Embassytown - China Mieville [0]
King Rat
Perdido Street Station
The Scar
Iron Council
Looking for Jake: Stories
Un Lun Dun
The City & The City
Kraken
Embassytown is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by China Miéville
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
Miéville, China.
Embassytown / China Miéville.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52451-5
1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Life on other planets—Fiction. 3. Space warfare—Fiction. 4. Loyalty—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.I265E46 2011
823′.914—dc22
2011002854
www.delreybooks.com
Jacket design and illustration: David Stevenson
v3.1
To Jesse
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m 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 I’m 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”
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Proem: The Immerser
0.1
0.2
0.3
Part One - Income
Latterday, 1
Formerly, 1
Latterday, 2
Formerly, 2
Latterday, 3
Part Two - Festivals
Latterday, 4
Formerly, 3
Latterday, 5
Formerly, 4
Latterday, 6
Formerly, 5
Latterday, 7
Formerly, 6
Latterday, 8
Part Three - Like As Not
Formerly, 7
Formerly, 8
Formerly, 9
Formerly, 10
Part Four - Addict
9
10
11
12
13
Part Five - Notes
14
15
16
Part Six - New Kings
17
18
19
Part Seven - The Languageless
20
21
22
23
24
Part Eight - The Parley
25
26
27
28
29
Part Nine - The Relief
30
31
About the Author
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. It’s been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but it’s 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? That’s you.” A face at the boat’s 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. “We’re 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, “that’s not … It is amazing though. Coming here. To the edge. With Lord knows what’s 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