The Host spoke.
Of course I’d seen its like many times. Some lived in the interstice where we dared ourselves to play. We sometimes found ourselves facing them, as they walked with crablike precision on whatever their tasks were, or even ran, with a gait that made them look as if they must fall, though they did not. We saw them tending the flesh walls of their nests, or what we thought of as their pets, those whispering companion animal things. We would quieten abruptly down in their presence and move away from them. We mimicked the careful politeness our shiftparents showed them. Our discomfort, like that of the adults we learned it from, outweighed any curiosity at the strange actions we might see the Hosts performing.
We would hear them speak to each other in their precise tones, so almost like our voices. Later in our lives a few of us might understand some of what they said, but not yet, and never really me.
I’d never been so close to one of the Hosts. My fear for Yohn distracted me from all I’d otherwise feel from this proximity to the thing, but I kept it in my sight, so it could not surprise me, then when it rocked closer to me I shied away abruptly and broke off whispering to my friend.
They were not the only exoterres I’d seen. There were exot inhabitants of Embassytown—a few Kedis, a handful of Shur’asi and others—but with them, while there was strangeness of course there was never that abstraction, that sheer remove one felt from Hosts. One Shur’asi shopkeeper would even joke with us, his accent bizarre but his humour clear.
Later I understood that those immigrants were exclusively from species with which we shared conceptual models, according to various measures. Hosts, the indigenes, in whose city we had been graciously allowed to build Embassytown, were cool, incomprehensible presences. Powers like subaltern gods, who sometimes watched us as if we were interesting, curious dust; and who provided our biorigging, and to which the Ambassadors alone spoke. We were reminded often that we owed them courtesy. Pass them in the street and we would show the required respect, then run on giggling. Without my friends, though, I couldn’t camouflage my fear with silliness.
“It’s asking if the boy’ll be alright,” the man said. He rubbed his mouth. “Colloquially, something like, will he run later or will he cool? It wants to help. It has helped. It probably thinks me rude.” He sighed. “Or mentally ill. Because I won’t answer it. It can see I’m diminished. If your friend doesn’t die it’ll be because it brought him here.
“The Hosts found him.” I could tell the man was trying to speak gently to me. He seemed unpractised. “They can come here but they know we can’t leave. They know more or less what we need.” He pointed at the Host’s pet. “They had their engines breathe oxygen into him. Yohn’ll maybe be fine. The constables’ll come soon. Your name’s Avice. Where do you live, Avice?” I told him. “Do you know my name?”
I’d heard it of course. I was unsure of the etiquette of speaking it to him. “Bren,” I said.
“Bren. That isn’t right. You understand that? You can’t say my name. You might spell it, but you can’t say it. But then I can’t say my name either. Bren is as good as any of us can do. It...” He looked at the Host, which nodded gravely. “Now, it can say my name. But that’s no good: it and I can’t speak anymore.”
“Why did they bring him to you, sir?” His house was close to the interstice, to where Yohn had fallen, but hardly adjacent.
“They know me. They brought your friend to me because though as I say they know me to be lessened in some way they also recognise me. They speak and they must hope I’ll answer them. I’m... I must be... very confusing to them.” He smiled. “It’s all foolishness, I know. Believe me I do know that. Do you know what I am, Avice?”
I nodded. Now, of course, I know that I had no idea what he was, and I’m not sure he did either.
The constables at last arrived with a medical team, and Bren’s room became an impromptu surgery. Yohn was intubated, drugged, monitored. Bren pulled me gently out of the experts’ way. We stood to one side, I, Bren and the Host, its animal tasting my feet with a tongue like a feather. A constable bowed to the Host, which moved its face in response.
“Thanks for helping your friend, Avice. Perhaps he’ll be fine. And I’ll see you soon, I’m sure. ‘Turnaround, incline, piggy, sunshine’?” Bren smiled.
While a constable ushered me out at last, Bren stood with the Host. It had wrapped him in a companionable limb. He did not pull away. They stood in polite silence, both looking at me.
AT THE NURSERY they fussed over me. Even assured by the officer that I’d done nothing wrong, the staffparents seemed a little suspicious about what I’d got myself into. But they were decent, because they loved us. They could see I was in shock. How could I forget Yohn’s shaking figure? More, how could I forget being quite so close up to the Host, the sounds of its voice? I was haunted by what had been, without question, its precise attention on me.
“So somebody had drinks with Staff, today, did they?” my shiftfather teased as he put me to bed. It was Dad Shemmi, my favourite.
Later in the out I took mild interest in all the varieties of ways to be a family. I don’t remember any particular jealousy I, or most other Embassytown children, felt at those of our shiftsiblings whose blood parents at times visited them: it wasn’t in particular our norm there. I never looked into it, but I wondered, in later life, whether our shift-and-nursery system continued social practices of Embassytown’s founders (Bremen has for a long time been relaxed about including a variety of mores in its sphere of governance), or if it had been thrown up a little later. Perhaps in vague social-evolutionary sympathy with the institutional raising of our Ambassadors.
No matter. You heard terrible stories from the nurseries from time to time, yes, but then in the out I heard bad stories too, about people raised by those who’d birthed them. On Embassytown we all had our favourites and those we were more scared of, those whose on-duty weeks we relished and those not, those we’d go to for comfort, those for advice, those we’d steal from, and so on; but our shiftparents were good people. Shemmi I loved the most.
“Why do the people not like Mr. Bren living there?”
“Not Mr. Bren, darling, just Bren. They, some of them, don’t think it’s right for him to live like that, in town.”
“What do you think?”
He paused. “I think they’re right. I think it’s... unseemly. There are places for the cleaved.” I’d heard that word before, from Dad Berdan. “Retreats just for them, so... It’s ugly to see, Avvy. He’s a funny one. Grumpy old sod. Poor man. But it isn’t good to see. That kind of wound.”
It’s disgusting, some of my friends later said. They’d learnt this attitude from less liberal shiftparents. Nasty old cripple should go to the sanatorium. Leave him alone, I’d say. He saved Yohn.
Yohn recovered. His experience didn’t stop our game. I went a little farther, a little farther over weeks, but I never reached Yohn’s marks. The fruits of his dangerous experiment, a last mark, was metres beyond any of his others, the initial letter of his name in a terrible hand. “I fainted there,” he would tell us. “I nearly died.” After his accident he was never able to go nearly so far again. He remained the second-best because of his history, but I could beat him now.
“How do I spell Bren’s name?” I asked Dad Shemmi, and he showed me.
“Bren,” he said, running his finger along the word: seven letters; four he sounded; three he could not.