Embassytown - China Mieville [29]
Those of my shiftparents still working had a party for me, and I was a bit startled by how happy it made me to go back, to be in the nursery, to kiss and hug and shout and re-greet these kind men and women, some now disconcertingly old, some seeming unchanged. “I told you you’d come back!” Dad Shemmi kept saying as I danced with him. “I told you!” They unwrapped the Bremen gewgaws I’d brought them. “This is too much, my love!” Mum Quiller said of some bracelet with aesthetic augmens. The dads and mums were shyly welcoming to my husband. He stood with a game smile all evening in the streamer-decorated hall while I got drunk, and he answered the same questions about himself repeatedly.
A few of those I’d grown up with crossed paths with me again, like Simmon. Though I slightly expected to, I never saw Yohn. I made other friends, from unfamiliar strata. I was invited to Staff parties. Though these had not been my circles before I left, there hadn’t been room enough in little Embassytown for me, an immerser-in-training, not at least to get near them. People, Staff, Ambassadors I’d known by sight and reputation in those days were abruptly acquaintances, and more. Some that I had expected to meet, however, were gone.
“Where’s Oaten?” I asked about a man who had mouthpieced often for Staff on our Embassytown trid. “Where’s Dad Renshaw?” “Where are GaeNor?” about that elderly Ambassador one of whom, when recruiting me to Language, had said “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” with a cadence so splendidly stilted it had become part of my internal idiolect, so whenever I introduced myself by my full name, a little is it? trailed the words in my head, in her voice. “Where’re DalTon?” I said, of the notorious Ambassador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learned it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood.
Oaten had retired on his modest local riches. Renshaw had died. Young. I was sad at that. GaeNor had died, one then almost immediately the other, of linkshock and loss. DalTon, I gathered—after continuing dissidence and some hinted-at final impatience with their colleagues, some ostentatiously opaque Staff internecine strife—had disappeared or been disappeared. Intrigued, I prodded at that, but got nothing more. I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions about Ambassadors directly, rather improperly, but I could gauge how far to push it and when to not.
I have no doubt that this was fallacious, but it felt to me as if I was quicker, better at sarcasm, wittier, because of my time in the out. People were kind to Scile and fascinated by him. He was fascinated back. He’d been on several worlds but emerged into Embassytown as if through a door in a wall. He explored. Our status wasn’t a secret. Nonex marriages like ours were known of but rare in Embassytown, which made us a titillation. We were spending most of our time together, still, but gradually less, as he expanded his own circles.
“Careful,” I told Scile, after one party where a man called Ramir had flirted with him, using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics. I’d never known Scile to show interest in men, but still. Homosex was a little bit illegal, I told him. Except for Ambassadors.
“What about that woman, Damier?” he said.
“She’s Staff,” I said. “Anyway it’s only a little bit illegal.”
“How quaint,” he said.
“Oh yes, it’s just darling.”
“So do they know you were once married to a woman?”
“I’ve been to the out, my love,” I said. “I can do anything I bloody want.”
I showed him where I’d played. We went to galleries and exhibitions of trid. Scile was fascinated by the tramp automa of Embassytown, melancholy-seeming mendicant