Embassytown

looked for EdGar, or someone I knew would talk to me. “What are you doing here?” said Ag or Nes of AgNes, her doppel shaking her head. They were rather grandes dames, and paid no attention to my muttered response. “I’d get going, girl.” “You’ll only be...” “... in the way.” Others were less dismissive—RanDolph gave me smiles and mimed exhaustion, a high-ranking vizier I’d once got drunk with even winked at me—but AgNes were right, I was an obstruction.

In a top-floor teahouse, overlooking our roofscape and its segue into the outlines of the city, I found Simmon, from Security, and cornered him. After obligatory protestations that he knew nothing, that he couldn’t tell me anything, he said, “I’ve not seen Ambassador EzRa since the party. I don’t know where they’ve gone. According to the original schedule they were due to be part of a meet-and-greet half an hour ago, but they never turned up. Mind you they weren’t the only ones. Plans have mostly gone to shit. Where in hell are the Hosts?”

Good question. Discussions of major issues between Embassytown and the Hosts—mining rights, our farms, technology barter, Language celebrations—were only occasional, but every day, there were minutiae that had to be agreed. There were always a few Ariekei in the corridors, for one or other negotiation. The Embassy was toughly floored, to withstand their point-feet.

“They’re not here,” Simmon said. He massaged the odd flesh of his biorigged arm. “None of them. We’ve had generations to compromise with them on what constitutes an appointment, so we know fine bloody well that several were supposed to be here this morning, and would normally have been, and they’re not. They’re not returning any of our buzzes. They’re not communicating with us at all.”

“We must have offended them pretty badly,” I said at last.

“Looks like it,” he said.

“How, do you think?”

“Pharotekton bloody knows how. Or EzRa knows.” Neither of us said anything for a moment. “Do you know someone called Oratee?” he said. “Or Oratees?”

“No. Who’s that?” It hadn’t sounded like an Ambassador: a strange name with no ghost-stress halfway through it.

“I don’t know. I heard CalVin and HenRy talking about them, sounded as if they’d know what’s going on. I thought you might know them. You know everyone.” It was nice of him, but I didn’t have it in me to play that up. “AgNes and a couple of other Ambassadors blame Wyatt for this, you know.”

“For what?”

“For whatever. For whatever it is that happened. I heard them. ‘This is all down to him and Bremen,’ they were saying. ‘We always knew they were undermining us, well here we are...’ ” Simmon made his prosthetic hand move open-closed to show a talkative mouth.

“So they know what’s going on, then?” He shrugged.

“Don’t think so, but. You don’t have to understand something to blame someone for it,” he said. “They’re right, anyway. This has to be a... manoeuvre, no question. EzRa... some Bremen weapon.”

What if AgNes were right? If so, and I played the particular last contact-card I had, it would be, I supposed, a betrayal of Embassytown. CalVin and Scile came to my mind and I overcame any hesitation. I buzzed Wyatt. As I connected I tried to think strategically, to work out where and how he was professional, where likely to bend, trying to work out what to say that might actually gain me some insight, persuade him to divulge something. The payoff to all this skulduggery was sheer bathos.

“Avice,” Wyatt shouted when I got through. “Thank God you called. I can’t get anyone to pick up over there. For fuck’s sake, Avice, what’s going on?”

HE WAS MORE CUT OFF even than me. He and his few assistants had offices in the heart of the Embassy, of course, but some Staff blamed him, others wanted to keep him out of whatever was happening, and all agreed they should caucus without him. They managed to do so never quite breaching the law that placed him, their Bremen overseer, above them.

They had circulated, as they were obliged to, a list of all that day’s many meetings. Wyatt had sent officers to all those in main halls, and had gone himself to one titled “Emergency Organisation” to discover that all these were sideshows, anxious extemporised discussions between mid-level Staff over issues such as stationery acquisition. The real debates, post-mortems on the party, hypotheses about the Hosts’ silence, had happened already, during the Any Other Business sessions of meetings of the Public Works Committee.

“It’s a fucking outrage, Avice!” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing that has to stop, that is exactly the sort of thing we’ve been sent to put an end to. They have conspired to keep me out. I’m their bloody superior! Not to mention what they’re doing to EzRa—these men are their colleagues, and they’re ostracising them. It’s a disgrace.”

“Wyatt, wait. Where are EzRa?”

“Ra’s in his room, or he was when I buzzed him. Ez I don’t know. Your colleagues—”

“They’re not my—”

“Your colleagues are freezing them out. I’m sure they’d arrest them if they could. Ez’s not answering, and I can’t find him...” The notion of an Ambassador having separate rooms, doing different things, still reeled me.

“Do they know what’s going on?”

“Don’t you think they’d tell me?” he said. “It’s not everyone here who tries to cut me out, you realise, just your bloody Ambassadors. Whatever it is they’re hatching...”

“Wyatt calm down. Whatever’s going on, you can see Staff aren’t in any more control than you.” He must have known the Embassy had had no contact of any kind from the city, since that night. “The Hosts aren’t saying anything. I think...” I said carefully, “I think EzRa... or we... must have accidentally done something that offended them... badly...”

“Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops we said the wrong thing, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.” He laughed and shook his head. “Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn’t lose our shit, did we? The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I’ve ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult’s intended, and when it’s a misunderstanding. Behind every Ku and Lono story, there’s... pilfering and cannon-fire. Believe me,” he added wryly. “It’s my job.” He made thieving-fingers motions. It was because he would say things like that that I liked him.

“There’s always argy-bargy, Avice,” he said, and leaned toward the screen. “Job like mine. I’ve not shown bad form, have I?” He said this suddenly almost plaintively. “But this... Avice, there are limits. JoaQuin and MayBel and that lot—they need to remember what I represent.”

Bremen was a power, so always at war, with other countries on Dagostin, and on other worlds. What if enemies sent battleships in our direction? Kicked Bremen in the colonies? What, were we going to raise our rifles, our biorigged cannons, aim at the skies? Any comeback for a little genocide like that, which they could offhandedly commit, would have to come from Bremen itself, if it calculated it worth it. Melees in the vacuum of sometimes-space, or terrible strange firefights in the immer. That threat, and Arieka’s isolation in rough immer—and, though it went unspoken, our lack of importance—were the deterrents against attacks at that level. But there were other factors in Bremen’s martial calculations.

The Ariekei were not pacifists. They sometimes conducted obscure internecine murders and feuds, I had been told; and whatever Wyatt said, whatever the reasons, there had been violent confrontations, deaths, between our species, in the early years of contact. Protocols between us were very firm, and for generations, there’d been no trouble in relations. So it felt absurd to imagine the Ariekei, the city, ever turning against Embassytown. But we were some thousands, and they were many many times that, and they had weapons.

Wyatt was more than a bureaucrat. He represented Bremen, officially our protector; and as such, he must be armed. His staff were suspiciously athletic for office workers. It was well known that there were weapon caches in Embassytown, to which Wyatt alone had access. The hidden silos were rumoured to contain firepower of a different magnitude from our own paltry guns. There for our benefit, of course, the claim was. Bremen officials arrived with the keys deep-coded in their augmens. It was impolitic and a little frightening of Wyatt to state so blatantly, even to