Embassytown - China Mieville [31]
At the coin wall, I told Scile about that first encounter with Bren. I’d found myself hesitating to take him there or tell him the story, and that piqued me, so I made myself. Scile looked lengthily at the house.
“Is he still there?” I asked a local stallholder.
“Don’t see much of him but he’s still there.” The man made a finger-sign against bad luck.
All this beckoning Scile through my childhood. Out at breakfast late one morning, at the end of the square in which we sat, I saw, and pointed out to Scile, a little group of young trainee Ambassadors, on one of their controlled, corralled, protected expeditions into the town for which they would one day intercede. There were five or six of them, it looked like, all from the same batch, ten or twelve children, a few kilohours off puberty, escorted by teachers, security, two adult Ambassadors, a men and a women, whom I could not identify at this distance. The apprentices’ links winked frenetically.
“What are they doing?” he said.
“Treasure hunt. Lessons. Don’t know,” I said. “Showing them round their demesne.” To my mild embarrassment and the amusement of other diners, Scile stood to watch them go, still chewing the dense Embassytown toast he claimed to love (too ascetic now for me).
“Do you see that often?”
“Not really,” I said. Most of the few times I’d seen such groups was as a child myself. If it happened when I was with my friends, we might try to catch the eyes of one or other of the not-yet-Ambassadors, giggle and run off if we succeeded, chased or not by their escorts. We’d play mocking and somewhat nervous games in their wake, for a few ostentatious minutes. I paid attention to my breakfast and waited for Scile to sit.
When he did he said, “What do you think about kids?”
I glanced in the direction the young doppels had taken. “Interesting chain of thought,” I said. “Here, it wouldn’t be like …” In the country he’d been born in, on the world he’d been born on, children were mostly raised by between two and six adults, connected to them and each other by direct genetics. Scile had mentioned his father, his mother, his auntfathers or whatever he called them, more than once and with affection. It was a long time since he had seen them: such ties mostly attenuate in the out.
“I know,” he said. “I just …” He waved at the town. “It’s nice here.”
“Nice?”
“There’s something here.”
“ ‘Something.’ I can tell words are your business. Anyway we’re going to pretend that I didn’t hear you. Why would I inflict this little place …”
“Oh stop it, really.” He smiled with only a little prickle in his voice. “You got out, yes, I know. You don’t mind it here half as much as you pretend to, Avice. You don’t like me that much, to come here if it was purgatory for you.” He smiled again. “Why would you mind it, anyway?”
“You’re forgetting something. This isn’t the out. In Bremen they consider most of what we do here—biorigging aside, and that we get out of the good graces of you-know-who—thuggish field medicine. And that includes sex-tech. You do remember how kids get made? You and I don’t exactly …”
He laughed. “Point,” he said. He took my hand. “Compatible everywhere but between sheets.”
“Who said I wanted to do it between sheets?” I said. It was a joke, not a seduction.
It all feels like prelude, now I reflect on it. The first time I saw exots of species I’d not grown up with was in a rowdy town on a tiny world we called Sebzi. I was introduced to a group of hive-things. I’ve no idea what they were, or from where their race originated. I’ve seen none of their kind since. One came forward on a pseudo-pod, leaned its hourglass body toward me and from a tiny snag-toothed ventricle said, in perfect Anglo-Ubiq, “Ms. Cho. It’s a pleasure.”
Scile reacted to Kedis and Shur’asi and Pannegetch, I don’t doubt,