmi they sent to fetch me. He squeezed my shoulder as he pointed me in to one of the nursery’s scruffy paperwork-and-datspace-filled offices. It was Mum Solfer’s room, and I’d not been in it before. Mostly Terretech, though a boxy biorigged bin was quietly eating her rubbish. Solfer was older, kind, distracted, knew me by name, which she did not all my shiftsiblings. She beckoned me, obviously uneasy. She stood, glanced around as if for a sofa, which the room was without, sat again. Behind her desk with her—not unamusing, in retrospect, it was smallish and too cramped for them—was Dad Renshaw, a relatively new, thoughtful and teacherly shiftfather, who smiled at me; and to my astonishment the third person waiting for me was Bren.

It had been almost a year, nearly 25Kh, since Yohn’s accident, since I or any of us had returned to that house. I’d grown, of course, and more than many of my siblings, but as soon as I entered, Bren smiled recognition. He looked unchanged. They might have been the same clothes he had on as before.

Mum shifted. Though she sat with the others on one side of the desk while I, on the stiffly adult chair to which she directed me, was on the other, the way she moved her eyebrows at me I felt suddenly that she and I were together in whatever this oddness was.

I’d be paid for this, she said (an uploading of no little size, it turned out); it was quite safe; it was an honour. She didn’t make very much sense. Dad Renshaw gently interrupted her. He turned to Bren and motioned for him to speak.

“You’re needed,” Bren said to me. “That’s all this is.” He opened his hands palm up, as if their emptiness were evidence of something. “The Hosts need you and again for some reason it’s ended up going through me. They’re trying to prepare something. They’re having a debate. A few of them are convinced they can make their point clearly by... by comparison.” He watched to see if I followed. “They’ve... sort of thought of one. But the events it describes haven’t happened. Do you understand what that means? They want to make it speakable. So they need to organise it. Quite precisely. It involves a human girl.” He smiled. “You see why I asked for you.” I suppose he didn’t know any other children.

Bren smiled at the way my mouth was moving. “You... want me to... perform a simile?” I said at last.

“It’s an honour!” Dad Renshaw said.

““It is an honour,” Bren said. “I can see you know that. ‘Perform’?” He wagged his head in a sort of well, yes and no way. “I won’t tell you lies. It’ll hurt. And it won’t be nice. But I promise you’ll be alright. I promise.” He leaned toward me. “There’ll be money in it for you, like your Mum was saying. And. Also. You’ll have the thanks of the Staff. And the Ambassadors.” Renshaw glanced up. I wasn’t so young as to not know what that gratitude was worth. I’d an idea of what I hoped to do when I was old enough, by then, and the goodwill of Staff was something I wanted very much.

I ALSO SAID YES to the request because I thought it would take me into the Host city. It did not. The Hosts came to us, to a part of town to which I’d hardly ever been. I was taken there in a corvid—my first flight, but I was too nervous to enjoy it— escorted not by constables but Embassy SecStaff, their bodies subtly gnarled with augmens and tecs.

Bren escorted me, with no one else, no shiftparents, though he had no official role in Embassytown. (I didn’t know that then.) That was a time, though, before he withdrew from the last of such informal Staff-like roles. He tried to be kind to me. I remember we skirted Embassytown’s edges and I saw for the first time the scale of the enormous throats that delivered biorigging and supplies to us. They flexed, wet and warm ends of siphons extending kilometres beyond our boundaries. I saw other craft over the city: some biorigged, some old Terretech, some chimerical.

We came down in a neglected quarter that no one had been bothered to take off-grid. Though it was almost empty its streets were lit by lifelong neon and trid spectres dancing in midair, announcing restaurants long-since closed. In the ruins of one such, Hosts were waiting. Their simile, I had been warned, required me to be alone with them, so Bren gave me into their authority.

He shook his head at me as he did, as if we were agreeing that something was a little absurd. He whispered that it wouldn’t be long, and that he would be waiting.

WHAT OCCURRED in that crumbling once-dining room wasn’t by any means the worst thing I’ve ever suffered, or the most painful, or the most disgusting. It was quite bearable. It was, however, the least comprehensible event that had or has ever happened to me. I was surprised how much that upset me.

For a long time the Hosts didn’t pay attention to me, but performed precise mimes. They raised their giftwings, they stepped forward and back. I could smell their sweet smell. I was frightened. I’d been prepared: it was imperative for the sake of the simile that I act my part perfectly. They spoke. I understood only the very basics of what I heard, could pick out an occasional word. I listened for the overlapping whisper I’d been told meant she, and when I heard it I came forward and did what they wanted.

I know now to call what I did then disassociating. I watched it all, myself included. I was impatient for it to finish; I felt nothing growing, no special connection between me and the Hosts. I was only watching. While we performed the actions that were necessary, that would allow them to speak their analogy, I thought of Bren. He could of course no longer speak to the Hosts. What was happening had been organised by the Embassy, and I supposed Bren’s erstwhile colleagues, the Ambassadors, must have been glad for him to help organise it. I wonder if they were giving him something to do.

After I was done, in the youthmall, my friends demanded all details. We were roughnecks like most Embassytowner children are. “You were with the Hosts? That’s import, Avvy! Swear? Say it like a Host?”

“Say it like a Host,” I said, appropriately solemn for the oath.

“No way. What did they do?” I showed my bruises. I both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Eventually I enjoyed the telling and embellishing of it. It gave me status for days.

Other consequences were more important. Two days later, Dad Renshaw escorted me to Bren’s house. It was the first time I’d been there since Yohn’s accident. Bren smiled and welcomed me, and there within I met my first Ambassadors.

Their clothes were the most beautiful I’d seen. Their links glinted, the lights on them stuttering in time to the fields they generated. I was cowed. There were three of them, and the room was crowded. The more so as, behind them, moving side to side, whispering to Bren or one or other Ambassador, was an autom, computer in segmented body, the woman’s face it gave itself animated as it spoke. I could see the Ambassadors trying to be warm to me, a child, as Bren had tried, without having any practise at it.

An older woman said, “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” in an amazing, grand voice. “Come in. Sit. We wanted to thank you. We think you should hear how you’ve been canonised.”

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time. “It’ll be shortened with use,” Bren told me. “Soon they’ll be saying you’re a girl ate what was given her.”

“What does it mean, sirs, ma’ams?”

They shook their heads, they moued. “It’s not really important, Avice,” one of them said. She whispered to the computer and I saw the created face nod. “And it wouldn’t be accurate anyway.” I asked again with another formulation, but they would say nothing more about it. They kept congratulating me on being in Language.

Twice during the rest of my adolescence I heard myself, my simile, spoken: once by an Ambassador, once by a Host. Years, thousands of hours after I acted it, I finally had it sort-of explained to me. It was a crude rendering, of course, but it is I think more or less an expression intended to invoke surprise and irony, a kind of resentful fatalism.

I didn’t speak to Bren again the whole rest of my childhood and youth, but I found out he visited my shiftparents at least one other time. I’m sure it was my help with the simile, and Bren’s vague patronage, that