Embassytown

Rukowsi had had a certain facility, a predisposition for mental connection unachievable for most of us: but it was generalised, not directed. He wasn’t a twin: he had no close friends with whom he’d achieved any particular intuitive bond. They didn’t have language to give his talent an accurate name, so they misrepresented it calling it empathy. It wasn’t that he felt as others felt, though: his ability manifested in nasty parlour tricks.

He’d been an interrogator. Virtuoso — knowing when a subject would break, what to press for, what to promise, whether they were lying, how to make them stop lying. He was recruited young, and they’d honed his strange skills, with exercises, ways of focusing, and with more invasive methods, too. They’d left him different.

Some among our little group were murmuring, interrupting Wyatt. I clicked my fingers to shut them up. “What?” I said. I waved my hand at Wyatt, Go on. “They made him... what... ? A mind reader?” Ez sat beyond our sound with his head down still. I wished the guards would hit him.

“Of course not,” Wyatt said. “Telepathy’s impossible. But with the right drugs, and implants and receivers, you can get brains into a certain phase. Enough. With a sensitive like him —” I sneered at that and Wyatt waited. “You know what I mean. There’s not many of them, but someone like him, when they’ve worked on him, and get him to train with someone else with the right hardware plugged in...” He tapped his head. “‘Ez’ there can make himself read like that person.” He waved his hand sine-wave style. “Same output. It’s related to linktech but it’s much stronger, works on heads bugger-all like each other, so long as one of them’s... Well, a quote sensitive unquote.

“At first they were thinking about totally other stuff, under-covers for id-readers, get agents out of scans — mimic brainwaves and whatnot. Then something occurred to them. You know,” he continued slowly, “supposedly they once tried growing their own doppels? Back in Charo City? When the colony started.” He shook his head. “Didn’t go so well. Story goes they sink years into it, without any Ariekei to listen to to keep the skills up, with no sense of Embassytown on the ground — miabs being even less frequent then — and end up with... well, pairs of people who are dysfunctional in Bremen.” He indicated twoness with his hands. “And everywhere. Hardly reliable.

“But then here’s Rukowsi. The thinking was it might be a way to solve an old problem.”

The mystery of what it was the Hosts discerned in our Ambassadors’ voices remained unsolved: all that Charo City had ascertained was that after implants, augmens, chemicals and hundreds of hours of training, Joel Rukowsi and his fellow agent, linguist Coley Wren, codename Ra, had been able to score astonishingly on the Stadt scale.

No one had known whether it would sound like Language to the Ariekei — but Stadt was the only test anyone had for that, and the operatives looked, at least, to have passed. If in fact it hadn’t worked, if it had failed in the ways the paymasters had imagined it might possibly fail, if EzRa had spoken and elicited polite incomprehension, then nothing would have been lost. Two career agents would have a long and dull assignment, until the next Bremen-bound ship. But what if they succeeded?

“None of you lot are fools,” Wyatt said. “Why would you think we are? You think we didn’t get all your provocations, your fake meetings, your secret agendas, your disobedience, your tax-skimming, your doctoring of biorigging, keeping the best, or making it so no one but Embassytowners can make it work? You think that’s been invisible? For Christ’s sake, we’ve known for hundreds of thousands of hours that you’ve been building to independence.”

The silence after he said that would have meant a declaration of war, shortly before. In these new times it was only a silence. What he said felt not like a revelation but like something impolite. Wyatt rubbed his eyes.

“It’s just history,” he said. “It’s adolescence. All colonies do it. We can set our fucking clocks by you. This is my fifth stationing. Before this, I was in Chao Polis, on Dracosi, on Berit Blue. Does that mean anything to you? Christ, do you people not read? Don’t you upload the dat that comes in the miabs? I’m a specialist. They send me in where outposts are spoiling for a fight.”

“You quash secession,” said Bren.

“God, no,” Wyatt said. “You may be the mysterious old man here, but I’m from the out, and you can’t hide your ignorance from me. Berit Blue did secede, with only the tiniest war.” He held thumb and forefinger minutely apart to show how small the war had been. “Dracosi’s independence was totally peaceful. Chao Polis is midway through thrashing out a plan with us for regional autonomy. How crude do you think we are, Bren? They are free... and they’re ours.” He let that sit.

“But there are exceptions. You’re too far from Bremen, too hard to reach, for easy management. And you’re not ready. You weren’t going to be getting independence soon. It’s the fault of Language: that’s what’s confused you. You think you’re aristocracy. You thought, I should say. And that this colony was your estate. And you had a kind of point: unlike every other aristocracy I’ve ever seen you really are indispensable. Were. So you’ve been choosing your successors since forever. Congratulations: you invented hereditary power.

“But every one of you, every Ambassador and every vizier, every member of Staff in Embassytown, is a Bremen employee. ‘Ambassadors’: get it? Who do you think you speak for? We can hire, and we can fire. And we can replace.”

EZRA HAD BEEN a test. An operation to strip our Ambassadors of power and hobble self-government. Their success would have changed everything. In two, three ship-shifts, the social system of this outpost would have been overthrown. If those other than our Ambassadors could speak Language, apparatchiks, career diplomats and loyalists could be sent to Embassytown for a few local years, and soon we’d rely on Bremen for survival. Our Ambassadors would die slowly half by half, doppel by doppel, and be mourned but not replaced. The cre`che would close. The infirmary would empty as death took the failed, and there would be no others.

It would have been a bloodless, elegant, slow assertion of Bremen control. How could we have asked for independence when our contact with the Hosts who sustained us relied on Bremen staff? All Embassytown had had was its monopoly on Language, and with EzRa, Bremen had tried to break that.

A world-destroying mistake. Not a stupid one: only the very worst luck. A quirk of psyche and phonetics. It made sense that they would try. It would have been an elegant imperial manoeuvre. Counter-revolution through language pedagogy and bureaucracy.

“Biorigging’s... good,” MagDa said. “It’s invaluable.” “And, minerals and stuff from here’s useful too. And a few other things.” “But still.” “Come on.” “Why all this?” We’re a backwater, they were saying. There was no false pride or denial. Most of us had wondered at some time why Embassytown wasn’t just allowed to die.

“I’d have thought it would make sense to some of you,” Wyatt said. “That you’d realise exactly what’s going on.” And he looked up, straight at me.

I stood and folded my arms. I looked down my face at him. Everyone turned their gaze to me. At last I said, “Immer.”

I’d been to towns in hollowed rocks and a planet threaded with linear cities like a filigree net, to dry places with unbreathable air, ports, and places about which I could say nothing. Some were independent. Many belonged, free or not, to Bremen. “They never let a colony collapse,” I said. We’d all heard it. “Never.” No matter if the cost of transportation outweighed the prices of trinkets and expertise shipped back, they wouldn’t let this town go, so long as we were theirs.

My companions were nodding slowly. Wyatt was not.

“Jesus, Avice,” he said. “What do you sound like? ‘It is a foundation of our government...’” There was a strange glee in him, a functionary’s dissidence, giving the lie to lines he’d spoken many times. “You know how many colonies have been cut off? You’ve seen the charts, the gravestone symbols in the immer.” I knew the stories of planets studded with human and human/exot ruins, where high-rises sank into alien muck. Found landscapes deserted by design, failure, and in one or two instances, mystery. They were an immerser cliche. I felt reproached by all that empty architecture: that, knowing of it, I could still have repeated my government’s lines.

“If it were in Bremen’s interests,” Wyatt said, “we’d let you go, and send me to oversee it. We didn’t go to this effort because we ‘leave no colony behind.’” He looked at me expectantly again. Have another go.

I thought of the charts. I looked up, as if through the ceiling, at Wreck. I knew more about the immer than anyone else there, including him. I remembered conversations, the shy enthusiasms of a helmsman unaware he