“Surl Tesh-echer used to come here all the time,” I said. “Maybe they’re coming to be where their friend used to be.”
The owner was terrified the Hosts would commit reprisal for 
’s death. Most people were. I was not. I’d seen Pear Tree step aside for Hasser and say something to him on his way. I’d seen CalVin and the others waiting for that. had been murdered but it also had been executed, publicly, by its peers. For heresy, had been sentenced to Death by Human.
Embassytown couldn’t know, and would not. The situation must be made to look to most people, and did, like a bloody mess, rather than the careful juridical moment it also was.
Ariekei traditioners had decided they could not tolerate , would not brook its experiments. A lie was a performance; a simile was rhetoric: their synthesis, though, the first step in their becoming quite another trope, was sedition. I would never assume I understood the motivations of any exot, and I had grown up knowing the thinking of the Hosts was beyond me. Whatever drove the Ariekene powers to their brutal decision might, might not, be comparable to the calculations that had also gone on behind Embassy doors. The Ariekene resistance to these innovations might have been ethical, or aesthetic, or random. It might have been religious or a game. Or instrumental, an expression of some cool, cynical calculation, a power-jostling among cliques.
I remembered Cal or Vin’s anxiety, when they’d told me that some of Scile’s ideas about made sense. The Ambassadors, as much as its Ariekene judges, had seen in it an approaching danger. I never thought CalVin saw whatever that coming badness was as my husband had, but where there’s commitment and dissent there might be change, and perhaps that was enough. There’d been a catastrophe on its way that, together, Ariekei and Terre had staved off. A problem they had solved.
Who could I tell? If I could prove anything, so what? Not everyone would think any of this the slightest crime. And what would I bring on myself? I’d no idea how many of the Ambassadors knew, or if they would disapprove if they did, or what they would do to me if I complained. I can’t have been the only one who worked out what had happened. There were enough snatches of information. But Staff asserted horror and shock and stressed to Embassytowners that they had apologised to our Hosts, and that Hasser and Valdik had both been brought to justice. They unleashed harsh policing against the remnants of the Druman cult.
Scile moved at last into the Embassy, became Staff. One day all his possessions were gone from my home. Among his flaws wasn’t cowardice. I think he was avoiding me; perhaps he wanted to spare me his rage.
I NEVER STOPPED being appalled by the sentencing I’d seen. But months passed—and our months are long—and we were out of the doldrums, and Valdik and Hasser were long dead. I still wouldn’t speak to CalVin or Scile, but though I didn’t know which Staff and Ambassadors were complicit in what had happened I couldn’t spurn them all forever. I couldn’t live in Embassytown like that. It felt not like compromise but survival.
Even CalVin and I came wordlessly to a way of being in the same room, if we so found ourselves. We might, I eventually came to accept, one day even exchange brief cool words.
I remembered those elements in Scile, the little opacities that had always been present, that I’d always been intrigued by, that now seemed to have come to constitute all of him. I didn’t know what fears the rest of the complicit Staff had had of , but I thought they must have been political. I was never sure about Scile, though, for all that he was Staff too now, and had for a long time been of their party. For all his consummate manipulation of the credulous simile zealots. He worked as apparatchik, but I wondered if he really was a prophet.
Many months after those horrible events, the first crisis, as Embassytown geared into a different kind of time, as the arrival of the next ship grew closer, as the time I’ve called “formerly” ended, the Hosts apparently made Scile a simile. I heard that from Ehrsul.
She couldn’t find out exactly what he’d had to do. He was part of Language but I never heard him used and in various, I hoped untraceable, eavesdropping ways, I did try. By contrast the similes Hasser and Valdik, changed as they were by the events, were invigorated.
Ehrsul was a good friend to me in what was a pretty bleak time, though I wouldn’t risk telling her everything that I knew had happened. I told myself that I was just waiting. I was immerser. When the relief came, I’d go into the out, away from this place. Then the miab arrived, with details of what would be arriving next, and news of our impossible Ambassador.
Wasn’t I going to stay to see what would happen? Everything
after this was latterday, and it’s the only story remaining. Wasn’t I eager for Embassytown to change?
Later, the scale of the crisis that unfolded made this, retrospectively, a guilty memory, but when first I realised that things were not going quite to plan, the first time I met EzRa at the Arrival Ball, when I sensed that they were spreading some unexpected chaos in Embassytown, it had made me happy.
Part Four
ADDICT
PEOPLE WANDERED through streets in a kind of utopian uncertainty, knowing that everything was different but unsure in what sort of place they lived now. Adults were talking and children playing games. “I’m minded to be careful,” I heard one man say, and I could have laughed in his face. Minded, are you? I could have said. Minded how? What will you do? How will you be careful?
We’d always lived in a ghetto, in a city that didn’t belong to us but to beings far more powerful and strange. We’d lived among gods—little tiny gods but gods compared to us, considering what was at their and our disposal— and ignored the fact. Now they’d changed, and we had no way to understand that, and all we could do was wait. Embassytowners’ foolish discussions were as meaningless right then as the sounds of birds.
Our news figures said things to me from screens and tridflats like: “The situation is being closely monitored.” We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after. I walked through the tiny Kedis district. The ruling troikas there had heard about the killing, knew enough Terre psychology that all our fears were rubbing off on them, and they were very anxious, too.
I couldn’t persuade Ehrsul to come to join me in the agitation and rush of Embassytown main, in the hilltop districts where people massed, following rumours that taught them nothing, staring, powerless spectators, into the city moving as opaquely as ever but differently opaquely now. We could all see it. I went to her apartment. Ehrsul was subdued, but then we all were.
She spiked me a coffee with one of the edgers many of us were taking. She moved backwards and forwards on her treads. Her mechanisms were smooth, but inevitably with that repetition tiny infelicitous noises in the machine of her became audible, then irritations.
“Have you found anything out?” I said.
“About what’s going on? Nothing. Nothing.”
“What about on the... ?”
“I said, nothing.” She made her face blink. “There’s all kinds of blather all over the nets, but if anyone out there understands what’s happened or knows what’s about to happen, they’re talking about it below what I can tap.”
“EzRa?”
“What about them? Do you think I’m just neglecting to tell you important bits? Christ.” I was embarrassed at her tone. “I don’t know where they are any more than you. I haven’t seen them since the party either.” I didn’t say
