Embassytown

said. “I never see any relation between what you mean and what they’re talking about, what they compare you with and use you for. So are you asking what do they think with Hasser? I’ve no idea.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“You mean literally what does he mean?”

“Right. Like, foundation-fact, like I mean girl who ate... well, you know.”

Scile hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it was, is... what they said was it’s like the boy who was opened up and closed again.” We stared at each other.

“Oh God,” I said.

“Yes. I can’t be sure, so don’t... but, yes.”

“Jesus.”

In the corvid, being hauled back to Embassytown, I said to Hasser, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a simile?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Overheard, then?” He smiled. “It’s complicated. It’s something I think about a lot, being simile. But I don’t know how you feel about it... For some of us, if you’re... If you want to talk about this stuff,” and he sounded guarded but excited, “there are a few of us who think it’s important.”

“Similes?” I said. “You, what, hang out?”

Well. They knew other tropes and Language moments too, of course, he explained. But it was certain of the similes in particular who had found a community with each other. I despised them instantly he told me.

“I don’t know how we missed you,” he said. “I know they say you, but how did the Hosts miss you for these events all this time? How did you miss us?”

“I suppose being Language was never the main thing in my life,” I said. I think I accidentally showed my contempt. If I’d not learnt to immerse and hadn’t got into the out, I reminded myself, I might have spent my days in the bars and halls and drink houses where these similes gathered. It must be a strange kind of life and notoriety, but it was something. I wanted to apologise for showing my sneer. I asked him what it all meant to him. After an initial guardedness, he said, “To be part of it! Language.”

Latterday, 5

NONE OF US with any nous believed the party was really back to normal. “Ehrsul.” I whispered to her and made motions, but when, winding her long chassis precisely she pathed her way to me, it was to tell me she couldn’t hack any coms to work out what was happening.

I found a couple of the last Ambassadors in the room, MagDa and EsMe. “What’s going on?” I said to them. “Hey. MagDa. Please.”

“We have to...” one of EsMe said. “It’s...” “Everything’s under control.”

“MagDa. What’s going on?”

Mag and Da and Es and Me looked as if they were going to say something. EsMe had never liked me, had a common Ambassador opinion of the returned outgoer, immerser, floaker, and so on, but still, they hesitated.

To my great shock Scile appeared beside us. He met my eyes, either without emotion or hiding it. “MagDa,” he said. “You have to come and talk to Ra.”

They nodded and I lost that moment. As the five of them walked away, I grabbed Scile’s arm. I kept my face impassive, and he looked back at me similarly. It hardly surprised me that he was closer to whatever was happening than I. He’d been working with Staff, he’d been in cahoots with Ambassadors. They’d always been so focused on using Language they weren’t used to learning about it, and as things had shifted in Embassytown, and it had become useful to think about such questions, they had, I understood, been fascinated with his theories. His work had made him useful. He had certainly been to more Staff functions than I had.

“So?” I said. I was only slightly surprised at my brazen self. Floakers did what they had to. “What’s going on?”

“Avvy,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

“Scile, do you know what’s happening?”

“No. I don’t. I’d a... I really don’t. This isn’t what I expected.” Near us two people touched wine glasses like little bells. The musicians were drunk now and the music was veering. This was the single chance many locals would have to meet the immerser crew, and they were taking advantage. Seeing pairs and little groups leave the party, I remembered that borrowed sex appeal of immer. I’d benefited from it myself on my return: it had been a heady few weeks.

“I have to go,” Scile said. “They need me.”

Es took one of his arms, Me the other. They surely knew relations were bad between Scile and me, and perhaps even why. I doubt they were sleeping with him. Scile’s assignations were brief and occasional. Though all Bremen marriages were legal in Embassytown, locals tended to invoke exclusive, property-based models. I was jealous of Scile, of course, but at what he’d become, and what secrets he knew.

IT WAS HALF an hour to my flat. Ehrsul came with me. In a lot of countries I’ve been in the populace all have personal vehicles. All but the largest streets of Embassytown were too narrow, and often too steep, for that. There were altanimals and some biorigged carriages to take certain routes, which switched from wheels or treads to legs where necessary, but most people went on foot.

Embassytown was a small and crowded place, our population growth limited by the edge of the aeoli breath. It was surrounded by the Host city, except at the very northern point, where Ariekene plains started. Semilegal urban growth was tolerated, jury-rigged rooms sutured to walls, looming over alleys like eaves, thrown up on roofs, always ready to be abandoned. Most Staff tacitly approved of such enterprising space-maximisation. Here and there were half-trained biorigged bits and pieces, some backstreet-crossbred with Terretech and holding together through luck, tended aspects of domesticity.

Arced over Embassytown was the Embassy itself, edging up to those plains. At something over a hundred metres it was the tallest building we had. A fat pillar, studded with horizontal boughs and landing pads, to and from which, even so late, bioluminescent corvids moved. Like something melted, the Embassy spread out at its base and became part of the streets that surrounded it. Staff neighbourhoods were half-covered, as much the innards of the Embassy itself as alleyways. Ehrsul and I descended by panelled lift, through walkways, corridors that became things between corridors and streets, arcades half-open, with unglazed windows, and then into the streets proper, and the breeze.

“God, it’s nice to get outside,” I said.

“We’re not, not really,” Ehrsul said. “We’re all always in the aeoli breath.” A room of air.

It made me think about her, that she didn’t leave Embassytown, though she could have. She wasn’t programmed to be interested in the city, I supposed. I shied away from that. In my rooms I sipped more wine, and Ehrsul companionably made trid visions of a similar glass, made her trid head drink from it. She patched into my station but could find out nothing about the evening’s occurrences on the localnet.

“I’ll try again when I get home,” she said. “No offence but your machine... you’d have more luck banging rocks together.”

I’d been to her home several times. It was tiny, and sparse, but there were pictures on the walls, a kitchen, furniture for human and other guests (one beautiful, obscene-looking Shur’asi stool). Her flat and its tasteful accoutrements were perhaps for my and others’ benefits: her pictures, her coffee table, her imported rug elements of an operating system, designed to make her user-friendly. These ruminations felt disgraceful. I wondered about EzRa.

Formerly, 4

HASSER BUZZED ME. “How did you get my number?” I said.