Embassytown - China Mieville [39]
So far as I could tell all were in middle age, in their third instar, and therefore sentient. Some wore sashes indicating incomprehensible (to me) rank or predilections; some were studded with ugly little jewels where their chitin was thick. The most senior of the Ambassadors, MayBel and JoaQuin, were walking them slowly through the room, giving each of them a glass of champagne—carefully rigged to be palatable to them. The Hosts held them daintily and sipped with their Cut mouths. I saw Ez watch them.
“Ra’s coming,” Ehrsul said.
“What do we call him?” I said. “What are he and Ez to each other? They’re not doppels.”
Wherever in the room he was, and with whom, Scile, I knew, would be as tense at the strangeness of all this as I. Ez and Ra approached each other, changing how they held themselves, getting into another mode.
How could it have happened?
All those structures in place, for all those thousands of hours, years. Embassytown years, the years I grew up with, long months named in silly nostalgia for an antique calendar, each many dozen-day weeks long. For almost an Embassytown century, since Embassytown was born, structures had been in place. Clone farms had been run; careful and unique child rearing had raised doppels into Ambassadors, with the skills of governance they would need. It was all under Bremen’s aegis of course: they were our home power; our public buildings all displayed clocks and calendars in Charo City time. But so far out here in the immer, everything should have been under Staff control.
CalVin once told me that Bremen’s original expectations of Arieka’s reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been overoptimistic. Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly. More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras or particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences. Was that enough? In any case, no colony is ever wound down.
How and why had Charo City trained this impossible Ambassador? I’d heard, like we all had, the story of the experiment and the freak result, the empathy reading spiking off the Stadt scale. But even if these two random friends did have such a connection, for whatever contingent psychic reason, why would they become Ambassadors?
“Wyatt’s excited,” Ehrsul said.
“They all are.” Gharda had approached, her music shift over, her instrument folded away. “Why wouldn’t they be?” she said.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Augmens relayed JoaQuin’s voices to hidden speakers. JoaQuin and MayBel went into encomia to their Ariekene guests. When that was done, they welcomed the new Ambassador.
I’d been to comings-out when Ambassadors came of age (strange, arrogant, charming young doppels greeting the crowd). But this of course was nothing like those appointments.
JoaQuin said, “This is an extraordinary time. We find ourselves with the task …” “… the enviable task, the strange task …” “… of coming up with a new kind of welcome. Perhaps some of you had heard that we have a new Ambassador?” Polite laughs. “We’ve spent a good deal of time with them over the last few days …” “… got to know them, and they us.” “These are unusual times.” Hear hear, said RanDolph. “It’s a privilege to be here, at an event I hope you will indulge us …” “… if we describe as history. This is an historic moment.” “Ladies and gentlemen …” “… Hosts …” “… all our guests. It’s our very great pleasure to welcome to Embassytown …” “… Ambassador EzRa.”
As the applause died, JoaQuin turned to the Hosts who stood beside them, and said our new Ambassador’s name accurately, in Language. “,” they said. The Hosts craned their eye-corals.
“Thank you, Ambassador JoaQuin,” Ez said. He conferred quietly with Ra. “It