Embassytown - China Mieville [20]
I went through the crowd, talked to friends, watching the glimmer of augmens interact, hearing snatches of immer slang and turning to the immersers who spoke them with a word or two in the same dialect, or a hand held in the fingerlock that told them what ship I’d last served on, to their delight. I might touch their glasses, and I’d go on.
Mostly, like everyone else, I was watching for the new Ambassador.
And then they came, in a moment that could only have been an anticlimax. It was Wyatt who opened the doors, more careful and hesitant than usual. JoaQuin smiled beside him, and I admired how well they hid the anxiety they must have felt. Conversation hushed. I was holding my breath.
There was some little commotion behind them, a moment of dispute between the figures who followed. The new Ambassador stepped forward past their guides, into Diplomacy Hall. That was a palpable moment.
One of the two men was tall and thin, with hair receding—a blinking, shyly smiling, sallow man. The other was stocky, muscular and more than a hand shorter. He grinned. He was looking around. He ran his hand through his hair. He wore augmens in his blood: I could see the shine of them around him. His companion seemed to have none. The shorter man had a Roman nose, the other a snub. Their skins were different colours, their eyes. They didn’t look like or at each other.
They stood, the new Ambassador, smiling in their very different ways. They stood there mooncalf and quite impossible.
Formerly, 1
Kilohours before, as we prepared for our travel, Scile came to some arrangement with his employers-cum-supervisors. I never made much effort to understand his academic world. So far as I could gather, he had arranged a very extended sabbatical, and technically his residence in Embassytown was part of a project minutely funded by his university. They were paying him a peppercorn retainer and keeping his access accounts live, with a view to ultimately publishing Forked Tongues: The SocioPsychoLinguistics of the Ariekei.
Researchers had come to Embassytown before, particularly Bremen scientists fascinated by the Hosts’ biological contrivings: there were one or two still there, waiting for relief. But there hadn’t been outsider linguists on Arieka in living memory, not since the pioneers who had striven to crack Language, nearly three and a half megahours before.
“I can stand on their shoulders,” Scile told me. “They had to work out how it worked from scratch. Why we could understand the Ariekei but they couldn’t understand us. Now we know that.”
While we prepared to arrive in Embassytown on what he called our honeymoon, Scile searched the libraries in Charo City. With my help he tried to tap into immerser-lore about the place and its inhabitants, and finally when we arrived he hunted in our own archives in Embassytown, but he found nothing systematic on his topic. That made him happy.
“Why’s no one written on it before?” I asked him.
“No one comes here,” he said. “It’s too far. It’s—no offence—stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Lord, none taken.”
“And dangerous nowhere, as well. Plus Bremen red tape. And to be honest, none of it makes much sense, anyway.”
“The language?”
“Yes. Language.”
Embassytown had its own linguists, but most, carta-denied if they even bothered to apply, were scholars in the abstract. They learned and taught Old and New French, Mandarin, Panarabic, spoke them to each other as exercises like others played chess. Some learned exot languages, to the extent that physiology allowed. The local Pannegetch forgot their native languages when they learned our Anglo-Ubiq, but five Kedis languages and three Shur’asi dialects were spoken in Embassytown, four and all of which respectively we could approximate.
Local linguists didn’t work on the language of the Hosts. Scile, though, was unaffected by our taboos.
He wasn’t