China Mieville - Embassytown

What we do, what we can do—immersers—is not just keep ourselves stable, sentient and healthy in the immer, stay able to walk and think, eat, defecate, obey and give orders, make decisions, judge immerstuff, the paradata that approximate distances and conditions, without being crippled with always-sick. Though that’s not nothing. It isn’t only that we have, some say (and some refute), a certain flatness of imagination that keeps the immer from basilisking us out of usefulness. We’ve learnt its caprices, to travel it, but knowledge can always be learnt.

Ships while still in the manchmal—Terre ones, I mean, I’ve never been on any exot vessels that abjure the immer and I know nothing about the ways they move—are heavy boxes full of people and stuff. Immerse, into the immer, where the translations of their ungainly lines have purpose, and they’re gestalts of which we’re part, each of us a function. Yes, we’re a crew working together like any crew, but more. The engines take us out of the sometimes, but it’s we who do the taking, too; it’s we who push the ship as well as it that pulls us. It’s us tacking and involuting through the ur-space, the shifts in it we call tides. Civilians, even those awake not puking or weeping, can’t do that. The fact is a lot of the bullshit we tell you about the immer is true. We’re still playing you, when we tell you: the story dramatises, even without lying.

“This is the third universe,” I told Scile. “There’ve been two others before this. Right?” I didn’t know how much civilians knew: this stuff had become my common sense. “Each one was born different. It had its own laws—in the first one they reckon light was about twice as fast as it is here now. Each one was born and grew and got old and collapsed. Three different sometimes. But below all that, or around it, or whatever, there’s only ever been one immer, one always.”

He did know all that, it turned out. But to be told these everyday facts by an immerser made them something new, and he listened like a boy.

WE WERE in a bad hotel on the outskirts of Pellucias, a small city popular with tourists because of the gorgeous magmafalls it straddles. It’s the capital of a small country on a world the name of which I don’t remember. In the everyday, it’s not in our galaxy, it’s off somewhere light-aeons away, but it and Dagostin are close neighbours via the immer.

By then I was seasoned enough. I’d been to many places. I was between commissions, when I met Scile, spending a couple of local weeks on self-granted shore leave before I went for another job. I was picking up rumours—of new immertech, exploration, dubious missions. The hotel bar was full of immersers and other port life, travellers recovering, and, this time, academics. I was pretty familiar with all but the last of these types. In the lobby was an ad for a course in The Healing Power of Story, at which I made rude noises. A trid of turning and altering words floated the corridors, welcoming guests to the inaugural meeting of the Gold and Silver Circuits Board; to a convocation of Shur’asi philosopher-bureaucrats; to CHEL, the Conference of Human Exoterre Linguists.

I was drunk in the bar with a bunch of temporary stopover friends, all now thoroughly hazy memories. We were being obnoxious. I went from half-heartedly flirting with a bartender to mocking a table of scholars from CHEL, no less drunk or boisterous than we. We’d eavesdropped on them, then told them with immerser swagger that they didn’t know anything about life or even languages in the out, and so on.

“Go on then, ask me something,” I said to Scile. That was the first thing I ever said to him. I know exactly how I’d have looked: leaning back in my high chair, turned so resting my back against the bar top, my head back so I could look down at him. I was surely pointing at him with both hands and smiling a bit pinch-mouthed so as to not yet give him any satisfaction. Scile was the least gone at his table, and he was refereeing the teasing on both sides. “I know all about weird languages,” I told him. “More than any of you buggers. I’m from Embassytown .”

When he believed me, I’ve never seen a man so astonished, so delighted. He didn’t stop playing but he looked at me very differently, the more when he discovered none of my companions were my compatriots. I was the only Embassytowner, and Scile loved it.

It wasn’t just his attention I liked: I was pleased with how this compact, tough-looking guy fenced with me, and kept everyone raucously amused while asking questions with actual content. We stumbled off after a while and spent a night and a day trying to enjoy sex together, sleeping, trying again, several times, with good-humoured lack of success. After that over breakfast he badgered and blandished and begged me; and I, pretending disdain and having a lovely time, acquiesced, and let him take me, tired but, as I teased him, not sore enough, to the conference.

He presented me to his colleagues. The CHEL was for the Terre study of all exot languages, but it was those generally considered most strange that fascinated its members. I saw slapdash temporary trids advertising sessions on cross-cultural chromatophore signalling, on touch communication among the unseeing Burdhan, and on me.

“I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?” said one young woman to me, apropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.”

I noticed my own trid in the background. Embassytowner guest! On life among the Ariekei. “That’s wrong,” I told the conference organisers, “they’re Hosts.” But they told me: “Only to you.”

Scile’s colleagues were eager to talk to me: no one there had met Embassytowners before. Nor Hosts, of course.

“They’re still quarantined,” I told them, “but in any case they’ve never asked about coming out. We don’t even know if they could take immersion.”

I was willing to be a curio but I disappointed them. I’d warned Scile I would. The discussion became vague and sociological when they realised that I wouldn’t be able to tell them almost anything about Language.

“I hardly understand any,” I said. “We only learn a tiny bit, except Staff and Ambassadors.”

One participant pulled up some recordings of Hosts speaking, and ran through some vocabulary. I was pleased to be able to nuance a couple of the definitions, but honestly there were at least two people in the room who understood Language better than I did.

Instead I told them stories of life in the outpost. They didn’t know about the aeoli, the air-sculpting that kept a breathable dome over Embassytown. A few had seen some bits of exported biorigging, but I could talk them through the out-of-date trids they had of the vaster infrastructure, the herds of houses, timelapse of a young bridge maturing from its pontoon-cell to link city regions for no reasons I could give. Scile asked me about religion, and I told him that so far as I knew the Hosts had none. I mentioned the Festivals of Lies. Scile was not the only one who wanted to pursue that. “But I thought they couldn’t,” someone said.

“That’s sort of the point,” I said. “To strive for the impossible.”

“What’re they like, those festivals?” I laughed and said I’d no clue, had never been to one, of course, had never been into the Host city.

They began to debate Language among themselves. Wondering how to repay their hospitality in anecdote, I told what had happened to me in the abandoned restaurant. They were attentive all over again. Scile stared with his manic precision. “You were in a simile?” they said.

“I am a simile,” I said.