Embassytown

jointed, dark-haired, and extended its wings: from its back its auditory fanwing, in many colours; from its front, from below its larger mouth, its limb of interaction and manipulation, its giftwing.

We would like to shake your giftwing with our hands, CalVin said in Language, and Scile, his face still closed to me, only pursing his lips a tiny bit, held out his hand. The Host clasped my husband’s hand in a greeting that would have made no sense to it, and then it clasped mine.

So Scile saw Language spoken. He listened. He asked quick questions of CalVin between their exchanges with the Host, which they, to my surprise, put up with.

“What? Is he insinuating that you couldn’t agree... ?”

“No, it’s...” “... more complicated than that.” “Hold on.”

Then CalVin would speak together. “,” I heard them say at one point; they were saying please.

“I got almost all of it,” Scile told me afterwards. He was very excited. “They shift tenses,” he said. “When they mentioned the negotiations they—the Ariekei, I mean—were in present discontinuous, but then they shifted into the elided past-present. That’s for, uh...” I knew what it was for, I assured him. He’d told me already. How could you not smile at him? I’d listened to him with affection, if not always with interest, over hundreds of hours.

“Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible, Avice?” he said. “Im, poss, ih, bul. It makes no sense. They don’t have polysemy. Words don’t signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language? How do their numbers work? It makes no sense. And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There’s not one mind behind Language when they speak it...”

“They’re not twins, love,” I said.

“Whatever. You’re right. Clones. Doppels. The Ariekei think they’re hearing one mind, but they’re not.” I raised one eyebrow and he said, “No they’re not. It’s like we can only talk to them because of a mutual misunderstanding. What we call their words aren’t words: they don’t, you know, signify. And what they call our minds aren’t minds at all.” He didn’t laugh when I did. “You have to wonder,” he said. “Don’t you? What it is they do—Staff I mean—to make two people think they’re one.”

“Yeah but they’re not two,” I said. “That’s the point about Ambassadors. That’s where your whole theory falls down.”

“But they could have been. Should have been. So what did they do?”

Unlike monozygots’, even doppels’ fingerprints were moulded and made identical. On principle. Every evening and morning Ambassadors corrected. Artmind microsurgery found whatever tiny marks and abrasions each half of each pair had uniquely picked up over the preceding day or night, and if they couldn’t be eradicated, they were replicated in the untouched half. Scile meant that, and more. He wanted to see the children: young doppels in the creche. He could still scandalise me with stuff like that. Not that such requests got responses. He wanted to watch how they were raised.

STAFF AND AMBASSADORS went into the city regularly, but only the young or gauche would ask for details. As naughty children we hacked communications and found pictures and reports we thought were secret (that of course weren’t very), that gave us insinuations of what occurred.

“Sometimes,” CalVin told us, “they call us in for what we call moots. They chant—not words, or words we don’t know.” “And when they’re done, one by one we take a turn, singing to them.”

“What’s it for?” I asked, and simultaneously CalVin replied, “We don’t know,” and smiled.

Everyone was in his or her best again, for another event. Very different from any previous. I wore a dress studded with oxblood jade. Scile wore a tuxedo and white rose. The flyer that came for us was a biorigged mongrel, Ariekene breed-techniques but its quasi-living interior tailored to Terre needs, and piloted by our artminds.

It had been a huge shock to us when CalVin had told us we could accompany them. This wasn’t a party in the Embassy. We were going into the Host city, to a Festival of Lies.

I’d spent thousands of hours in the immer. I’d been to ports on tens of countries on tens of worlds, had even experienced that travellers’ shock we floakers called the retour, when after preparations for the alterity of a new world, one walks a quite inhuman capital and stares at intricate indigens, and starts to suspect that one has been there before. Still, the night Scile and I dressed to go into the city, I was nervous as I had not been since I left Arieka.

I watched through boat windows as we flew over the ivy and roofs of my little ghetto city. I breathed out when we crossed over the zone where the architecture went from the brick and ivied wood of my youth to the polymers and biorigged flesh of the Hosts, from alley-tangles to street-analogues of other topographies. Building- things were coming down and being replaced. Construction sites like combined slaughterhouses, puppy farms and quarries.

There were about twenty of us: five Ambassadors, a handful of Staff, and we two. Scile and I smiled at each other through our masks and breathed in the exhalations of our little portable aeoli. Quickly, very quickly, we were touched down on a roof, and followed our companions out and down and into an edifice, in the city.

A complex, many-chambered place the angles of which astonished me. Everyone who had ever talked about my poise would have laughed to see me literally stagger backwards in that room. Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs. A kind Staff member steered Scile and me. Our party walked without Ariekene chaperone. I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart. I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them. More than I’d ever seen.

The rooms were alive, cells rainbowing as we entered. Ariekei were speaking in turn, and the Ambassadors sung in alien politeness. Through a swallowing corridor, several Hosts in their final instars milled in dignified mindlessness. A bridge whistled to us.

For the first time in my life I saw Host young: steaming nutrient broths effervesced with elvers. Further off was the fightcreche, where the savage little second instars played with and killed each other. In a hall crisscrossed with walkways on tendons and platforms on muscular limbs were hundreds of Ariekei, giftwings extended, fanwings pretty with inks and natural pigments, gathered for the Festival of Lies.

FOR HOSTS, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.

Our Ambassadors, though, were human. They could lie as well in Language as in our own language, to the Hosts’ unending delight. These eisteddfods of mendacity had not existed—how could they?—before we Terre came. The Festivals of Lies had occurred almost as long as Embassytown had existed: they were one of our first gifts to the Hosts. I’d heard of them, but never expected to see one.

Our Ambassadors went among the hundreds of whickering Ariekei. Staff, Scile and I—we who couldn’t speak here—watched. The room was punctured with ventricles: I could hear it breathing.

“They’re welcoming us,” Scile told me, listening to all the voices. More. “It’s saying that, uh, they’ll see, I think, miracles, now. He’s asking our first something to step forward. It’s a compound, wait, uh...” He sounded tense. “Our first liar.”

“How do they make that word?” I said.

“Oh you know,” he said. “Sayer-of-things-that-are-not, that sort of thing.”

Furniture was extruding in the room as it self-organised into a vague amphitheatre. Ambassador MayBel, elderly, stylish women, stood before an Ariekes, which raised what looked like a big fibre-trailing fungus in its giftwing. It inserted the dangles into the sockets of the zelle jigging by its legs, and the mushroom-thing made a sound and glowed quickly changing colours, cycling to a nacreous blue.

The Host spoke. “It says: ‘describe it,’ ” Scile whispered. MayBel answered, May in the Cut, Bel the Turn voice.

The Ariekei stepped up and down, a sudden unanimity. A tense excitement. They tottered and chattered.

“What did they say?” I said. “MayBel? What did they—?”

Scile looked as if in disbelief at me. “They’re saying ‘It’s red.’ ”