Embassytown - China Mieville [45]
Embassytown was a small and crowded place, our population growth limited by the edge of the aeoli breath. It was surrounded by the Host city, except at the very northern point, where Ariekene plains started. Semilegal urban growth was tolerated, jury-rigged rooms sutured to walls, looming over alleys like eaves, thrown up on roofs, always ready to be abandoned. Most Staff tacitly approved of such enterprising space-maximisation. Here and there were half-trained biorigged bits and pieces, some backstreet-crossbred with Terretech and holding together through luck, tended aspects of domesticity.
Arced over Embassytown was the Embassy itself, edging up to those plains. At something over a hundred metres it was the tallest building we had. A fat pillar, studded with horizontal boughs and landing pads, to and from which, even so late, bioluminescent corvids moved. Like something melted, the Embassy spread out at its base and became part of the streets that surrounded it. Staff neighbourhoods were half-covered, as much the innards of the Embassy itself as alleyways. Ehrsul and I descended by panelled lift, through walkways, corridors that became things between corridors and streets, arcades half-open, with unglazed windows, and then into the streets proper, and the breeze.
“God, it’s nice to get outside,” I said.
“We’re not, not really,” Ehrsul said. “We’re all always in the aeoli breath.” A room of air.
It made me think about her, that she didn’t leave Embassytown, though she could have. She wasn’t programmed to be interested in the city, I supposed. I shied away from that. In my rooms I sipped more wine, and Ehrsul companionably made trid visions of a similar glass, made her trid head drink from it. She patched into my station but could find out nothing about the evening’s occurrences on the localnet.
“I’ll try again when I get home,” she said. “No offence but your machine … you’d have more luck banging rocks together.”
I’d been to her home several times. It was tiny, and sparse, but there were pictures on the walls, a kitchen, furniture for human and other guests (one beautiful, obscene-looking Shur’asi stool). Her flat and its tasteful accoutrements were perhaps for my and others’ benefits: her pictures, her coffee table, her imported rug elements of an operating system, designed to make her user-friendly. These ruminations felt disgraceful. I wondered about EzRa.
Formerly, 4
Hasser buzzed me. “How did you get my number?” I said.
“Please,” he said. He didn’t sound particularly intimidated, though I was deploying my best fuck-you immerser swagger. “It’s not hard to track you down. Come and have a drink.”
“Why would I come and have a drink?”
“Please,” he said. “There are people you should really meet.”
The similes met in an amiably collapsing part of Embassytown, near our young ruins. I took a long route, walking for most of the morning, past many ignored and homeless automa. I even passed the coin wall and as I always did glanced at the door.
There are slums on Charo City, and I’ve spent more time than I’d like in their environs. Many of the ports at which I’ve docked are in or by such areas: it’s as if slumism is an infection carried by ships. When in the course of Embassytown parties members of reformer factions started mouthing, I tended to interrupt them. “Slums?” I’d say. “Believe me, my friend, I’ve seen slums. You know where I’ve been? I know from slums. We don’t have slums.”
In Embassytown there were no rag-draped children playing with paper boats in stinking water, in potholes; no people selling themselves for food to immersers and people from the out, nor hawking bits of their DNA or flesh to bioccaneers; wattle-and-daub huts didn’t shake as ships rose and descended overhead, didn’t collapse every few landings. Our social graphs were pretty flat: differentials of money and power were minor. Excepting Staff, and Ambassadors.
The wallscreens and projectors in our unkempt areas were on forgotten loops, their cycles degraded. Some advertised discontinued