ACL—ACCELERATED CONTACT LINGUISTICS—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, bioluminescent words, all varieties of sounds that organisms can make. Dialects comprehensible only as palimpsests of references to everything already said, or in which adjectives are rude and verbs unholy. I’ve seen the trid diary of an ACLer barricaded in his cabin, whose vessel has been boarded by what we didn’t then know as Corscans—it was first contact. He’s afraid, as he should be, of the huge things battering at his door, but he’s recording his excitement at having just understood the tonal structures of their speech.
When the ACLers and the crews came to Arieka, there started more than 250 kilohours of bewilderment. It wasn’t that the Host language is particularly difficult to understand, or changeable, or excessively various. There were startlingly few Hosts on Arieka, scattered around the one city, and all spoke the same language. With the linguists’ earware and drives it wasn’t hard to amass a database of sound-words (the newcomers thought of them as words, though where they divided one from the next of the Ariekei, might not recognise fissures). The scholars made pretty quick sense of syntax. Like all exot languages it had its share of astonishments. But there was nothing so alien that it trumped the ACLers or their machines.
The Hosts were patient, seemed intrigued by and, insofar as anyone could tell through their polite opacity, welcoming to their guests. They had no access to immer, nor exotic drives or even sublux engines; they never left their atmosphere, but they were otherwise advanced. They manipulated life with astonishing finesse, and they seemed unsurprised that there was sentience elsewhere.
The Hosts did not learn our Anglo-Ubiq. Did not seem to try. But within a few thousand hours, Terre linguists could understand much of what the Hosts said, and synthesised responses and questions in the one Ariekene language. The phonetic structure of the sentences they had their machines speak—the tonal shifts, the vowels and the rhythm of consonants— were precise, accurate to the very limits of testing.
The Hosts listened, and did not understand a single sound.
“HOW MANY OF YOU get away?” Scile asked me.
“You make it sound like a prison-break,” I said.
“Well, come on. As I recall, you’ve said to me more than once that you made it out. As I recall you may have told me that, ahem, you’d never go back.” He looked a sly look.
“Touché,” I said. We were about to start on the last leg to Embassytown.
“So how many of you?”
“Not a whole lot. You mean immersers?”
“I mean anyone.”
I shrugged. “A couple of non-immersers must get cartas every so often. Not that many people bother applying, even if you do pass the tests.”
“You in touch with any of your classmates?”
“Classmates? You mean the immersers in my batch, who left with me? Hardly.” I made finger motions to indicate our dispersal. “Anyway. There were only three others. We weren’t close.” Even had the practicalities of miab-hauled letters not made it near impossible, I wouldn’t have tried and nor would they. A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn’t expecting any of them to return.
On that journey to Embassytown, Scile had had his sopor amended, spiked with gerons so he would age while under. It’s an affecting gesture, to ensure that the sleep of travel doesn’t keep you young while your working partner grows older.
In fact he didn’t spend all his time under. With the help of medicines and augmens, he spent a little of the journey awake and studying, where immer allowed, breaking off to retch or fend off panic with chemical prophylactics as necessary. “Listen to this,” he read to me. We were at the table, passing through very calm immer shallows. In deference to his always-sickness I was eating dried-up fruit, a nearly odourless food. “ ‘You are of course aware that every Man has two mouths or voices.’ In this”—he prodded what he was reading—“they have sex by singing to each other.” It was some antique book about a flat land.
“What’s the point of that nonsense?” I said.
“I’m looking for epigraphs,” he said. He tried other old stories. Looking for invented cousins to the Hosts, he showed me descriptions of Chorians and Tucans, Ithorians, Wess’har, invented double-tongued beasts. I couldn’t share his enthusiasms for these grotesques.
“I could have Proverbs 5:4,” he said, staring at his screen. I didn’t ask for an explanation: we used to joust like that sometimes. Instead I uploaded a Bible when I was alone, to find: “But in the end she’s bitter as wormwood, sharp as a sword with two mouths.”
The Hosts aren’t the only polyvocal exots. Apparently there are races who emit two, three or countless sounds simultaneously, to talk. The Hosts, the Ariekei, are comparatively simple. Their speech is an intertwining of two voices only, too complexly various to be pegged as “bass” or “treble.” Two sounds—they can’t speak either voice singly—inextricable by the chance co-evolution of a vocalising ingestion mouth and what was once probably a specialised organ of alarm.
The first ACLers listened and recorded and understood them. “Today we heard them talk about a new building,” the bewildered figures on the old trid told Scile and me. “Today they were discussing their bio-work.” “Today they were listing the names of stars.”
We saw Urich and Becker and their colleagues, neither of them yet famous at the time we spied on, mimicking the noises of the locals, repeating their sentences to them. “We know that’s a greeting. We know it is.” We watched a long-dead linguist play sounds to a waiting Ariekes. “We know they can hear,” she said. “We know they understand by hearing each other; we know that if one of its friends said exactly what I just played, they’d understand each other.” Her recording shook its head at us and Scile shook his.
Of the epiphany itself, there’s only Urich and Becker’s written testimony. In the way of these things, others from their party later denounced the record as misrepresentative, but it was the Urich-Becker manuscript that became the story. I’d seen the children’s version long ago. I remembered the picture of the moment; Urich’s features a delight to the caricaturist, him and subtler-faced Sura Becker both rendered with pop-eyed exaggeration, staring at a Host. I’d never read the unbowdlerised manuscript till Scile pulled it up for me.
We knew a great number of words and phrases [I read]. We knew the most important greeting: 
. We heard it every day and we repeated it every day—the latter without effect.
We programmed our voxware and had it speak the word repeatedly. And repeatedly the Ariekei ignored it again. At last in frustration we looked at each other and screamed half the word each like a curse. By chance they were simultaneous. Urich yelled “suhaill,” Becker “jarr,” at once.