I wasn’t sure what she suspected me of. Ultimately, as a carta-carrying Embassytown native immerser, crewing and vouching for my fiancé, it only took tenacity to get him the rights to entry, and me to reentry. Scile had been preparing for his work there, reading, listening to recordings, watching what few trids and vids there are. He’d even decided on what the title of his book would be.
“One shift only,” I told him. “We’re only going until the next relief.” In Charo City, in a cathedral to Christ Uploaded, which to my surprise he asked for, I married Scile according to Bremen law, in the second degree, registering as a nonconnubial love-match, and I took him to Embassytown.
Part One
INCOME
Latterday, 1
DIPLOMACY HALL was jammed. It was usual for every ball, every greeting of leaving visitors, to be busy, but not like that night. It was hardly surprising: there’d been extraordinary anticipation. However much the Staff might have insisted to us all that this was a regular arrival, they didn’t even attempt to sound as if they believed it.
I was jostled among the dress-clothes. I wore jewels and I activated a few augmens that sent a corona of pretty lights around me. I leaned against the wall in the thick leaves.
“Well don’t you look good?” Ehrsul had found me. “Short hair. Choppy. Like it. Did you say goodbye to Kayliegh?”
“I thank you, and I did indeed. I still can’t believe she got the papers to leave.”
“Well.” Ehrsul nodded to where Kayliegh hung onto the arm of Damier, a Staffwoman partly responsible for cartas. “I think she may have made a horizontal application.” I laughed.
Ehrsul was autom. Her integument was adorned that night with acrylic peacock feathers, and trid jewellery orbited her. “I’m so tired,” she said. She made her face crackle as if static interrupted it. “I’m just waiting to see our new Ambassador in action—how can I not, really?—then I’m gone.”
She only ever used one corpus, according to some Terrephile sense of politesse or accommodation. I think she knew that having to relate to someone variably physically incarnate would trouble us. She was import, of course, though it wasn’t clear where she’d come from, or when. She’d been in Embassytown for longer than the lifetime of anyone I knew. Her Turingware was way beyond local capabilities, and more than the equal of any I’d seen in the out. Spending time with most automa is like accompanying someone brutally cognitively damaged, but Ehrsul was a friend. “Come save me from the village idiots,” she sometimes said to me after downloading updates alongside other automa.
“Do you joke to yourself when no one’s watching?” I had asked her once.
“Does it matter?” she had said at last, and I felt scolded. It had been rude and adolescent to raise the question of her personality, her apparent consciousness, of whether it was for my benefit. It was a tradition that none of the few automs whose behaviour was human enough to prompt the question would answer it.
She was my best friend, and somewhat well known, oddity that she was. When I met her I was certain I had seen her before. I couldn’t place it, at first; then when I realised what I thought the situation had been I asked her abruptly (as if I could startle her): “What did they want you there for? At Bren’s place, ages ago, when the Ambassadors recited my simile to me? That was you, wasn’t it? Remember?”
“Avice,” she had said, gently reproving, and made her face shake as if disappointed. That was all I ever got from her on the matter and I didn’t push it.
We huddled together by the indoor ivy and watched little cams flit around the room, recording. Decorative biorigging shed colours from carapaces.
“Have you met them, then?” Ehrsul said. “The esteemed intake for whom we wait? I haven’t.”
That surprised me. Ehrsul had no job, wasn’t under the obligation of any tithe, but as a computer she was valuable to Staff, and often acted for them. I would have said the same about me—that my inside-outside status had been useful to them—until I fell from favour. I’d have expected Ehrsul to be part of whatever discussions had been ongoing, but since the new Ambassador had arrived, apparently, the Staff had retreated into clique.
“There’s tussling,” Ehrsul said. “That’s what I’ve heard.” People told Ehrsul things: perhaps it was because she wasn’t human, but was almost. I think she also tapped into the localnet, broke encryption on enough snips to be a good source of information to friends. “People are worried. Though I gather some have rather taken a shine... Watch MagDa. And now Wyatt’s been insisting on getting involved.”
“Wyatt?”
“He’s been citing old laws, trying to brief the Ambassador alone, thank you very much. That sort of thing.”
Wyatt, the Bremen representative, had arrived with his small staff on the previous trade vessel, to relieve Chettenham, his predecessor. He was scheduled to leave in one more tour’s time. Bremen had established Embassytown somewhat more than two megahours ago. We were all juridically Bremeni: protectees. But the Ambassadors who governed formally in Bremen’s name were born here, of course, as were Staff and we who made up their canton. Wyatt, Chettenham and other attachés on their lengthy postings relied on Staff for trade information, for suggestions, for access to Hosts and tech. It was rare for them to issue orders other than “Carry on.” They were advisors to Staff, too, useful for gauging the politics in the capital. I was intrigued that Wyatt was now interpreting his remit in so muscular a fashion.
This was the first time in living memory that an Ambassador had arrived from the out. Had the party not forced their hands—the ship was leaving and the ball couldn’t be delayed— I suspected the Staff would have tried to quarantine the new arrivals longer, and continued with whatever their intrigues were.
“CalVin’s here,” Ehrsul warned quietly, her displayed face glancing over my shoulder. I did not look round. She looked at me and made a little what? face, telling me without words that she’d still like to know what had happened there, sometime. I shook my head.
Yanna Southel, Embassytown’s senior research scientist, arrived, and with her an Ambassador. I whispered to Ehrsul, “Good, it’s EdGar. Time to schmooze. I’ll report back in a bit.” I made it slowly through the crowd into the Ambassador’s orbit. There in the middle of laughter and buffeted a little by those dancing, I raised my glass and made EdGar face me.
“Ambassador,” I said. They smiled. “So,” I said. “Are we ready?”
“Christ Pharos no,” said Ed or Gar. “You ask as if I should know what’s going on, Avice,” said the other. I inclined my head. EdGar and I had always enjoyed an exaggerated flirtation. They liked me; they were garrulous, gossips, always giving up as much as and a little more than they should. The dapper older men glanced side to side, raised eyebrows in theatrical alarm as if someone might swoop in and stop them speaking. That conspiratorialism was their shtick. They had probably been warned off me in the last few months, but they still treated me with a chatty courtesy I appreciated. I smiled but hesitated when I realised that despite their party faces, they seemed genuinely unhappy.
“I wouldn’t have thought it were...” “... possible,” EdGar said. “There’s things going on here...” “... that we don’t understand.”