Embassytown by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

none. I mentioned the Festivals of Lies. Scile was not the only one who wanted to pursue that. “But I thought they couldn’t,” someone said.
    “That’s sort of the point,” I said. “To strive for the impossible.”
    “What’re they like, those festivals?” I laughed and said I’d no clue, had never been to one, of course, had never been into the Host city.
    They began to debate Language among themselves. Wondering how to repay their hospitality in anecdote, I told what had happened to me in the abandoned restaurant. They were attentive all over again. Scile stared with his manic precision. “You were in a simile?” they said.
    “I am a simile,” I said.
    “You’re a story?”
    I was glad to be able to give Scile something. He and his colleagues were more excited at my having been similed than I was.
    S OMETIMES I teased Scile that he only wanted me for my Hosts’ language, or because I’m part of a vocabulary.
    He’d finished the bulk of his research. It was a comparative study of a particular set of phonemes, in several different languages—and not all of one species, or one world, which made little sense to me. “What are you looking for?” I said.
    “Oh, secrets,” he said. “You know. Essences. Inherentnesses.”
    “Bravo on that ugly word. And?”
    “And there aren’t any.”
    “Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”
    “That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”
    “Bravo again.” I toasted him.
    We stayed together in that hotel much longer than either of us had planned, and then I, having no plans and no commission, sought work on the vessel taking him a trade route home. I was experienced and well-referenced, and getting the job wasn’t hard. It was only a short trip, 400 hours or somesuch. When I realised how bad was Scile’s reaction to immersion I was very touched that he chose not to travel in sopor that first time together. It was a pointless gesture—he endured my shifts in lonely nausea, and despite meds could hardly even speak to me when I was off-duty. But even irritated at his condition, I was touched.
    From what I gathered, it wouldn’t have taken very much for him to tidy up his last few chapters, the charts, sound files and trids. But Scile suddenly announced to me that he was not going to hand in his thesis.
    “You’ve done all that work and you won’t jump the last hoop?” I said.
    “Sod it,” he said, flamboyantly unconcerned. He made me laugh. “The revolution stalled!”
    “My poor failed radical.”
    “Yeah. Well. I was bored.”
    “But, hold on,” I tried to say, more or less, “but are you serious? Surely it would be worth—”
    “It’s done, it’s old news, forget it. I have other research projects anyway, simile. What are you like ?” He bowed at that bad joke, clicked his fingers and moved us, thematically, on. He kept asking about Embassytown. His intensity was exciting, but he diluted it with enough self-mockery that I believed his sometimes obsessive demeanour was partly performance.
    We didn’t stay long in his parochial university town. He said he’d follow me and pester me until I gave in and took him I-knew-where. I didn’t believe any of this, but when I got my next commission he took transit with me, as a passenger.
    Once on that trip, when we were in shallow, calm immer, I brought Scile out of sopor to see a school of the immer predators we call hai. I’ve spoken to captains and scientists who don’t believe them to be anything like life, only aggregates of immer, their attacks and jackknife precision just the jostles of an immer chaos in which our manchmal brains can’t learn to see the deep random. Myself, I’ve always thought them monsters. Scile, fortified with drugs, and I watched our assertion-charges shake the immer and send the hai darting.
    When we emerged wherever we emerged, wherever our vessel had delivery or pickup, Scile would