Embassytown by China Miéville Page A

it’ll all be good for us.” “To have a newcomer, to shake us up. But no one’s sanguine.”
    “Where’s JoaQuin? And where’s Wyatt?”
    “They’re bringing the new boy along. Together.” “Neither’s been letting the other out of their sight.”
    Staff were making space in front of the entrance to the hall, preparing for JoaQuin, the Chair of the Ambassadors, for Wyatt the Bremen attaché, and for the new Ambassador. There were people I didn’t recognise. I’d lost sight of the pilot, so couldn’t ask if they were crew, immigrants or temporaries.
    At most of these balls the newly arrived—permanent or single-tour—would be surrounded by locals. They wouldn’t lack company, sexual or conversational. Their clothes and accoutrements, their augmens, would be like grails. What ’ware they had would be pirated, and for weeks the localnet would be twittering with exotic new algorithms. This time, no one cared about anything but the new Ambassador.
    “What else arrived? Anything useful?” Ambassador JasMin was in earshot, and I made a point of asking them, rather than EdGar. JasMin didn’t like me so I spoke to them when I could to let them know they didn’t intimidate me. They didn’t answer and I walked, greeted Simmon, a security officer. We hadn’t been close for years, but we liked each other sincerely enough that there was little awkwardness, though I was present as a guest, and an out-of-favour one at that, while he was working. He shook my hand with his biorigged right limb, which he’d worn since a gun had burst on a target range and taken off his own flesh version.
    I went through the crowd, talked to friends, watching the glimmer of augmens interact, hearing snatches of immer slang and turning to the immersers who spoke them with a word or two in the same dialect, or a hand held in the fingerlock that told them what ship I’d last served on, to their delight. I might touch their glasses, and I’d go on.
    Mostly, like everyone else, I was watching for the new Ambassador.
    A ND THEN they came, in a moment that could only have been an anticlimax. It was Wyatt who opened the doors, more careful and hesitant than usual. JoaQuin smiled beside him, and I admired how well they hid the anxiety they must have felt. Conversation hushed. I was holding my breath.
    There was some little commotion behind them, a moment of dispute between the figures who followed. The new Ambassador stepped forward past their guides, into Diplomacy Hall. That was a palpable moment.
    One of the two men was tall and thin, with hair receding— a blinking, shyly smiling, sallow man. The other was stocky, muscular and more than a hand shorter. He grinned. He was looking around. He ran his hand through his hair. He wore augmens in his blood: I could see the shine of them around him. His companion seemed to have none. The shorter man had a Roman nose, the other a snub. Their skins were different colours, their eyes. They didn’t look like or at each other.
    They stood, the new Ambassador, smiling in their very different ways. They stood there mooncalf and quite impossible.

Formerly, 1
     
    K ILOHOURS BEFORE , as we prepared for our travel, Scile came to some arrangement with his employers-cum-supervisors. I never made much effort to understand his academic world. So far as I could gather, he had arranged a very extended sabbatical, and technically his residence in Embassytown was part of a project minutely funded by his university. They were paying him a peppercorn retainer and keeping his access accounts live, with a view to ultimately publishing Forked Tongues: The SocioPsychoLinguistics of the Ariekei.
    Researchers had come to Embassytown before, particularly Bremen scientists fascinated by the Hosts’ biological contrivings: there were one or two still there, waiting for relief. But there hadn’t been outsider linguists on Arieka in living memory, not since the pioneers who had striven to crack Language, nearly three and a