Embassytown (16 page)

“They’re not here,” Simmon said. He massaged the odd flesh of his biorigged arm. “None of them. We’ve had generations to compromise with them on what constitutes an appointment, so we know fine bloody well that several were supposed to be here this morning, and would normally have been, and they’re not. They’re not returning any of our buzzes. They’re not communicating with us at all.”

“We must have offended them pretty badly,” I said at last.

“Looks like it,” he said.

“How, do you think?”

“Pharotekton bloody knows how. Or EzRa knows.” Neither of us said anything for a moment. “Do you know someone called Oratee?” he said. “Or Oratees?”

“No. Who’s that?” It hadn’t sounded like an Ambassador: a strange name with no ghost-stress halfway through it.

“I don’t know. I heard CalVin and HenRy talking about them, sounded as if they’d know what’s going on. I thought you might know them. You know everyone.” It was nice of him, but I didn’t have it in me to play that up. “AgNes and a couple of other Ambassadors blame Wyatt for this, you know.”

“For what?”

“For whatever. For whatever it is that happened. I heard them. ‘This is all down to him and Bremen,’ they were saying. ‘We always knew they were undermining us, well here we are . . .’ ” Simmon made his prosthetic hand move open-closed to show a talkative mouth.

“So they know what’s going on, then?” He shrugged.

“Don’t think so, but. You don’t have to understand something to blame someone for it,” he said. “They’re right, anyway. This has to be a . . . manoeuvre, no question. EzRa . . . some Bremen weapon.”

What if AgNes were right? If so, and I played the particular last contact-card I had, it would be, I supposed, a betrayal of Embassytown. CalVin and Scile came to my mind and I overcame any hesitation. I buzzed Wyatt. As I connected I tried to think strategically, to work out where and how he was professional, where likely to bend, trying to work out what to say that might actually gain me some insight, persuade him to divulge something. The payoff to all this skulduggery was sheer bathos.

“Avice,” Wyatt shouted when I got through. “Thank God you called. I can’t get anyone to pick up over there. For fuck’s sake, Avice, what’s going on?”

H
E WAS MORE CUT OFF
even than me. He and his few assistants had offices in the heart of the Embassy, of course, but some Staff blamed him, others wanted to keep him out of whatever was happening, and all agreed they should caucus without him. They managed to do so never quite breaching the law that placed him, their Bremen overseer, above them.

They had circulated, as they were obliged to, a list of all that day’s many meetings. Wyatt had sent officers to all those in main halls, and had gone himself to one titled “Emergency Organisation” to discover that all these were sideshows, anxious extemporised discussions between mid-level Staff over issues such as stationery acquisition. The real debates, post-mortems on the party, hypotheses about the Hosts’ silence, had happened already, during the Any Other Business sessions of meetings of the Public Works Committee.

“It’s a fucking outrage, Avice!” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing that has to stop, that is
exactly
the sort of thing we’ve been sent to put an end to. They have
conspired
to keep me out. I’m their bloody superior! Not to mention what they’re doing to EzRa—these men are their colleagues, and they’re ostracising them. It’s a disgrace.”

“Wyatt, wait. Where are EzRa?”

“Ra’s in his room, or he was when I buzzed him. Ez I don’t know. Your colleagues—”

“They’re not my—”

“Your colleagues are freezing them out. I’m sure they’d arrest them if they could. Ez’s not answering, and I can’t find him . . .” The notion of an Ambassador having separate rooms, doing different things, still reeled me.

“Do they know what’s going on?”

“Don’t you think they’d tell me?” he said. “It’s not
everyone
here who tries to cut me out, you realise, just your bloody Ambassadors. Whatever it is they’re hatching . . .”

“Wyatt calm down. Whatever’s going on, you can see Staff aren’t in any more control than you.” He must have known the Embassy had had no contact of any kind from the city, since that night. “The Hosts aren’t saying anything. I think . . .” I said carefully, “I think EzRa . . . or we . . . must have accidentally done something that offended them . . . badly . . .”

“Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be
mea culpa
s about cultural insensitivity,
oops we said the wrong thing
, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.” He laughed and shook his head. “Avice, we must have made
thousands
of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like
our
visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn’t lose our shit, did we? The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I’ve ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult’s intended, and when it’s a misunderstanding. Behind every Ku and Lono story, there’s . . . pilfering and cannon-fire. Believe me,” he added wryly. “It’s my job.” He made thieving-fingers motions. It was because he would say things like that that I liked him.

“There’s always argy-bargy, Avice,” he said, and leaned toward the screen. “Job like mine. I’ve not shown bad form, have I?” He said this suddenly almost plaintively. “But this . . . Avice, there are limits. JoaQuin and MayBel and that lot—they need to remember what I represent.”

Bremen was a power, so always at war, with other countries on Dagostin, and on other worlds. What if enemies sent battleships in
our
direction? Kicked Bremen in the colonies? What, were we going to raise our rifles, our biorigged cannons, aim at the skies? Any comeback for a little genocide like that, which they could offhandedly commit, would have to come from Bremen itself, if it calculated it worth it. Mêlées in the vacuum of sometimes-space, or terrible strange firefights in the immer. That threat, and Arieka’s isolation in rough immer—and, though it went unspoken, our lack of importance—were the deterrents against attacks at that level. But there were other factors in Bremen’s martial calculations.

The Ariekei were not pacifists. They sometimes conducted obscure internecine murders and feuds, I had been told; and whatever Wyatt said, whatever the reasons, there had been violent confrontations, deaths, between our species, in the early years of contact. Protocols between us were very firm, and for generations, there’d been no trouble in relations. So it felt absurd to imagine the Ariekei, the city, ever turning against Embassytown. But we were some thousands, and they were many many times that, and they had weapons.

Wyatt was more than a bureaucrat. He represented Bremen, officially our protector; and as such, he must be armed. His staff were suspiciously athletic for office workers. It was well known that there were weapon caches in Embassytown, to which Wyatt alone had access. The hidden silos were rumoured to contain firepower of a different magnitude from our own paltry guns. There for our benefit, of course, the claim was. Bremen officials arrived with the keys deep-coded in their augmens. It was impolitic and a little frightening of Wyatt to state so blatantly, even to me, an outsider of sorts and a friend of his, of sorts, that his staff were soldiers, with access to arms, and he their CO.

It was true that he was patient. He ignored Embassytown’s minor-to-moderate embezzlement when the miabs came, and every few years when Bremen taxes were collected. He encouraged his officers to mix with Staff and commoners, and even sanctioned the occasional intermarriage. Like all colonial postings, his was a difficult job. With communication with his bosses so occasional, initiative and flexibility were vital. We’d had officious women and men in his post before, and it had made ugly politics. In return for his softly-softly stance Wyatt felt owed. That the Ambassadors were unfair.

I liked Wyatt but he was naïve. He was Bremen’s man, when the lights went out. I understood that and what it meant, even if he did not.

Formerly, 5

H
OSTS WOULD SOMETIMES
bob into view, alone or in small groups, zelles at their feet, walking their slowed-down scuttle through our alleyways. Who can say what their errands were? Perhaps they were sightseeing, or taking what, according to odd topographies, were shortcuts, into our quarter and out again. Some came deep into the aeoli breath, right into Embassytown neighbourhoods, and of these some were looking for the similes. These Ariekei were fans.

Every few days one or two or a little conclave would arrive with dainty chitin steps. They would enter The Cravat, their fanwings twitching, wearing clothes for display—sashes fronded with fins and filigrees that each caught the wind with a particular sound, as distinct as garish colours.

“Our public demands us,” someone said the first time I saw such an approach. Despite the faux-weary joke anyone could tell that this audience meant a great deal to the similes. The one time I persuaded Ehrsul to come with me, ostensibly to store up anecdotes so we could later laugh at my new acquaintances, the arrival of some Hosts seemed to discombobulate her. She ignored my whispers about the Ariekei, did not speak much except in brief polite non sequiturs. I’d been with her in Hosts’ company before, of course, but never in so informal a setting, never according to their unknown whims, not terms requested by Embassytown panjandrums. She never came back.

The owners and regular clientele of The Cravat would courteously ignore the Hosts, which would murmur to each other. Their eye-corals would crane and the tines separate, looking us over as we looked back. Waiters and customers stepped smoothly around them. The Hosts would talk quietly as they examined us.

“Says it’s looking for the one who balanced metal,” someone would translate. “That’s you, Burnham. Stand up, man! Make yourself known.” “They’re talking about your clothes, Sasha.” “That one says I’m more useful than you are—says he speaks me all the time.” “That’s
not
what it says, you cheeky sod . . .” So on. When the Hosts gathered around me, sometimes I had to suppress a moment of memory of child-me in that restaurant.

I didn’t find it hard to recognise repeat visitors, by that configuration of eye-corals, those patterns on the fanwing. With the exhilaration of minor blasphemy we christened them according to these peculiarities: Stumpy, Croissant, Fiver. They, it seemed, recognised each of us as easily.

We learnt the favourite similes of many. One of my own regular articulators was a tall Host with a vivid black-and-red fanwing, just enough like a flamenco dress for us to call it Spanish Dancer.

“It does this brilliant thing,” Hasser said to me. He knew I was hardly fluent. “When it talks about you.” I could see him groping for nuances. “‘When we talk about talking,’ it says, ‘most of us are like the girl who ate what was given to her. But we might
choose
what we say with her.’ It’s virtuoso.” He shrugged at my expression and would have left it, but I made him explain.

In the main my simile was used to describe a kind of making do. Spanish Dancer and its friends, though, by some odd rhetoric, by emphasis on a certain syllable, spoke me rather to imply potential change. That was the kind of panache that could get Hosts ecstatic. I had no idea whether many of them had always been so fascinated by Language, or whether that obsession resulted from their interactions with the Ambassadors, and with us strange Languageless things.

Scile always wanted details of what had happened, who had said what, which Hosts had been there. “It’s not fair,” I told him. “You won’t come with me, but you get annoyed if I can’t repeat every tedious thing anyone said?”

“I wouldn’t be welcome and you know it.” That was true. “Why do you keep going if it’s so dull?”

It was a reasonable question. The excitement with which the other similes reacted to the Host visitors, and the range, or its lack, of what they talked about when there were no Hosts there, irritated me, greatly, every time. I think I had, though, a sense that this was where things might occur, that this was important.

T
HERE WAS A
H
OST
who often accompanied Spanish Dancer. It was squatter than most, its legs gnarled, its underbelly more pendulous, as it approached old age. For some reason I forget we named it Beehive.

“I’ve seen it before,” said Shanita. It spoke incessantly, and we listened, but it seemed a mixture of half-sentences. We could make no sense of what it said. I remembered where I knew it from: my first-ever journey into the city. It had competed at that Festival of Lies. It had been unusually able to misdescribe that untruth-target object. It had called the thing some wrong colour.

“It’s a liar,” I said. I was clicking my fingers. “I’ve seen it before too.”

“Hm,” said Valdik. He looked rather suspicious. “What’s it saying now?” Beehive was circling, watching us, scratching at the air with its giftwing.

“ ‘Like this, like this,’ ” Hasser translated. He shook his head,
I’ve no idea
. “ ‘Like, they are, similar, different, not the same, the same.’ ”