Embassytown by China Miéville Page B

half megahours before.
    “I can stand on their shoulders,” Scile told me. “They had to work out how it worked from scratch. Why we could understand the Ariekei but they couldn’t understand us. Now we know that.”
    While we prepared to arrive in Embassytown on what he called our honeymoon, Scile searched the libraries in Charo City. With my help he tried to tap into immerser-lore about the place and its inhabitants, and finally when we arrived he hunted in our own archives in Embassytown, but he found nothing systematic on his topic. That made him happy.
    “Why’s no one written on it before?” I asked him.
    “No one comes here,” he said. “It’s too far. It’s—no offence—stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”
    “Lord, none taken.”
    “And dangerous nowhere, as well. Plus Bremen red tape. And to be honest, none of it makes much sense, anyway.”
    “The language?”
    “Yes. Language.”
    Embassytown had its own linguists, but most, carta-denied if they even bothered to apply, were scholars in the abstract. They learnt and taught Old and New French, Mandarin, Panarabic, spoke them to each other as exercises like others played chess. Some learnt exot languages, to the extent that physiology allowed. The local Pannegetch forgot their native languages when they learnt our Anglo-Ubiq, but five Kedis languages and three Shur’asi dialects were spoken in Embassytown, four and all of which respectively we could approximate.
    Local linguists didn’t work on the language of the Hosts. Scile, though, was unaffected by our taboos.
    H E WASN’T FROM Bremen, nor from any of its outposts, nor from another nation on Dagostin. Scile was from an urban moon, Sebastapolis, which I’d vaguely heard of. He grew up very polyglot. I was never quite sure which language, if any, he considered his first. While we travelled I was envious of the blitheness, the sheer uninterest with which he ignored his birth home.
    Our route to Embassytown was roundabout. The ships we took were crewed by immersers from more places than I’d ever see. I knew the charts of Bremen’s crowded immer cognita , could once have told you the names of nations on many of its core worlds, and some of those I served with on my way home were from none of them. There were Terre from regions so far off that they teased, telling me the name of their world was Fata Morgana, or Fiddler’s Green.
    Had I ship-hopped in other directions, I could have gone to regions of immer and everyday where Bremen was the fable. People get lost in the overlapping sets of knownspace. Those who serve on exot vessels, who learn to withstand the strange strains of their propulsion—of swallowdrives, overlight foldings, bansheetech—go even farther with less predictable trajectories, and become even more lost. It’s been this way for megahours, since women and men found the immer and we became Homo diaspora .
    Scile’s fascination with the Hosts’ language was always a bit of a titillation to me. I don’t know if, as an outsider not only to Embassytown but to Bremen space itself, he could appreciate the frisson he produced in me every time he said “Ariekei” instead of the respectful “Hosts,” every time he parsed their sentences and told me what they meant. I’m sure it’s some kind of irony or something that it was through my foreign husband’s researches that I learnt most of what I know about the language of the city in a ghetto of which I was born.
    ACL—A CCELERATED C ONTACT L INGUISTICS —was, Scile told me, a speciality crossbred from pedagogics, receptivity, programming and cryptography. It was used by the scholarexplorers of Bremen’s pioneer ships to effect very fast communication with indigenes they encountered or which encountered them.
    In the logs of those early journeys, the excitement of the ACLers is moving. On continents, on worlds vivid and drab, they record first moments of understanding with menageries of exots. Tactile languages,