Embassytown

having a lovely time, acquiesced, and let him take me, tired but, as I teased him, not sore enough, to the conference.

He presented me to his colleagues. The CHEL was for the Terre study of all exot languages, but it was those generally considered most strange that fascinated its members. I saw slapdash temporary trids advertising sessions on cross-cultural chromatophore signalling, on touch communication among the unseeing Burdhan, and on me.

“I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?” said one young woman to me, apropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.”

I noticed my own trid in the background. Embassytowner guest! On life among the Ariekei. “That’s wrong,” I told the conference organisers, “they’re Hosts.” But they told me: “Only to you.”

Scile’s colleagues were eager to talk to me: no one there had met Embassytowners before. Nor Hosts, of course.

“They’re still quarantined,” I told them, “but in any case they’ve never asked about coming out. We don’t even know if they could take immersion.”

I was willing to be a curio but I disappointed them. I’d warned Scile I would. The discussion became vague and sociological when they realised that I wouldn’t be able to tell them almost anything about Language.

“I hardly understand any,” I said. “We only learn a tiny bit, except Staff and Ambassadors.”

One participant pulled up some recordings of Hosts speaking, and ran through some vocabulary. I was pleased to be able to nuance a couple of the definitions, but honestly there were at least two people in the room who understood Language better than I did.

Instead I told them stories of life in the outpost. They didn’t know about the aeoli, the air-sculpting that kept a breathable dome over Embassytown. A few had seen some bits of exported biorigging, but I could talk them through the out-of-date trids they had of the vaster infrastructure, the herds of houses, timelapse of a young bridge maturing from its pontoon-cell to link city regions for no reasons I could give. Scile asked me about religion, and I told him that so far as I knew the Hosts had none. I mentioned the Festivals of Lies. Scile was not the only one who wanted to pursue that. “But I thought they couldn’t,” someone said.

“That’s sort of the point,” I said. “To strive for the impossible.”

“What’re they like, those festivals?” I laughed and said I’d no clue, had never been to one, of course, had never been into the Host city.

They began to debate Language among themselves. Wondering how to repay their hospitality in anecdote, I told what had happened to me in the abandoned restaurant. They were attentive all over again. Scile stared with his manic precision. “You were in a simile?” they said.

“I am a simile,” I said.

“You’re a story?”

I was glad to be able to give Scile something. He and his colleagues were more excited at my having been similed than I was.

SOMETIMES I teased Scile that he only wanted me for my Hosts’ language, or because I’m part of a vocabulary.

He’d finished the bulk of his research. It was a comparative study of a particular set of phonemes, in several different languages—and not all of one species, or one world, which made little sense to me. “What are you looking for?” I said.

“Oh, secrets,” he said. “You know. Essences. Inherentnesses.”

“Bravo on that ugly word. And?”

“And there aren’t any.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

“Bravo again.” I toasted him.

We stayed together in that hotel much longer than either of us had planned, and then I, having no plans and no commission, sought work on the vessel taking him a trade route home. I was experienced and well-referenced, and getting the job wasn’t hard. It was only a short trip, 400 hours or somesuch. When I realised how bad was Scile’s reaction to immersion I was very touched that he chose not to travel in sopor that first time together. It was a pointless gesture—he endured my shifts in lonely nausea, and despite meds could hardly even speak to me when I was off-duty. But even irritated at his condition, I was touched.

From what I gathered, it wouldn’t have taken very much for him to tidy up his last few chapters, the charts, sound files and trids. But Scile suddenly announced to me that he was not going to hand in his thesis.

“You’ve done all that work and you won’t jump the last hoop?” I said.

“Sod it,” he said, flamboyantly unconcerned. He made me laugh. “The revolution stalled!”

“My poor failed radical.”

“Yeah. Well. I was bored.”

“But, hold on,” I tried to say, more or less, “but are you serious? Surely it would be worth—”

“It’s done, it’s old news, forget it. I have other research projects anyway, simile. What are you like?” He bowed at that bad joke, clicked his fingers and moved us, thematically, on. He kept asking about Embassytown. His intensity was exciting, but he diluted it with enough self-mockery that I believed his sometimes obsessive demeanour was partly performance.

We didn’t stay long in his parochial university town. He said he’d follow me and pester me until I gave in and took him I-knew-where. I didn’t believe any of this, but when I got my next commission he took transit with me, as a passenger.

Once on that trip, when we were in shallow, calm immer, I brought Scile out of sopor to see a school of the immer predators we call hai. I’ve spoken to captains and scientists who don’t believe them to be anything like life, only aggregates of immer, their attacks and jackknife precision just the jostles of an immer chaos in which our manchmal brains can’t learn to see the deep random. Myself, I’ve always thought them monsters. Scile, fortified with drugs, and I watched our assertion-charges shake the immer and send the hai darting.

When we emerged wherever we emerged, wherever our vessel had delivery or pickup, Scile would register at local libraries, picking at old research and starting his new project. Where there were sights we saw them. We shared beds but fairly quickly we gave up on sex.

He learnt languages wherever we were, with his ferocious concentration, slang if he already knew the formal vocabulary. I’d travelled far more than he had, but I spoke and read only Anglo-Ubiq. I was pleased by his company, often amused, always interested. I tested him, taking jobs that hauled us through immer for hundreds of hours at a time, nothing cruelly long but long enough. He finally passed, according to my unclear emotional accounting, when I realised that I wasn’t only watching to see if he’d stay, but was hoping he wouldn’t leave.

We were married on Dagostin, in Bremen, in Charo City, to where I’d sent my childish letters. I told myself, and it was true, that it was important for me to emerge in my capital port sometimes. Even at the dragged-out pace of interworld letterexchanges, Scile had corresponded with local researchers; and I, never a loner, had contacts and the quick intense friendships that come and go among immersers; so we knew we’d have a reasonable turnout. There in my national capital, which most Embassytowners never saw, I could register with the union, download savings into my main account, amass news of Bremen jurisdiction. The flat I owned was in an unfashionable but pleasant part of the city. Around my house I rarely saw anyone accoutremented with the silly luxury tech imported from Embassytown.

Being married under local law would make it easier for Scile to visit any of Bremen’s provinces or holdings. I responded for a long time to his pestering fascination, never the joke he at first pretended, with the information that I’d no intention of returning to Embassytown. But I think by the time we married I was ready to give him the gift of taking him to my first home.

IT WASN’T wholly straightforward: Bremen controlled entry to some of its territories almost as carefully as it did egress. We were intending to disembark there, so I wasn’t just signing up on a merchant run. At Transit House, perplexed officials sent me up a chain of authority. I’d expected that but I was mildly surprised at how high, if my