Embassytown

Latterday, 4

WE WERE ALL WATCHING the new Ambassador.

Ez hunkered down into a slightly pugnacious pose. He opened and closed his fists. I could tell he enjoyed what he was doing. He looked up at the Hosts from below a gathered brow.

Ra watched them sidelong. He pulled himself up, so tall and straight that he seemed to teeter slightly. The two of them were so absurdly distinct it was like a joke that erred in overdoing it. I was reminded of Laurel and Hardy, of Merlo and Rattleshape, of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

When they were done speaking, a wave of something went through all of us in Diplomacy Hall so palpably it was as if it rippled the ivy. I turned to Ehrsul and raised my eyebrows. We all knew this had been momentous, but there were perhaps a full five seconds before any of us realised that anything bad had happened.

THE HOSTS were swaying as if they were at sea. One spasmed its giftwing and its fanwing, another kept them unnaturally still. One opened and closed its membranes several times in neurotic repetition.

Three were plugged into their zelles by flesh skeins that bled in chemicals or energy, and by I suppose feedback the untoward behaviour of the Hosts infected their battery-beasts. The little ambulatory generators staggered, emitted sounds unlike any I’d heard them make before.

In very slow and unnerving unison, the Ariekei emerged from their trance. Their eye-corals drooped toward us, and at last focused. They straightened and unstiffened their legs, as if coming out of sleep.

EzRa were frowning. They whispered to each other, and spoke again.

Are the bodies and/or brains of our Hosts troubled by invading biological entities or an allergic reaction to an environmental factor? they said, I later learnt. That is they said, Has something happened to make you suboptimal? They said, Are you alright?

Their words sounded as if Ez said some stuttering poem while Ra mimicked birds. As they spoke the Ariekei jerked again, again in that ugly simultaneity, the linked zelles snapping back with them. They were lost back to their glaze. This time one made a noise, a moan from its Cut-mouth.

JoaQuin and MayBel conferred in agitation. MayBel approached the Ariekei. The Hosts came gradually again, very gradually, out of what had taken them. CalVin saw me. We stared at each other, across the room, for the first time in some time. I saw in their eyes nothing but fear.

STAFF RALLIED, Ambassadors stepped in, bustled and led the Hosts away. As the Ariekei woke from whatever this was, they started declaiming, talking across each other, loud and chaotically. They were asking for the new Ambassador. Where is ? they kept saying. Where is ? I understood enough Language to know that.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please,” one of JoaQuin said. Someone from Staff must have spoken to the musicians on duty, because their playing started again. I’d not even realised they had stopped. Waiters recirculated. I saw security officers going somewhere, Simmon among them, controlled but in obvious urgency.

“Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen,” JoaQuin said. “Our guests, the Hosts, have been...” JoaQuin paused and conferred. “There’s been a small misunderstanding...” “... absolutely nothing to be concerned about...” I saw LoGan, CharLott, LuCy, AnDrew crowding the Hosts away. “Nothing at all important and entirely our own fault...” The two of them laughed. “We’re rectifying things now.” “There’s absolutely no reason to concern yourselves!” “The party continues. Please join us in raising your glasses.”

Many locals were eager to be reassured. Newcomers and temporary guests didn’t know how concerned they should be. We raised our glasses.

“To the captain and crew of the immership Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Response...” said JoaQuin, “... to our most welcome immigrants, new citizens...” “... and above all, to Ambassador EzRa. May they have a long and happy career here in Embassytown.” “To EzRa!”

We all said it. The recipients of our toast raised their own drinks in reciprocation. They looked at the door through which the Hosts had been taken. It was to the credit of Staff that the party didn’t die. Within ten minutes most people were behaving more or less as they had been before.

“What the fuck was that?” I said quietly to Gharda.

“No bloody idea,” she said.

I couldn’t see Scile. There were several Ambassadors still in the room, along with Staff. I approached EdGar, but to my shock they turned away from me. I said their name in such a way that they couldn’t pretend not to have heard, and they glanced and said, “Not now, Avice.”

“You don’t even know what I want,” I said.

“Really, Avice.” “Not now.” They interspersed their words with smiles of greeting to those who passed them.

The crowd parted a moment and as if by plan revealed Cal or Vin. He still stared right at me. I was so startled I stopped moving. I couldn’t see my watcher’s doppel. The party concealed him again.

Gharda reappeared, with the pilot on her arm. She saw me and hesitated, looked a query at me. I waved, by all means. It mattered not at all how much more travelled I was than my city’s rulers, how airily I’d given them knowledge, how eagerly they’d received it. As EdGar walked away, I was nothing. It was they and the other Ambassadors who would, in closed session, decide what had happened, and what would happen now. They made law.

Formerly, 3

A LONG TIME AGO I performed a strange unpleasant ritual in the shell of a restaurant. For that I was, Ambassadors and Staff had occasionally told me, feted by the Ariekei in my absence. That had meant nothing until the moment in the hall, at the festival, after the lying, when the Hosts discovered who I was.

They spoke rapidly, craned their eye-corals. They spoke me every day, Scile told me afterwards. That was what they said to CalVin. I do not know, one Host said to CalVin, about me, how I did without her, how I thought what I needed to think.

Her? This was the question that we called the Tallying Mystery: did the Hosts consider each Ambassador one mind, double-bodied people? And if so, did they think the rest of us half-things, irrelevances, machines? A city full of the Ambassadors’ marionettes? When they knew me as simile, they asked for me to come back, but I was never sure if I was guest, exhibit, or something else. When we went, the Hosts took care of us, whether or not they understood that we were people.

I accepted their invitations because Scile could always come with me. A present to him, for which he was effusive, though I think he wanted to talk, to debrief, after the events more than I would. We would be ushered to the Hosts’ halls. There were usually Ambassadors and viziers and others there too, and these glimpses of secrets that had gone on all my life, the toing and froing of Staff in the Host city, were almost as disturbing to me as anything else that happened. I’d keep spotting Ambassadors walking flesh corridors in conversation with Ariekei, places I couldn’t imagine any human having a purpose.

These events, to which they had no in, were titillations to most of my friends. “A festival? Of lies?” Gharda said at a party after the first one. “The Hosts asked for you?” They were all gathered around me demanding to know what the city was like, and I laughed because someone said That’s import! exactly as we had when we were children.

My occasional presence in the city was troubling, I could tell, to the Ambassadors. They didn’t like seeing me there. This was their mystery. Staff debriefed me exhaustively after each of these trips, asking what I’d seen, what I’d understood.

The second time I entered the city, into another hall with a crowd of Hosts, I was left near a collection of obscure objects and anaesthetised Ariekene animals, and with four other humans, enzymatic lights bowing in the curves of their aeoli helmets. Two were Ambassador LeNa, who ignored me. The other two were young men, commoners like me.

“Hello,” said one. He smiled enthusiastically and I did not smile back. “I’m Hasser: I’m an example. Davyn’s a topic. You’re Avice, aren’t you? You’re a simile.”

NEITHER THIS, nor any of the other times I went in, was an event the same as the first gathering I’d attended. They were more chaotic, and, I learnt, less focused. There had for a while been a vogue among the Hosts for what were, more or less, conventions. Celebrations of Language, with broader remits than just the rare lies. They would gather as many of us necessary constructed facts as they could in one place, as many enLanguaged elements as possible—animate, inanimate, sentient and not—and come to look at us, use and theorise us, without consensus. We sat polite through wheezing, stuttering, sung arguments around and about us. I found it less compelling than the devoted lying I’d first seen.

I was lulled by the roar and whisper of the Cut- and the Turn-mouths, while Scile tried to translate. Hosts stamped back and forward, disagreeing in factions. Something like a polemic, I gathered, went on between those who thought me a useful figure of speech, and those who did not.

It was a crippled, strange debate, I think. There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was—they would have asserted— like. But those critics of course couldn’t say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have them.

“But...” said Scile. He was unhappy.

“They must be in the back of their minds, those thoughts,” I said. “Is that why they’re angry? They’ve been denied them.”

“Hold on,” he said. “One of them’s saying about you: ‘It’s a comparison, and... it is something new.’ I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

“Alright, my love, just...”

“Hey,” Scile whispered. “They’re using the other figures of speech.” He indicated our Embassytown companions, at whom the Hosts stared. He turned his head in surprise. “If I understand them... that man Hasser—he lied to us. He’s not an example: he’s a simile, like you.”

Whatever the question marks over my efficacy, I must have had my uses: for the several weeks these events were in vogue, the Hosts kept bringing me back.

SOMETHING SOURED between CalVin and me. For weeks during our sex I’d teased them that I could tell the difference in the way they touched me: they probably knew there was a little truth to it. When we’d first got together I’d been immaturely excited that I was sleeping with an Ambassador. But that rather performed giddiness didn’t last long.

I remember the feel of them, the cool of their links in their necks, minimalist jewellery amplifying their thoughts into each other. I remember watching them touch each other—peculiar, unique erotics. Afterwards, I might grin salaciously when I distinguished them, but it was an edgy game. “Cal,” I would say, pointing at one, then the other. “Vin. Cal... Vin.” They might smile, might look away. I could sometimes, especially in the mornings, see differences. The marks of night-time—a face imprinted by a pillow, particular bags below eyes. CalVin never left long before ablutions, locking the door to the correction chamber and emerging with all those tiny differences effaced or copied.

They didn’t like that I was being asked back to the conferences and conventions. But Staff would hardly turn down Host requests like that. Once one of CalVin told me in sudden fury, apropos of nothing I’d noticed, that Ambassadors had no bloody power at all, that the other Staff and viziers and the rest made all the bloody decisions, that he and his doppel had less say than anyone.

I argued with them, now, sometimes. After one really unpleasant altercation I swear I did not start, Cal or Vin stayed for seconds in the doorway staring at me, with an expression I couldn’t read, while his doppel walked away. Perhaps I wouldn’t have liked it if they could immerse, I supposed. I doubted I would have cared, though.

“It’s not the same,” I said to the one still there. “You speak Language. I am it.”

THERE WERE HOSTS who favoured my simile above all others, and came to every event at which I was present. They extolled my uses, over all the allegories or rhetorical devices embedded in varying ways in men and women and other things present. “You have fans,” Scile said. These were my months of simile fame.

I saw Hasser several other times; we would stand and wait while we were deployed in harsh arguments. There were Language dissidents, urging a reconception of what I and the other similes might have been. From the reactions of the other Hosts, this thought-experiment was in bad taste. After one such, I asked Scile if he’d heard the Hosts speak to Hasser, and if so what he was about.

Scile understood Language as well as an Ambassador, but “I don’t know how you bloody things work,” he said. “I never see any relation between what you mean and what they’re talking about, what they compare you with and use you for. So are you asking what do they think with Hasser? I’ve no idea.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“You mean literally what does he mean?”

“Right. Like, foundation-fact, like I mean girl who ate... well, you know.”

Scile hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it was, is... what they said was it’s like the boy who was opened up and closed again.” We stared at each other.

“Oh God,” I said.

“Yes. I can’t be sure, so don’t... but, yes.”

“Jesus.”

In the corvid, being hauled back to Embassytown, I said to Hasser, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a simile?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Overheard, then?” He smiled. “It’s complicated. It’s something I think about a lot, being simile. But I don’t know how you feel about it... For some of us, if you’re... If you want to talk about this stuff,” and he sounded guarded but excited, “there are a few of us who think it’s important.”

“Similes?” I said. “You, what, hang out?”

Well. They knew other tropes and Language moments too, of course, he explained. But it was certain of the similes in particular who had found a community with each other. I despised them instantly he told me.

“I don’t know how we missed you,” he said. “I know they say you, but how did the Hosts miss you for these events all this time? How did you miss us?”

“I suppose being Language was never the main thing in my life,” I said. I think I accidentally showed my contempt. If I’d not learnt to immerse and hadn’t got into the out, I reminded myself, I might have spent my days in the bars and halls and drink houses where these similes gathered. It must be a strange kind of life and notoriety, but it was something. I wanted to apologise for showing my sneer. I asked him what it all meant to him. After an initial guardedness, he said, “To be part of it! Language.”

Latterday, 5

NONE OF US with any nous believed the party was really back to normal. “Ehrsul.” I whispered to her and made motions, but when, winding her long chassis precisely she pathed her way to me, it was to tell me she couldn’t hack any coms to work out what was happening.

I found a couple of the last Ambassadors in the room, MagDa and EsMé. “What’s going on?” I said to them. “Hey. MagDa. Please.”

“We have to...” one of EsMé said. “It’s...” “Everything’s under control.”

“MagDa. What’s going on?”

Mag and Da and Es and Mé looked as if they were going to say something. EsMé had never liked me, had a common Ambassador opinion of the returned outgoer, immerser, floaker, and so on, but still, they hesitated.

To my great shock Scile appeared beside us. He met my eyes, either without emotion or hiding it. “MagDa,” he said. “You have to come and talk to Ra.”

They nodded and I lost that moment. As the five of them walked away, I grabbed Scile’s arm. I kept my face impassive, and he looked back at me similarly. It hardly surprised me that he was closer to whatever was happening than I. He’d been working with Staff, he’d been in cahoots with Ambassadors. They’d always been so focused on using Language they weren’t used to learning about it, and as things had shifted in Embassytown, and it had become useful to think about such questions, they had, I understood, been fascinated with his theories. His work had made him useful. He had certainly been to more Staff functions than I had.

“So?” I said. I was only slightly surprised at my brazen self. Floakers did what they had to. “What’s going on?”

“Avvy,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

“Scile, do you know what’s happening?”

“No. I don’t. I’d a... I really don’t. This isn’t what I expected.” Near us two people touched wine glasses like little bells. The musicians were drunk now and the music was veering. This was the single chance many locals would have to meet the immerser crew, and they were taking advantage. Seeing pairs and little groups leave the party, I remembered that borrowed sex appeal of immer. I’d benefited from it myself on my return: it had been a heady few weeks.

“I have to go,” Scile said. “They need me.”

Es took one of his arms, Mé the other. They surely knew relations were bad between Scile and me, and perhaps even why. I doubt they were sleeping with him. Scile’s assignations were brief and occasional. Though all Bremen marriages were legal in Embassytown, locals tended to invoke exclusive, property-based models. I was jealous of Scile, of course, but at what he’d become, and what secrets he knew.

IT WAS HALF an hour to my flat. Ehrsul came with me. In a lot of countries I’ve been in the populace all have personal vehicles. All but the largest streets of Embassytown were too narrow, and often too steep, for that. There were altanimals and some biorigged carriages to take certain routes, which switched from wheels or treads to legs where necessary, but most people went on foot.

Embassytown was a small and crowded place, our population growth limited by the edge of the aeoli breath. It was surrounded by the Host city, except at the very northern point, where Ariekene plains started. Semilegal urban growth was tolerated, jury-rigged rooms sutured to walls, looming over alleys like eaves, thrown up on roofs, always ready to be abandoned. Most Staff tacitly approved of such enterprising space-maximisation. Here and there were half-trained biorigged bits and pieces, some backstreet-crossbred with Terretech and holding together through luck, tended aspects of domesticity.

Arced over Embassytown was the Embassy itself, edging up to those plains. At something over a hundred metres it was the tallest building we had. A fat pillar, studded with horizontal boughs and landing pads, to and from which, even so late, bioluminescent corvids moved. Like something melted, the Embassy spread out at its base and became part of the streets that surrounded it. Staff neighbourhoods were half-covered, as much the innards of the Embassy itself as alleyways. Ehrsul and I descended by panelled lift, through walkways, corridors that became things between corridors and streets, arcades half-open, with unglazed windows, and then into the streets proper, and the breeze.

“God, it’s nice to get outside,” I said.

“We’re not, not really,” Ehrsul said. “We’re all always in the aeoli breath.” A room of air.

It made me think about her, that she didn’t leave Embassytown, though she could have. She wasn’t programmed to be interested in the city, I supposed. I shied away from that. In my rooms I sipped more wine, and Ehrsul companionably made trid visions of a similar glass, made her trid head drink from it. She patched into my station but could find out nothing about the evening’s occurrences on the localnet.

“I’ll try again when I get home,” she said. “No offence but your machine... you’d have more luck banging rocks together.”

I’d been to her home several times. It was tiny, and sparse, but there were pictures on the walls, a kitchen, furniture for human and other guests (one beautiful, obscene-looking Shur’asi stool). Her flat and its tasteful accoutrements were perhaps for my and others’ benefits: her pictures, her coffee table, her imported rug elements of an operating system, designed to make her user-friendly. These ruminations felt disgraceful. I wondered about EzRa.

Formerly, 4

HASSER BUZZED ME. “How did you get my number?” I said.

“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-café 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 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. Mêlées 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 me, an outsider of sorts and a friend of his, of sorts, that his staff were soldiers, with access to arms, and he their CO.

It was true that he was patient. He ignored Embassytown’s minor-to-moderate embezzlement when the miabs came, and every few years when Bremen taxes were collected. He encouraged his officers to mix with Staff and commoners, and even sanctioned the occasional intermarriage. Like all colonial postings, his was a difficult job. With communication with his bosses so occasional, initiative and flexibility were vital. We’d had officious women and men in his post before, and it had made ugly politics. In return for his softly-softly stance Wyatt felt owed. That the Ambassadors were unfair.

I liked Wyatt but he was naïve. He was Bremen’s man, when the lights went out. I understood that and what it meant, even if he did not.

Formerly, 5

HOSTS WOULD SOMETIMES bob into view, alone or in small groups, zelles at their feet, walking their slowed-down scuttle through our alleyways. Who can say what their errands were? Perhaps they were sightseeing, or taking what, according to odd topographies, were shortcuts, into our quarter and out again. Some came deep into the aeoli breath, right into Embassytown neighbourhoods, and of these some were looking for the similes. These Ariekei were fans.

Every few days one or two or a little conclave would arrive with dainty chitin steps. They would enter The Cravat, their fanwings twitching, wearing clothes for display—sashes fronded with fins and filigrees that each caught the wind with a particular sound, as distinct as garish colours.

“Our public demands us,” someone said the first time I saw such an approach. Despite the faux-weary joke anyone could tell that this audience meant a great deal to the similes. The one time I persuaded Ehrsul to come with me, ostensibly to store up anecdotes so we could later laugh at my new acquaintances, the arrival of some Hosts seemed to discombobulate her. She ignored my whispers about the Ariekei, did not speak much except in brief polite non sequiturs. I’d been with her in Hosts’ company before, of course, but never in so informal a setting, never according to their unknown whims, not terms requested by Embassytown panjandrums. She never came back.

The owners and regular clientele of The Cravat would courteously ignore the Hosts, which would murmur to each other. Their eye-corals would crane and the tines separate, looking us over as we looked back. Waiters and customers stepped smoothly around them. The Hosts would talk quietly as they examined us.

“Says it’s looking for the one who balanced metal,” someone would translate. “That’s you, Burnham. Stand up, man! Make yourself known.” “They’re talking about your clothes, Sasha.” “That one says I’m more useful than you are—says he speaks me all the time.” “That’s not what it says, you cheeky sod...” So on. When the Hosts gathered around me, sometimes I had to suppress a moment of memory of child-me in that restaurant.

I didn’t find it hard to recognise repeat visitors, by that configuration of eye-corals, those patterns on the fanwing. With the exhilaration of minor blasphemy we christened them according to these peculiarities: Stumpy, Croissant, Fiver. They, it seemed, recognised each of us as easily.

We learnt the favourite similes of many. One of my own regular articulators was a tall Host with a vivid black-and-red fanwing, just enough like a flamenco dress for us to call it Spanish Dancer.

“It does this brilliant thing,” Hasser said to me. He knew I was hardly fluent. “When it talks about you.” I could see him groping for nuances. “‘When we talk about talking,’ it says, ‘most of us are like the girl who ate what was given to her. But we might choose what we say with her.’ It’s virtuoso.” He shrugged at my expression and would have left it, but I made him explain.

In the main my simile was used to describe a kind of making do. Spanish Dancer and its friends, though, by some odd rhetoric, by emphasis on a certain syllable, spoke me rather to imply potential change. That was the kind of panache that could get Hosts ecstatic. I had no idea whether many of them had always been so fascinated by Language, or whether that obsession resulted from their interactions with the Ambassadors, and with us strange Languageless things.

Scile always wanted details of what had happened, who had said what, which Hosts had been there. “It’s not fair,” I told him. “You won’t come with me, but you get annoyed if I can’t repeat every tedious thing anyone said?”

“I wouldn’t be welcome and you know it.” That was true. “Why do you keep going if it’s so dull?”

It was a reasonable question. The excitement with which the other similes reacted to the Host visitors, and the range, or its lack, of what they talked about when there were no Hosts there, irritated me, greatly, every time. I think I had, though, a sense that this was where things might occur, that this was important.

THERE WAS A HOST who often accompanied Spanish Dancer. It was squatter than most, its legs gnarled, its underbelly more pendulous, as it approached old age. For some reason I forget we named it Beehive.

“I’ve seen it before,” said Shanita. It spoke incessantly, and we listened, but it seemed a mixture of half-sentences. We could make no sense of what it said. I remembered where I knew it from: my first-ever journey into the city. It had competed at that Festival of Lies. It had been unusually able to misdescribe that untruth-target object. It had called the thing some wrong colour.

“It’s a liar,” I said. I was clicking my fingers. “I’ve seen it before too.”

“Hm,” said Valdik. He looked rather suspicious. “What’s it saying now?” Beehive was circling, watching us, scratching at the air with its giftwing.

“ ‘Like this, like this,’ ” Hasser translated. He shook his head, I’ve no idea. “ ‘Like, they are, similar, different, not the same, the same.’ ”

The Cravat wasn’t the only place we met, but it was by far the most common venue. Occasionally we might get together in a restaurant near the shopping districts, or the canalside benches of another parlour, but only when planned in advance and only from some vague sense of propriety, of not being hidebound. The Cravat, though, was where the Hosts had come to know they might find us, and being so found was very much the point.

The similes thought of themselves as a salon of debate, but only a certain range of dissidence was permissible. Once a young man tried to engage us with arguments that turned from independence to seditionism, anti-Staffist stuff, and I had to intervene to save him from a beating.

I took him outside. “Go,” I told him. A crowd of the similes were gathered, jeering, shouting at him to come back and try impugning the Ambassadors one more time.

He said, “I thought they were supposed to be radicals.” He looked so forlorn I wanted to give him a hug.

“That lot? Depends who you ask,” I said. “Yeah, they’d be traitors according to Bremen. But they’re more loyal to Staff than the Staff are.”

Plebiscite politics were absurd in Embassytown. As if any of us could speak to Hosts! And for The Cravat crew, even ignoring the fact of Embassytown’s inevitable collapse in the event of their absence, without Ambassadors, who would speak these men and women so proud of being similes to the Hosts?

Latterday, 7

THE ARIEKEI didn’t respond to any attempts at contact. In those incommunicado hours, I more than once considered buzzing CalVin, or Scile, to demand information: they would be more likely than anyone else I knew to have some. It wasn’t the confrontation that stopped me, but the conviction that I wouldn’t be able to shame or bully anything out of them.

It was a spring in Embassytown and the chill was dissipating. From high in the Embassy I looked over the roofscape of the city, to animalships and blinking architecture. Something was changing. A colour or its lack, a motion, a palsy.

A corvid rose from an Embassy landing pad, moved through the sky to the city’s airspace, edged from place to place, hovering, looking for somewhere to land; defeated, it returned. The Ambassadors aboard must have sent messages down to the various housebodies they overflew, without response.

There were probably still plenty of Embassytowners who didn’t yet know anything was wrong. The official press were loyal or inefficient. But there had been many people at that party, and stories were spreading.

THE SUN still rose, and the shops sold things, and people went to work. It was a slow catastrophe.

I called the number Ehrsul had given me, which she had extracted from a newly and imperfectly upgraded net, which she had told me was Ez’s. He—or whomever it was I’d called—didn’t answer. I kept swearing, as quietly as I could make myself, and tried again, again without result.

Later I learnt that that day, in desperation, Ambassadors went into the city on foot. Pairs of desperate doppels accosted the Hosts they met, speaking Language at them through the transmitters of their aeoli helmets and receiving polite non-answers, or incomprehension, or unhelpful intimations of disaster.

Someone came to my house. I opened the door and it was Ra, standing there on my threshold. I stared at him in silence for long seconds.

“You look surprised,” he said.

“Understatement,” I said. I stepped aside for him. Ra kept taking his buzzer out and making as if to switch it off, then leaving it on. “They trying to reach you?” I said.

“Only Wyatt,” he said.

“Really? No one else? No Ambassadors? You not being followed?”

“How are you?” he said. “I was thinking...” We sat for a long time on chairs facing each other. He looked over his shoulder, behind himself, more than once. There was nothing there but my wall.

“Where’s Ez?” I said.

He shrugged. “He’s gone out.”

“Shouldn’t you be together?” He shrugged again. “In the Embassy? Look, Ra, how did you even get out? I’d have thought they’d have you on bloody lockdown.” If it had been me in charge, I would have incarcerated EzRa, to control the situation, or contain it, whatever the situation was. Perhaps they had tried. But if Ra was telling the truth, both the new Ambassador had got away.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “You know. Needs must. I just wanted to... Had to split.” I had to laugh a second at that. There had to be quite a story there.

“So,” I said eventually. “How do you like our little town?” He laughed in turn.

“Jesus,” he said. As if he’d seen something good and unexpected. Outside, gulls sounded. They veered, headed constantly for the sea they glimpsed kilometres away, were turned back constantly by sculpted winds and aeoli breath. It was very rare that any broke out into the proper local air, and died.

“You have to help me,” he said. “I need to know what’s going on.”

“Are you joking?” I said. “What do you think I know? Jesus, this is a comedy of errors. What do you think I’ve been trying to find out, for God’s sake? Why have you come to me?”

“I’ve spoken to everyone I could find who was at that party—”

“Didn’t try very hard, did you, if you only just got to me...”

“All the Staff, I mean, and other people from the Embassy. The higher-up ones wouldn’t say anything to me, and the rest... A couple of them told me to talk to you.”

“Well, I don’t know why. I thought you were in the middle of it all, I thought you’d...”

“Whoever up there does know something, they’re not telling me. Us. But these others, they just... They said you know people, Avice. Ambassadors. And that people tell you things.”

I shook my head. “That’s just bloody outsider-chic,” I exhaled. “You thought you could go a roundabout way, get something through me? They’re just saying that because I’m immerser. And because I was sleeping with CalVin, for a while. But not for months. Local months, not Bremen months. My own damn husband’s a foreigner and he knows more than me, and he won’t even talk to me.” I stared at him. “You seriously telling me you’ve got no idea what’s happening? Does Wyatt know you’re here?”

“No. He helped me slip away, but... And neither does Ez. It’s not their business.” He bit his lip. “Well, officially it is, I mean... I just wanted...” After a silence, Ra met my eye. He stood. “Look,” he said, all of a sudden calm. “I need to find out what’s going on. Wyatt is worse than useless. Ez’s trying to pull rank. We’ll see how far that gets him. And I hear you might know people who know things.” In that moment he seemed not like Ez’s luggage, but an officer and an agent of a colonial power.

“Tell me,” I said at last. “What you do know. What’s been going on. What you’ve heard, suspect, anything.”

The Hosts had come back. Two days of silence, and then they had been at the Embassy, a troupe of heavy presences swaying across a landing pod. “At least forty of them,” he said. “Christ knows how they fit into their vessel. They were asking for me and Ez.”

The way he told it, the Ariekei had barely responded to Ambassadors’ questions and greetings. They demanded, repeatedly and with strange rudeness, to speak to EzRa.

“I trained for this,” Ra said. “I’ve studied them, I’ve studied Language. You saw the first group meet us at the party? That wasn’t normal, was it? I knew it wasn’t. This was the same, only more. They were... agitated. Talking nonsense. I was there already, but then Ez came in and then they recognised us. Started saying: ‘Please, good evening Ambassador EzRa, please, please, yes.’ Like that.

“Some of the others—like your friends CalVin—tried to get in our way. Telling us no. We’d said too much.” He shook his head. “And the Hosts are edging closer and closer. We’ve got nowhere to go, and they’re huge. It’s feeling... So we just... raised our voices and spoke Language. Ez and I. We said good evening. Told them it was an honour. And when we did—”

When they spoke the same thing happened as had before, but this time to a larger little multitude. I might have been able to track down footage or trid of the occurrence—there must have been vespcams there—but Ra told me and I could easily imagine it. The crowd of Hosts stiffening; some staggering; maybe tumbling in carapace piles. Sounds, the double-calls of Ariekene distress, becoming something unfamiliar, counterpoints. Were they swooning? Their noises went up and down in complex relation to EzRa’s voice. “We tried to keep going,” Ra said. “To keep talking. But in the end Ez just petered out. So I did too.” When they did, the Host in front rebudded open its eyes and craned them backwards at its companions, without turning its body, and said to them: “I told you.”

The Ariekei had staggered in the wood-walled stateroom, with the concrete of Embassytown beyond, and the sky dusted with birds in their air-cage. The Ambassadors and Staff were left standing half to attention and bewildered.

We thought of Ariekei in terms of stuff from an antique world—we looked at our Hosts and saw insect-horse-coral-fan things. Those were chimeras of our own baggage. There they were, the Hosts, humming polyphonically in reveries that were utterly their own.

“They left. Some Ambassadors were trying to stop them but short of actually getting in their way, what could they do? They were shouting at them to stay, to talk. EdGar and LoGan were screaming, JoaQuin and AgNes were... trying to be more persuasive. But the Hosts just marched back out. Me and Ez were saying what should we do, and CalVin and ArnOld were saying we’d done quite enough.” He held his head in his hands. “Now not even MagDa’ll talk to us. I haven’t seen them for days. Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

“Of course,” I said. “Don’t be absurd.”

“There was a lot of shouting.”

“Who’s Oratees?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

“CalVin and HenRy mentioned them,” I said. Simmon’s half-heard insight. “I think they might be who to find. I thought you might know...”

“You mean Oratees, or CalVin, or HenRy might be who to find?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “... Yes.” I shrugged, Yes, why not?

“I thought you could help,” he said. “People have a lot of faith in your abilities.”

“Did they tell you I can floak?” I said. “I wish I’d never told them that fucking word. They think I can do anything now. Except they don’t, really: they just want the opportunity to say ‘floak’.”

“They’re talking to the exots.” Ra said. “The Ambassadors have to let the Kedis and the others know something’s happening. They were obviously hoping they’d have things under control, but...” My doorbell sounded again. “Wait,” he said, but I was already up and out of the room.

I opened my door to constables and Security officers. Some were men younger than me, looking shy.

“Ms. Benner Cho?” one said. “Sorry to disturb you. I believe, uh, is Ra here?” He stumbled over the lack of honorific.

“Avice, where is he?”

I knew that voice. “MagDa?” I said. I’d not seen them behind the escort.

The Ambassador pushed their way to the front. “We need to talk to them.” “Urgently.”

“Hello.” It was Ra, come up behind me. I didn’t turn.

“Ra.” I thought they’d be furious, but Mag and Da looked just relieved to see him. Emotional. “There you are.” “You have to come back.”

“You need protective custody, sir,” an officer said. MagDa seemed exasperated by that, in fact, but they didn’t interrupt. “For your safety. Until we’ve got things under control. Please come with us.”

Ra stood up tall. The officer met his eye. Ra nodded to me, after a moment, and let them take him. I nodded back. I was vaguely disappointed in him.

When they led him away they didn’t lock his hands together. They walked respectfully beside him, like what they said they were, a protective corps. It was a sort of courtesy, I suppose, though I don’t think anyone with a passing understanding of Embassytown politics wouldn’t have known he was more or less under arrest. I watched him go, to join Ez, and perhaps Wyatt, in what I was sure would be scrupulously well-kept rooms, locked and guarded from the outside.

Formerly, 6

IN ITS RELIGIOUS LAWS Embassytown was a cutting from Bremen. There was no established church, but as with many smaller colonies, its founders had included a reasonable minority of faithful. The Church of God Pharotekton was as close as we came to an official congregation. Its lighthouse towers jutted through Embassytown roofs, their beacons spinning, rotating spokes of light at night.

There were other congregations: tiny synagogues; temples; mosques; churches, mustering a few score regulars. A handful of ultra-orthodox in each tradition stood firm against ungodly innovations, attempting to maintain religious calendars based on Bremen’s thirty-seven-hour days, or according to insane nostalgia on the supposed days and seasons of Terre.

Like the Hosts, the Kedis of Embassytown had no gods: according to their professed faith the souls of their ancestors and of their unborn were united in a never-ending jealous war against them, the living, but they mostly displayed a far less bleak and embattled outlook than that theology would suggest. There were religious Shur’asi, but only dissidents: most were atheist, perhaps because apart from through accident, they didn’t die and were very rarely born.

Embassytowners were free not to believe. I wasn’t used to thinking about evil.

BEEHIVE'S NAME was , we gleaned from its conversations with other Hosts. I told CalVin, mangling the name with my monovoice, saying the Cut and Turn one after the other. “Can you find out when it’s competing at another Festival of Lies?” I said. “It’s a loyal fan of mine, and I’d like to... return the favour.”

“You want to go...” “... to another festival?”

“Yeah. Me and another couple of the similes.” It had occurred as a whim, mere curiosity about my observer, but having thought of it I could not let the idea go. When I’d mooted it to Hasser and a couple of the others, they’d been enthusiastic. “Do you think we could do that? Think you could get us in again?” It had been a while since we’d been summoned to any Languagefests, and though I was alone among them in being more intrigued by the lying than by my own deployment, the other Cravateers would hardly say no to any entry.

CalVin did pursue this, though not with the best grace. I wondered at the time why they were indulging me at all. One or the other always behaved with surliness to me. The differences in their demeanours were tiny, but I was used to Ambassadors and could sense them. I thought that they were taking turns to be colder and warmer, in a variant of traditional police procedure.

In The Cravat, conversations between the Hosts illuminated disagreements. They had camps, constituted by theories and arcane politics. Some seemed to love us—of course I shouldn’t use that word—as spectacle. Some rated our various merits: we called them the critics. The man who swims with the fishes is simple, one said. The girl who ate what was given to her is like more things. Valdik laughed but wasn’t happy to hear that the trope of him was trite. Beehive, which I started to call “Surl Tesh-echer”, a failure closer to its name, was the guru of another group. Champion liar.

It had regular companions: Spanish Dancer; and one we called Spindle; and one Longjohn—it had a biorigged replacement hoof. Of what any of us understood it’s hard to approximate what they said in Anglo-Ubiq: think of people circling an exhibit in a gallery, staring at it, from time to time uttering a single word or short phrase, like “Incomplete”, or “Potential”, or “Intricacies of fact and uncertainties of expression”, and occasional longer opaque things.

“ ‘The birds circle like the girl who ate what was put in front of her,’ ” Hasser translated. “ ‘The birds are like the girl who ate what was put in front of her and are like the man who swims with fishes and are like the split stone...’ ”

The other Ariekei, those not of ’s party, loudly answered these garbled claims. They responded to the presence of and its companions with excitement or agitation. Contrariwise, , Spanish Dancer and the others didn’t acknowledge the critics at all, that I could tell. We called ’s group the Professors.

stretched the logic of analogy—the birds were not like me, having eaten the food given to me, as far as most of the other Ariekei could see. “They think it’s being disrespectful when it says they are,” Hasser said. He looked unhappy. The birds are like the girl who ate what she was given, one of the Professors said again. It stuttered as it spoke, it mangled its words, had to stop and start and try again.

AN EARLY winter day I came to The Cravat—still attending, I noted wryly—dirty with leaf-muck and cold dust from Embassytown alleys. Valdik was the only other simile there. He was uncomfortable with me, less talkative even than usual. I wondered if perhaps he’d had some bad news about his outside life, of which I knew and wanted to know nothing. We sat in silence that was not companionable.

After one coffee I was ready to leave, when Shanita and Darius came in together. She was a taciturn simile I’d always sensed was a bit intimidated by me; he was frank and ingenuous, not very smart. They greeted me pleasantly enough.

“Why was Scile here?” Darius said as he sat. I was aware of Valdik sitting still and not reacting.

“Scile?” I said.

“He was here again, earlier,” Darius said. “A Host was here. Being really weird. Your husband, not the Host. He walked around putting little...” He fingered the air for the words. “Little nuts and bolts on all the tables. Wouldn’t tell me why.”

“Again? Here again?”

He had come once before when I was not there, it seemed, late at night, with three Hosts present. Darius hadn’t seen it but Hasser had, and told him. That time Scile had been strangely dressed, in clothes all one colour. Shanita nodded at the anecdote. Scile had, she said, while Valdik said nothing, laid down the same objects that first time, too.

“What’s that all about?” Darius said.

“I don’t know,” I said. I spoke carefully.

I suspected from his stillness that Valdik had an idea, in fact, as I did, what this might have been. That Scile, by these unnatural attention-getting rituals, was trying to stick in the mind. Trying to be good to think with, to be suggestive. To become a simile.

What the hell did he think he might mean? I thought, but corrected myself: that wouldn’t matter.

A CORVID DROPPED us deep in the city, in astonishing rooms, catacombs in skin, alcoves full of house’s organs sutured in place.

The hall was full of the interplaited cadences of Language. I’d never seen so many young, just woken into their third instar and Language. They matched their parents in size and shape, but they were children and you could tell by the colour of their bellies and the way they were given to swaying. They were avid spectators while the liars tried to lie.

Most of the competitors could only be silent, failing in their struggle to say something not true. I was with Hasser, Valdik and a few others chosen from among our regulars I don’t know how. We were chaperoned by ArnOld. They were there to perform and made it clear that they resented this babysitting duty. Hosts greeted them by their correct name: “”.

Scile was with me. He was talking, tentatively, with my simile companions. It had been a fair time since he’d seen Language in its home; it was for him I’d asked for this: he knew it, had been shy with gratitude. We were not nearly so close as we’d been at the time of our first festival, and I think the present surprised him. I hadn’t heard of any more efforts to enLanguage himself. I’d said nothing about any of them to him.

Before now the humans came. A Host, a lie-athlete, one of the Professors, I realised, was speaking.

Before the humans came we were... and it stalled. One of its companions continued. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. A sensation went through the audience. It was followed by another speaker: Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much...

I’d learnt enough to know this trick, a collaborative faux-mendacity: the last was repeating the previous sentence but dropping its voices to near nothing at the final clause. Of certain things was said, but so quietly the audience couldn’t hear it. It was showmanship, fakery, a crowd-pleaser, and the crowd were pleased.

ArnOld stiffened and said together: “”.

Beehive. It was swaying. Its giftwing circled, its fanwing stretched. It stepped up to the lying ground.

THERE WERE two main ways the few Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. One was to go slow. They would try to conceive the untrue clause—near-impossible, their minds reacting allergically to such a counterfactual even unspoken, conceived without signification. Having prepared it mentally, however successfully or un-, they would pretend-forget it to themselves. Speak each of its constituent words at a certain speed, at a beat, separated, apart enough in the mind of a speaker that each was a distinct concept, utterable with and as its own meaning; but just sufficiently fast and rhythmic that to listeners, they accreted into a ponderous but comprehensible, and untrue, sentence. The liars I had thus far seen with any success were slow-liars.

There was another technique. It was the more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of noises before the untruth of their totality stole a speaker’s ability to think them.

opened its mouths.

Before the humans came, it said in ornery staccato, we didn’t speak.

There was a long quiet. And then a convulsion, a riot.

I wished very much that I had any understanding of Ariekene body language. might have been exuding triumph, patience, or nothing. It hadn’t whispered the second half of any truth; or trudged sound-by-metronome-sound through a constructed-unconstructed sentence. What had said was unquestionably a lie.

The audience reeled. I reeled.

THE HOSTS woke in their third instar suddenly fluent, Language a direct function of their consciousness. “Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”

“The evolution of trust...” I started to say.

“There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers. “This Language is miraculous,” Scile had said. I was somehow repulsed by it, in fact. It was astonishing, given what Language needs to do, that the Ariekei had survived. That, I decided, was what Scile must have meant, so I agreed.

If evolution was morality they would be unable to hear lies, too, like two-thirds of the fabular monkeys, but it’s more random and beautiful, so that was only the case for those few who managed to speak them, of their own little untruths. Unbacked by signifieds, the lies of Language were just noises to their own liar. Biology’s lazy: if mouths speak truth, why should ears discriminate between it and its opposite? When what was spoken was, definitionally, what was? And by this hole in adaptation, though or because they were not built to say them, the Hosts could understand lies. And either believe them—belief being a meaningless given—or, where the falsity was ostentatious and the point, experience them as some giddying impossible, the said unthinkable.

It’s me who’s monomaniacal, here: it’s unfair to insinuate that all Hosts cared about was Language, but I can’t fail to do so. This is a true story I’m telling, but I am telling it, and that entails certain things. So: the Hosts cared about everything, but Language most of all.

RADICAL AND cussed, got that lie out into the world, a vomit of phonemes, against its own mind.

The public were rapturous. We’d witnessed a rare performance. I was delighted. Ambassador ArnOld was astonished. Hasser was bemused. Valdik and Scile were aghast.

Latterday, 8

KEDIS AND SHUR'ASI were being escorted to the Embassy. The newscasts’ little vespcams saw them.

Midlevel Staff gathered troikas and quads from the Kedis community, a few Shur’asi think-captains. Vehicles arced over our roofs, antennas and the girders of our construction, over the white smoke from our chimneys. One shot recurred on the bulletins: a young Staff member swatting at the cam through which we saw. He must have been very tense to be so unprofessional.

The newscasts, voice and text, were flummoxed. Perhaps to most locals there’d been no sense of crisis until this ingathering of our exots. The pods that took them to the Ambassadorial explanations flocked with birds, and fist-sized cams that rose and fell among them.

Beyond Embassytown, the oddness of angles and movements that had touched the city seemed to be spreading.

I BUZZED Ehrsul, RanDolph, Simmon, but could get through to no one. After a hesitation I tried Wyatt, but he didn’t answer either.

My handset still contained Hasser’s number, and Valdik’s, and several other similes’. It had been a long time. I considered calling one. What does it matter now? I thought, but I didn’t do it.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one doing so, but I’d begun to prepare, for whatever it was. I was copying what data I thought precious, hiding treasured objects, packing essentials into a shoulder bag. I’d always been fascinated at how my body ran things sometimes. While I felt like I was agonising, my limbs did what was needed.

Night would come without my noticing, and the aeoli-breath was still cool. Then at this crucial change-moment I remember there were night-bird noises and the gibbering of local animals. It wasn’t yet so late there was no traffic. I wasn’t tired at all. It was hard to make sense of the shots from Embassytown that I was watching. The newsware was still processing. A human commentator said, “We’re not sure what... we... we’re seeing something from the city... ah... movement from...”

The figures in cam-view were Ariekei. The Ariekei were moving. On my screen and through my window, I saw corvids frantic in several directions in the air. I heard things. I was already leaning out of my house and I saw their source. The Hosts were coming out of their city into Embassytown.

I RAN TO the interzone between Embassytown and the city. Lights came on as people woke to the noise, but though I was joined by more and more blinking citizens I didn’t feel part of anything. I passed under light globes whispering where moths touched them. Below arches I’d known all my life, and, tasting the thinning air, I knew I was only a street or two from the edge of the city. I was in Beckon Street, which swept downhill out of our enclave.

It was an old part of Embassytown. There were plaster griffins at the edges of the eaves. Not far away, our architecture was overcome, the ivy that tugged it smothered by fronds of fleshmatter and Ariekene business. The biorigging probed plastone and brick in a rill of skin.

The Hosts filled the road, jostling each other with odd motion. A single Host had grace but en masse they were a herd, in slow stampede. I’d never seen so many. I could hear the slide of their armour, the tap-tapping of thousands of their feet. Zelles scuttled.

As they came into the human reach the streetlamps and the colours of our displays made them a psychedelia. Rumpled women and men in nightclothes lined the walkways, so the Ariekei entered Embassytown with us either side as if to greet them, as if this were a parade. Cameras darted overhead, little busybodies.

There were Hosts in all their sentient stages, from the newly conscious to those about to slip into mindlessness. Hundreds of fanwings fluttered, and I wanted to be above looking down at that, a camouflage of shuddering colours. They passed me, I followed them.

Many Terre watching could understand Language, but of course none of us could speak it. Some couldn’t restrain asking in Anglo-Ubiq: “What are you doing?” “Where are you going?” We trailed the Ariekei north, climbing the incline toward the Embassy, on the roadways and verges, crabgrass and our debris. Constables had arrived. They waved their arms as if moving us on, as if they were protecting our aging walls. They said things that had no meaning at all: “Come on now!” or “Move away there!”

Human children had come to stare. I saw them play Ambassador, dueting nonsense noises and nodding wisely as if the Ariekei were responding. The Hosts took us a coiled route, amassing onlookers, cats and altfoxes bolting before the aliens. We came past the ruins.

Several Ambassadors—RanDolph, MagDa, EdGar, I saw—emerged from the dark, constables and Staff around them. They shouted greetings, but the Hosts didn’t pause or acknowledge them.

The Ambassadors said, “!” Stop. Wait. Stop.

Friends, they shouted, tell us what we can do, why are you here? They retreated at the head of the Ariekene crowd, ignored. Someone had turned on the light of a church, as if it were Utuday, and its beam rotated overhead. The Hosts began to speak, to shout, each in their two voices. A cacophony at first, a mix of speech and sounds I think weren’t speech, and out of that came a chant. Several words I didn’t know, and one I did.

“... ... ...”

THE ARIEKEI spread out before the black stone steps of the Embassy. I walked among them. The Hosts let me in, moving to accommodate me, glancing with eye-corals. Their spiky fibrous limbs were a thicket, their unbending flanks like polished plastic. My littleness was hidden, and unobserved I watched the Ambassadors panicking. “,” the Hosts kept saying. The people of Embassytown were saying it as best they could, too—“EzRa...” An undeliberate chant of the same word in two languages, the name.

JoaQuin and MayBel debated in furious whispers. Behind JasMin and ArnOld and MagDa I saw CalVin. They looked stricken. Staff were bickering too, and the constables around them looked close to panic, their carbines and geistguns dangerously at ready.

A Host stepped forward. “,” it said: I am .

One of those that had greeted EzRa, at the Arrival Ball.

Hello, said. We are here for . Bring . And on. JoaQuin tried to speak, and MayBel, and the Host paid no attention. Others joined in with it, its demand. They came slowly forward, and it was impossible not to have a sense of their bigness, the sway of their shell-hard limbs.

“... we have no choice!” I heard Joa or Quin, and I thought it was to MayBel but saw with shock that it was to Quin or Joa. The Ambassadors unhuddled, and stepping out from among them, coming forth as if in a conjuring trick, was EzRa.

EZ LOOKED anxious; Ra was cardsharp blank. As their colleagues parted for them Ez gave them a look of hatred. At the top of the stairs EzRa looked down at the congregation.

The Ariekei spread the tines of their antlers of eyes wide to take in the two men.

“.”

spoke again. The Language-fluent among us meant what it said was quickly communicated.

EzRa, it said. Talk.

EzRa will speak to us or we will make it speak.

“You can’t do this,” someone from Staff or Ambassadorial ranks shouted, and someone else answered, “What can we do?” EzRa looked at each other and murmured a preparation. Ez sighed; Ra’s face remained set.

Friends, they said. Ez said “curish” and Ra “loah”—friends. There was a snap of Ariekei thoraxes and limbs.

Friends, we thank you for this visit, EzRa said, and the Ariekei reeled, buffeting me. Friends, we thank you for this greeting, EzRa said, and the ecstasy went on.

Ra continued to mutter occasionally but Ez had gone silent, so Language decomposed. The Hosts hubbubbed. Some flailed their giftwings and wrapped themselves within them, some entwined them with others’.

shouted speak and spoke again. They said pleasantries, emptinesses, polite variants of Hello, hello.

The Ariekei concentrated, as if asleep or digesting. Around the plaza I saw hundreds of Embassytowners, and soundless hovering cams.

“You stupid, stupid bastards,” someone said on the Embassy steps. The words were as ignored as the ivy. Everyone was looking at the Hosts. They were coming back from whatever it was that had happened to them.

Good, said one. It wasn’t . Good. It turned. did so too. The Ariekei all turned back the way they had come.

“Wait! Wait!” It was MagDa. “Pharos!” “We have to...” One of them gestured to Ez and Ra: Don’t speak again. MagDa conferred and shouted in Language. We must speak, they said.

Whether out of pity, courtesy, curiosity or whatever, and other leaders, if that’s what they were, of the gathering craned their eye-corals, twisted them backwards, looking behind them. I heard someone say, “Put it down, Officer. Christ, man...”

We have much to discuss, MagDa said. Please join us. May we ask you to enter?

Constables and SecStaff came through the crowd. “Go.” One stood before me. She held a stubby gun. She spoke to me rapidly, the same spiel she was giving everyone. “Please clear the streets. We’re trying to bring this under control. Please.”

Like everyone else, I obeyed my orders slowly. The Ariekei had arrived in strange coherence. Now most of them straggled away at random, leaving their scent and unique marks in the dirt. An urgent-faced boy in a constable’s uniform whispered to me to please fuck off right now, and I sped up a little. The Ambassadors were trying to usher a few Hosts, those which had hesitated, into the Embassy. They didn’t seem to be succeeding.