Embassytown

“Please,” he said. He didn’t sound particularly intimidated, though I was deploying my best fuck-you immerser swagger. “It’s not hard to track you down. Come and have a drink.”

“Why would I come and have a drink?”

“Please,” he said. “There are people you should really meet.”

The similes met in an amiably collapsing part of Embassytown, near our young ruins. I took a long route, walking for most of the morning, past many ignored and homeless automa. I even passed the coin wall and as I always did glanced at the door.

There are slums on Charo City, and I’ve spent more time than I’d like in their environs. Many of the ports at which I’ve docked are in or by such areas: it’s as if slumism is an infection carried by ships. When in the course of Embassytown parties, members of reformer factions started mouthing, I tended to interrupt them. “Slums?” I’d say. “Believe me, my friend, I’ve seen slums. You know where I’ve been? I know from slums. We don’t have slums.”

In Embassytown there were no rag-draped children playing with paper boats in stinking water, in potholes; no people selling themselves for food to immersers and people from the out, nor hawking bits of their DNA or flesh to bioccaneers; wattle-and-daub huts didn’t shake as ships rose and descended overhead, didn’t collapse every few landings. Our social graphs were pretty flat: differentials of money and power were minor. Excepting Staff, and Ambassadors.

The wallscreens and projectors in our unkempt areas were on forgotten loops, their cycles degraded. Some advertised discontinued products, or luxuries from the out of which I knew there had been none left for a long time. Here as elsewhere in Embassytown the walls were overgrown with ivy and altivy, and specked with a local moss- analogue, so the light from those advertisements and crude public art was dappled with leaf-shadows.

There were places where, pushed through the foliage, embedded in bricks and plastone, pipes siphoned information from or fed illicit and troublemaking opinions to the screens. I walked in the glimmer of hacked denunciations of Bremen, threats of violence to Wyatt and his small staff. A demagogic trid ghost muttered about freedoms, democracies and taxation. Even Wyatt would hardly have been very concerned about this half-hearted radical’s display, though I’m sure he would have excoriated the constabulary for failing to take such graffiti offline.

I was in a shopping street specialising in leather and altleather. I smelt tanning and guts by a shop where ripe purses were being harvested from a biorigged tree. The butchers cut them with skill, making a slit to which they would attach a clasp, scooping out innards and readying the skins for sealing. In the rear was a crop of immature umbrellas, silly luxuries weakly flexing their vespertilian canopies. The altleather goods were simple, mouthless, arseless things which couldn’t have lived: the viscera that slopped in the shop’s gutter were vague and meaningless.

At least a dozen similes were gathered in the wine-cafe called The Cravat, to where I’d been directed. Its trid sign stalked endlessly in front of it, a figure failing to do up its neckpiece. I stepped through it (an unexpected flourish of tridware making it look up as if startled before reverting to its loop) and inside.

“Avice!” Hasser was delighted. “Introductions... Darius, who wore tools instead of jewellery; Shanita, who was kept blind and awake for three nights; Valdik, who swims every week with fishes.” He went round the room like that. “This is Avice,” he said, “who ate what was given to her.”

OF COURSE we were hardly all the similes the Ariekei spoke. Some were animal or inanimate: there was a house in Embassytown out of which, many years before, the Hosts had taken all the furniture, then put it back, to allow some figure of speech. The split stone, made so they could speak the thought, it’s like the stone that was split and put together again. Most, though, were Terre men and women: there was something in us that facilitated.

Many similes, of course, were uninterested in their status. There were I gathered one or two among Staff. Even Ambassadors. They never came.

“They don’t like being Language,” Hasser said. “It makes them feel vulnerable—they like speaking Language, not being it. Plus they’d have to hobnob with commoners.” He spoke with the complicated amalgam of respect and resentment I’d heard before and would again, many times.

We talked about Language, and what it meant to be what we were. They talked: mostly I listened. I tried to keep the irritations their blather raised to myself. I’d come, after all. A disproportionate number of the similes seemed, to varying degrees, to be independencers. They said this and that about Bremen’s benighted hand and ruthless agents. Having met Wyatt, this in particular made me snort.

“I don’t see any of you turning down anything from the miab,” I said.

“No,” someone answered, “but we should trade, instead of handing over bloody taxes and aid.”

Hasser gave me sotto voce information about my interlocutors as they spoke, like a vizier in the ears of an Ambassador. “She’s just bitter because she doesn’t get called very often. Her simile’s too recondite.” “He’s less a simile than an example, honestly. And he knows it.” When I went home I was peppery about them all. I told Scile how ridiculous a scene it was. But I went back. I’ve thought a lot about why I did. Which does not mean I could explain it.

On my second trip, Valdik, who every week swam with fishes, told the story of his similification. He was an ongoing: his status depended not on something that he had done or had done to him, but on something he had to continue to do. It’s like the man who swims with fishes every week, the Hosts might want to say, to make whatever obscure point it was, and to allow them that, it had to be true that he did. Hence his duty.

“There’s a marble bath in Staff quarters,” Valdik said. Glanced up at me, back down. “They shipped it years ago, all the way through the immer. They put little altfish in with me, which can take the chlorine. I swim every Overday.” I suspected he spent the eleven days between each such trip preparing for the next. I did not know what efforts were made to ensure such activities were ongoing, the tenses of the Hosts’ similes accurate. I wondered if that was part of the Ambassadors’ slight unease with us: the possibility of a simile strike.

When it was my turn, I told my new companions about the restaurant, and the things I ate, and it was unpleasant enough, what had happened, that I accrued some credibility. Some of them stared at me; one or two, like Valdik, were avoiding looking at me at all. “Welcome home,” said someone quietly. I hated that and stopped policing my expressions, made sure they could see that I hated it. And I hated that when he took his own turn, described terrible things done to enLanguage him, Hasser, who had been opened and closed again, modulated his voice and timed his delivery and turned it, true as it was, into a story.

Latterday, 6

A CITIZEN WHO didn’t spend much time at the Embassy might not have seen that anything was wrong: the checkpoints were manned; Staff and Staff-apprentices were around; signs still appeared in trid and flatscreen glowing information. Disquiet, though, was palpable, since the party, to those who knew.

No ship had ever left with such an unfocused valedictory as our last arrival. Of course sufficient pomp had been attempted. Soon enough after the Arrival Ball that some were still cheerfully dishevelled, the immerser crew had been seen off on their boat by a gathering of Ambassadors, Staff and people like me, Embassytowners holding their breath until, left alone, they could deal with whatever it was that was happening. In fact, they, we, didn’t deal with it at all. There were those among the Staff, I picked up later, who had tried to insist that the ship not leave.

I, Avice Benner Cho, immerser, first a lover then an ex of CalVin (some Embassytowners probably thought it a lie, that, but it was part of me and was also true), advisor to Staff on out-business, had my entry to the state offices blocked by a nervous constable. In the end it didn’t take much. A little floaking—I think you’ve made a mistake, Officer, a moment’s But that’s precisely why I’m here, they wanted my help—and I was passed. I had no illusions about my real stock to insiders. But to have to go through that simply to get into the hallways?

Inside there wasn’t even a pretence at calm. I jostled past Staff whispering arguments with each other. I