Embassytown - China Mieville [6]
It’s disgusting, some of my friends later said. They’d learnt this attitude from less liberal shiftparents. Nasty old cripple should go to the sanatorium. Leave him alone, I’d say. He saved Yohn.
Yohn recovered. His experience didn’t stop our game. I went a little farther, a little farther over weeks, but I never reached Yohn’s marks. The fruits of his dangerous experiment, a last mark, was metres beyond any of his others, the initial letter of his name in a terrible hand. “I fainted there,” he would tell us. “I nearly died.” After his accident he was never able to go nearly so far again. He remained the second-best because of his history, but I could beat him now.
“How do I spell Bren’s name?” I asked Dad Shemmi, and he showed me.
“Bren,” he said, running his finger along the word: seven letters; four he sounded; three he could not.
0.2
When I was seven years old I left Embassytown. Kissed my shiftparents and siblings goodbye. I returned when I was eleven: married; not rich but with savings and a bit of property; knowing a little of how to fight, how to obey orders, how and when to disobey them; and how to immerse.
I’d become fair-to-good at several things, though I excelled, I thought, at only one. It wasn’t violence. That’s an everyday risk of port life, and over my time away I’d lost only a few more fights than I’d won. I look stronger than I am, I was always quickish, and like many middling scrappers I’d become good at insinuating more skill than I had. I could avoid confrontations without obvious cowardice.
I was bad at money but had amassed some. I couldn’t claim that marriage was my real skill, but I was better at it than many. I’d had two previous husbands and a wife. I’d lost them to changes of predilection, without rancour—as I say, I wasn’t bad at marriage. Scile was my fourth spouse.
As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to—those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.
Immersers, I think, created the term. Everyone has some floaker in them. There’s a devil on your shoulder. Not everyone crewing aspires to master the technique—there are those who want to captain or explore—but for most, floaking is indispensable. Some people think it mere indolence but it’s a more active and nuanced technique than that. Floakers aren’t afraid of effort: many crew work very hard to get shipboard in the first place. I did.
When I think of my age I think in years, still, even after all this time and travel. It’s bad form, and ship-life should have cured me of it. “Years?” one of my first officers shouted at me. “I don’t give two shits about whatever your pisspot home’s sidereal shenanigans are, I want to know how old you are.”
Answer in hours. Answer in subjective hours: no officer cares if you’ve slowed any compared to your pisspot home. No one cares which of the countless year-lengths you grew up with. So, when I was about 170 kilohours old I left Embassytown. I returned when I was 266Kh, married, with savings, having learnt a few things.
I was about 158 kilohours old when I learnt that I could immerse. I knew then what I’d do, and I did it.
I answer in subjective hours; I have to bear objective hours vaguely in mind; I think in the years of my birth-home, which was itself dictated to by the schedules of another place. None of this has anything to do with Terre. I once met a junior immerser from some self-hating backwater who reckoned in what he called “earth-years,” the risible fool. I asked him if he’d been to the place by the calendar of which he lived. Of course he’d no more idea of where it was than I.
As I’ve grown older I’ve become conscious of how unsurprising I am. What happened to me didn’t happen to many Embassytowners—that’s surely the point—but the story of its happening is classic. I was born in a place that I thought for thousands of hours was enough of a universe. Then I knew