Embassytown - China Mieville [32]
He introduced himself to the Shur’asi shopkeeper we knew as Gusty—Scile ostentatiously and with pleasure told me its actual namestring—and cultivated a brief friendship. People were charmed to see them about town, Scile with a companionable arm around Gusty’s main trunk, the Shur’asi’s cilia scuttling it at Scile’s pace. They’d swap stories. “You go on about the immer,” Gusty would say. “Try travelling by whorl-drive. Blimey, that was a journey.” I was never able to decide if his mind really was as like ours as the shape of his anecdotes suggested. Certainly he performed our small talk well, even once mimicking the poor Anglo-Ubiq of a Kedis neighbour, in a complicated joke.
Of course Scile wanted to meet the Ariekei. It was the Ariekei he studied nightly, when he stopped being social. It was they who eluded him.
“I still can’t find out almost anything about them,” he said. “What they’re like, what they think, what they do, how they work. Even stuff written by Ambassadors describing their work, their, you know, their interactions with the Ariekei, it’s all … incredibly empty.” He looked at me as if he wanted something. “They know what to do,” he said, “but not what it is they’re doing.”
It took me moments to make sense of his complaint. “It’s not the Ambassadors’ job to understand the Hosts,” I said.
“So whose is it?”
“It’s no one’s job to understand them.” I think that was when I first really saw the gap between us.
By now we knew Gharda and Kayliegh and others, Staff and those close to them. I had become friends with Ehrsul. She teased me about my lack of profession (she, unlike most Embassytowners, had been au fait with the term “floaker” before I introduced it), and I teased her right back about the same thing. As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she’d never become anyone else’s property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.
“It’s just Turingware,” Scile said when she wasn’t there, though he allowed that it was better such than he’d seen before. He was amused by how we related to her. I didn’t like his attitude, but he was as polite to her as if he did think her a person, so I didn’t pick a fight with him about it. The only real interest he ever showed in Ehrsul was when it occurred to him that, because she did not breathe, she would be able to go into the city. I told him the truth: that she said to me when I asked her about it that she never did or would, that I could not say why, and, given how she’d said it, I wasn’t minded to ask.
She was sometimes asked to tinker with Embassytown’s artminds and automa, which would bring her into close contact with Staff: we were often at the same official soirées. I was there because I had uses, too. I’d been out more recently than any of my superiors: only a few Staff had ever left for official business to Bremen and returned. I was a source, could tell them about the recent politics and culture in Charo City.
When I’d first left Embassytown, Dad Renshaw had taken me to one side—literally, he’d steered me to the edge of the room in which I was having a farewell party. I’d waited for fatherly homilies, spurious rumours about life in the out, but what he had told me was that if I ever came back, Embassytown would be very interested in information on the state of things in Bremen. It was so polite and matter-of-fact it took me a while to assure myself I’d been asked to spy. I was only amused, was all, at the unlikeliness. Then I was ruefully amused again when, thousands