My early days back in Embassytown, with savings and an outsider, immerser chic. I swaggered. I was welcomed back in delight by those who’d known me, who had never thought to see me again, who’d doubted the news of my return in the preceding miab.
I wasn’t rich by any real standard, but my savings were in Bremen Eumarks. This was the foundation currency of Embassytown, of course, but one rarely seen: with thirty or more kilohours between visits from the metropole—more than an Embassytown year—our little economy was self-standing. In deference to the Eumark, like all Bremen’s colonies, our currency was called the Ersatz. All those Ersatzes were incommensurable, each its own and worthless beyond its polity’s bounds. That portion of my account I’d downloaded and had with me, a few months’ life in Bremen, was enough for me to live in Embassytown until the next relief, perhaps even the one after that. I don’t even think people much resented it—I’d earned my money in the out. I told people that what I was doing with it now was floaking. That was inaccurate—there being no commands for me to get away with minimally obeying, I was simply not working—but they were delighted with the immer slang. They seemed to consider my idleness my right.
Those of my shiftparents still working had a party for me, and I was a bit startled by how happy it made me to go back, to be in the nursery, to kiss and hug and shout and re-greet these kind men and women, some now disconcertingly old, some seeming unchanged. “I told you you’d come back!” Dad Shemmi kept saying as I danced with him. “I told you!” They unwrapped the Bremen gewgaws I’d brought them. “This is too much, my love!” Mum Quiller said of some bracelet with aesthetic augmens. The dads and mums were shyly welcoming to my husband. He stood with a game smile all evening in the streamer-decorated hall while I got drunk, and he answered the same questions about himself repeatedly.
A few of those I’d grown up with crossed paths with me again, like Simmon. Though I slightly expected to, I never saw Yohn. I made other friends, from unfamiliar strata. I was invited to Staff parties. Though these had not been my circles before I left, there hadn’t been room enough in little Embassytown for me, an immerser-in-training, not at least to get near them. People, Staff, Ambassadors I’d known by sight and reputation in those days were abruptly acquaintances, and more. Some that I had expected to meet, however, were gone.
“Where’s Oaten?” I asked about a man who had mouthpieced often for Staff on our Embassytown trid. “Where’s Dad Renshaw?” “Where are GaeNor?” about that elderly Ambassador, one of whom, when recruiting me to Language, had said “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” with a cadence so splendidly stilted it had become part of my internal idiolect, so whenever I introduced myself by my full name, a little is it? trailed the words in my head, in her voice. “Where’re DalTon?” I said, of the notorious Ambassador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learnt it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood.
Oaten had retired on his modest local riches. Renshaw had died. Young. I was sad at that. GaeNor had died, one then almost immediately the other, of linkshock and loss. DalTon, I gathered—after continuing dissidence and some hinted-at final impatience with their colleagues, some ostentatiously opaque Staff internecine strife—had disappeared or been disappeared. Intrigued, I prodded at that, but got nothing more. I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions about Ambassadors directly, rather improperly, but I could gauge how far to push it and when not to.
I have no doubt that this was fallacious, but it felt to me as if I was quicker, better at sarcasm, wittier, because of my time in the out. People were kind to Scile and fascinated by him. He was fascinated back. He’d been on several worlds but emerged into Embassytown as if through a door in a wall. He explored. Our status wasn’t a secret. Nonex marriages like ours were known of but rare in Embassytown, which made us a titillation. We were spending most of our time together, still, but gradually less, as he expanded his own circles.
“Careful,” I told Scile, after one party where a man called Ramir had flirted with him, using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics. I’d never known Scile show interest in men, but still. Homosex was a little bit illegal, I told him. Except for Ambassadors.
“What about that woman, Damier?” he said.
“She’s Staff,” I said. “Anyway it’s only a little bit illegal.”
“How quaint,” he said.
“Oh yes, it’s just darling.”
“So do they know you were once married to a woman?”
“I’ve been to the out, my love,” I said. “I can do anything I bloody want.”
I showed him where I’d played. We went to galleries and exhibitions of trid. Scile was fascinated by the tramp automa of Embassytown, melancholy-seeming mendicant machines. “Do they ever go into the city?” he said. They did, but even could he corner them their artminds were too feeble to describe it to him.
It was Language that he was there for, of course, but he wasn’t blinkered to other strangenesses. Ariekene biorigging astonished him. At the houses of friends, he would stare like an appraiser at their quasi-living artefacts, architectural filigrees, their occasional medical tweak, prostheses and similar. With me, he would stand at the edge of the aeolian breath, on balconies and viewbridges in Embassytown, watching the herds of power plants and factories graze. Yes, he was staring into the city at where Language was, but he was looking at the city itself as well. Once, he waved like a boy, and though the far-off things can’t have seen us, it seemed as if one station twitched its antennae in response.
Near the heart of Embassytown was the site of the first archive. The field of rubble could have been cleared but it had been left as it was for lifetimes, since it felclass="underline" over one and a half megahours, more than half a local century. Our early town-planners must have thought that humans need ruins. Children still came, as we had, sometimes, and the overgrown dereliction was busy with Terre animals and those local lives that could tolerate the air we breathed. They, too, Scile spent a long time watching.
“What’s that?” A red simian thing with a dog’s head, shinning up a pipe.
“A fox, it’s called,” I said.
“Is it an altered?”
“I don’t know. Way back, if so.”
“What’s that?”
“A jackdaw.” “A stickleback-cat.” “A dog.” “Some indigene, I don’t know its name.”
“That’s not what we call a dog where I come from,” he’d say, or “Jack, daw,” carefully repeating names. It was unfamiliar indigenous Ariekene things that interested him most.
Once we spent hours in a very hot sun. We sat talking about things, then not talking, holding hands long enough and still enough that the animals and abflora forgot we were alive and treated us as landscape. Two creatures each the size of my forearm wrestled in the grass. “Look,” I said, quietly. “Shh.” Some way from the animals a clumsy little biped was edging away, its rear a fringe of blood.
“It’s injured,” Scile said.
“Not exactly.” Like every Embassytowner child, I knew what this was. “Look,” I said. “That’s the hunter.” A ferocious little altbrock, its black-and-white fur spattered. “What it’s fighting’s called a trunc. As is that thing running away. I know they look like different animals. You see how the tail end of that one over there’s all ragged? And the head of the one getting into it with the altbrock’s torn, too? That’s the brainhalf and that’s the meathalf of the same animal. They tear apart when the trunc’s attacked: the meathalf holds off any predators while the brain end runs off looking for a last chance to mate.”