China Mieville - Embassytown

After I was done, in the youthmall, my friends demanded all details. We were roughnecks like most Embassytowner children are. “You were with the Hosts ? That’s import , Avvy! Swear? Say it like a Host?”

“Say it like a Host,” I said, appropriately solemn for the oath.

“No way . What did they do ?” I showed my bruises. I both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Eventually I enjoyed the telling and embellishing of it. It gave me status for days.

Other consequences were more important. Two days later, Dad Renshaw escorted me to Bren’s house. It was the first time I’d been there since Yohn’s accident. Bren smiled and welcomed me, and there within I met my first Ambassadors.

Their clothes were the most beautiful I’d seen. Their links glinted, the lights on them stuttering in time to the fields they generated. I was cowed. There were three of them, and the room was crowded. The more so as, behind them, moving side to side, whispering to Bren or one or other Ambassador, was an autom, computer in segmented body, the woman’s face it gave itself animated as it spoke. I could see the Ambassadors trying to be warm to me, a child, as Bren had tried, without having any practise at it.

An older woman said, “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” in an amazing, grand voice. “Come in. Sit. We wanted to thank you. We think you should hear how you’ve been canonised.”

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time. “It’ll be shortened with use,” Bren told me. “Soon they’ll be saying you’re a girl ate what was given her .”

“What does it mean, sirs, ma’ams?”

They shook their heads, they moued. “It’s not really important, Avice,” one of them said. She whispered to the computer and I saw the created face nod. “And it wouldn’t be accurate anyway.” I asked again with another formulation, but they would say nothing more about it. They kept congratulating me on being in Language.

Twice during the rest of my adolescence I heard myself, my simile, spoken: once by an Ambassador, once by a Host. Years, thousands of hours after I acted it, I finally had it sort-of explained to me. It was a crude rendering, of course, but it is I think more or less an expression intended to invoke surprise and irony, a kind of resentful fatalism.

I didn’t speak to Bren again the whole rest of my childhood and youth, but I found out he visited my shiftparents at least one other time. I’m sure it was my help with the simile, and Bren’s vague patronage, that helped get me past the exam board. I worked hard but was never an intellectual. I had what was needed for immersion, but no more than several others did, and less than some who didn’t pass. Very few cartas were granted, to civilians, or those of us with the aptitudes to traverse the immer out of sopor. There was no obvious reason that a few months later, after those tests, even with my facilities acknowledged, I should have been given, as I was, rights to de-world, into the out.

EACH SCHOOL YEAR, the second monthling of December was given over to assessments. Most investigated what we’d learnt from our lessons; a few others checked more recherche´ abilities. Not many of us scored particularly highly in these latter, in the various flairs prized elsewhere, in the out. In Embassytown we started from the wrong stock, we were told: we had the wrong mutagens, the wrong equipment, a lack of aspiration. Many children didn’t even sit the more arcane exams, but I was encouraged to. Which I suppose means my teachers and shiftparents had seen something in me.

I did perfectly fine in most things; well in rhetoric and some performative elements of literature, which pleased me, and in readings of poetry. But what I stood out in, it transpired, without knowing what it was I was doing, were certain activities the purposes of which I couldn’t divine. I stared at a query-screen of bizarre plasmings. I had to react to them in various ways. It took about an hour and it was well designed, like a game, so I wasn’t bored. I proceeded to other tasks, none testing knowledge, but reactions, intuitions, inner-ear control, nervousness. What they gauged was potential skill at immersing.

The woman who ran the sessions, young and chic in smart clothes borrowed, bartered or begged from one of the Bremeni staff, in fashion in the out, went over my results with me, and told me what they meant. I could see she was not unimpressed. She stressed to me, not cruelly but to avoid any later upset, that this concluded nothing and was just stage one of many. But I knew as she explained this that I would become an immerser, and I did. I’d only started to feel the smallness of Embassytown by then, to grumble in claustrophobia, but with her readings came impatience.

I finagled, when I was old enough, invitations to Arrival Balls, and hobnobbed with women and men from the out. I enjoyed and envied the seeming insouciance with which they mentioned countries on other planets.

It was only kilohours or years later that I really understood how not-inevitable my trajectory had been. That many students with more aptitude than me hadn’t succeeded; that I truly might have failed to leave. My story was the cliche´, but theirs was by far the more common, the more true. That contingency had made me feel sick, then, as if I might fail still, even though I was out.

Even people who’ve never immersed think they know— more or less, they might grant—what the immer is. They don’t. I had this argument once with Scile. It was the second conversation we ever had (the first was about language). He started in with his opinions, and I told him I wasn’t interested in hearing what the landstuck might think about immer. We lay in bed and he teased me as I went on about his ignorance.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “You don’t even believe what you’re saying; you’re too smart for this. You’re just spouting immerser bullshit. I could do this stuff in my sleep. ‘No one understands it like us, not the scientists, not the politicians, not the bloody public!’ It’s your favourite story, this. Keeps everyone out.”

He made me laugh with his impression. Still, I told him, still: the immer was indescribable. But he wouldn’t let me have that either. “You’re fooling no one with this stuff. You think I haven’t listened to how you talk? I know, I know, you’re not one for the gab, you’re just a floaker, blah blah. As if you don’t read your poetry, as if you take language for granted.” He shook his head. “Anyway, you’ll do me out of a job with talk like that. ‘It’s beyond words ,’ indeed. There’s no such thing.”

I put my hand over his mouth. That was just how it was, I told him. “Now, granted,” he continued through my fingers, performing the same teacherly tone, now muffled, “words can’t actually be referents, that I grant you, there’s the tragedy of language, but our asymptotic efforts at deploying them aren’t nothing, either.” Hush up, you, I told him. It’s all true, I said, I say it like a Host. “Well then,” he said, “I withdraw, in the face of truth.”

I’d studied the immer a long time, but my first moment of immersion had been as impossible to describe as I insisted. With the handful of other carta-passed new crew and emigrants, and Bremeni Embassy Staff who’d finished their commissions, I’d come by ketch to my vessel. My first commission was with the Wasp of Kolkata . It was quasi-autonomous, a cityship, immersing under the flag of itself, subcontracted by Dagostin for this run. I remember I stood with all the other greenhorns in the crow’s-nest, Arieka a wall across the sky through which we moved, with beautiful care, toward our immersion point. Somewhere beneath the world’s static-seeming cloud was Embassytown.