Embassytown

wouldn’t be like...” In the country he’d been born in, on the world he’d been born on, children were mostly raised by between two and six adults, connected to them and each other by direct genetics. Scile had mentioned his father, his mother, his auntfathers or whatever he called them, more than once and with affection. It was a long time since he had seen them: such ties mostly attenuate in the out.

“I know,” he said. “I just...” He waved at the town. “It’s nice here.”

“Nice?”

“There’s something here.”

“ ‘Something.’ I can tell words are your business. Anyway we’re going to pretend that I didn’t hear you. Why would I inflict this little place...”

“Oh stop it, really.” He smiled with only a little prickle in his voice. “You got out, yes, I know. You don’t mind it here half as much as you pretend to, Avice. You don’t like me that much, to come here if it was purgatory for you.” He smiled again. “Why would you mind it, anyway?”

“You’re forgetting something. This isn’t the out. In Bremen they consider most of what we do here— biorigging aside, and that we get out of the good graces of you-know-who—thuggish field medicine. And that includes sex-tech. You do remember how kids get made? You and I don’t exactly...”

He laughed. “Point,” he said. He took my hand. “Compatible everywhere but between sheets.”

“Who said I wanted to do it between sheets?” I said. It was a joke, not a seduction.

It all feels like prelude, now I reflect on it. The first time I saw exots of species I’d not grown up with was in a rowdy town on a tiny world we called Sebzi. I was introduced to a group of hive-things. I’ve no idea what they were, or from where their race originated. I’ve seen none of their kind since. One came forward on a pseudopod, leaned its hourglass body toward me and from a tiny snag-toothed ventricle said, in perfect Anglo-Ubiq, “Ms. Cho. It’s a pleasure.”

Scile reacted to Kedis and Shur’asi and Pannegetch, I don’t doubt, with more aplomb than I had that time. He gave talks in Embassytown’s east, about his work and travels (I was impressed by how he was able to tell the truth but make his life sound coherent, precisely arced). A Kedis troika approached afterwards, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.

He introduced himself to the Shur’asi shopkeeper we knew as Gusty—Scile ostentatiously and with pleasure told me its actual namestring—and cultivated a brief friendship. People were charmed to see them about town, Scile with a companionable arm around Gusty’s main trunk, the Shur’asi’s cilia scuttling it at Scile’s pace. They’d swap stories. “You go on about the immer,” Gusty would say. “Try travelling by whorl-drive. Blimey, that was a journey.” I was never able to decide if his mind really was as like ours as the shape of his anecdotes suggested. Certainly he performed our small talk well, even once mimicking the poor Anglo-Ubiq of a Kedis neighbour, in a complicated joke.

Of course Scile wanted to meet the Ariekei. It was the Ariekei he studied nightly, when he stopped being social. It was they who eluded him.

“I still can’t find out almost anything about them,” he said. “What they’re like, what they think, what they do, how they work. Even stuff written by Ambassadors describing their work, their, you know, their interactions with the Ariekei, it’s all... incredibly empty.” He looked at me as if he wanted something. “They know what to do,” he said, “but not what it is they’re doing.”

It took me moments to make sense of his complaint. “It’s not the Ambassadors’ job to understand the Hosts,” I said.

“So whose is it?”

“It’s no one’s job to understand them.” I think that was when I first really saw the gap between us.

By now we knew Gharda and Kayliegh and others, Staff and those close to them. I had become friends with Ehrsul. She teased me about my lack of profession (she, unlike most Embassytowners, had been au fait with the term “floaker” before I introduced it), and I teased her right back about the same thing. As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she’d never become anyone else’s property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.

“It’s just Turingware,” Scile said when she wasn’t there, though he allowed that it was better such than he’d seen before. He was amused by how we related to her. I didn’t like his attitude, but he was as polite to her as if he did think her a person, so I didn’t pick a fight with him about it. The only real interest he ever showed in Ehrsul was when it occurred to him that, because she did not breathe, she would be able to go into the city. I told him the truth: that she said to me when I asked her about it that she never did or would, that I could not say why, and, given how she’d said it, I wasn’t minded to ask.

She was sometimes asked to tinker with Embassytown’s artminds and automa, which would bring her into close contact with Staff: we were often at the same official soirees. I was there because I had uses, too. I’d been out more recently than any of my superiors: only a few Staff had ever left for official business to Bremen and returned. I was a source, could tell them about the recent politics and culture in Charo City.

When I’d first left Embassytown, Dad Renshaw had taken me to one side—literally, he’d steered me to the edge of the room in which I was having a farewell party. I’d waited for fatherly homilies, spurious rumours about life in the out, but what he had told me was that if I ever came back, Embassytown would be very interested in information on the state of things in Bremen. It was so polite and matter-of-fact it took me a while to assure myself I’d been asked to spy. I was only amused, was all, at the unlikeliness. Then I was ruefully amused again when, thousands of hours later, back in Embassytown, I realised I was making myself useful just as I’d been asked to.

Scile and I would have been objects of interest whatever we did—he, an intense and fascinated outsider, was a curio; I, part of Language, and a returned immerser, a minor celebrity. But purveying facts about Bremen as I did, I, a commoner, and my commoner husband were welcomed into Staff circles even more smoothly than we would otherwise have been. Our invitations continued after Embassytown’s little media stopped running interviews with and stories about the prodigal immerser.

They approached me very soon after I returned. Not Ambassadors, of course, but some viziers and high-level muck-a-mucks, requesting my presence at a meeting where they said things so vague I didn’t parse their purpose for a minute, until abruptly I remembered Dad Renshaw’s intercession, and understood that the muted questions about some of the trends in Bremen and associated powers and possible attitudes to dependencies and their aspirations were requests for political intelligence. And that they were offering payment.

That last seemed silly. I took no money for telling them what little I could. I waved into silence someone’s diplomatic explanations of their political concerns: it didn’t matter. I showed them newspipes, downloads, gave them perhaps a tiny sense of the balance of power in Bremen’s ruling Cosmopolitan Democratic party. Bremen’s wars, interventions and exigencies had never fascinated me, but perhaps to those more focused on them, what I told them might give insights into recent vicissitudes. Honestly I doubt any of it was stuff their artminds and analysts wouldn’t have predicted or guessed.

It was hardly high espionage drama. A few days later I was introduced to Wyatt, then Bremen’s new man in Embassytown, whom my Staff interlocutors had mentioned to me in obliquely warning fashion. He immediately teased me about that earlier meeting. He asked if I had a camera in his bedroom, or something like that. I laughed. I liked it when we crossed paths. He gave me a personal number.

It was in circles such as this, Embassytown society, that I met Ambassador CalVin and became their lover. One of the things they did for me was give Scile an opportunity to meet the Hosts.

CalVin were tall, grey-skinned men, a little older than me, with a certain playfulness, and the charming arrogance of the best Ambassadors. They invited me, and, at my request, Scile, to functions, and would come in turn into the town with us, where an Ambassador walking the streets without a Staff retinue was uncommon enough to attract attention.

“Ambassador,” Scile worked up courage to ask them, at first cautiously, “I have a question about your... exchanges with the Hosts.” And then into some minutely specific, arcane enquiry. CalVin, earning at that time my gratitude, were patient, though their answers were doubtless disappointing.

In CalVin’s company I saw, heard and intuited details about aspects of Embassytown life I never otherwise would have. I picked up on my lovers’ momentary references, hints and asides. They wouldn’t always answer me