Read Online Embassytown by China Miéville - Free Book Online

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.
    “H OW 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