Embassytown (11 page)

That last seemed silly. I took no money for telling them what little I could. I waved into silence someone’s diplomatic explanations of their political concerns: it didn’t matter. I showed them newspipes, downloads, gave them perhaps a tiny sense of the balance of power in Bremen’s ruling Cosmopolitan Democratic party. Bremen’s wars, interventions and exigencies had never fascinated me, but perhaps to those more focused on them, what I told them might give insights into recent vicissitudes. Honestly I doubt any of it was stuff their artminds and analysts wouldn’t have predicted or guessed.

It was hardly high espionage drama. A few days later I was introduced to Wyatt, then Bremen’s new man in Embassytown, whom my Staff interlocutors had mentioned to me in obliquely warning fashion. He immediately teased me about that earlier meeting. He asked if I had a camera in his bedroom, or something like that. I laughed. I liked it when we crossed paths. He gave me a personal number.

It was in circles such as this, Embassytown society, that I met Ambassador CalVin and became their lover. One of the things they did for me was give Scile an opportunity to meet the Hosts.

CalVin were tall, grey-skinned men, a little older than me, with a certain playfulness, and the charming arrogance of the best Ambassadors. They invited me, and, at my request, Scile, to functions, and would come in turn into the town with us, where an Ambassador walking the streets without a Staff retinue was uncommon enough to attract attention.

“Ambassador,” Scile worked up courage to ask them, at first cautiously, “I have a question about your . . . exchanges with the Hosts.” And then into some minutely specific, arcane enquiry. CalVin, earning at that time my gratitude, were patient, though their answers were doubtless disappointing.

In CalVin’s company I saw, heard and intuited details about aspects of Embassytown life I never otherwise would have. I picked up on my lovers’ momentary references, hints and asides. They wouldn’t always answer me when I pressed them—they might say something about colleagues gone astray, or Ariekene factions, and then refuse to elaborate—but I learnt even just from overhearing.

I asked them about Bren. “I don’t see him often,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to come to gatherings.”

“I’d forgotten you’ve a connection with him,” CalVin said, both eyeing me, though in slightly different ways. “No, Bren’s rather self-exiled. Not that he’d ever
leave
, you understand.” “That wouldn’t fit with what he thinks he is, to the rest of us.” “And he had the chance. He
could
have left.” “After he was cleaved.” “Instead . . .” They laughed. “He’s sort of our licensed misery.” “He knows most of what goes on. And further afield, too—he knows things he really shouldn’t.” “You couldn’t call him loyal. But he’s useful.” “But you really couldn’t call him loyal, anymore, if he ever was.” Scile listened avidly to them.

“What’s it like?” Scile asked me. “I mean, I’ve been with two people before and I’m sure you have too, but I don’t think that’s—”

“
No
, Pharoi, no. Lord, you’re
terrible
. It’s not the same at all.” I was adamant at the time: now I have doubts.

“Do they both concentrate on you?” he said. We giggled, he at the silly prurience, me at what felt almost like blasphemy.

“
No
, it’s all very egalitarian. Cal, me and Vin, all in it together. Honestly, Scile, it’s not like I’m the only person an Ambassador’s ever—”

“You’re the only one I’ve got access to, though.” By then I wasn’t sure that was true. “I thought homosex isn’t approved of,” he said.

“Now you’re just showing off,” I said. “That’s not what they do together. Them or any of the Ambassadors. You know that. It’s . . . masturbation.” That was the common if scandalous description, and it made me feel like a kid to say it. “Imagine what it’s like when two Ambassadors get together.”

Scile spent hours, many hours, listening to recordings of Ariekei speaking, watching trids and flats of encounters between them and the Ambassadors. I watched him mouth things to himself and write illegible notes, one-handedly input into his datspace. He learnt fast. That was no surprise to me. When at last CalVin invited us to an event at which the Hosts would be present, Scile understood Language pretty much perfectly.

It was to be one of the discussions Ambassadors held with Hosts every few weeks. Interworld trade might come only every few thousand hours, but it was backed by and built on exhaustive, careful negotiation. With the arrival of each immership, terms agreed between Staff and Hosts (with the imprimatur of Bremen’s representative) were communicated, the vessel would leave with those details and Ariekene goods and tech, returning on its next round with whatever we had promised the Ariekei in return. They were patient.

“There’s a reception,” one of CalVin told us. “Would you like to come?”

We were not allowed into the actual negotiations, of course. Scile regretted this. “Why do you care?” I said. “It’ll be dull as hell. Trade talks? Really? How much of this, what do you want of that . . .”

“I want to know, that’s exactly it. What is it they want? Do you even know what we exchange with them?”

“Expertise, mostly. For AI and artminds and things. That they can’t make . . .”

“I know, because of Language. But I’d love to hear how they
relate
to that tech, when they get hold of it.”

An Ariekes couldn’t type into an artmind, of course: writing was incomprehensible to them. Oral input was no better: as far as any exopsych specialists could discern, the Hosts couldn’t ken interacting with a machine. The computer would speak back to them in what we heard as flawless vernacular, but to the Ariekei, with no sentience behind them, those words were just noises.

So our designers had created computers that were eavesdroppers. We built them from the simple loudhailer- and telephone-animals the Ariekei biorigged. They could—though no one made sense of how—understand each other’s voices (and those of our Ambassadors) through speakers or even recorded: so long as what was or had been said had that sentience, a genuine mind speaking it, neither distance nor time degraded its compre-hensibility, its meaningness, what Scile had provocatively called the “soul”. We took those little mediators and upgraded, altered and sometimes ultimately replaced them with communication tech the Hosts could not have created. We routed their voices through artminds.

The programs were designed to work between interlocutors, to create their own instructions by insinuation. The Ariekei spoke to each other as they always had, and if their conversations took certain theoretical turns, the ’ware would listen in, make calculations, alter production, perform automated tasks. Just what the Ariekei understood to be occurring was of course beyond me, but they knew, I was told, that we had given them something—they paid for it, after all.

“And what do we get?” Scile said.

CalVin indicated a chandelier above us, tugging itself with slow grace into the darker areas of the room, extruding and reabsorbing tendril-end lights. “Biorigged stuff, of course,” they said. “You know that.” “You’ve seen it in Bremen, too. A lot of our food. And some gems and bits and pieces.” Like most Embassytowners I was rather vague on the details of the barters they were describing. “And gold.”

They were on duty, but CalVin hosted well, that first party. Scile stood by the table of delicacies, human and Ariekene, waiting. “Fraternising with the locals, at last?” Ehrsul had come quietly up behind me. She spoke suddenly, made me start and laugh.

“He’s so well behaved,” I said, nodding in Scile’s direction.

“Patient,” she said. “But then, you don’t have to be, you’ve already met the Hosts.”

She was only passing through, she said, supposedly on some upgrading errand. She swivelled and rolled past Scile with a whispered word, and he greeted her and watched her go. “You know what CalVin told me?” he said quietly to me. He gestured with his glass towards Ehrsul’s retreating form. “She can speak it. It sounds flawless. All the Ambassadors know exactly what she’s saying. But if she tries it with the Hosts, they don’t get a word.” He met my eyes. “She’s not really speaking Language at all.”

He continued his effort to cover his impatience—he was, at least, not rude about it. CalVin made sure to introduce him to those Staff and Ambassadors present he didn’t know. And of course, finally, when they arrived, with that usual shift in the room, to the Hosts.

It was the first time for thousands of hours I’d seen them so close. There were four. Three were in prime, in their third instar, and their tall outlines quivered with whiskers. The last was in finis—its dotage. Its abdomen was massive and pendulous and its limbs spindled. It walked firmly but was mindless. Its siblings had brought it as a kind of charity. It followed them under instinct, by sight and chemical trail. It was an evolutionary strategy on Arieka shared by more than one phylum that an animal’s last incarnation was as a food store for the young. They could gnaw at the nutritional swathings of its abdomen for days without killing it. Our Hosts had done so, in their early history, but they had given the practice up generations before as, we inferred, a barbarism. They mourned when their fellows entered their penultimate form, when their minds died, and respectfully shepherded the ambulatory corpses till they fell apart.

The undead thing bumped the table, upsetting wine and canapés, and HenRy, LoGan, CalVin and the other Ambassadors laughed politely as if at a joke.

“Please,” CalVin said, and brought Scile forward, towards the honoured indigens. I could not read Scile’s face. “Scile Cho Baradjian, this is Speaker—” and then in Cut and Turn at once they said the lead Host’s name.

It looked down at us from its jutting coralline extrusion, each random bud studded with an eye.

“
,” CalVin said, together. Only Ambassadors could speak Host names.

Waving on a stalk-throat by its neck, its Cut-mouth terribly like human lips, the Host muttered: and at the level of our chests, where its body swelled, its Turn-mouth opened and coughed, emitting little rounded vowel sounds,
tao dao thao
.

It wore the organs of tiny animals coiled about its neck. Something wound between its stiletto feet, a companion animal. One accompanied all the Ariekei but the brain-dead old-timer. It was the size of a baby, a grub-thing with stump legs and filigree antennae, its back punctuated with holes, some ringed with inlaid metal. Its locomotion was between a scamper and a convulsion. It was a zelle, a biorigged battery-beast, into which leads and wires could be slotted, and out of which, depending on what its owner fed it, different power would flow. The Ariekene city was full of such sources.

stepped forward on four legs a little like a spider’s, long, too-jointed, dark-haired, and extended its wings: from its back its auditory fanwing, in many colours; from its front, from below its larger mouth, its limb of interaction and manipulation, its giftwing.

We would like to shake your giftwing with our hands
, CalVin said in Language, and Scile, his face still closed to me, only pursing his lips a tiny bit, held out his hand. The Host clasped my husband’s hand in a greeting that would have made no sense to it, and then it clasped mine.

So Scile saw Language spoken. He listened. He asked quick questions of CalVin between their exchanges with the Host, which they, to my surprise, put up with.

“What? Is he insinuating that you couldn’t agree . . . ?”

“No, it’s . . .” “. . . more complicated than that.” “Hold on.”

Then CalVin would speak together. “
,” I heard them say at one point; they were saying
please
.