Embassytown

that I’d seen Ra more recently. “Oh, there’s plenty of rumours: they’re in the out, they’re taking control, they’re preparing an invasion, they’re dead. Nothing I’d stake a rep on. If your channels to the Embassy haven’t netted anything, why would my pitiful little searchware?” We regarded each other.

“Alright,” I said slowly. “Come with me...”

“I’m not going anywhere, Avice,” she said, and her voice foreclosed argument. I was not, this one time, wholly disappointed at that.

I WENT TO the coin wall. The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock. But I knocked, and Bren answered.

I was looking down when he opened the door, to give myself a second. I raised my head to him. He looked much older to me, because his hair was grey. That was all, though: he was hardly collapsing. He recognised me. Before I met his eyes, I’m sure.

“Avice,” he said. “Benner. Cho.”

“Bren,” I said. We stared at each other, and eventually he made a sound between a sigh and a laugh, and I smiled if sadly and he stepped aside for me to enter the room I remembered so extraordinarily well, which hadn’t changed at all.

He brought me a drink and I joked about the cordial he’d given me the first time I was there. He remembered the chant we’d used when spinning coins, and recited it to me, imperfectly. He said something or other, something that meant you went into the out, you’re an immerser! A congratulations. I felt like thanking him. We sat looking at each other. He was still thin, wore what could have been the same smart clothes I remembered.

“So,” he said. “You’ve come here because the world’s ending.” A muted screen behind him played out the confusion of Embassytown.

“Is it?” I said.

“Oh I think so. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I think it’s the end of the world, yes.” He sat back. He looked comfortable. He drank and looked at me. “Yes I do. Everything you know’s finished. You know that, don’t you? Yes, I can see you do.” I saw his affection for me. “You impressed me,” he said. “Such an intense girl. I wanted to laugh. Even while you were looking after your poor friend. Who breathed Host air.”

“Yohn.”

“Anyway. Anyway.” He smiled. “It’s the end of the world and you’re here why? You think I can help?”

“I think you can tell me things.”

“Oh believe me,” he said, “no one in that castle wants me to know anything. They keep me as out of it as they can these days. I’m not saying I’ve no ins at all—there are those who keep an old man in gossip—but you probably know at least as much as me.”

“Who’s Oratees?” I said. He looked sharply up.

“Oratees?” he said. “It really is? Oh. Well. Christ Pharotekton.” He smoothed down his shirt. “I did wonder. I thought maybe that must be it, but...” He shook his head. “But you doubt. You can hardly believe it, can you?”

“Oratees isn’t a person,” Bren said. “They’re a thing. They’re junkies.”

“Everything that could happen has happened sometime,” he said. He leaned towards me. “Where are the failed Ambassadors, d’you think, Avice?” It was so shocking a question that I held my breath.

“If I put it to you outright, you wouldn’t imagine, would you, that every single one of the monozogs the Embassy raises is suited to Ambassadorial duties?” he said. “Of course not. Some doppels don’t take—don’t look enough like each other to be fixed, have quirks, can’t think enough alike, despite all the training. Whatever.

“You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s just not thought. You know that doppels retire, when the other dies.” He raised his hands, slightly, indicating himself. “You’ve never been in the Embassy creche, have you? There are those who never get out of it in the first place. If you’ve been grown and raised and trained for one job, and you can’t do it, what’s the profit in letting you out? That could only cause trouble.”

Little rooms of rendered twins, mouldering. Slack and separate doppels gone bad, one whole, one like a melted image; or perhaps both wrong; or neither wrong in any physical way but with some bone-deep meanness; or just not able to do what they were born to.

“And if you’re already out,” Bren said, “by the time you realise you hate your job or your doppel, or whatever? Well. Well.” He spoke gently, breaking something to me. “When he died, my... it was an accident. It’s not as if we were old. People knew us... me. I was much too young to disappear. They tried to entice me to the rest home of course. But they couldn’t force me. So what if my neighbours don’t like me? So what if they see something crippled? No one likes a cleaved showing off their injury. We’re stumps.” He smiled. “That’s what we are.

“There are trainees who can never speak Language. I don’t know why. Just can’t speak in time no matter how they practise. That’s simple: you don’t let them go. But there are harder cases. They might look like any other pair. It’s happened before, to varying degrees. We had a colleague, when I was training. WilSon. Whatever joined-up mind it was behind their Language, for the Hosts to understand, it must have been a little out. A tiny bit. Nothing I could hear, but the Hosts... well.

“We were doing exams. We’d been tested by other Ambassadors and Staff, and in our last practical we had to speak to a Host. It was waiting. I don’t know what it thought it was doing, how they asked it to help. Hello, WilSon say, when it’s their turn.

“Straightaway we can see something’s wrong,” he said. “From how the Ariekes moves. Every time they talk to us, they taste our minds, and we’re alien. So it’s heady stuff. But if the two halves of an Ambassador aren’t... quite enmeshed enough? Not two random voices: close enough to speak Language and for them to get it. But wrong? Broken?” I said nothing.

“You know what Language is to them,” Bren said. “What they hear through the words. So, if they hear words they understand, they know are words, but it’s fractured? Ambassadors speak with empathic unity. That’s our job. What if that unity’s there and not-there?” He waited. “It’s impossible, is what. Right there in its form. And that is intoxicating. And they mainline it. It’s like a hallucination, a there-not-there. A contradiction that gets them high.

“Maybe not all of them. Every Host WilSon spoke to knew something was strange, and a few of them...” He shrugged. “Got drunk. On their words. Didn’t matter what WilSon said. Isn’t it a nice day; Please pass the tea; anything. The Hosts heard it and some of them got swoony and some of them wanted it again and again.

“Ambassadors are orators, and those to whom their oration happens are oratees. Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.”

OUTSIDE PEOPLE ran through the streets in frightened carnival. There was the noise of fireworks. Bren refilled my glass.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“WilSon? They were quarantined, and they died.” He drank.

“Everyone respects me, but that can’t stop them hating me,” Bren said. “I understand that. They don’t like to see my wound.” He wrote his name in the air—his full name, seven letters: BrenDan. There’d been a time he was BrenDan, or more properly . Then his doppel had died, and he’d become BrenDan, . He couldn’t say his own name correctly.

BrenDan looked at me thoughtfully for a long time. He went to a desk. “Let me show you something.”

He threw me a shallow box. Inside were two links. His, and his doppel Dan’s. I examined the filigree circuits, the wires and contacts, the carefully carved initials and silver leaves. Their clasps had been cut open. I looked at him and could see the tiny marks on his neck