Embassytown

The crowd parted a moment and as if by plan revealed Cal or Vin. He still stared right at me. I was so startled I stopped moving. I couldn’t see my watcher’s doppel. The party concealed him again.

Gharda reappeared, with the pilot on her arm. She saw me and hesitated, looked a query at me. I waved, by all means. It mattered not at all how much more travelled I was than my city’s rulers, how airily I’d given them knowledge, how eagerly they’d received it. As EdGar walked away, I was nothing. It was they and the other Ambassadors who would, in closed session, decide what had happened, and what would happen now. They made law.

Formerly, 3

A LONG TIME AGO I performed a strange unpleasant ritual in the shell of a restaurant. For that I was, Ambassadors and Staff had occasionally told me, feted by the Ariekei in my absence. That had meant nothing until the moment in the hall, at the festival, after the lying, when the Hosts discovered who I was.

They spoke rapidly, craned their eye-corals. They spoke me every day, Scile told me afterwards. That was what they said to CalVin. I do not know, one Host said to CalVin, about me, how I did without her, how I thought what I needed to think.

Her? This was the question that we called the Tallying Mystery: did the Hosts consider each Ambassador one mind, double-bodied people? And if so, did they think the rest of us half-things, irrelevances, machines? A city full of the Ambassadors’ marionettes? When they knew me as simile, they asked for me to come back, but I was never sure if I was guest, exhibit, or something else. When we went, the Hosts took care of us, whether or not they understood that we were people.

I accepted their invitations because Scile could always come with me. A present to him, for which he was effusive, though I think he wanted to talk, to debrief, after the events more than I would. We would be ushered to the Hosts’ halls. There were usually Ambassadors and viziers and others there too, and these glimpses of secrets that had gone on all my life, the toing and froing of Staff in the Host city, were almost as disturbing to me as anything else that happened. I’d keep spotting Ambassadors walking flesh corridors in conversation with Ariekei, places I couldn’t imagine any human having a purpose.

These events, to which they had no in, were titillations to most of my friends. “A festival? Of lies?” Gharda said at a party after the first one. “The Hosts asked for you?” They were all gathered around me demanding to know what the city was like, and I laughed because someone said That’s import! exactly as we had when we were children.

My occasional presence in the city was troubling, I could tell, to the Ambassadors. They didn’t like seeing me there. This was their mystery. Staff debriefed me exhaustively after each of these trips, asking what I’d seen, what I’d understood.

The second time I entered the city, into another hall with a crowd of Hosts, I was left near a collection of obscure objects and anaesthetised Ariekene animals, and with four other humans, enzymatic lights bowing in the curves of their aeoli helmets. Two were Ambassador LeNa, who ignored me. The other two were young men, commoners like me.

“Hello,” said one. He smiled enthusiastically and I did not smile back. “I’m Hasser: I’m an example. Davyn’s a topic. You’re Avice, aren’t you? You’re a simile.”

NEITHER THIS, nor any of the other times I went in, was an event the same as the first gathering I’d attended. They were more chaotic, and, I learnt, less focused. There had for a while been a vogue among the Hosts for what were, more or less, conventions. Celebrations of Language, with broader remits than just the rare lies. They would gather as many of us necessary constructed facts as they could in one place, as many enLanguaged elements as possible—animate, inanimate, sentient and not—and come to look at us, use and theorise us, without consensus. We sat polite through wheezing, stuttering, sung arguments around and about us. I found it less compelling than the devoted lying I’d first seen.

I was lulled by the roar and whisper of the Cut- and the Turn-mouths, while Scile tried to translate. Hosts stamped back and forward, disagreeing in factions. Something like a polemic, I gathered, went on between those who thought me a useful figure of speech, and those who did not.

It was a crippled, strange debate, I think. There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was—they would have asserted— like. But those critics of course couldn’t say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have them.

“But...” said Scile. He was unhappy.

“They must be in the back of their minds, those thoughts,” I said. “Is that why they’re angry? They’ve been denied them.”

“Hold on,” he said. “One of them’s saying about you: ‘It’s a comparison, and... it is something new.’ I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

“Alright, my love, just...”

“Hey,” Scile whispered. “They’re using the other figures of speech.” He indicated our Embassytown companions, at whom the Hosts stared. He turned his head in surprise. “If I understand them... that man Hasser— he lied to us. He’s not an example: he’s a simile, like you.”

Whatever the question marks over my efficacy, I must have had my uses: for the several weeks these events were in vogue, the Hosts kept bringing me back.

SOMETHING SOURED between CalVin and me. For weeks during our sex I’d teased them that I could tell the difference in the way they touched me: they probably knew there was a little truth to it. When we’d first got together I’d been immaturely excited that I was sleeping with an Ambassador. But that rather performed giddiness didn’t last long.

I remember the feel of them, the cool of their links in their necks, minimalist jewellery amplifying their thoughts into each other. I remember watching them touch each other—peculiar, unique erotics. Afterwards, I might grin salaciously when I distinguished them, but it was an edgy game. “Cal,” I would say, pointing at one, then the other. “Vin. Cal... Vin.” They might smile, might look away. I could sometimes, especially in the mornings, see differences. The marks of night-time—a face imprinted by a pillow, particular bags below eyes. CalVin never left long before ablutions, locking the door to the correction chamber and emerging with all those tiny differences effaced or copied.

They didn’t like that I was being asked back to the conferences and conventions. But Staff would hardly turn down Host requests like that. Once one of CalVin told me in sudden fury, apropos of nothing I’d noticed, that Ambassadors had no bloody power at all, that the other Staff and viziers and the rest made all the bloody decisions, that he and his doppel had less say than anyone.

I argued with them, now, sometimes. After one really unpleasant altercation I swear I did not start, Cal or Vin stayed for seconds in the doorway staring at me, with an expression I couldn’t read, while his doppel walked away. Perhaps I wouldn’t have liked it if they could immerse, I supposed. I doubted I would have cared, though.

“It’s not the same,” I said to the one still there. “You speak Language. I am it.”

THERE WERE HOSTS who favoured my simile above all others, and came to every event at which I was present. They extolled my uses, over all the allegories or rhetorical devices embedded in varying ways in men and women and other things present. “You have fans,” Scile said. These were my months of simile fame.

I saw Hasser several other times; we would stand and wait while we were deployed in harsh arguments. There were Language dissidents, urging a reconception of what I and the other similes might have been. From the reactions of the other Hosts, this thought-experiment was in bad taste. After one such, I asked Scile if he’d heard the Hosts speak to Hasser, and if so what he was about.

Scile understood Language as well as an Ambassador, but “I don’t know how you bloody things work,” he