Embassytown Read Online Free PDF Page A

myself included. I was impatient for it to finish; I felt nothing growing, no special connection between me and the Hosts. I was only watching. While we performed the actions that were necessary, that would allow them to speak their analogy, I thought of Bren. He could of course no longer speak to the Hosts. What was happening had been organised by the Embassy, and I supposed Bren’s erstwhile colleagues, the Ambassadors, must have been glad for him to help organise it. I wonder if they were giving him something to do.
    After I was done, in the youthmall, my friends demanded all details. We were roughnecks like most Embassytowner children are. “You were with the Hosts ? That’s import , Avvy! Swear? Say it like a Host?”
    “Say it like a Host,” I said, appropriately solemn for the oath.
    “No way . What did they do ?” I showed my bruises. I both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Eventually I enjoyed the telling and embellishing of it. It gave me status for days.
    Other consequences were more important. Two days later, Dad Renshaw escorted me to Bren’s house. It was the first time I’d been there since Yohn’s accident. Bren smiled and welcomed me, and there within I met my first Ambassadors.
    Their clothes were the most beautiful I’d seen. Their links glinted, the lights on them stuttering in time to the fields they generated. I was cowed. There were three of them, and the room was crowded. The more so as, behind them, moving side to side, whispering to Bren or one or other Ambassador, was an autom, computer in segmented body, the woman’s face it gave itself animated as it spoke. I could see the Ambassadors trying to be warm to me, a child, as Bren had tried, without having any practise at it.
    An older woman said, “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” in an amazing, grand voice. “Come in. Sit. We wanted to thank you. We think you should hear how you’ve been canonised.”
    The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time. “It’ll be shortened with use,” Bren told me. “Soon they’ll be saying you’re a girl ate what was given her .”
    “What does it mean, sirs, ma’ams?”
    They shook their heads, they moued. “It’s not really important, Avice,” one of them said. She whispered to the computer and I saw the created face nod. “And it wouldn’t be accurate anyway.” I asked again with another formulation, but they would say nothing more about it. They kept congratulating me on being in Language.
    Twice during the rest of my adolescence I heard myself, my simile, spoken: once by an Ambassador, once by a Host. Years, thousands of hours after I acted it, I finally had it sort-of explained to me. It was a crude rendering, of course, but it is I think more or less an expression intended to invoke surprise and irony, a kind of resentful fatalism.
    I didn’t speak to Bren again the whole rest of my childhood and youth, but I found out he visited my shiftparents at least one other time. I’m sure it was my help with the simile, and Bren’s vague patronage, that helped get me past the exam board. I worked hard but was never an intellectual. I had what was needed for immersion, but no more than several others did, and less than some who didn’t pass. Very few cartas were granted, to civilians, or those of us with the aptitudes to traverse the immer out of sopor. There was no obvious reason that a few months later, after those tests, even with my facilities acknowledged, I should have been given, as I was, rights to de-world, into the out.

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    E ACH SCHOOL YEAR , the second monthling of December was given over to assessments. Most investigated what we’d learnt from our lessons; a few others checked more recherche´ abilities.