Embassytown - China Mieville [19]
This was the first time in living memory that an Ambassador had arrived from the out. Had the party not forced their hands—the ship was leaving and the ball couldn’t be delayed—I suspected the Staff would have tried to quarantine the new arrivals longer, and continued with whatever their intrigues were.
“CalVin’s here,” Ehrsul warned quietly, her displayed face glancing over my shoulder. I did not look round. She looked at me and made a little what? face, telling me without words that she’d still like to know what had happened there, sometime. I shook my head.
Yanna Southel, Embassytown’s senior research scientist, arrived, and with her an Ambassador. I whispered to Ehrsul, “Good, it’s EdGar. Time to schmooze. I’ll report back in a bit.” I made it slowly through the crowd into the Ambassador’s orbit. There in the middle of laughter and buffeted a little by those dancing, I raised my glass and made EdGar face me.
“Ambassador,” I said. They smiled. “So,” I said. “Are we ready?”
“Christ Pharos no,” said Ed or Gar. “You ask as if I should know what’s going on, Avice,” said the other. I inclined my head. EdGar and I had always enjoyed an exaggerated flirtation. They liked me; they were garrulous, gossips, always giving up as much as and a little more than they should. The dapper older men glanced side to side, raised eyebrows in theatrical alarm as if someone might swoop in and stop them speaking. That conspiratorialism was their shtick. They had probably been warned off me in the last few months, but they still treated me with a chatty courtesy I appreciated. I smiled but hesitated when I realised that despite their party faces, they seemed genuinely unhappy.
“I wouldn’t have thought it were …” “… possible,” EdGar said. “There’s things going on here …” “… that we don’t understand.”
“What about the rest of the Ambassadors?” I said.
We looked around the room. Many of their colleagues had arrived now. I saw EsMé in iridescent dresses; ArnOld fingering the tight collars wedged uncomfortable-looking below their links; JasMin and HelEn debating complexly, each Ambassador interrupting the other, each half of each Ambassador finishing their doppel’s words. So many Ambassadors in one place made for a dreamish feel. Socketed into their necks and variously ornamental, according to taste, diodes in their circuited links staccattoed through colours in simultaneous pairs.
“Honestly?” said EdGar. “They’re all worried” “To various degrees.” “Some of them think we’re …” “… exaggerating. RanDolph thinks it’ll all be good for us.” “To have a newcomer, to shake us up. But no one’s sanguine.”
“Where’s JoaQuin? And where’s Wyatt?”
“They’re bringing the new boy along. Together.” “Neither’s been letting the other out of their sight.”
Staff were making space in front of the entrance to the hall, preparing for JoaQuin, the Chair of the Ambassadors, for Wyatt the Bremen attaché, and for the new Ambassador. There were people I didn’t recognise. I’d lost sight of the pilot, so couldn’t ask if they were crew, immigrants or temporaries.
At most of these balls the newly arrived—permanent or single-tour—would be surrounded by locals. They wouldn’t lack company, sexual or conversational. Their clothes and accoutrements, their augmens, would be like grails. What ’ware they had would be pirated, and for weeks the localnet would be twittering with exotic new algorithms. This time, no one cared about anything but the new Ambassador.
“What else arrived? Anything useful?” Ambassador JasMin was in earshot, and I made a point of asking them, rather than EdGar. JasMin didn’t like me so I spoke to them when I could to let them know they didn’t intimidate me. They didn’t answer and I walked, greeted Simmon, a security officer. We hadn’t been close for years, but we liked each other sincerely enough that there was little awkwardness, though I was present as a guest,