China Mieville - Embassytown

IT WAS PUT DOWN quickly. They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer. It was banished or dispatched after minutes of shrieking.

Thankfully no Hosts were harmed. But the emergence left scores of others dead. Some were killed in the explosion; some were lessened, had partially poured away. From then on, when retrieving miabs, Staff obeyed the protocols of care that they had been letting slip. Our trids showed repeated debates, fury and angst. Whoever it was in Staff who was sacked in disgrace was a scapegoat for the system. A young, dashingly ill-disciplined Ambassador DalTon more or less asserted that on cam, in anger, which I remember the parents talking about. Dad Noor even told me the disaster would be the end of the pomp of arrival. He was wrong about this, of course. He was always a lugubrious man.

Of course my friends and I were obsessed with the tragedy. Within a very short time we were playing it as a game, making immer-bubbling and cracking-shellcase noises, firing finger-guns and sticks at those of us temporarily monsters. I conceived of the stichling as some sort of slayed dragon.

THERE’S A STORY told, sort of a traditional view, that immersers never remember their childhoods. That’s obviously not true. People say it as a way to stress the strangeness of the immer; the implication being that there’s something in that foundational altreality that plays buggery with human minds. (Which it can do, certainly, but not like that.)

It’s not true, but it is the case that I, and most of the immersers I’ve known, have casual, or vague, or discombobulated memories of when we were small. I don’t think it’s a mystery: I think it’s a corollary of our mindsets, the way we think, those of us who want to go into the out.

I recall episodes very well, but episodes, not a timeline. The most relevant times, the definitional ones. The rest of it’s disorganised in my head, and mostly I don’t mind. Here: one other time in my childhood, I was in the company of Hosts. One morning in the third monthling of July I was called to a meeting.

It was Dad Shemmi they sent to fetch me. He squeezed my shoulder as he pointed me in to one of the nursery’s scruffy paperwork-and-datspace-filled offices. It was Mum Solfer’s room, and I’d not been in it before. Mostly Terretech, though a boxy biorigged bin was quietly eating her rubbish. Solfer was older, kind, distracted, knew me by name, which she did not all my shiftsiblings. She beckoned me, obviously uneasy. She stood, glanced around as if for a sofa, which the room was without, sat again. Behind her desk with her—not unamusing, in retrospect, it was smallish and too cramped for them—was Dad Renshaw, a relatively new, thoughtful and teacherly shiftfather, who smiled at me; and to my astonishment the third person waiting for me was Bren.

It had been almost a year, nearly 25Kh, since Yohn’s accident, since I or any of us had returned to that house. I’d grown, of course, and more than many of my siblings, but as soon as I entered, Bren smiled recognition. He looked unchanged. They might have been the same clothes he had on as before.

Mum shifted. Though she sat with the others on one side of the desk while I, on the stiffly adult chair to which she directed me, was on the other, the way she moved her eyebrows at me I felt suddenly that she and I were together in whatever this oddness was.

I’d be paid for this, she said (an uploading of no little size, it turned out); it was quite safe; it was an honour. She didn’t make very much sense. Dad Renshaw gently interrupted her. He turned to Bren and motioned for him to speak.

“You’re needed,” Bren said to me. “That’s all this is.” He opened his hands palm up, as if their emptiness were evidence of something. “The Hosts need you and again for some reason it’s ended up going through me. They’re trying to prepare something. They’re having a debate. A few of them are convinced they can make their point clearly by... by comparison.” He watched to see if I followed. “They’ve... sort of thought of one. But the events it describes haven’t happened. Do you understand what that means? They want to make it speakable. So they need to organise it. Quite precisely. It involves a human girl.” He smiled. “You see why I asked for you.” I suppose he didn’t know any other children.

Bren smiled at the way my mouth was moving. “You... want me to... perform a simile ?” I said at last.

“It’s an honour!” Dad Renshaw said.

““It is an honour,” Bren said. “I can see you know that. ‘Perform’?” He wagged his head in a sort of well, yes and no way. “I won’t tell you lies. It’ll hurt. And it won’t be nice. But I promise you’ll be alright. I promise.” He leaned toward me. “There’ll be money in it for you, like your Mum was saying. And . Also. You’ll have the thanks of the Staff. And the Ambassadors.” Renshaw glanced up. I wasn’t so young as to not know what that gratitude was worth. I’d an idea of what I hoped to do when I was old enough, by then, and the goodwill of Staff was something I wanted very much.

I ALSO SAID YES to the request because I thought it would take me into the Host city. It did not. The Hosts came to us, to a part of town to which I’d hardly ever been. I was taken there in a corvid—my first flight, but I was too nervous to enjoy it— escorted not by constables but Embassy SecStaff, their bodies subtly gnarled with augmens and tecs.

Bren escorted me, with no one else, no shiftparents, though he had no official role in Embassytown. (I didn’t know that then.) That was a time, though, before he withdrew from the last of such informal Staff-like roles. He tried to be kind to me. I remember we skirted Embassytown’s edges and I saw for the first time the scale of the enormous throats that delivered biorigging and supplies to us. They flexed, wet and warm ends of siphons extending kilometres beyond our boundaries. I saw other craft over the city: some biorigged, some old Terretech, some chimerical.

We came down in a neglected quarter that no one had been bothered to take off-grid. Though it was almost empty its streets were lit by lifelong neon and trid spectres dancing in midair, announcing restaurants long-since closed. In the ruins of one such, Hosts were waiting. Their simile, I had been warned, required me to be alone with them, so Bren gave me into their authority.

He shook his head at me as he did, as if we were agreeing that something was a little absurd. He whispered that it wouldn’t be long, and that he would be waiting.

WHAT OCCURRED in that crumbling once-dining room wasn’t by any means the worst thing I’ve ever suffered, or the most painful, or the most disgusting. It was quite bearable. It was, however, the least comprehensible event that had or has ever happened to me. I was surprised how much that upset me.

For a long time the Hosts didn’t pay attention to me, but performed precise mimes. They raised their giftwings, they stepped forward and back. I could smell their sweet smell. I was frightened. I’d been prepared: it was imperative for the sake of the simile that I act my part perfectly. They spoke. I understood only the very basics of what I heard, could pick out an occasional word. I listened for the overlapping whisper I’d been told meant she , and when I heard it I came forward and did what they wanted.

I know now to call what I did then disassociating. I watched it all, myself included. I was impatient for it to finish; I felt nothing growing, no special connection between me and the Hosts. I was only watching. While we performed the actions that were necessary, that would allow them to speak their analogy, I thought of Bren. He could of course no longer speak to the Hosts. What was happening had been organised by the Embassy, and I supposed Bren’s erstwhile colleagues, the Ambassadors, must have been glad for him to help organise it. I wonder if they were giving him something to do.