Embassytown - China Mieville [7]
Here’s another memory. We used to play at immersing, running up behind each other in a little I’m invisible crouch, then shouting “Emerge!” and grabbing. We knew very little about immersion, and that playacting was, I would come to learn, not much more inaccurate than most adult descriptions of the immer.
Irregularly throughout my youth, scheduled between incoming ships, miabs would arrive. Uncrewed little boxes full of oddments, steered by ’ware. Plenty were lost en route: became hazards forever, I later learned, in variously strange corroded forms, in the immer they’d been built to travel. But most reached us. As I got older my excitement at those arrivals became coloured by frustration, envy of them, until I realised I would, in fact, get out into the out. They became hints, then: little whispers.
When I was four and a half years old I saw a train hauling a just-touched-down miab through Embassytown. Like most children and many adults, I always wanted to witness their arrival. There was a little gang of us there from the nursery, watched and lightly corralled by Mum Quiller, I think it was, and we ourselves roughly looked out for our much younger shiftfriends. We were able to lean up over the railings mostly uninterrupted and chatter at each other and the arrival.
As always the miab was laid on a colossal flatbed, and the biorigged locomotor that hauled it through the wide cut of Embassytown’s industrial rails was heaving, putting out temporary muscular legs to strain along with its engine. The miab on its back was bigger than my nursery’s hall. A very real container, snub-bullet-shaped, moving through light rain. Its surface sheened with saft that evanesced out from its crystal shielding in threads that degraded to nothing. The authorities were irresponsible, I know now, not to have waited for that immer-stained surface to calm. This wasn’t the first miab they’d brought in still damp from its journey.
I saw a building dragged. That’s what it looked like. A big train wheezing with effort, its enginarii cajoling it through a gash. The enormous room was tugged uphill toward the Ambassadors’ castle, surrounded by Embassytowners, cheering and waving ribbons. It had an escort of centaurs, men and women perched at the front of quadruped biorigged conveyances. Some of the town’s few exots stood by their Terre friends: Kedis frills rose and flushed colours, Shur’asi and Pannegetch made their sounds. There were automa in the crowd: some staggering boxes, some with persuasive-enough turingware that they seemed enthusiastic participants.
Inside the unmanned vessel would be cargo, presents to us from Dagostin and perhaps beyond, import things we coveted, bookware and books, newsware, rare foods, tech, letters. The craft itself would be cannibalised, too. I’d sent things out in return myself, yearly, when our own much smaller miabs were dispatched. They contained hardy goods and the paraphernalia of official duties (all carefully copied before dispatch—no one would assume any miab would reach its destination), but a little space was retained for children to correspond with pen-pal schools in the out.
“Miab, miab, message in a bottle!” Mum Berwick would sing as she gathered our letters up. Dear Class 7, Bowchurch High, Charo City, Bremen, Dagostin, I remember writing. I wish that I could come with my letter to visit you. Brief catch-up epistolary flurries every rare often.
The miab passed by one of the waterways we called rivers, which are small canals, under Stilt Bridge. I remember that there were Hosts there, with a delegation of Embassy Staff, looking down through the bridge’s coloured-glass portals, flanked by our security on biorigged mount-machines.
It was out of my sight when the stowaway emerged from the miab, but I’ve seen recordings. The tracks were overlooked by tenements on the east side and the animal gardens on the west when cracking first became audible.