Embassytown by China Miéville Read Free Book Online Page A

register at local libraries, picking at old research and starting his new project. Where there were sights we saw them. We shared beds but fairly quickly we gave up on sex.
    He learnt languages wherever we were, with his ferocious concentration, slang if he already knew the formal vocabulary. I’d travelled far more than he had, but I spoke and read only Anglo-Ubiq. I was pleased by his company, often amused, always interested. I tested him, taking jobs that hauled us through immer for hundreds of hours at a time, nothing cruelly long but long enough. He finally passed, according to my unclear emotional accounting, when I realised that I wasn’t only watching to see if he’d stay, but was hoping he wouldn’t leave.
    We were married on Dagostin, in Bremen, in Charo City, to where I’d sent my childish letters. I told myself, and it was true, that it was important for me to emerge in my capital port sometimes. Even at the dragged-out pace of interworld letterexchanges, Scile had corresponded with local researchers; and I, never a loner, had contacts and the quick intense friendships that come and go among immersers; so we knew we’d have a reasonable turnout. There in my national capital, which most Embassytowners never saw, I could register with the union, download savings into my main account, amass news of Bremen jurisdiction. The flat I owned was in an unfashionable but pleasant part of the city. Around my house I rarely saw anyone accoutremented with the silly luxury tech imported from Embassytown.
    Being married under local law would make it easier for Scile to visit any of Bremen’s provinces or holdings. I responded for a long time to his pestering fascination, never the joke he at first pretended, with the information that I’d no intention of returning to Embassytown. But I think by the time we married I was ready to give him the gift of taking him to my first home.
    I T WASN’T wholly straightforward: Bremen controlled entry to some of its territories almost as carefully as it did egress. We were intending to disembark there, so I wasn’t just signing up on a merchant run. At Transit House, perplexed officials sent me up a chain of authority. I’d expected that but I was mildly surprised at how high, if my reading of office furniture as evidence wasn’t on the fritz, the buck-passing went.
    “You want to go back to Embassytown?” a woman who must presumably have been only a rung or two down from the boss said. “You have to realise that’s . . . unusual.”
    “So everyone keeps telling me.”
    “You miss home?”
    “Hardly,” I told her. “The things we do for love.” I sighed theatrically but she didn’t want to play. “It’s not as if I relish the idea of being stuck so far from the hub.” She met my look and did not respond.
    She asked me what I planned to do on Arieka, in Embassytown. I told her the truth—to floak, I said. That didn’t amuse her either. To whom would I be reporting on arrival? I told her no one—I was no one’s subordinate there, I was a civilian. She reminded me that Embassytown was a Bremen port. Where had I been since entering the out? Everywhere, she stressed, and who could remember that? I had to go through my cartas and all my old dat-swipes, though she must have known that at plenty of places such formalities of arrival were slapdash. She read my list, including terminuses and brief stops I didn’t remember at all. She asked me questions about the local politics of one or two at which I could only smile, so ill-equipped was I to answer; and she stared at me as I burbled.
    I wasn’t sure what she suspected me of. Ultimately, as a carta-carrying Embassytown native immerser, crewing and vouching for my fiancé, it only took tenacity to get him the rights to entry, and me to reentry. Scile had been preparing for his work there, reading, listening to recordings, watching what few trids and vids there are. He’d even decided on what the title of his book would