"Am I going to have to separate you two girls?" It was Ez again. He made me start. He'd extricated himself from JoaQuin's anxious stewarding. He offered me a drink. He flexed something inside himself, and his augmens glimmered, changing the colour of his vague halo. I realised that with the help of his innard tech he might have been listening to us. I focused on him and tried not to look for Scile. Ez was shorter than me, and muscular. His hair was cut close.

"Ez, this is Ehrsul," I said. To my astonishment he looked at her, said nothing and looked back at me. The rudeness made me gasp.

"Having a good time?" he said to me. I watched tiny lights move across his corneas. Ehrsul was moving away. I was going to go with her and blank him haughtily, but behind his back she flashed a quick display: Stay Stay, learn learn.

"You're going to have to do a lot better than that," I said to him quietly.

"What?" He was startled. "What? Your-"

"She's not mine," I said. He stared at me.

"The autom? I apologise. I'm sorry."

"It isn't me you owe that to." He inclined his head.

"What are you monitoring?" I said to him after a silence. "I can see your displays."

"It's just habit. Temperature, air impurities, ambient noise. Mostly pointless. A few other things: I worked for years in situations that . . . well, I got used to checking for trid, cameras, ears, that sort of thing." I raised an eyebrow. "And I tend to run translationware as a default."

"No!" I said. "How exciting. Now, tell me the truth. Got 'ware in your ears? Are you running a soundtrack?"

He laughed. "No," he said. "I grew out of that. I haven't done that for . . . a good week or two."

"Why are you running translation programs? You . . ." I put my arm on his and looked suddenly exaggeratedly stricken. "You do speak do speak Language, don't you? Oh dear, there's been a terrible misunderstanding." Language, don't you? Oh dear, there's been a terrible misunderstanding."

He laughed again. "Oh, I can get by get by in Language, that's not it." More seriously: "But I don't speak any of the Shur'asi or Kedis dialects, or . . ." in Language, that's not it." More seriously: "But I don't speak any of the Shur'asi or Kedis dialects, or . . ."

"Oh, you won't find exots here tonight. Apart from Mine Host, obviously." I was surprised he didn't know this. Emba.s.sytown was a Bremen colony, under Bremen laws that restricted our few exots to guestworker status.

"What about you?" he said. "I don't see augmens. So you speak Language?"

For a moment I really didn't understand what he meant. "No. I let my sockets close up. I had a few bits and pieces once. They can be useful for immersion. And also," I said, "yes, you know, I can see how a bit to help make sense of what the Hosts say is . . . useful. But I've seen them, they're too . . . It's intrusive."

"That's sort of the point," he said.

"Right, and I can put up with that if it's any use, but Language is beyond it," I said. "Get them, when you hear a Host speak you get a whole eyeful or earful of nonsense. h.e.l.lo slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent h.e.l.lo slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent blah blah." I raised an eyebrow. "It was pointless." blah blah." I raised an eyebrow. "It was pointless."

Ez watched me. He knew I was lying. He must have known that the notion of using translationware for Language would be, to an Emba.s.sytowner, profoundly inappropriate. Not illegal, but an appalling impertinence. I didn't even know quite why I had said all that.

"I've heard of you," he said. I waited. If EzRa were even slightly good at their job they'd have prepared something personal to say to most of the people they might meet, tonight. What Ez said next, though, astonished me. "Ra reminded me where we'd heard your name. You're in a simile, aren't you? And I gather you've been to the city? Outside Emba.s.sytown." Someone brushed past him. He didn't stop looking at me.

"Yes," I said. "I've been there."

"I'm sorry, I think I've . . . Sorry if I've . . . It's not my business."

"No, it's just, I'm surprised."

"Of course I've heard of you. We do our research, you know. There's not many Emba.s.sytowners who've done what you've done."

I didn't say anything. I felt I don't know what, to hear that I featured in the Bremen reports on Emba.s.sytown. I inclined a gla.s.s at Ez, said some goodbye, and went to find Ehrsul manoeuvring her cha.s.sis through the crowd.

"SO WHAT'S THEIR STORY?" I said. Ehrsul gave her display shoulders a shrug.

"Ez is a charmer, isn't he?" she said. "Ra seems better but he's shy."

"Anything online?" She'd probably been trying to hack into data floating around.

"Not much," she said. "It's some kind of coup for Wyatt that they're here. He's crowing so hard hens everywhere are getting randy. That's why the Staff are so tense. I decrypted the tail end of something . . . I'm pretty sure Staff made EzRa sit a test sit a test. I suppose, you know, it's the first time in Christ-knows-how-long there's been an Amba.s.sador from the out, and they queried whether anyone who didn't grow up speaking Language could possibly get the nuances. They must resent this appointment."

"They're all technically appointees too, don't forget," I said. It was something that rankled with Staff: on his arrival, Wyatt, like every attache, had had to formally license all the Amba.s.sadors to speak for Bremen. "Anyway, they can speak Language? EzRa?" all technically appointees too, don't forget," I said. It was something that rankled with Staff: on his arrival, Wyatt, like every attache, had had to formally license all the Amba.s.sadors to speak for Bremen. "Anyway, they can speak Language? EzRa?"

She shrugged again. "Wouldn't be here if they'd failed," she said.

Something happened in the room. A feeling, a moment when, conviviality notwithstanding, it was suddenly imperative to focus. It was like that every time the Hosts came into a room, as they had just come into Diplomacy Hall.

THE PARTYGOERS tried not to be rude-as if it were possible for us to be rude to them, as if the Hosts considered politesse on axes that would make any sense to us. Nonetheless, most of us kept up our chitchat and did not ogle. tried not to be rude-as if it were possible for us to be rude to them, as if the Hosts considered politesse on axes that would make any sense to us. Nonetheless, most of us kept up our chitchat and did not ogle.

An exception was the crew, who stared frankly at the Ariekei they had never seen before. Across the room I saw my helmsman and I saw the expression on his face. Once I had heard a theory. It was an attempt to make sense of the fact that no matter how travelled people are, no matter how cosmopolitan, how biotically miscegenated their homes, they can't be insouciant at the first sight of any exot race. The theory is that we're hardwired with the Terre biome, that every glimpse of anything not descended from that original backwater home, our bodies know we should not ever see.

Formerly, 2

I WASN'T SURE WASN'T SURE how Emba.s.sytown would be for Scile. He can't have been the first settler from the out to be brought back by a returnee, but I'd never known others. how Emba.s.sytown would be for Scile. He can't have been the first settler from the out to be brought back by a returnee, but I'd never known others.

I'd spent a long time on ships in the immer, or in ports on planets with diurnal durations inimical to humanity's. My return was the first time for thousands of hours that I'd been able to dispense with circadian implants and settle into actual solar rhythms. Scile and I acclimatised to the nineteen-hour Ariekene days by traditional means, spending most of our time outside.

"I warned you," I told him. "It's a tiny place."

Now I remember those days with real pleasure. Still. I kept telling Scile about my sacrifice in returning to that little place-to come back from the out! to funnel back down!-but I was happier than I'd imagined I would be when I emerged from the sealed train in the aeolian zone, and breathed Emba.s.sytown smells. It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

My early days back in Emba.s.sytown, with savings and an outsider, immerser chic. I swaggered. I was welcomed back in delight by those who'd known me, who had never thought to see me again, who'd doubted the news of my return in the preceding miab.

I wasn't rich by any real standard, but my savings were in Bremen Eumarks. This was the foundation currency of Emba.s.sytown, of course, but one rarely seen: with thirty or more kilohours between visits from the metropole-more than an Emba.s.sytown year-our little economy was self-standing. In deference to the Eumark, like all Bremen's colonies, our currency was called the Ersatz. All those Ersatzes were incommensurable, each its own and worthless beyond its polity's bounds. That portion of my account I'd downloaded and had with me, a few months' life in Bremen, was enough for me to live in Emba.s.sytown until the next relief, perhaps even the one after that. I don't even think people much resented it-I'd earned my money in the out. I told people that what I was doing with it now was floaking. That was inaccurate-there being no commands for me to get away with minimally obeying, I was simply not working-but they were delighted with the immer slang. They seemed to consider my idleness my right.

Those of my shiftparents still working had a party for me, and I was a bit startled by how happy it made me to go back, to be in the nursery, to kiss and hug and shout and re-greet these kind men and women, some now disconcertingly old, some seeming unchanged. "I told you you'd come back!" Dad Shemmi kept saying as I danced with him. "I told you!" They unwrapped the Bremen gewgaws I'd brought them. "This is too much, my love!" Mum Quiller said of some bracelet with aesthetic augmens. The dads and mums were shyly welcoming to my husband. He stood with a game smile all evening in the streamer-decorated hall while I got drunk, and he answered the same questions about himself repeatedly.

A few of those I'd grown up with crossed paths with me again, like Simmon. Though I slightly expected to, I never saw Yohn. I made other friends, from unfamiliar strata. I was invited to Staff parties. Though these had not been my circles before I left, there hadn't been room enough in little Emba.s.sytown for me, an immerser-in-training, not at least to get near them. People, Staff, Amba.s.sadors I'd known by sight and reputation in those days were abruptly acquaintances, and more. Some that I had expected to meet, however, were gone.

"Where's Oaten?" I asked about a man who had mouthpieced often for Staff on our Emba.s.sytown trid. "Where's Dad Renshaw?" "Where are GaeNor?" about that elderly Amba.s.sador, one of whom, when recruiting me to Language, had said "Avice Benner Cho, is it?" with a cadence so splendidly stilted it had become part of my internal idiolect, so whenever I introduced myself by my full name, a little is it? is it? trailed the words in my head, in her voice. "Where're DalTon?" I said, of the notorious Amba.s.sador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learnt it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood. trailed the words in my head, in her voice. "Where're DalTon?" I said, of the notorious Amba.s.sador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learnt it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood.

Oaten had retired on his modest local riches. Renshaw had died. Young. I was sad at that. GaeNor had died, one then almost immediately the other, of linkshock and loss. DalTon, I gathered-after continuing dissidence and some hinted-at final impatience with their colleagues, some ostentatiously opaque Staff internecine strife-had disappeared or been disappeared. Intrigued, I prodded at that, but got nothing more. I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions about Amba.s.sadors directly, rather improperly, but I could gauge how far to push it and when not to.

I have no doubt that this was fallacious, but it felt to me as if I was quicker, better at sarcasm, wittier, because of my time in the out. People were kind to Scile and fascinated by him. He was fascinated back. He'd been on several worlds but emerged into Emba.s.sytown as if through a door in a wall. He explored. Our status wasn't a secret. Nonex marriages like ours were known of but rare in Emba.s.sytown, which made us a t.i.tillation. We were spending most of our time together, still, but gradually less, as he expanded his own circles.

"Careful," I told Scile, after one party where a man called Ramir had flirted with him, using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics. I'd never known Scile show interest in men, but still. h.o.m.os.e.x was a little bit illegal, I told him. Except for Amba.s.sadors.

"What about that woman, Damier?" he said.

"She's Staff," I said. "Anyway it's only a little bit illegal."

"How quaint," he said.

"Oh yes, it's just darling."

"So do they know you were once married to a woman?"

"I've been to the out, my love," I said. "I can do anything I b.l.o.o.d.y want."

I showed him where I'd played. We went to galleries and exhibitions of trid. Scile was fascinated by the tramp automa of Emba.s.sytown, melancholy-seeming mendicant machines. "Do they ever go into the city?" he said. They did, but even could he corner them their artminds were too feeble to describe it to him.

It was Language that he was there for, of course, but he wasn't blinkered to other strangenesses. Ariekene biorigging astonished him. At the houses of friends, he would stare like an appraiser at their quasi-living artefacts, architectural filigrees, their occasional medical tweak, prostheses and similar. With me, he would stand at the edge of the aeolian breath, on balconies and viewbridges in Emba.s.sytown, watching the herds of power plants and factories graze. Yes, he was staring into the city at where Language was, but he was looking at the city itself as well. Once, he waved like a boy, and though the far-off things can't have seen us, it seemed as if one station twitched its antennae in response.

Near the heart of Emba.s.sytown was the site of the first archive. The field of rubble could have been cleared but it had been left as it was for lifetimes, since it fell: over one and a half megahours, more than half a local century. Our early town-planners must have thought that humans need ruins. Children still came, as we had, sometimes, and the overgrown dereliction was busy with Terre animals and those local lives that could tolerate the air we breathed. They, too, Scile spent a long time watching.

"What's that?" A red simian thing with a dog's head, shinning up a pipe.

"A fox, it's called," I said.

"Is it an altered?"

"I don't know. Way back, if so."

"What's that?"

"A jackdaw." "A stickleback-cat." "A dog." "Some indigene, I don't know its name."

"That's not what we call a dog where I come from," he'd say, or "Jack, daw," carefully repeating names. It was unfamiliar indigenous Ariekene things that interested him most.

Once we spent hours in a very hot sun. We sat talking about things, then not talking, holding hands long enough and still enough that the animals and abflora forgot we were alive and treated us as landscape. Two creatures each the size of my forearm wrestled in the gra.s.s. "Look," I said, quietly. "Shh." Some way from the animals a clumsy little biped was edging away, its rear a fringe of blood.

"It's injured," Scile said.

"Not exactly." Like every Emba.s.sytowner child, I knew what this was. "Look," I said. "That's the hunter." A ferocious little altbrock, its black-and-white fur spattered. "What it's fighting's called a trunc. As is that thing running away. I know they look like different animals. You see how the tail end of that one over there's all ragged? And the head of the one getting into it with the altbrock's torn, too? That's the brainhalf and that's the meathalf of the same animal. They tear apart when the trunc's attacked: the meathalf holds off any predators while the brain end runs off looking for a last chance to mate."

"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 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." 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Amba.s.sadors, 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 p.u.b.erty, escorted by teachers, security, two adult Amba.s.sadors, 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 embarra.s.sment and the amus.e.m.e.nt of other diners, Scile stood to watch them go, still chewing the dense Emba.s.sytown 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-Amba.s.sadors, 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 p.r.i.c.kle 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 that much, to come here if it was purgatory for you." He smiled again. "Why would you mind it, anyway?" 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 s.e.x-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 hourgla.s.s 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 Emba.s.sytown'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 s.h.e.m.a.l.e 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 Amba.s.sadors 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 Amba.s.sadors' job to understand understand the Hosts," I said. 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.