“It doesn’t look anything like other local stuff,” Scile said. “But... I don’t think it’s Terre?” The meathalf of the trunc was winning, grinding the altbrock down. “Before it tore apart it would have had eight legs. There weren’t any octopodes on Terre, were there? Maybe underwater, but...”
“It’s not Terre or Ariekene,” I said. “It was brought in by accident kilohours ago, on a Kedis ship. They’re little gypsies. They must smell good or something: loads of things attack them. Even though if they then win, eating trunc-flesh makes them puke, or kills them. Poor little refugees.”
The brainhalf of the autotruncator was in the shadow of long-fallen stone and circuitry, watching the triumph of its erstwhile hind limbs. It teetered like a meerkat or a little dinosaur. The brainhalf had taken the trunc’s only eyes, and the meathalf circled in blind pugnacity, sniffing for more enemies from which to protect its escaped mind.
In an act of obscure sentimentality, Scile, with some effort, evaded the trunc meathalf’s claws—no small achievement, given that all it was driven to do by its remaining scrag-end thoughts was to fight—and brought it home. He kept it alive for several days. In the cage he rigged he put down food, and the trunc circled it and snatched mouthfuls as it continued its unending vigilant rounds, though it had no brain to protect. It tried to fight any brushes or cloths that we dangled near it. It died, and broke down very fast like a salted slug, leaving only mess for us to dispose of.
At the coin wall, I told Scile about that first encounter with Bren. I’d found myself hesitating to take him there or tell him the story, and that piqued me, so I made myself. Scile looked lengthily at the house.
“Is he still there?” I asked a local stallholder.
“Don’t see much of him but he’s still there.” The man made a finger-sign against bad luck.
All this beckoning Scile through my childhood. Out at breakfast late one morning, at the end of the square in which we sat, I saw, and pointed out to Scile, a little group of young trainee Ambassadors, on one of their controlled, corralled, protected expeditions into the town for which they would one day intercede. There were five or six of them, it looked like, all from the same batch, ten or twelve children, a few kilohours off puberty, escorted by teachers, security, two adult Ambassadors, a men and a women, whom I could not identify at this distance. The apprentices’ links winked frenetically.
“What are they doing?” he said.
“Treasure hunt. Lessons. Don’t know,” I said. “Showing them round their demesne.” To my mild embarrassment and the amusement of other diners, Scile stood to watch them go, still chewing the dense Embassytown toast he claimed to love (too ascetic now for me).
“Do you see that often?”
“Not really,” I said. Most of the few times I’d seen such groups was as a child myself. If it happened when I was with my friends, we might try to catch the eyes of one or other of the not-yet-Ambassadors, giggle and run off if we succeeded, chased or not by their escorts. We’d play mocking and somewhat nervous games in their wake, for a few ostentatious minutes. I paid attention to my breakfast and waited for Scile to sit.
When he did he said, “What do you think about kids?”
I glanced in the direction the young doppels had taken. “Interesting chain of thought,” I said. “Here, it wouldn’t be like...” In the country he’d been born in, on the world he’d been born on, children were mostly raised by between two and six adults, connected to them and each other by direct genetics. Scile had mentioned his father, his mother, his auntfathers or whatever he called them, more than once and with affection. It was a long time since he had seen them: such ties mostly attenuate in the out.
“I know,” he said. “I just...” He waved at the town. “It’s nice here.”
“Nice?”
“There’s something here.”
“ ‘Something.’ I can tell words are your business. Anyway we’re going to pretend that I didn’t hear you. Why would I inflict this little place...”
“Oh stop it, really.” He smiled with only a little prickle in his voice. “You got out, yes, I know. You don’t mind it here half as much as you pretend to, Avice. You don’t like me that much, to come here if it was purgatory for you.” He smiled again. “Why would you mind it, anyway?”
“You’re forgetting something. This isn’t the out. In Bremen they consider most of what we do here—biorigging aside, and that we get out of the good graces of you-know-who—thuggish field medicine. And that includes sex-tech. You do remember how kids get made? You and I don’t exactly...”
He laughed. “Point,” he said. He took my hand. “Compatible everywhere but between sheets.”
“Who said I wanted to do it between sheets?” I said. It was a joke, not a seduction.
It all feels like prelude, now I reflect on it. The first time I saw exots of species I’d not grown up with was in a rowdy town on a tiny world we called Sebzi. I was introduced to a group of hive-things. I’ve no idea what they were, or from where their race originated. I’ve seen none of their kind since. One came forward on a pseudopod, leaned its hourglass body toward me and from a tiny snag-toothed ventricle said, in perfect Anglo-Ubiq, “Ms. Cho. It’s a pleasure.”
Scile reacted to Kedis and Shur’asi and Pannegetch, I don’t doubt, with more aplomb than I had that time. He gave talks in Embassytown’s east, about his work and travels (I was impressed by how he was able to tell the truth but make his life sound coherent, precisely arced). A Kedis troika approached afterwards, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.
He introduced himself to the Shur’asi shopkeeper we knew as Gusty—Scile ostentatiously and with pleasure told me its actual namestring—and cultivated a brief friendship. People were charmed to see them about town, Scile with a companionable arm around Gusty’s main trunk, the Shur’asi’s cilia scuttling it at Scile’s pace. They’d swap stories. “You go on about the immer,” Gusty would say. “Try travelling by whorl-drive. Blimey, that was a journey.” I was never able to decide if his mind really was as like ours as the shape of his anecdotes suggested. Certainly he performed our small talk well, even once mimicking the poor Anglo-Ubiq of a Kedis neighbour, in a complicated joke.
Of course Scile wanted to meet the Ariekei. It was the Ariekei he studied nightly, when he stopped being social. It was they who eluded him.
“I still can’t find out almost anything about them,” he said. “What they’re like, what they think, what they do, how they work. Even stuff written by Ambassadors describing their work, their, you know, their interactions with the Ariekei, it’s all... incredibly empty.” He looked at me as if he wanted something. “They know what to do,” he said, “but not what it is they’re doing.”
It took me moments to make sense of his complaint. “It’s not the Ambassadors’ job to understand the Hosts,” I said.
“So whose is it?”
“It’s no one’s job to understand them.” I think that was when I first really saw the gap between us.
By now we knew Gharda and Kayliegh and others, Staff and those close to them. I had become friends with Ehrsul. She teased me about my lack of profession (she, unlike most Embassytowners, had been au fait with the term “floaker” before I introduced it), and I teased her right back about the same thing. As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she’d never become anyone else’s property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.