Embassytown

Latterday, 1

Latterday, 2

“PLEASE JOIN ME”—I couldn’t see who it was who spoke loudly, announcing the arrivals to Diplomacy Hall— “in welcoming Ambassador EzRa.”

They were immediately surrounded. In that moment I saw no close friends, had no one with whom to share my tension or conspiratorial look. I waited for EzRa to do the rounds. When they did, how they did so was another indicator of their strangeness. They must have known how it would seem to us. As JoaQuin and Wyatt introduced them to people, Ez and Ra separated, moved somewhat apart. They glanced at each other from time to time, like a couple, but there were soon metres between them: nothing like doppels, nothing like an Ambassador. Their links must work differently, I thought. I glanced at their little mechanisms. They each wore a distinct design. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Disguising their unease with functionaries’ aplomb, JoaQuin led Ez and Wyatt Ra.

Each half of the new Ambassador was at the centre of a curious crowd. This was the first chance most of us had had to meet them. But there were Staff and Ambassadors whose fascination for the newcomers had clearly outlasted their own initial meetings. LeNa, RanDolph and HenRy were laughing with Ez, the shorter man, while Ra looked bashful as AnDrew asked him questions, and MagDa, I realised, stayed close enough to touch his hands.

The party bustled about me. I caught sight of Ehrsul’s rendered eyes at last and winked as Ra approached me. Wyatt made an aaah noise, held out his hands, kissed my cheeks.

“Avice! Ra, this is Avice Benner Cho, one of Embassytown’s... Well, Avice is any number of things.” He bowed as if granting me something. “She’s one of our immersers. She’s spent a good deal of time in the out, and now she offers cosmopolitan expertise and an invaluable traveller’s eye.” I liked Wyatt, and his little power plays. You might say we tended to twinkle at each other.

“Ra,” I said. A hesitation too short for him to notice, I think, and I held out my hand. I shouldn’t call him “Mr.” or “Squire”: legally he was not a man, but half of something. Had he been with Ez I’d have addressed them as “Ambassador.” I nodded at AnDrew, at Mag, at Da, who watched.

“Helmser Cho,” Ra said quietly. He after his own hesitation took my hand.

I laughed. “You’ve promoted me. And it’s Avice. Avice is fine.”

“Avice.”

We stood silent for a moment. He was tall and slim, pale, his hair dark and plaited. He seemed slightly anxious but he pulled himself together somewhat as we spoke.

“I admire you being able to immerse,” he said. “I never get used to it. Not that I’ve travelled a lot, but that’s partly why.”

I forget what I replied, but whatever it was, there was a silence after it. After a minute I said to him, “You’ll have to get better at it, you know. Small talk. That’s what your job is, from here on in.”

He smiled. “I’m not sure that’s quite fair,” he said.

“No,” I said. “There’s wine to drink and papers to sign, too.” He seemed delighted by that. “And for that you came all the way to Arieka,” I said. “For ever and ever.”

“Not for ever,” he said. “We’ll be here seventy, eighty kilohours. Until the next relief but one, I think. Then back to Bremen.”

I was astounded. My blather stopped. Of course I should not have been taken aback. An Ambassador leaving Embassytown. Nothing about this situation made sense. An Ambassador with somewhere else to return to was a contradiction in my terms.

Wyatt was muttering to Ra. MagDa smiled at me from behind them. I liked MagDa: they were one of the Ambassadors who hadn’t treated me differently since my falling out with CalVin.

“I’m from Bremen,” Ra told me. “I’d like to travel like you have.”

“Are you Cut or Turn?” I asked.

It was obvious he didn’t like the question. “Turn,” he said. He was older than me but not by very much.

“How did all this happen?” I said. “You and Ez? It takes years... How long have you been training?”

“Avice, really,” Wyatt said from behind Ra. “You’ll hear all about that—” He raised his eyebrows in a rebuke, but I raised mine back. There was a moment between him and Ra, before Ra spoke.

“We’d been friends a long time,” he said. “We got tested years ago. Kilohours, I mean. It was a random thing, part of an exhibition about the Stadt method.” He stopped as the noise in the room grew louder. Mag or Da said something, laughing, moved between me and Ra demanding the attention he politely turned on them.

“He’s tense,” I said to Wyatt quietly.

“I don’t think this is his favourite thing,” he said. “But then, would it be yours? Poor man’s in a zoo.”

“ ‘Poor man,’ ” I said. “Very, very strange to hear you speak of him like that.”

“Strange times.” We laughed over a swell of music. There was a strong smell of perfume and wine. We watched EzRa, who were not EzRa, not really, who were Ez and Ra, separated by metres. Ez was bantering with facility and pleasure. He caught my eye, excused himself to his interlocutors and approached.

“Hi,” he said. “I see you met my colleague.” He held out his hand.

“Your colleague? Yes, I met him.” I shook my head. JoaQuin were at Ez’s elbows, one on each side like elderly parents, and I nodded at them. “Your colleague. You really are just determined to scandalise us, Ez,” I said.

“Oh, please. No. Not at all, not at all.” He grinned an apology at the doppels escorting him. “It’s... well, I suppose it’s just a slightly different way of doing things.”

“And it’ll be invaluable,” said Joa, or Quin, heartily. The two spoke in turn. “You’re always telling us we’re too...” “... stuck in our ways, Avice. This will be...” “... good for us, and good for Embassytown.” One of them slapped Ez on the back. “Ambassador EzRa’s an outstanding linguist and bureaucrat.”

“You’re going to say they’re a ‘new broom,’ aren’t you, Ambassador?” I said.

JoaQuin laughed. “Why not?” “Why not indeed?” “That’s exactly what they are.”

WE WERE RUDE, Ehrsul and I. We’d stick together, whispering and showing off, at all these sorts of events. So when she waved a trid hand to attract my attention I joined her expecting to play. But when I reached her she said to me urgently, “Scile’s here.”

I didn’t look round. “Are you sure?”

“I never thought he’d come,” she said.

I said, “I don’t know what...” It was some time since I’d seen my husband. I didn’t want a scene. I bit a knuckle for a moment, stood up straighter. “He’s with CalVin, isn’t he?”

“Am I going to have to separate you two girls?” It was Ez again. He made me start. He’d extricated himself from JoaQuin’s anxious stewarding. He offered me a drink. He flexed something inside himself, and his augmens glimmered, changing the colour of his vague halo. I realised that with the help of his innard tech he might have been listening to us. I focused on him and tried not to look for Scile. Ez was shorter than me, and muscular. His hair was cut close.

“Ez, this is Ehrsul,” I said. To my astonishment he looked at her, said nothing and looked back at me. The rudeness made me gasp.

“Having a good time?” he said to me. I watched tiny lights move across his corneas. Ehrsul was moving away. I was going to go with her and blank him haughtily, but behind his back she flashed a quick display: Stay, learn.

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” I said to him quietly.

“What?” He was startled. “What? Your—”

“She’s not mine,” I said. He stared at me.

“The autom? I apologise. I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t me you owe that to.” He inclined his head.

“What are you monitoring?” I said to him after a silence. “I can see your displays.”

“It’s just habit. Temperature, air impurities, ambient noise. Mostly pointless. A few other things: I worked for years in situations that... well, I got used to checking for trid, cameras, ears, that sort of thing.” I raised an eyebrow. “And I tend to run translationware as a default.”

“No!” I said. “How exciting. Now, tell me the truth. Got ’ware in your ears? Are you running a soundtrack?”

He laughed. “No,” he said. “I grew out of that. I haven’t done that for... a good week or two.”

“Why are you running translation programs? You...” I put my arm on his and looked suddenly exaggeratedly stricken. “You do speak Language, don’t you? Oh dear, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”

He laughed again. “Oh, I can get by in Language, that’s not it.” More seriously: “But I don’t speak any of the Shur’asi or Kedis dialects, or...”

“Oh, you won’t find exots here tonight. Apart from Mine Host, obviously.” I was surprised he didn’t know this. Embassytown was a Bremen colony, under Bremen laws that restricted our few exots to guestworker status.

“What about you?” he said. “I don’t see augmens. So you speak Language?”

For a moment I really didn’t understand what he meant. “No. I let my sockets close up. I had a few bits and pieces once. They can be useful for immersion. And also,” I said, “yes, you know, I can see how a bit to help make sense of what the Hosts say is... useful. But I’ve seen them, they’re too... It’s intrusive.”

“That’s sort of the point,” he said.

“Right, and I can put up with that if it’s any use, but Language is beyond it,” I said. “Get them, when you hear a Host speak you get a whole eyeful or earful of nonsense. Hello slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent blah blah.” I raised an eyebrow. “It was pointless.”

Ez watched me. He knew I was lying. He must have known that the notion of using translationware for Language would be, to an Embassytowner, profoundly inappropriate. Not illegal, but an appalling impertinence. I didn’t even know quite why I had said all that.

“I’ve heard of you,” he said. I waited. If EzRa were even slightly good at their job they’d have prepared something personal to say to most of the people they might meet, tonight. What Ez said next, though, astonished me. “Ra reminded me where we’d heard your name. You’re in a simile, aren’t you? And I gather you’ve been to the city? Outside Embassytown.” Someone brushed past him. He didn’t stop looking at me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been there.”

“I’m sorry, I think I’ve... Sorry if I’ve... It’s not my business.”

“No, it’s just, I’m surprised.”

“Of course I’ve heard of you. We do our research, you know. There’s not many Embassytowners who’ve done what you’ve done.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt I don’t know what, to hear that I featured in the Bremen reports on Embassytown. I inclined a glass at Ez, said some goodbye, and went to find Ehrsul manoeuvring her chassis through the crowd.

“SO WHAT'S THEIR STORY?” I said. Ehrsul gave her display shoulders a shrug.

“Ez is a charmer, isn’t he?” she said. “Ra seems better but he’s shy.”

“Anything online?” She’d probably been trying to hack into data floating around.

“Not much,” she said. “It’s some kind of coup for Wyatt that they’re here. He’s crowing so hard hens everywhere are getting randy. That’s why the Staff are so tense. I decrypted the tail end of something... I’m pretty sure Staff made EzRa sit a test. I suppose, you know, it’s the first time in Christ-knows-how-long there’s been an Ambassador from the out, and they queried whether anyone who didn’t grow up speaking Language could possibly get the nuances. They must resent this appointment.”

“They’re all technically appointees too, don’t forget,” I said. It was something that rankled with Staff: on his arrival, Wyatt, like every attaché, had had to formally license all the Ambassadors to speak for Bremen. “Anyway, they can speak Language? EzRa?”

She shrugged again. “Wouldn’t be here if they’d failed,” she said.

Something happened in the room. A feeling, a moment when, conviviality notwithstanding, it was suddenly imperative to focus. It was like that every time the Hosts came into a room, as they had just come into Diplomacy Hall.

THE PARTYGOERS tried not to be rude—as if it were possible for us to be rude to them, as if the Hosts considered politesse on axes that would make any sense to us. Nonetheless, most of us kept up our chitchat and did not ogle.

An exception was the crew, who stared frankly at the Ariekei they had never seen before. Across the room I saw my helmsman and I saw the expression on his face. Once I had heard a theory. It was an attempt to make sense of the fact that no matter how travelled people are, no matter how cosmopolitan, how biotically miscegenated their homes, they can’t be insouciant at the first sight of any exot race. The theory is that we’re hardwired with the Terre biome, that every glimpse of anything not descended from that original backwater home, our bodies know we should not ever see.

Formerly, 2

I WASN'T SURE how Embassytown would be for Scile. He can’t have been the first settler from the out to be brought back by a returnee, but I’d never known others.

I’d spent a long time on ships in the immer, or in ports on planets with diurnal durations inimical to humanity’s. My return was the first time for thousands of hours that I’d been able to dispense with circadian implants and settle into actual solar rhythms. Scile and I acclimatised to the nineteen-hour Ariekene days by traditional means, spending most of our time outside.

“I warned you,” I told him. “It’s a tiny place.”

Now I remember those days with real pleasure. Still. I kept telling Scile about my sacrifice in returning to that little place—to come back from the out! to funnel back down!—but I was happier than I’d imagined I would be when I emerged from the sealed train in the aeolian zone, and breathed Embassytown smells. It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

My early days back in Embassytown, with savings and an outsider, immerser chic. I swaggered. I was welcomed back in delight by those who’d known me, who had never thought to see me again, who’d doubted the news of my return in the preceding miab.

I wasn’t rich by any real standard, but my savings were in Bremen Eumarks. This was the foundation currency of Embassytown, of course, but one rarely seen: with thirty or more kilohours between visits from the metropole—more than an Embassytown year—our little economy was self-standing. In deference to the Eumark, like all Bremen’s colonies, our currency was called the Ersatz. All those Ersatzes were incommensurable, each its own and worthless beyond its polity’s bounds. That portion of my account I’d downloaded and had with me, a few months’ life in Bremen, was enough for me to live in Embassytown until the next relief, perhaps even the one after that. I don’t even think people much resented it—I’d earned my money in the out. I told people that what I was doing with it now was floaking. That was inaccurate—there being no commands for me to get away with minimally obeying, I was simply not working—but they were delighted with the immer slang. They seemed to consider my idleness my right.

Those of my shiftparents still working had a party for me, and I was a bit startled by how happy it made me to go back, to be in the nursery, to kiss and hug and shout and re-greet these kind men and women, some now disconcertingly old, some seeming unchanged. “I told you you’d come back!” Dad Shemmi kept saying as I danced with him. “I told you!” They unwrapped the Bremen gewgaws I’d brought them. “This is too much, my love!” Mum Quiller said of some bracelet with aesthetic augmens. The dads and mums were shyly welcoming to my husband. He stood with a game smile all evening in the streamer-decorated hall while I got drunk, and he answered the same questions about himself repeatedly.

A few of those I’d grown up with crossed paths with me again, like Simmon. Though I slightly expected to, I never saw Yohn. I made other friends, from unfamiliar strata. I was invited to Staff parties. Though these had not been my circles before I left, there hadn’t been room enough in little Embassytown for me, an immerser-in-training, not at least to get near them. People, Staff, Ambassadors I’d known by sight and reputation in those days were abruptly acquaintances, and more. Some that I had expected to meet, however, were gone.

“Where’s Oaten?” I asked about a man who had mouthpieced often for Staff on our Embassytown trid. “Where’s Dad Renshaw?” “Where are GaeNor?” about that elderly Ambassador, one of whom, when recruiting me to Language, had said “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” with a cadence so splendidly stilted it had become part of my internal idiolect, so whenever I introduced myself by my full name, a little is it? trailed the words in my head, in her voice. “Where’re DalTon?” I said, of the notorious Ambassador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learnt it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood.

Oaten had retired on his modest local riches. Renshaw had died. Young. I was sad at that. GaeNor had died, one then almost immediately the other, of linkshock and loss. DalTon, I gathered—after continuing dissidence and some hinted-at final impatience with their colleagues, some ostentatiously opaque Staff internecine strife—had disappeared or been disappeared. Intrigued, I prodded at that, but got nothing more. I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions about Ambassadors directly, rather improperly, but I could gauge how far to push it and when not to.

I have no doubt that this was fallacious, but it felt to me as if I was quicker, better at sarcasm, wittier, because of my time in the out. People were kind to Scile and fascinated by him. He was fascinated back. He’d been on several worlds but emerged into Embassytown as if through a door in a wall. He explored. Our status wasn’t a secret. Nonex marriages like ours were known of but rare in Embassytown, which made us a titillation. We were spending most of our time together, still, but gradually less, as he expanded his own circles.

“Careful,” I told Scile, after one party where a man called Ramir had flirted with him, using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics. I’d never known Scile show interest in men, but still. Homosex was a little bit illegal, I told him. Except for Ambassadors.

“What about that woman, Damier?” he said.

“She’s Staff,” I said. “Anyway it’s only a little bit illegal.”

“How quaint,” he said.

“Oh yes, it’s just darling.”

“So do they know you were once married to a woman?”

“I’ve been to the out, my love,” I said. “I can do anything I bloody want.”

I showed him where I’d played. We went to galleries and exhibitions of trid. Scile was fascinated by the tramp automa of Embassytown, melancholy-seeming mendicant machines. “Do they ever go into the city?” he said. They did, but even could he corner them their artminds were too feeble to describe it to him.

It was Language that he was there for, of course, but he wasn’t blinkered to other strangenesses. Ariekene biorigging astonished him. At the houses of friends, he would stare like an appraiser at their quasi-living artefacts, architectural filigrees, their occasional medical tweak, prostheses and similar. With me, he would stand at the edge of the aeolian breath, on balconies and viewbridges in Embassytown, watching the herds of power plants and factories graze. Yes, he was staring into the city at where Language was, but he was looking at the city itself as well. Once, he waved like a boy, and though the far-off things can’t have seen us, it seemed as if one station twitched its antennae in response.

Near the heart of Embassytown was the site of the first archive. The field of rubble could have been cleared but it had been left as it was for lifetimes, since it fell: over one and a half megahours, more than half a local century. Our early town-planners must have thought that humans need ruins. Children still came, as we had, sometimes, and the overgrown dereliction was busy with Terre animals and those local lives that could tolerate the air we breathed. They, too, Scile spent a long time watching.

“What’s that?” A red simian thing with a dog’s head, shinning up a pipe.

“A fox, it’s called,” I said.

“Is it an altered?”

“I don’t know. Way back, if so.”

“What’s that?”

“A jackdaw.” “A stickleback-cat.” “A dog.” “Some indigene, I don’t know its name.”

“That’s not what we call a dog where I come from,” he’d say, or “Jack, daw,” carefully repeating names. It was unfamiliar indigenous Ariekene things that interested him most.

Once we spent hours in a very hot sun. We sat talking about things, then not talking, holding hands long enough and still enough that the animals and abflora forgot we were alive and treated us as landscape. Two creatures each the size of my forearm wrestled in the grass. “Look,” I said, quietly. “Shh.” Some way from the animals a clumsy little biped was edging away, its rear a fringe of blood.

“It’s injured,” Scile said.

“Not exactly.” Like every Embassytowner child, I knew what this was. “Look,” I said. “That’s the hunter.” A ferocious little altbrock, its black-and-white fur spattered. “What it’s fighting’s called a trunc. As is that thing running away. I know they look like different animals. You see how the tail end of that one over there’s all ragged? And the head of the one getting into it with the altbrock’s torn, too? That’s the brainhalf and that’s the meathalf of the same animal. They tear apart when the trunc’s attacked: the meathalf holds off any predators while the brain end runs off looking for a last chance to mate.”

“It doesn’t look anything like other local stuff,” Scile said. “But... I don’t think it’s Terre?” The meathalf of the trunc was winning, grinding the altbrock down. “Before it tore apart it would have had eight legs. There weren’t any octopodes on Terre, were there? Maybe underwater, but...”

“It’s not Terre or Ariekene,” I said. “It was brought in by accident kilohours ago, on a Kedis ship. They’re little gypsies. They must smell good or something: loads of things attack them. Even though if they then win, eating trunc-flesh makes them puke, or kills them. Poor little refugees.”

The brainhalf of the autotruncator was in the shadow of long-fallen stone and circuitry, watching the triumph of its erstwhile hind limbs. It teetered like a meerkat or a little dinosaur. The brainhalf had taken the trunc’s only eyes, and the meathalf circled in blind pugnacity, sniffing for more enemies from which to protect its escaped mind.

In an act of obscure sentimentality, Scile, with some effort, evaded the trunc meathalf’s claws—no small achievement, given that all it was driven to do by its remaining scrag-end thoughts was to fight—and brought it home. He kept it alive for several days. In the cage he rigged he put down food, and the trunc circled it and snatched mouthfuls as it continued its unending vigilant rounds, though it had no brain to protect. It tried to fight any brushes or cloths that we dangled near it. It died, and broke down very fast like a salted slug, leaving only mess for us to dispose of.

At the coin wall, I told Scile about that first encounter with Bren. I’d found myself hesitating to take him there or tell him the story, and that piqued me, so I made myself. Scile looked lengthily at the house.

“Is he still there?” I asked a local stallholder.

“Don’t see much of him but he’s still there.” The man made a finger-sign against bad luck.

All this beckoning Scile through my childhood. Out at breakfast late one morning, at the end of the square in which we sat, I saw, and pointed out to Scile, a little group of young trainee Ambassadors, on one of their controlled, corralled, protected expeditions into the town for which they would one day intercede. There were five or six of them, it looked like, all from the same batch, ten or twelve children, a few kilohours off puberty, escorted by teachers, security, two adult Ambassadors, a men and a women, whom I could not identify at this distance. The apprentices’ links winked frenetically.

“What are they doing?” he said.

“Treasure hunt. Lessons. Don’t know,” I said. “Showing them round their demesne.” To my mild embarrassment and the amusement of other diners, Scile stood to watch them go, still chewing the dense Embassytown toast he claimed to love (too ascetic now for me).

“Do you see that often?”

“Not really,” I said. Most of the few times I’d seen such groups was as a child myself. If it happened when I was with my friends, we might try to catch the eyes of one or other of the not-yet-Ambassadors, giggle and run off if we succeeded, chased or not by their escorts. We’d play mocking and somewhat nervous games in their wake, for a few ostentatious minutes. I paid attention to my breakfast and waited for Scile to sit.

When he did he said, “What do you think about kids?”

I glanced in the direction the young doppels had taken. “Interesting chain of thought,” I said. “Here, it wouldn’t be like...” In the country he’d been born in, on the world he’d been born on, children were mostly raised by between two and six adults, connected to them and each other by direct genetics. Scile had mentioned his father, his mother, his auntfathers or whatever he called them, more than once and with affection. It was a long time since he had seen them: such ties mostly attenuate in the out.

“I know,” he said. “I just...” He waved at the town. “It’s nice here.”

“Nice?”

“There’s something here.”

“ ‘Something.’ I can tell words are your business. Anyway we’re going to pretend that I didn’t hear you. Why would I inflict this little place...”

“Oh stop it, really.” He smiled with only a little prickle in his voice. “You got out, yes, I know. You don’t mind it here half as much as you pretend to, Avice. You don’t like me that much, to come here if it was purgatory for you.” He smiled again. “Why would you mind it, anyway?”

“You’re forgetting something. This isn’t the out. In Bremen they consider most of what we do here—biorigging aside, and that we get out of the good graces of you-know-who—thuggish field medicine. And that includes sex-tech. You do remember how kids get made? You and I don’t exactly...”

He laughed. “Point,” he said. He took my hand. “Compatible everywhere but between sheets.”

“Who said I wanted to do it between sheets?” I said. It was a joke, not a seduction.

It all feels like prelude, now I reflect on it. The first time I saw exots of species I’d not grown up with was in a rowdy town on a tiny world we called Sebzi. I was introduced to a group of hive-things. I’ve no idea what they were, or from where their race originated. I’ve seen none of their kind since. One came forward on a pseudopod, leaned its hourglass body toward me and from a tiny snag-toothed ventricle said, in perfect Anglo-Ubiq, “Ms. Cho. It’s a pleasure.”

Scile reacted to Kedis and Shur’asi and Pannegetch, I don’t doubt, with more aplomb than I had that time. He gave talks in Embassytown’s east, about his work and travels (I was impressed by how he was able to tell the truth but make his life sound coherent, precisely arced). A Kedis troika approached afterwards, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.

He introduced himself to the Shur’asi shopkeeper we knew as Gusty—Scile ostentatiously and with pleasure told me its actual namestring—and cultivated a brief friendship. People were charmed to see them about town, Scile with a companionable arm around Gusty’s main trunk, the Shur’asi’s cilia scuttling it at Scile’s pace. They’d swap stories. “You go on about the immer,” Gusty would say. “Try travelling by whorl-drive. Blimey, that was a journey.” I was never able to decide if his mind really was as like ours as the shape of his anecdotes suggested. Certainly he performed our small talk well, even once mimicking the poor Anglo-Ubiq of a Kedis neighbour, in a complicated joke.

Of course Scile wanted to meet the Ariekei. It was the Ariekei he studied nightly, when he stopped being social. It was they who eluded him.

“I still can’t find out almost anything about them,” he said. “What they’re like, what they think, what they do, how they work. Even stuff written by Ambassadors describing their work, their, you know, their interactions with the Ariekei, it’s all... incredibly empty.” He looked at me as if he wanted something. “They know what to do,” he said, “but not what it is they’re doing.”

It took me moments to make sense of his complaint. “It’s not the Ambassadors’ job to understand the Hosts,” I said.

“So whose is it?”

“It’s no one’s job to understand them.” I think that was when I first really saw the gap between us.

By now we knew Gharda and Kayliegh and others, Staff and those close to them. I had become friends with Ehrsul. She teased me about my lack of profession (she, unlike most Embassytowners, had been au fait with the term “floaker” before I introduced it), and I teased her right back about the same thing. As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she’d never become anyone else’s property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.

“It’s just Turingware,” Scile said when she wasn’t there, though he allowed that it was better such than he’d seen before. He was amused by how we related to her. I didn’t like his attitude, but he was as polite to her as if he did think her a person, so I didn’t pick a fight with him about it. The only real interest he ever showed in Ehrsul was when it occurred to him that, because she did not breathe, she would be able to go into the city. I told him the truth: that she said to me when I asked her about it that she never did or would, that I could not say why, and, given how she’d said it, I wasn’t minded to ask.

She was sometimes asked to tinker with Embassytown’s artminds and automa, which would bring her into close contact with Staff: we were often at the same official soirées. I was there because I had uses, too. I’d been out more recently than any of my superiors: only a few Staff had ever left for official business to Bremen and returned. I was a source, could tell them about the recent politics and culture in Charo City.

When I’d first left Embassytown, Dad Renshaw had taken me to one side—literally, he’d steered me to the edge of the room in which I was having a farewell party. I’d waited for fatherly homilies, spurious rumours about life in the out, but what he had told me was that if I ever came back, Embassytown would be very interested in information on the state of things in Bremen. It was so polite and matter-of-fact it took me a while to assure myself I’d been asked to spy. I was only amused, was all, at the unlikeliness. Then I was ruefully amused again when, thousands of hours later, back in Embassytown, I realised I was making myself useful just as I’d been asked to.

Scile and I would have been objects of interest whatever we did—he, an intense and fascinated outsider, was a curio; I, part of Language, and a returned immerser, a minor celebrity. But purveying facts about Bremen as I did, I, a commoner, and my commoner husband were welcomed into Staff circles even more smoothly than we would otherwise have been. Our invitations continued after Embassytown’s little media stopped running interviews with and stories about the prodigal immerser.

They approached me very soon after I returned. Not Ambassadors, of course, but some viziers and high-level muck-a-mucks, requesting my presence at a meeting where they said things so vague I didn’t parse their purpose for a minute, until abruptly I remembered Dad Renshaw’s intercession, and understood that the muted questions about some of the trends in Bremen and associated powers and possible attitudes to dependencies and their aspirations were requests for political intelligence. And that they were offering payment.

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.

“I got almost all of it,” Scile told me afterwards. He was very excited. “They shift tenses,” he said. “When they mentioned the negotiations they—the Ariekei, I mean—were in present discontinuous, but then they shifted into the elided past-present. That’s for, uh...” I knew what it was for, I assured him. He’d told me already. How could you not smile at him? I’d listened to him with affection, if not always with interest, over hundreds of hours.

“Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible, Avice?” he said. “Im, poss, ih, bul. It makes no sense. They don’t have polysemy. Words don’t signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language? How do their numbers work? It makes no sense. And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There’s not one mind behind Language when they speak it...”

“They’re not twins, love,” I said.

“Whatever. You’re right. Clones. Doppels. The Ariekei think they’re hearing one mind, but they’re not.” I raised one eyebrow and he said, “No they’re not. It’s like we can only talk to them because of a mutual misunderstanding. What we call their words aren’t words: they don’t, you know, signify. And what they call our minds aren’t minds at all.” He didn’t laugh when I did. “You have to wonder,” he said. “Don’t you? What it is they do—Staff I mean—to make two people think they’re one.”

“Yeah but they’re not two,” I said. “That’s the point about Ambassadors. That’s where your whole theory falls down.”

“But they could have been. Should have been. So what did they do?”

Unlike monozygots’, even doppels’ fingerprints were moulded and made identical. On principle. Every evening and morning Ambassadors corrected. Artmind microsurgery found whatever tiny marks and abrasions each half of each pair had uniquely picked up over the preceding day or night, and if they couldn’t be eradicated, they were replicated in the untouched half. Scile meant that, and more. He wanted to see the children: young doppels in the crèche. He could still scandalise me with stuff like that. Not that such requests got responses. He wanted to watch how they were raised.

STAFF AND AMBASSADORS went into the city regularly, but only the young or gauche would ask for details. As naughty children we hacked communications and found pictures and reports we thought were secret (that of course weren’t very), that gave us insinuations of what occurred.

“Sometimes,” CalVin told us, “they call us in for what we call moots. They chant—not words, or words we don’t know.” “And when they’re done, one by one we take a turn, singing to them.”

“What’s it for?” I asked, and simultaneously CalVin replied, “We don’t know,” and smiled.

Everyone was in his or her best again, for another event. Very different from any previous. I wore a dress studded with oxblood jade. Scile wore a tuxedo and white rose. The flyer that came for us was a biorigged mongrel, Ariekene breed-techniques but its quasi-living interior tailored to Terre needs, and piloted by our artminds.

It had been a huge shock to us when CalVin had told us we could accompany them. This wasn’t a party in the Embassy. We were going into the Host city, to a Festival of Lies.

I’d spent thousands of hours in the immer. I’d been to ports on tens of countries on tens of worlds, had even experienced that travellers’ shock we floakers called the retour, when after preparations for the alterity of a new world, one walks a quite inhuman capital and stares at intricate indigens, and starts to suspect that one has been there before. Still, the night Scile and I dressed to go into the city, I was nervous as I had not been since I left Arieka.

I watched through boat windows as we flew over the ivy and roofs of my little ghetto city. I breathed out when we crossed over the zone where the architecture went from the brick and ivied wood of my youth to the polymers and biorigged flesh of the Hosts, from alley-tangles to street-analogues of other topographies. Building-things were coming down and being replaced. Construction sites like combined slaughterhouses, puppy farms and quarries.

There were about twenty of us: five Ambassadors, a handful of Staff, and we two. Scile and I smiled at each other through our masks and breathed in the exhalations of our little portable aeoli. Quickly, very quickly, we were touched down on a roof, and followed our companions out and down and into an edifice, in the city.

A complex, many-chambered place the angles of which astonished me. Everyone who had ever talked about my poise would have laughed to see me literally stagger backwards in that room. Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs. A kind Staff member steered Scile and me. Our party walked without Ariekene chaperone. I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart. I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them. More than I’d ever seen.

The rooms were alive, cells rainbowing as we entered. Ariekei were speaking in turn, and the Ambassadors sung in alien politeness. Through a swallowing corridor, several Hosts in their final instars milled in dignified mindlessness. A bridge whistled to us.

For the first time in my life I saw Host young: steaming nutrient broths effervesced with elvers. Further off was the fightcrèche, where the savage little second instars played with and killed each other. In a hall crisscrossed with walkways on tendons and platforms on muscular limbs were hundreds of Ariekei, giftwings extended, fanwings pretty with inks and natural pigments, gathered for the Festival of Lies.

FOR HOSTS, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.

Our Ambassadors, though, were human. They could lie as well in Language as in our own language, to the Hosts’ unending delight. These eisteddfods of mendacity had not existed—how could they?—before we Terre came. The Festivals of Lies had occurred almost as long as Embassytown had existed: they were one of our first gifts to the Hosts. I’d heard of them, but never expected to see one.

Our Ambassadors went among the hundreds of whickering Ariekei. Staff, Scile and I—we who couldn’t speak here—watched. The room was punctured with ventricles: I could hear it breathing.

“They’re welcoming us,” Scile told me, listening to all the voices. More. “It’s saying that, uh, they’ll see, I think, miracles, now. He’s asking our first something to step forward. It’s a compound, wait, uh...” He sounded tense. “Our first liar.”

“How do they make that word?” I said.

“Oh you know,” he said. “Sayer-of-things-that-are-not, that sort of thing.”

Furniture was extruding in the room as it self-organised into a vague amphitheatre. Ambassador MayBel, elderly, stylish women, stood before an Ariekes, which raised what looked like a big fibre-trailing fungus in its giftwing. It inserted the dangles into the sockets of the zelle jigging by its legs, and the mushroom-thing made a sound and glowed quickly changing colours, cycling to a nacreous blue.

The Host spoke. “It says: ‘describe it,’ ” Scile whispered. MayBel answered, May in the Cut, Bel the Turn voice.

The Ariekei stepped up and down, a sudden unanimity. A tense excitement. They tottered and chattered.

“What did they say?” I said. “MayBel? What did they—?”

Scile looked as if in disbelief at me. “They’re saying ‘It’s red.’ ”

MayBel bowed. The Ariekene hubbub continued while Ambassador LeRoy took their place. The Ariekes stroked its zelle, and the object attached to it changed shape and colour, altered into a great green teardrop. “Describe it,” Scile translated again.

LeRoy glanced at each other and began. “They said: ‘It’s a bird,’ ” Scile said. The Ariekei muttered. The noun was shorthand for a local winged form, as well as meaning our Embassytown birds. LeRoy spoke again and several Ariekei shouted, out of control. “LeRoy says it’s flying away,” Scile said into my helmet. I swear I saw Hosts crane their eye-corals up as if the lifeless plasm might have taken off. Le and Roy spoke together again. “They say...” Scile frowned as he followed. “They say it’s become a wheel,” he said, over the strange pandemonium of the audience.

One at a time every Ambassador lied. The Hosts grew boisterous in a fashion I’d never seen, then to my alarm seemed intoxicated, literally lie-drunk. Scile was tense. The room was whispering, echoing the furore of its inhabitants.

It was CalVin’s turn. They declaimed. “ ‘And the walls are disappearing,’ ” Scile translated. “ ‘And the ivy of Embassytown is winding about our legs...” Hosts examined their limbs. “... and the room’s turning to metal and I’m growing larger and the room and I are becoming one.’ ”

That’s enough, I thought, and someone must have agreed, and whispered to CalVin. They bowed and stepped away.

The Ariekei slowly calmed. I thought it was over. But then, as we stared, a few Host came forward.

“It’s a sport,” said Cal, or Vin, who approached, sweating, as they saw my surprise. “An extreme sport,” said the other. “For— oh for years now, they’ve been trying to mimic us.” “A few are getting not-too-bad at it.” I watched.

“What colour is it?” the Ariekes holding the target object asked the competitors, as it had the Terre. One by one each Host would try to lie.

Most could not. They emitted croons and clickings that were effort.

“Red,” Scile translated. The bulb was red, and the speaker double-whined in what I presumed was disappointment. “Blue,” said another, also truthfully; the object changed each time. “Green.” “Black.” Some made noises that were only noises, clicks and wheezes of failure, not words at all.

Every tiniest success was celebrated. When the object was a yellow, the Host trying to lie, an Ariekes with a scissor-shape on its fanwing, shuddered and retracted several of its eyes, gathered itself, and in its two voices said a word that would have translated as something like “yellow-beige.” It was hardly a dramatic untruth, but the crowd were rapturous at it.

A group of Hosts approached us. “Avice,” Cal or Vin said politely. “This is...” and they started to say names.

I never saw the point of these niceties between the likes of me and Ariekei. Understanding only Language-speakers to have minds, they must have thought it odd when Ambassadors carefully introduced them to speechless amputated half-things. As if an Ariekes insisted on one politely saying hello to its battery animal.

So I thought, but it didn’t turn out that way. The Ariekei shook my hand with their giftwings when CalVin asked them to. They had cool dry skin. I shut my mouth to obscure whatever emotion was rising in me (I’m still not sure what it was). The Ariekei registered something as the Ambassadors told them my name. They spoke, and Scile quickly translated into my ear.

“They’re saying: ‘This?’ ” he told me. “ ‘This is the one?’ ”

Latterday, 3

THERE ARE WAYS to tell Hosts apart. There’s the fingerprint-unique patterning on each fanwing (any observation of this fact was generally followed by the tedious mention of the fact that Embassytown was the only place where Terre fingerprints were not all unique). There are subtleties of carapace shading, of spines on limbs, of eye-antler shape. These days I rarely bothered to pay attention, nor with a few exceptions did I learn the names of the Ariekei I met. So I couldn’t say if during that first or any later visit to the city, I had previously met any of the Host delegation that joined us all those kilohours later, in Diplomacy Hall, to greet EzRa, the impossible new Ambassador.

So far as I could tell all were in middle age, in their third instar, and therefore sentient. Some wore sashes indicating incomprehensible (to me) rank or predilections; some were studded with ugly little jewels where their chitin was thick. The most senior of the Ambassadors, MayBel and JoaQuin, were walking them slowly through the room, giving each of them a glass of champagne—carefully rigged to be palatable to them. The Hosts held them daintily and sipped with their Cut mouths. I saw Ez watch them.

“Ra’s coming,” Ehrsul said.

“What do we call him?” I said. “What are he and Ez to each other? They’re not doppels.”

Wherever in the room he was, and with whom, Scile, I knew, would be as tense at the strangeness of all this as I. Ez and Ra approached each other, changing how they held themselves, getting into another mode.

How could it have happened?

All those structures in place, for all those thousands of hours, years. Embassytown years, the years I grew up with, long months named in silly nostalgia for an antique calendar, each many dozen-day weeks long. For almost an Embassytown century, since Embassytown was born, structures had been in place. Clone farms had been run; careful and unique child rearing had raised doppels into Ambassadors, with the skills of governance they would need. It was all under Bremen’s aegis of course: they were our home power; our public buildings all displayed clocks and calendars in Charo City time. But so far out here in the immer, everything should have been under Staff control.

CalVin once told me that Bremen’s original expectations of Arieka’s reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been over-optimistic. Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly. More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras or particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences. Was that enough? In any case, no colony is ever wound down.

How and why had Charo City trained this impossible Ambassador? I’d heard, like we all had, the story of the experiment and the freak result, the empathy reading spiking off the Stadt scale. But even if these two random friends did have such a connection, for whatever contingent psychic reason, why would they become Ambassadors?

“Wyatt’s excited,” Ehrsul said.

“They all are.” Gharda had approached, her music shift over, her instrument folded away. “Why wouldn’t they be?” she said.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Augmens relayed JoaQuin’s voices to hidden speakers. JoaQuin and MayBel went into encomia to their Ariekene guests. When that was done, they welcomed the new Ambassador.

I’d been to comings-out when Ambassadors came of age (strange, arrogant, charming young doppels greeting the crowd). But this of course was nothing like those appointments.

JoaQuin said, “This is an extraordinary time. We find ourselves with the task...” “... the enviable task, the strange task...” “... of coming up with a new kind of welcome. Perhaps some of you had heard that we have a new Ambassador?” Polite laughs. “We’ve spent a good deal of time with them over the last few days...” “... got to know them, and they us.” “These are unusual times.” Hear hear, said RanDolph. “It’s a privilege to be here, at an event I hope you will indulge us...” “... if we describe as history. This is an historic moment.” “Ladies and gentlemen...” “... Hosts...” “... all our guests. It’s our very great pleasure to welcome to Embassytown...” “... Ambassador EzRa.”

As the applause died, JoaQuin turned to the Hosts who stood beside them, and said our new Ambassador’s name accurately, in Language. “,” they said. The Hosts craned their eye-corals.

“Thank you, Ambassador JoaQuin,” Ez said. He conferred quietly with Ra. “It’s a great pleasure to be here,” Ez continued. He said a few standard, gracious things. I was watching the other Ambassadors. Ra’s self-introduction was brief, little more than his own name.

“We want to stress what an honour this is for us,” Ez said. “Embassytown’s one of the most important outposts of Bremen, and a vibrant community in its own right. We’re more grateful than we can say for your wonderful welcome. We look forward to becoming a part of the Embassytown community, working together for its future, and working together for Bremen’s.” There was applause of course. Ez waited.

“We look forward to working with you,” Ra said. Some Staff and Ambassadors were trying to hide nervousness. Some, I thought, eagerness.

“We realise that you must have questions,” Ez said. “Please don’t be shy about them. We realise we’re an... anomaly, for now...” He smiled. “We’re happy to talk about it, though to be honest we don’t really know why or how we can do what we do, either. We’re a mystery to us as well as to you.” The laugh he waited for and got was brief. “Now we’d like to do something we’ve trained very long and hard to do. We are an Ambassador— I’m very proud to say that—and we have a job to do. What we would like to do is to greet our gracious Hosts.” This applause seemed genuine.

The vespcams swarmed and wallscreens showed images, from scores of angles, of Ez and Ra coming together, ushered by their new colleagues toward the Hosts. The Ariekei stood in a semicircle. I’ve no idea what their conception was of what was happening. If nothing else, they knew that this was an Ambassador and that it was called .

EzRa conferred together like any other Ambassador did, whispering, preparing their words. The Hosts craned their eyes. Every Terre in the room seemed to lean in, to hold her or his breath. With great theatre, EzRa turned and spoke Language.

EZ WAS THE CUT, Ra the Turn. They spoke well, beautifully. I had heard enough of it to tell that. Their accent was good, their timing good. Their voices were well suited. They said to the Hosts that it was an honour to meet them. , they said. Good greetings.

That was the moment everything changed. EzRa looked at each other, smiled. Their first official pronouncement. If it hadn’t been an absurd faux pas I think we would all have clapped. I’m sure many people hadn’t really thought them capable.

We were busy listening to them speak, and gauging their abilities. We didn’t notice everything change. I don’t think any of us at that moment noticed the reactions of the Hosts.