Embassytown

Formerly, 7

AFTER THE FESTIVAL, Scile disappeared. He wouldn’t answer my buzzes, or did so only with terse comments and promises to return. Wherever he was he might be blanking me, but he had conferred, I suspected, with unlikely people. I was with Valdik and Shanita a day after the festival when Valdik was buzzed; when he’d answered he shut up and glanced at me with wide-open eyes. I had been abruptly sure that Scile was on the line.

After a couple of days my husband came back to our rooms and we had the fight that had been simmering for a long time. As with most such, the specifics are uninteresting and largely beside the point. He was surly, and pissy, and made little quips about how I passed my time, barbs at least as anxious as they were nasty, not that I was in the mood to care about that. I’d had enough of his recent predilection for gnomic pronouncements, and his bad temper.

“Who do you think arranged that trip, Scile?” I shouted. He wouldn’t answer or look at me, and I didn’t put my hand on my hips or gesticulate, I folded my arms and leaned back and stared down my face at him like I had the first time I’d met him. “Some people might think thanks were in order, not days of this sulky shit. What makes you think you can behave like this? Where did you fucking go?”

He made some reference that made it clear he had been with Ambassadors. I stopped at that, halfway through a riposte. What in immer? I remember thinking. Who buggers off to high-level meetings when they’re having a hissy fit?

“Listen,” Scile said. I could see him deciding something, trying hard to calm our altercation. “Listen, will you please listen.” He waved a paper. “I know what it’s trying to do. Surl Tesh-echer. It practises, and it preaches, to its coterie. This is what it’s been saying.” He didn’t say how he’d got the transcript. “You, similes...” he said. “The Hosts aren’t like us, okay: it’s not exactly most of us who’d get excited to meet a... an adjectival phrase or a past participle or whatever. But it’s no surprise some of them would want to meet a simile. You help them think. Someone with reverence for Language would love that.

“But who’d want to lie? A punk, is who. Avice, listen. There are fans, and there are liars. And only Surl Tesh-echer and its friends are both.” He smoothed out the paper. “Are you ready to listen to me? You think I’ve just been sitting in a cupboard for the good of my health? This is what it’s been saying.”

“ ‘BEFORE THE HUMANS came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.” He glanced at me. “We didn’t walk on our wings. We didn’t walk. We didn’t swallow earth. We didn’t swallow.” Scile was reading nervously, quickly.

“ ‘There’s a Terre who swims with fishes, one who wore no clothes, one who ate what was given her, one who walks backwards. There’s a rock that was broken and cemented together. I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion. I’m like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I wasn’t not like the rock that was broken and cemented together.

“ ‘I do what I always do, I’m like the Terre who swims with fishes. I’m not unlike that Terre. I’m very like it.

‘I’m not water. I’m not water. I’m water.’ ”

No translations I’d ever seen of Host pronouncements were properly comprehensible, but this read different. I realised a counter-intuitive affinity. For all its strangeness it sounded a little, a tiny bit, more like, less unlike Anglo-Ubiq than most Language did. It didn’t have the usual precise and nuanced exactnesses.

“It’s not like most competitors, trying to force out a lie,” Scile said. “It’s more systematic. It’s training itself into untruth. It’s using these weird constructions so it can say something true, then interrupt itself, to lie.”

“It didn’t perform most of these,” I said.

“It’s been practising,” he said. “We’ve always known the Hosts need you, right? You and the rest of you. Like the split rock, like they need those two poor cats they stitched into a bag. They need similes to say certain things, right? To think them. They need to make them in the world, so they can make the comparison.”

“Yes. But...” I looked at the paper. I read over it. was teaching itself to lie.

“ ‘I’m like the rock that was broken,’ ” Scile said, “then ‘not not it.’ It can’t quite do it, but it’s trying to go from ‘I’m like the rock’ to ‘I am the rock.’ See? Same comparative term, but different. Not a comparison anymore.”

He showed me old books in hard or virtua: Leezenberg, Lakoff, u-senHe, Ricoeur. I was used to his odd fascinations, they’d helped charm me ages ago. Now they and he made me uneasy.

“A simile,” he said, “is true because you say so. It’s a persuasion: this is like that. That’s not enough for it anymore. Similes aren’t enough.” He stared. “It wants to make you a kind of lie. To change everything.

“Simile spells an argument out: it’s ongoing, explicit, truth-making. You don’t need... logos, they used to call it. Judgement. You don’t need to... to link incommensurables. Unlike if you claim: ‘This is that.’ When it patently is not. That’s what we do. That’s what we call ‘reason’, that exchange, metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Teshecher wants. To bring in a lie.” He spoke very calmly. “It wants to usher in evil.”

“I’m worried about Scile,” I said to Ehrsul.

“Avice,” she said to me at last, after I’d tried to explain to her. “I’m sorry but I’m not sure what you’re saying to me.” She did listen: I don’t want to give the impression that all she did was tell me not to tell her. Ehrsul listened but I’m not sure to what. I was hardly exact, I couldn’t be.

“I’M WORRIED about Scile,” I said to CalVin. I tried them instead. “He’s gone a bit religious.”

“Pharotekton?” one of them said.

“No. Not church. But...” I’d gleaned more scraps of Scile’s emergent theology. I call it that though he was adamant it had nothing to do with God. “He wants to protect the Ariekei. From changing Language.” I told CalVin about the temptation, what Scile thought planned. “He thinks a lot’s at stake,” I said.

I still love this man and I’m afraid of what’s happening, I was saying. Can you help me? I don’t understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, what’s making him afraid, how he’s able to make it even get to me. Something like that.

“Let me talk to him,” CalVin said. The one who hadn’t spoken looked with raised eyebrows at his doppel, then smiled and looked back at me.

Formerly, 8

CALVIN, as they’d promised me, spent time with Scile. My husband’s research was intense, antisocial, his memos to himself were everywhere and mostly not comprehensible, his files scattered across our datspace. The truth is I was a little scared. I didn’t know how to react to what I saw in Scile now. The fervour had always been there, but though he tried to disguise it—after that one conversation he didn’t talk about his anxieties to me—I could see it was growing stronger.

That he tried to hide it confused me. I wondered if he thought his concerns were the only appropriate ones to the shifts in some Hosts’ practice, and if the lack of such anxiety from the rest of us was devastating. If he thought the whole world mad, forcing him into dissimulation. I went through those of his thesis notes, appointment diaries, textbook annotations I could access, as if looking for a master code. It gave me a better sense, if still partial and confused, of his theories.

“What do you think?” I asked CalVin. They looked put out by my uncharacteristic pleading. They told me there was no question that Scile was looking at things in an unusual way, and that his focus was, yes, rather intense. But overall, not to worry. What a useless injunction.

To MY SURPRISE Scile started coming to The Cravat with me. I’d thought we would do less, not more, in each other’s company. I didn’t tell him I knew he’d been previously, on his own. I saw no evidence of more efforts to persuade the Hosts to speak him. Instead, he began to exercise a subtle pull on some of the similes. He took part in the discussions, would imply certain of his theories, especially those according to which similes represented the pinnacle and limit of Language. Communication making truth. Slightly to my surprise, no one made him, unsimile outsider, other than welcome. The opposite, really. Valdik wasn’t alone in listening. Valdik wasn’t an intelligent man and I was worried for him.

I mustn’t exaggerate. I think Scile seemed himself, only perhaps more focused than previously, more distracted. I no longer thought we could stay together, but I wanted to know that he was alright.

These were in other ways not bad times for me. We were between reliefs. It was always deep in those days that Embassytown became most vividly itself, neither waiting for something, nor celebrating something that had happened. We called these times the doldrums. Of course we knew the more conventional use of the term, but like a few other uncanny words, for us it meant itself and its own opposite. During those still, drab days, cut off on our immer outskirt, without contact, a long time after and before any miabs, we turned inwards.

Fiestas and spectaculars, on the spareday at the end of each of our long months, our crooked alleys interwoven with ribbons and full of music. Children would dance wearing trid costumes, their integuments of light overlapping and crystalline. There were parties. Some formal; many not; some costume; a few naked.

This doldrums culture was part of our economy. After a visit, we had luxuries and new technology to invigorate our markets and production: when one was due there was a rash of spending and innovation, out of excitement and the knowledge that our commodities would soon change, that new-season goods would be in expensive vogue. Between, in the doldrums, things were static, not desperate but pinched, and these fetes were punctuations, and meant small runs on certain indulgences.

One night I was in bed with CalVin. One of them was asleep. The other was stroking my flank, whispering conversation. It was a rare thing, to be with one doppel only. I felt a strong urge to ask his name. I think now I know which it was. I was running my finger over the back of his neck, the link in him, beautifully rendered in the hollow below his skull’s overhang. I looked at its twin, on the sleeping half of the Ambassador.

“Should I be worried about Scile?” I said. The sleeper shifted and we were still a second.

“I don’t think so,” my companion whispered. “He’s onto something, you know.”

I didn’t understand. “I’m not worried that he’s wrong,” I said. “I’m worried that he’s... that...”

“But he’s not wrong. Or at least—he’s pointing out something.”

I sat up. “Are you saying—?” I stood and paced, and the sleeping doppel woke and looked at me mildly. Cal and Vin conferred in whispers, and it didn’t sound like simple agreement. “What are you saying?” I said.

“There are some persuasive elements to what he says.” It was the newly woken doppel who spoke.

“I can’t believe you’re telling me—”

“I’m not. I’m not telling you anything.” He spoke impassively. His doppel looked at him and then at me, uneasily. “You asked us to keep a watch on him, and we are, and we have. And we’re looking into some of the things he’s saying. An eccentric he may be, but Scile’s not stupid, and there’s no question that this Host...” He looked at his doppel and together they said, “.” The half of CalVin who had been talking continued: “... is definitely pursuing some odd strategies.”

I stood naked at the edge of the bed and watched them: one lying back and looking up at me, the other with his knees drawn.

I ADMIT DEFEAT. I’ve been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don’t know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn’t pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn’t a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn’t want to be what I want to make it.

IN THE STREETS OF Embassytown, a congregation was forming. Valdik appeared to be at its centre. It was Valdik who expounded the theories, now. My husband was a canny man, even in his obsessions.

“Valdik Druman’s at the centre of it now?” CalVin said. “Valdik? Really?”

“I know it sounds unlikely...” I said.

“Well, he’s an adult, he’s making his own choices.”

“It’s not that simple.” I knew CalVin were right and wrong at the same time.

Most Embassytowners did not know or care about any of these debates. Of those who did, most would consider them pretty unimportant, secure—and there was security in it—in the certainty that Hosts could not lie, whatever a few agitated similes insisted. For those who knew about the festivals, a few Hosts determined to push at the boundaries of Language was too obscure a phenomenon to be any kind of problem, let alone a moral one. That left only a tiny number of Embassytowners, disproportionately the credulous. But their number was growing.

Valdik speechified at The Cravat on the nature of the similes and the role of Language. His arguments were confused but passionate and affecting.

“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” Valdik said. “No other language anywhere in the universe. Where what’s said is truth. Can you imagine what it would be to lose that?”

“It isn’t fair what you’re doing to Valdik,” I told Scile, on one of his rare visits to what had been our home.

“He’s not a fucking child, Avice,” Scile said. He was collecting clothes and notes. He did not look at me as he rummaged. “He decides what he wants.”

WALKING NEAR the ruins I was handed a flyer on cheap nantech paper that flashed a trid as I unfolded it. It made me start: it was Valdik’s face, apple-sized, in my hand.

DRUMAN, it said, ON THE BATTLE AGAINST THE LIE. A time and place, not The Cravat but a little hall. With it brought to my attention, I noticed details of that and similar meetings guerrilla-coded into wallscreens, hacked nuisance trids. I went. I’d thought I’d find Scile, but no. I stayed at the back of the room.

Valdik wore a projector, and trids of him appeared throughout the temple, random and staticky. At the front of the room I saw Shanita, Darius, Hasser and other similes and tropes. Valdik preached. He was still a middling speaker. I don’t know how this mediocrity amassed a following—something about the doldrums. He expounded religiose foolishness—“two voices but one truth, because what is the truth but dual, bifurcated, not in conflict but two forms of one truth” and so forth.

The place wasn’t a quarter full. It contained indulgent friends, the curious, refugees from other cults. A convocation of the hopeless and bored. When I got home, Scile was speaking down the line. He smiled an unconvincing greeting at me as I came in, turned so that I couldn’t hear him nor see his mouth move. I wondered whether, if Valdik were removed from this self-appointed office, with what I was convinced was Scile’s instrument confiscated, his mania would dissipate.

“What should we do?” CalVin said. “These meetings aren’t illegal.”

“You can do anything you want.”

“Well...” “We could have Druman taken for Administrative Detention...” “... but do you really want that?”

“Yes!” I said, but of course I didn’t, and of course they wouldn’t do it.

“Listen,” they said. “Don’t worry.” “We’ll watch Scile.” “We’ll keep him safe.” That they did, though neither in the way, nor from what, I’d assumed.

Formerly, 9

SOMEONE RELEASED a viral ’ware into the vagrant automa of Embassytown that gave them Valdik’s mania. It made them preachers in his new church. Their eloquence depended on the sophistication of their processors: most were little more than ecstatics, but a few were sudden theologians. They ambled as they always had but now accosted us and exhorted us to defend prelapsarian language, Language, we poor sinners (the rhetoric was kitsch), doomed forever ourselves to speak with a deep structure of lie but at least granted service to the double-tongue of truth, and more like that.

Patches were programmed and released and did their job but the infection was tenacious, and for weeks these tramp priests proselytised us, their catechisms changing as their ’ware degraded and threw up protestant, variant sects. “We are the stewards of the angels,” I was told by one machine that staggered like a supplicant. “We are the stewards of the speaking angels, of God’s language.” The virus shut down when its resultant theories strayed too far from emergent Drumanian orthodoxy.

I asked Ehrsul if she was concerned, if she’d felt the tickling of virtual germs. She dismissed the other automa as mental weaklings and told me that yes, though she’d felt it, she’d hardly been in danger herself. Of course Valdik and his radical similes were suspected, but no one could prove who had programmed it, and though it was a nuisance that was all it ultimately was.

I knew Scile didn’t have the expertise to program, or I’d have thought it his doing.

WHEN I WENT back to The Cravat, now, I did so for socially diagnostic reasons. Many previous regulars no longer drank there: alienated by Valdik’s vatic pronouncements, they set up refusenik simile salons. Others had taken their place. I went to hear Valdik speak, out of what I told myself was a pornography of doomed causes, and maybe to listen for grounds to demand some intervention. He hymned the Ambassadors (in his model, interceding hierophants); expressed gratitude at being simile, truths, Language in flesh.

was there, with Spanish Dancer and others, at the last of Valdik’s gatherings I went to. The Host had amassed more followers, too, so I thought it must be improving its technique, a better and better liar. They watched each other. Valdik glowered. I didn’t know if the Hosts felt his hostility. Hasser was there—one of the few who retained friends on both sides of the emergent simile split. He acknowledged me, his face displaying an emotion for which I’ve no name; it reminded me of my own. An unease, is as close as I can get to it.

“Aren’t you worried?” I asked Ehrsul.

“I told you,” she said, “I’m immune.”

“No I mean... what do you reckon? Do you ever think about it? I mean, does it ever make you feel anything one way or the other, that some of the Hosts are learning... well, can talk their way around truth, now?” She said nothing, so I said: “Can lie.”

We were in a bar in one of Embassytown’s shopping streets. Ehrsul in her minor notoriety was being glanced at by slightly moneyed youth. We spoke quietly under music and the clatter of glasses. Ehrsul did not answer me. “Something’s changing. Which may or may not be a good thing,” I said finally.

She looked at me with a projected face that, by design or a coincidence of ambiguous stimuli-responses in her ’ware, was inscrutable. She said nothing. I grew more and more uncomfortable in that enigmatic silence, until I talked about something else, to which she responded as normal, with all the exaggerated intimacies of our friendship.

It never meant that much to me one way or the other that I was simile; I didn’t care what Valdik preached. It’s Scile, I said to myself: but no, though I was worried for him that wasn’t all. I never really knew what else it was.

“SO WHAT’S being done?” I asked CalVin. Even the Ambassadors were concerned, now, I gathered. The new philosophy couldn’t have had more than a score or two of serious devotees, but fervour unnerved us in Embassytown. The Hosts must surely have picked up some atmosphere: I’d seen more Ariekei than usual in the aeolian breath of our quarter.

“We’re talking to the Hosts,” CalVin said. “We’re going to organise...” “... a festival.” “Here, in Embassytown.” “To stress that it’s theirs too, to speak in.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. I’d never heard of an Ariekene event in Embassytown. “But is that supposed to... What are you doing about Valdik?”

One of CalVin stared at me, the other looked away. I was angry and I tried to work out with whom. Scile was ensconced somewhere, with radical similes or the Staff, and would never respond to me now, and that seemed to concern no one. There I was, between cliques and secrets. I couldn’t tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

“It’s the doldrums, Avvy,” Ehrsul said to me later. “This is what happens. You’re talking as if it’s end-time. I think...” She paused. “You’re upset because of Scile. You care about him, and he’s gone from you.” She stumbled exactly like someone who thought would.

ARIEKEI REPRESENTATIVES came in flyers, to plan this hybrid festival. I was often in the Embassy, floaking, and I came to know them all. One tall and thickset Ariekes had a mark on its fanwing like a bird in a canopy of leaf, so I called it Pear Tree.

“This is what we need,” CalVin said. “We’re all too tense.” “There’ll be a parade, and stalls and games for Terre...” “... and a Festival of Lies for the Hosts.”

“What about Valdik?” I said again. “And what about Scile?”

“Valdik’s nothing.” “Scile we’ve not seen for a couple of weeks.”

“So where is he... ?”

“Don’t worry.” “It’ll be okay.” “Honestly, this event’ll put paid to a lot of these problems.”

I thought it was absolutely absurd. No one agreed with me. In all my life I’ve never felt so alone.

The festival was to take place in a piazza near the southern edge of Embassytown. It was christened the Licence Party: a pun on Lies and Sense, I was told. I never got what the “sense” referred to. Signs went up displaying that idiot name, and a necessary explanation.

VALDIK LIVED in Embassytown’s east. There was a balcony in front of his door overlooking a leisure canal, and a garden full of flowers and birds, altbirds, local fauna.

“Avice,” he said, slowly, when he opened the door to me. If he was surprised he hid it.

“Valdik,” I said. “Can you help me? I need to find Scile.”

His relief was visible. “Is everything alright... ?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “No. I just... I haven’t seen him for days...” My hesitation was real, though my main reason for being there was not Scile, but to assess Valdik and his theology. He let me in and I saw the trappings of his new beliefs. Papers everywhere, all the crazy cabbala and misplaced rigour of a sect.

“Me neither,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I think he’s still with CalVin and the others.”

“They haven’t seen him for weeks,” I said.

“No, they were with him a few days ago.” That silenced me. “He was at The Cravat and they came for him,” Valdik said.

“When?” I said. “Who?”

“CalVin and some Staff.”

“CalVin?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Valdik didn’t sound like a prophet. I had to leave: I could hardly focus on his beliefs at that moment.

WHEN FINALLY CalVin next said they had time to see me, I was careful to be good company. We ate together. They spoke mostly about the Licence Party. One day, one night, half another day. CalVin emerged from their ablutions equalised. Their accrued blemishes were gone or replicated. I said nothing.

I watched them sleep, watched their skins take on differential marks from cotton and the unconscious motion of their hands. When one or other would half-wake, I would be waiting. I would try to murmur-talk to them: gauge what Cal or Vin said. It was strange, trying to do something I’d not known could even occur to me.

He on my left, I decided, at last, murmured my name with a care I recognised, smiled with something really warm. It was desperately hard to tell with only these night-fuddled moments. But he on my left, I decided at last, Cal or Vin, was the one who liked me more. I put my fingers to his lips, made him wake without sound. He opened his eyes.

“Cal,” I whispered. “Or Vin. Tell me. I know he won’t.” I indicated the sleeping other. “I know you’ve seen Scile. I know. Where is he? What’s happening?”

I saw my mistake. I saw it the instant I moved my hands.

“You,” he said, and though he was quiet I could hear his outrage. That I’d try to find out secrets, and that I’d do so by this blasphemy. My expression was frozen in misplaced intimacy. “How dare you...”

I cursed. He sat up. His doppel shifted.

“You have some bastard nerve, Avice,” the man I’d woken said. “How dare you. If we’ve seen Scile it’s not your business...”

“He’s my husband!”

“It’s not your business. We’re taking care of things. Like you begged us to. And you come here and treat us... like this... do this... ?”

Beside us the newly woken doppel was rising. I looked at him and felt shame. How could I have mis-seen it? There it was, that thing I’d thought I detected in his brother.

“You thought he was me... ?” he said. I saw hurt, and other emotions.

“How could you?” he said. His doppel added: “... do this?”

The raging one stood, sheets puddling on the floor. “Get out,” he said. “Leave. You are damned... fucking lucky we don’t pursue this.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” said the other quietly.

“This is over,” the standing one, Cal or Vin, said, and his doppel, the man I should have woken, looked up at him, looked at me, shook his head, turned away. I left the room having ruined my own plan.

On my way home, through the night, I cursed myself. I passed a little tour of Ariekei murmuring in Language as they looked like curators at our lamplit dwellings.

Formerly, 10

AT VARIOUS FAIRS and events in Embassytown, I’d been asked to tell stories of the immer. I’d shown trids and images of my hours in the out, supposedly for children, though there were always many adults in the audience. The immer was and is full of renegades and refugees. They emerge where they can and do what they can get away with. I’d tell the stories. I had transported most things to most places: jewellery; immer-miserable livestock; payloads of organic garbage to a trash planet-state run by pirates. I’d save the best for the end, a changing display of the pharos that marks the edge of the known always: here, right beside Arieka. I’d show it through various filters, culminating in the tropeware that made it a lighthouse, a beacon in murk.

“See? That’s what you see. That’s right here. Beyond us there’s nothing charted. We live at the end of the light.” I was amazed at how addictive the spook and thrill was. My presence wasn’t requested this time, for the Licence Party.

“What happened between you and CalVin?” Ehrsul asked me. I didn’t tell her, or anyone.

THE MICROCLIMATES over the city and those over Embassytown were rigged according to a complex algorithm I’d never bothered to decode. I was always vaguely charmed by planets in thrall to their tilt, with seasons that were more or less predictable. In Embassytown, I noticed particular weathers, of course, but didn’t ever expect them.

It grew warm. It was apparently time for us to have a summer.

I went to the Licence Party alone. When I realised that she was expecting us to go together I had to tell Ehrsul no. From her silence I know I hurt her, or spurred the subroutine of her Turingware that manifested as if that were so. But I couldn’t be there with anyone. I wasn’t punishing her—because this had not been Ehrsul’s only silence recently—but I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this was a last chapter.

THERE WERE game rooms, food halls, massage houses, places for sex; and there were zones designed for our Hosts. They came in large numbers, informed by their networks, the tech like town criers that we had helped to automate. I’d never seen so many Hosts in Embassytown.

Fortune-tellers and performers were on the streets. Trid caricatures of passersby flashed in and out of existence. We came in through security: Terretech detectors of metals and energy flows, and biorigged proscenia that snuffled as we came through, tasting for the telltales of weapon compounds. There were constables in the crowd.

With night the humans and Kedis grew more drunk or drugged. Children ran on frenetic missions. Automa wandered in. I saw a pod of adolescent Shur’asi, a lone Pannegetch casting dice. The Hosts spectated as we played our shovepenny games. They looked with tourist fascination, listened to the songs our singers sung, titillated by our harmonics. I couldn’t find Scile.

I don’t think the Ariekei ever empathised with our predilection for symmetry and hinge-points: solstices, noon. But the Licence Party was ours as well as theirs, and the Festival of Lies started at midnight.

The marquee was the size of a cathedral: in places the biorigged skin hadn’t finished growing, and decorative gauze or plastic were woven over the holes. There was theatrical seating for Terre around the arena, and standing places for exots and for the Hosts. I saw people I knew. They shouted my name. I saw Hasser, and he raised his hand. He looked afraid. He was gone too fast for me to reach him. By the main performance space was a large group of Ambassadors. CalVin was there, and CharLott, JoaQuin and MagDa and JasMin and others, conferring with Staff. Ariekei were near them, one or two I recognised. Pear Tree, and others that perhaps I might call leaders. Beyond them performers waited, Host and Ariekei.

was there, with Spanish Dancer and the others of its entourage. It wasn’t hard to recognise.

There was a hush, whispered Terre excitement when the lights went down and a few coloured illuminations fired. In a strong, projected doubled voice, Ambassador CharLott stepped into the centre of the spectators, spoke Language. A translator shouted to us locals theatrically, “ ‘It’s raining in here,’ the Ambassador says! ‘It’s raining liquor on us!’ ”

It sounded as though they were trying to excite Embassytowners with these feeble falsities as if we were Host, and I thought it absurd. But, over the delighted noises of the Ariekei looking up to find the rain that wasn’t there, came the shrieks of Terre, my neighbours yelling delight at each new untruth from the Ambassador. As if none of them could lie.

I reached the front as CharLott came to the end of their set. Other Ambassadors performed. They were building an arc for the listeners, I realised. For us. Here were lies that were a comic interlude, here a ratcheting-up of tension, here a moving moment.

When after long heady minutes they were done, Hosts stepped up in their place. Each Ariekes spoke only one or two short lies. Most did it by verbal trickery like a whispered final clause. Each success was marked with Terre cheers and Ariekene approval. Many competitors stumbled and said something true. The Host audience responded with what could have been scorn or could have been pity.

I stand, I don’t stand.

This before me is not red.

stepped forward at last, for a scheduled confrontation. Opposite it was an Ambassador, LuCy, moving like pugilists, swinging their arms as if limbering. I realised I was surprised, that when I’d read about this contest I had thought it would be CalVin representing Embassytown. Ambassador and Host squared. This was some blasphemy, I thought. Who could have allowed this? There was cheering, but I heard a man beside me, as if channelling my opinion, muttering, “This is not right.”

Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things, said.

The MC was shouting the rules of the stand-off. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things, said again, and shucked its wings. Whatever alien feelings it was feeling, they looked to us like bravado. The two women of the Ambassador and that intricate big beast the Ariekes stared at each other. The Ambassador opened their mouths. Before they spoke, said, Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much.

Ruckus. Before the humans came, the Host went on, and I knew what the lie would be, we didn’t speak.

It said it clearly. There was a moment, then the Ariekei stuttered in their ecstasy of reception. Even the Terre knew that we had heard something extraordinary. There was noise everywhere. Some shouted argument. I saw jostling in the crowd.

“Not true!” someone was shouting. “Not true!”

Men and women were got suddenly, violently, out of someone else’s way. They screamed and parted. I could see the man coming, and it was Valdik.

“Not true!” he said. He ran and shouted and brought a cudgel down on the ground, and I felt a spasming report. There was energy in his weapon. So much for security. He faced . Valdik shouted that it was not true. He raised his weapon. Eye-corals strained. People were running toward us. Valdik shouted, “Fucking snake!” watched him, its coral spreading wide as horns. I heard the bark of a weapon and Valdik went down, his club scorching the floor. Constables grabbed him. He was beaten down.

“He went for a Host?” people were gasping.

I could hear Valdik still shouting: “The devil! He’ll fucking destroy us! Don’t let it lie!”

None of the Ariekei made a sound. The officers hauled Valdik upright finally, blood-smeared and ragged, hardly conscious. They began to drag him, his feet scratching on the floor, out of the grounds. Tens of seconds had passed since his attack. In that whole hall, I think I was the only person watching CalVin and their silent colleagues, one of the very few not staring at the battered would-be assassin being taken away.

I saw Scile. He was with them, among the Ambassadors and Staff. That was it; that was where to look. They were looking not at Valdik but at , and beyond it at Pear Tree and its group of Ariekei. I was one of very few in that hall who saw what happened then.

Pear Tree moved. From behind it stepped Hasser. He walked quickly. Even was still looking at Valdik. No constables saw Hasser coming, or were there to intervene. They were busy, suckers to the oldest feint. I moved.

One of ’s eyebuds glimpsed something and the whole coral arced backward, to stare. I saw Spanish Dancer, heard it calling, its giftwing moving in alien distress. Hasser aimed a biorigged thing. A ceramic carapace, a pistolgrip that gripped him back. He fired. No one was there to stop him.

He fired and the gun-animal opened its throat and howled. He blasted across the lying ground, spraying mud-coloured Host blood.

It broke apart as it flew. Hasser didn’t stop firing. The assault tore ’s giftwing from its body. Its legs dyingly scuttled, so insectile it was appalling. It gushed from everywhere.

Then Hasser was snatched out of my sight himself by a constable’s bullet. By the time screaming started again I was beside him. I trembled. I struggled for breath as if I were beyond the aeoli. Hasser stared without sight. I heard the rattle of scute from ’s posthumous fitting.

Spanish Dancer traced shapes with its wings. Its colours flushed. I’d never before seen Ariekene grief. I looked at Pear Tree, which looked down at me. I ignored the commotion and all the wails in the room, and watched Pear Tree, and CalVin, and Scile. I remember I moaned every time I exhaled. They were looking at Hasser’s body without expression. They must have seen me.

THAT IS HOW the most virtuoso liar of the Ariekei was murdered.

The days after that were as you’d imagine. Chaos, fear, excitement. No Host had been harmed by an Embassytowner for hundreds of thousands of hours, for lifetimes. Suddenly we felt we existed on sufferance. Staff imposed a curfew, gave the constabulary and SecStaff extraordinary powers. In the out, I’d spent time in cities and colonies under dictatorships of various forms, and I knew that what we had was a quaint approximation of martial law; but for Embassytown it was unprecedented.

I HAD SO MUCH sadness in me. I cried, only when I was alone. I was so sorry for Hasser, silly secret zealot; and for Valdik who I still believe never knew he’d been a distraction, and whose loyalty to Scile was such that, after that night, he went to his execution denying that anyone else had had any hand in his plan.

So sorry for . I never knew what emotion would have been appropriate for an Ariekene loss, so I settled for sadness.

For a day I turned off my buzz and did not answer when anyone came to my door. The second day I kept the buzz off, but I did answer the knocking. It was an autom I’d never seen before, a whirring anthropoid outline. I blinked and wondered who’d sent this thing and then I saw its face. Its screen was cruder than any I’d seen her rendered on before, but it was Ehrsul.

“Avice,” she said. “Can I come in?”

“Ehrsul, why’d you load yourself into... ?” I shook my head and stepped back for her to enter.

“The usual one doesn’t have these.” She swung the thing’s arms like deadweight ropes.

“Why do you need them?” I said. And Pharotekton bless her she grabbed hold of me, just as if I’d lost someone. She did not ask me anything. I hugged her right back, for a long time.

I WENT BACK once more to The Cravat. Set my expression, walked a floaker walk. None of the similes were there, nor, I think, did any ever come back. I let my show drop. But the owner, a man whose name I had never bothered to learn, referring to him only by the vernacular slang handle we’d granted him that I now cannot remember, hurried up to me in agitation, as if I could help him. He told me that Ariekei were still coming: Spanish Dancer; one we’d known as Baptist; others of the Professors. They’d been staring at where the similes used to sit.

“Surl Tesh-echer used to come here all the time,” I said. “Maybe they’re coming to be where their friend used to be.”

The owner was terrified the Hosts would commit reprisal for ’s death. Most people were. I was not. I’d seen Pear Tree step aside for Hasser and say something to him on his way. I’d seen CalVin and the others waiting for that. had been murdered but it also had been executed, publicly, by its peers. For heresy, had been sentenced to Death by Human.

Embassytown couldn’t know, and would not. The situation must be made to look to most people, and did, like a bloody mess, rather than the careful juridical moment it also was.

Ariekei traditioners had decided they could not tolerate , would not brook its experiments. A lie was a performance; a simile was rhetoric: their synthesis, though, the first step in their becoming quite another trope, was sedition. I would never assume I understood the motivations of any exot, and I had grown up knowing the thinking of the Hosts was beyond me. Whatever drove the Ariekene powers to their brutal decision might, might not, be comparable to the calculations that had also gone on behind Embassy doors. The Ariekene resistance to these innovations might have been ethical, or aesthetic, or random. It might have been religious or a game. Or instrumental, an expression of some cool, cynical calculation, a power-jostling among cliques.

I remembered Cal or Vin’s anxiety, when they’d told me that some of Scile’s ideas about made sense. The Ambassadors, as much as its Ariekene judges, had seen in it an approaching danger. I never thought CalVin saw whatever that coming badness was as my husband had, but where there’s commitment and dissent there might be change, and perhaps that was enough. There’d been a catastrophe on its way that, together, Ariekei and Terre had staved off. A problem they had solved.

Who could I tell? If I could prove anything, so what? Not everyone would think any of this the slightest crime. And what would I bring on myself? I’d no idea how many of the Ambassadors knew, or if they would disapprove if they did, or what they would do to me if I complained. I can’t have been the only one who worked out what had happened. There were enough snatches of information. But Staff asserted horror and shock and stressed to Embassytowners that they had apologised to our Hosts, and that Hasser and Valdik had both been brought to justice. They unleashed harsh policing against the remnants of the Druman cult.

Scile moved at last into the Embassy, became Staff. One day all his possessions were gone from my home. Among his flaws wasn’t cowardice. I think he was avoiding me; perhaps he wanted to spare me his rage.

I NEVER STOPPED being appalled by the sentencing I’d seen. But months passed—and our months are long—and we were out of the doldrums, and Valdik and Hasser were long dead. I still wouldn’t speak to CalVin or Scile, but though I didn’t know which Staff and Ambassadors were complicit in what had happened I couldn’t spurn them all forever. I couldn’t live in Embassytown like that. It felt not like compromise but survival.

Even CalVin and I came wordlessly to a way of being in the same room, if we so found ourselves. We might, I eventually came to accept, one day even exchange brief cool words.

I remembered those elements in Scile, the little opacities that had always been present, that I’d always been intrigued by, that now seemed to have come to constitute all of him. I didn’t know what fears the rest of the complicit Staff had had of , but I thought they must have been political. I was never sure about Scile, though, for all that he was Staff too now, and had for a long time been of their party. For all his consummate manipulation of the credulous simile zealots. He worked as apparatchik, but I wondered if he really was a prophet.

Many months after those horrible events, the first crisis, as Embassytown geared into a different kind of time, as the arrival of the next ship grew closer, as the time I’ve called “formerly” ended, the Hosts apparently made Scile a simile. I heard that from Ehrsul.

She couldn’t find out exactly what he’d had to do. He was part of Language but I never heard him used and in various, I hoped untraceable, eavesdropping ways, I did try. By contrast the similes Hasser and Valdik, changed as they were by the events, were invigorated. It’s like the boy who was opened and closed again and is dead. It’s like the man who swam weekly with the fishes and is dead. The Ariekei found new uses for these new formulations.

Ehrsul was a good friend to me in what was a pretty bleak time, though I wouldn’t risk telling her everything that I knew had happened. I told myself that I was just waiting. I was immerser. When the relief came, I’d go into the out, away from this place. Then the miab arrived, with details of what would be arriving next, and news of our impossible Ambassador.

Wasn’t I going to stay to see what would happen? Everything

after this was latterday, and it’s the only story remaining. Wasn’t I eager for Embassytown to change?

Later, the scale of the crisis that unfolded made this, retrospectively, a guilty memory, but when first I realised that things were not going quite to plan, the first time I met EzRa at the Arrival Ball, when I sensed that they were spreading some unexpected chaos in Embassytown, it had made me happy.