China Miéville - Embassytown

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The Scar
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Un Lun Dun
The City & The City
Kraken

Embassytown is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by China Miville

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Published in the United Kingdom by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miville, China.
Embassytown / China Miville.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52451-5
1. Human-alien encountersFiction. 2. Life on other planetsFiction. 3. Space warfareFiction. 4. LoyaltyFiction. I. Title.
PR6063.I265E46 2011
823.914dc22
2011002854

www.delreybooks.com

Jacket design and illustration: David Stevenson

v3.1

To Jesse

Im very grateful to Mark Bould, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Andrea Gibbons, Chloe Healy, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter Lavery, Farah Mendlesohn, Davis Moensch, Tom Penn, Max Schaefer, Chris Schluep, Jesse Soodalter, Karen Traviss, Jeremy Trevathan, and all at Macmillan and Del Rey. Among the writers Im particularly grateful to are I. A. Richards, Paul Ricoeur, and Tran Duc Thao.

The word must communicate something (other than itself).

Walter Benjamin, On Language as such and on the Language of Man

The children of the embassy all saw the boat land. Their teachers and shiftparents had had them painting it for days. One wall of the room had been given over to their ideas. Its been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but its a tradition to represent them with such trails. When I was young, I painted ships the same way.

I looked at the pictures and the man beside me leaned in too. Look, I said. See? Thats you. A face at the boats window. The man smiled. He gripped a pretend wheel like the simply rendered figure.

You have to excuse us, I said, nodding at the decorations. Were a bit parochial.

No, no, the pilot said. I was older than him, dressed up and dropping slang to tell him stories. He enjoyed me flustering him. Anyway, he said, thats not It is amazing though. Coming here. To the edge. With Lord knows whats beyond. He looked into the Arrival Ball.

There were other parties: seasonals, comings-out, graduations and yearsends, the three Christmases of December; but the Arrival Ball was always the most important. Dictated by the vagaries of trade winds, it was irregular and rare. It had been years since the last.

Diplomacy Hall was crowded. Mingling with the embassy staff were security, teachers and physicians, local artists. There were delegates from isolated outsider communities, hermit-farmers. There were a very few newcomers from the out, in clothes the locals would soon emulate. The crew was due to leave the next day or the one after; Arrival Balls always came at the end of a visit, as if celebrating an arrival and a departure at once.

A string septet played. One of the members was my friend Gharda, who saw me and frowned an apology for the unsubtle jig she was halfway through. Young men and women were dancing. They were licensed embarrassments to their bosses and elders, who would themselves, to their younger colleagues delight, sometimes sway or turn a humorously stilted pirouette.

By the temporary display of childrens illustrations were Diplomacy Halls permanent hangings: oils and gouaches, flat and trid photographs of staff, Ambassadors and attachs; even Hosts. They tracked the citys history. Creepers reached the height of the panelling to a deco cornice, spread into a thicket canopy. The wood was designed to sustain them. Their leaves were disturbed by thumb-sized vespcams hunting for images to transmit.

A security man Id been friends with years before waved a brief greeting with his prosthesis. He was silhouetted in a window metres high and wide, which overlooked the city and Lilypad Hill. Behind that slope was the boat, loaded with cargo. Beyond kilometres of roofs, past rotating church-beacons, were the power stations. They had been made uneasy by the landing, and were still skittish, days later. I could see them stamping.

Thats you, I said, pointing them out to the steersman. Thats your fault. He laughed but he was only half looking. He was distracted by pretty much everything. This was his first descent.

I thought I recognised a lieutenant from a previous party. On his last arrival, years before, it had been a mild autumn in the embassy. Hed walked with me through the leaves of the high-floor gardens and stared into the city, where it had not been autumn, nor any other season he could have known.

I walked through smoke from salvers of stimulant resin and said goodbyes. A few outlanders whod finished commissions were leaving, and with them a tiny number of locals whod requested, and been granted, egress.

Darling, are you weepy? said Kayliegh. I wasnt. Ill see you tomorrow, and maybe even the day after. And you can But she knew that communication would be so difficult it would end. We hugged until she, at least, was a little teary, and laughing too, saying, You of all people, you must know why Im off, and I was saying, I know, you cow, Im so jealous!

I could see her thinking, You chose, and it was true. Id been going to leave, until half a year before, until the last miab had descended, with the shocking news of what, who, was on the way. Even then Id told myself Id stick to my plan, head into the out when the next relief came. But it was no real revelation to me when at last the yawl had crossed the sky and left it howling, and Id realised I was going to stay. Scile, my husband, had probably suspected before I did that I would.

When will they be here? asked the pilot. He meant the Hosts.

Soon, I said, having no idea. It wasnt the Hosts I wanted to see.

Ambassadors had arrived. People came close to them but they didnt get jostled. There was always space around them, a moat of respect. Outside, rain hit the windows. Id been able to ascertain nothing of what had been going on behind doors from any of my friends, any usual sources. Only the top bureaucrats and their advisors had met our most important, controversial newcomers, and I was hardly among them.

People were glancing at the entrance. I smiled at the pilot. More Ambassadors were entering. I smiled at them, too, until they acknowledged me.

The city Hosts would come before long, and the last of the new arrivals. The captain and the rest of the ships crew; the attachs; the consuls and researchers; perhaps a few late immigrants; and the point of all this, the impossible new Ambassador.

When we were young in Embassytown, we played a game with coins and coin-sized crescent offcuts from a workshop. We always did so in the same place, by a particular house, beyond the rialto in a steep-sloping backstreet of tenements, where advertisements turned in colours under the ivy. We played in the smothered light of those old screens, by a wall we christened for the tokens we played with. I remember spinning a heavy two-sou piece on its edge and chanting as it went,