Embassytown - China Mieville [8]
You can see from the newsloads that some in the crowd knew what was happening. There were shouts as the noise grew, people trying to warn people. Some of those who understood simply ran. Us kids mostly just stood I think, though Mum Quiller would have done her best to get us out of there. There’s the sound of the miab’s ceramic case straining in anti-Newtonian ways. People are peering over the railings to see; more and more are getting out of there.
The miab splits, sending blades of hull matter viciously airborne. Something from the immer comes out.
Taxonomy is imprecise. Most experts agree that what emerged on that day was a minor manifestation, one I’d later learn to call a stichling. It was an insinuation at first, composing itself of angles and shadows. It accreted itself from its surrounds, manifesting in the transient. The bricks, plastone and concrete of buildings, the energy of the cages and the flesh of the captive animals from the gardens spilled toward and into the swimming thing, against physics. They substanced it. Houses were unroofed as their slates dripped sideways into a presence growing every moment more physical, more suited to this realness.
It was put down quickly. They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer. It was banished or dispatched after minutes of shrieking.
Thankfully no Hosts were harmed. But the emergence left scores of others dead. Some were killed in the explosion; some were lessened, had partially poured away. From then on, when retrieving miabs, Staff obeyed the protocols of care that they had been letting slip. Our trids showed repeated debates, fury and angst. Whoever it was in Staff who was sacked in disgrace was a scapegoat for the system. A young, dashingly ill-disciplined Ambassador DalTon more or less asserted that on cam, in anger, which I remember the parents talking about. Dad Noor even told me the disaster would be the end of the pomp of arrival. He was wrong about this, of course. He was always a lugubrious man.
Of course my friends and I were obsessed with the tragedy. Within a very short time we were playing it as a game, making immer-bubbling and cracking-shellcase noises, firing finger-guns and sticks at those of us temporarily monsters. I conceived of the stichling I think as some sort of slayed dragon.
There’s a story told, sort of a traditional view, that immersers never remember their childhoods. That’s obviously not true. People say it as a way to stress the strangeness of the immer; the implication being that there’s something in that foundational altreality that plays buggery with human minds. (Which it can do, certainly, but not like that.)
It’s not true, but it is the case that I, and most of the immersers I’ve known, have casual, or vague, or discombobulated memories of when we were small. I don’t think it’s a mystery: I think it’s a corollary of our mindsets, the way we think, those of us who want to go into the out.
I recall episodes very well, but episodes, not a timeline. The most relevant times, the definitional ones. The rest of it’s disorganised in my head, and mostly I don’t mind. Here: one other time in my childhood, I was in the company of Hosts. One morning in the third monthling of July I was called to a meeting.
It was Dad Shemmi they sent to fetch me. He squeezed my shoulder as he pointed me in to one of the nursery’s scruffy paperwork-and-datspace-filled offices. It was Mum Solfer’s room, and I’d not been in it before. Mostly Terretech, though a boxy biorigged bin was quietly eating her rubbish. Solfer was older, kind, distracted, knew me by name, which she did not all my shiftsiblings. She beckoned me, obviously uneasy. She stood, glanced around as if for a sofa, which the room was without, sat again. Behind her desk with her—not unamusing, in retrospect, it was smallish and too cramped for them—was Dad Renshaw,