Embassytown

“Where’s Oaten?” I asked about a man who had mouthpieced often for Staff on our Embassytown trid. “Where’s Dad Renshaw?” “Where are GaeNor?” about that elderly Ambassador, one of whom, when recruiting me to Language, had said “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” with a cadence so splendidly stilted it had become part of my internal idiolect, so whenever I introduced myself by my full name, a little is it? trailed the words in my head, in her voice. “Where’re DalTon?” I said, of the notorious Ambassador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learnt it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood.

Oaten had retired on his modest local riches. Renshaw had died. Young. I was sad at that. GaeNor had died, one then almost immediately the other, of linkshock and loss. DalTon, I gathered—after continuing dissidence and some hinted-at final impatience with their colleagues, some ostentatiously opaque Staff internecine strife—had disappeared or been disappeared. Intrigued, I prodded at that, but got nothing more. I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions about Ambassadors directly, rather improperly, but I could gauge how far to push it and when not to.

I have no doubt that this was fallacious, but it felt to me as if I was quicker, better at sarcasm, wittier, because of my time in the out. People were kind to Scile and fascinated by him. He was fascinated back. He’d been on several worlds but emerged into Embassytown as if through a door in a wall. He explored. Our status wasn’t a secret. Nonex marriages like ours were known of but rare in Embassytown, which made us a titillation. We were spending most of our time together, still, but gradually less, as he expanded his own circles.

“Careful,” I told Scile, after one party where a man called Ramir had flirted with him, using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics. I’d never known Scile show interest in men, but still. Homosex was a little bit illegal, I told him. Except for Ambassadors.

“What about that woman, Damier?” he said.

“She’s Staff,” I said. “Anyway it’s only a little bit illegal.”

“How quaint,” he said.

“Oh yes, it’s just darling.”

“So do they know you were once married to a woman?”

“I’ve been to the out, my love,” I said. “I can do anything I bloody want.”

I showed him where I’d played. We went to galleries and exhibitions of trid. Scile was fascinated by the tramp automa of Embassytown, melancholy-seeming mendicant machines. “Do they ever go into the city?” he said. They did, but even could he corner them their artminds were too feeble to describe it to him.

It was Language that he was there for, of course, but he wasn’t blinkered to other strangenesses. Ariekene biorigging astonished him. At the houses of friends, he would stare like an appraiser at their quasi-living artefacts, architectural filigrees, their occasional medical tweak, prostheses and similar. With me, he would stand at the edge of the aeolian breath, on balconies and viewbridges in Embassytown, watching the herds of power plants and factories graze. Yes, he was staring into the city at where Language was, but he was looking at the city itself as well. Once, he waved like a boy, and though the far-off things can’t have seen us, it seemed as if one station twitched its antennae in response.

Near the heart of Embassytown was the site of the first archive. The field of rubble could have been cleared but it had been left as it was for lifetimes, since it fell: over one and a half megahours, more than half a local century. Our early town-planners must have thought that humans need ruins. Children still came, as we had, sometimes, and the overgrown dereliction was busy with Terre animals and those local lives that could tolerate the air we breathed. They, too, Scile spent a long time watching.

“What’s that?” A red simian thing with a dog’s head, shinning up a pipe.

“A fox, it’s called,” I said.

“Is it an altered?”

“I don’t know. Way back, if so.”

“What’s that?”

“A jackdaw.” “A stickleback-cat.” “A dog.” “Some indigene, I don’t know its name.”

“That’s not what we call a dog where I come from,” he’d say, or “Jack, daw,” carefully repeating names. It was unfamiliar indigenous Ariekene things that interested him most.

Once we spent hours in a very hot sun. We sat talking about things, then not talking, holding hands long enough and still enough that the animals and abflora forgot we were alive and treated us as landscape. Two creatures each the size of my forearm wrestled in the grass. “Look,” I said, quietly. “Shh.” Some way from the animals a clumsy little biped was edging away, its rear a fringe of blood.

“It’s injured,” Scile said.

“Not exactly.” Like every Embassytowner child, I knew what this was. “Look,” I said. “That’s the hunter.” A ferocious little altbrock, its black-and-white fur spattered. “What it’s fighting’s called a trunc. As is that thing running away. I know they look like different animals. You see how the tail end of that one over there’s all ragged? And the head of the one getting into it with the altbrock’s torn, too? That’s the brainhalf and that’s the meathalf of the same animal. They tear apart when the trunc’s attacked: the meathalf holds off any predators while the brain end runs off looking for a last chance to mate.”

“It doesn’t look anything like other local stuff,” Scile said. “But... I don’t think it’s Terre?” The meathalf of the trunc was winning, grinding the altbrock down. “Before it tore apart it would have had eight legs. There weren’t any octopodes on Terre, were there? Maybe underwater, but...”

“It’s not Terre or Ariekene,” I said. “It was brought in by accident kilohours ago, on a Kedis ship. They’re little gypsies. They must smell good or something: loads of things attack them. Even though if they then win, eating trunc-flesh makes them puke, or kills them. Poor little refugees.”

The brainhalf of the autotruncator was in the shadow of long-fallen stone and circuitry, watching the triumph of its erstwhile hind limbs. It teetered like a meerkat or a little dinosaur. The brainhalf had taken the trunc’s only eyes, and the meathalf circled in blind pugnacity, sniffing for more enemies from which to protect its escaped mind.

In an act of obscure sentimentality, Scile, with some effort, evaded the trunc meathalf’s claws—no small achievement, given that all it was driven to do by its remaining scrag-end thoughts was to fight—and brought it home. He kept it alive for several days. In the cage he rigged he put down food, and the trunc circled it and snatched mouthfuls as it continued its unending vigilant rounds, though it had no brain to protect. It tried to fight any brushes or cloths that we dangled near it. It died, and broke down very fast like a salted slug, leaving only mess for us to dispose of.

At the coin wall, I told Scile about that first encounter with Bren. I’d found myself hesitating to take him there or tell him the story, and that piqued me, so I made myself. Scile looked lengthily at the house.

“Is he still there?” I asked a local stallholder.

“Don’t see much of him but he’s still there.” The man made a finger-sign against bad luck.

All this beckoning Scile through my childhood. Out at breakfast late one morning, at the end of the square in which we sat, I saw, and pointed out to Scile, a little group of young trainee Ambassadors, on one of their controlled, corralled, protected expeditions into the town for which they would one day intercede. There were five or six of them, it looked like, all from the same batch, ten or twelve children, a few kilohours off puberty, escorted by teachers, security, two adult Ambassadors, a men and a women, whom I could not identify at this distance. The apprentices’ links winked frenetically.

“What are they doing?” he said.

“Treasure hunt. Lessons. Don’t know,” I said. “Showing them round their demesne.” To my mild embarrassment and the amusement of other diners, Scile stood to watch them go, still chewing the dense Embassytown toast he claimed to love (too ascetic now for me).

“Do you see that often?”

“Not really,” I said. Most of the few times I’d seen such groups was as a child myself. If it happened when I was with my friends, we might try to catch the eyes of one or other of the not-yet-Ambassadors, giggle and run off if we succeeded, chased or not by their escorts. We’d play mocking and somewhat nervous games in their wake, for a few ostentatious minutes. I paid attention to my breakfast and waited for Scile to sit.

When he did he said, “What do you think about kids?”

I glanced in the direction the young doppels had taken. “Interesting chain of thought,” I said. “Here, it