Embassytown Read Online Free PDF

Not many of us scored particularly highly in these latter, in the various flairs prized elsewhere, in the out. In Embassytown we started from the wrong stock, we were told: we had the wrong mutagens, the wrong equipment, a lack of aspiration. Many children didn’t even sit the more arcane exams, but I was encouraged to. Which I suppose means my teachers and shiftparents had seen something in me.
    I did perfectly fine in most things; well in rhetoric and some performative elements of literature, which pleased me, and in readings of poetry. But what I stood out in, it transpired, without knowing what it was I was doing, were certain activities the purposes of which I couldn’t divine. I stared at a query-screen of bizarre plasmings. I had to react to them in various ways. It took about an hour and it was well designed, like a game, so I wasn’t bored. I proceeded to other tasks, none testing knowledge, but reactions, intuitions, inner-ear control, nervousness. What they gauged was potential skill at immersing.
    The woman who ran the sessions, young and chic in smart clothes borrowed, bartered or begged from one of the Bremeni staff, in fashion in the out, went over my results with me, and told me what they meant. I could see she was not unimpressed. She stressed to me, not cruelly but to avoid any later upset, that this concluded nothing and was just stage one of many. But I knew as she explained this that I would become an immerser, and I did. I’d only started to feel the smallness of Embassytown by then, to grumble in claustrophobia, but with her readings came impatience.
    I finagled, when I was old enough, invitations to Arrival Balls, and hobnobbed with women and men from the out. I enjoyed and envied the seeming insouciance with which they mentioned countries on other planets.
    It was only kilohours or years later that I really understood how not-inevitable my trajectory had been. That many students with more aptitude than me hadn’t succeeded; that I truly might have failed to leave. My story was the cliche´, but theirs was by far the more common, the more true. That contingency had made me feel sick, then, as if I might fail still, even though I was out.
    Even people who’ve never immersed think they know— more or less, they might grant—what the immer is. They don’t. I had this argument once with Scile. It was the second conversation we ever had (the first was about language). He started in with his opinions, and I told him I wasn’t interested in hearing what the landstuck might think about immer. We lay in bed and he teased me as I went on about his ignorance.
    “What are you talking about?” he said. “You don’t even believe what you’re saying; you’re too smart for this. You’re just spouting immerser bullshit. I could do this stuff in my sleep. ‘No one understands it like us, not the scientists, not the politicians, not the bloody public!’ It’s your favourite story, this. Keeps everyone out.”
    He made me laugh with his impression. Still, I told him, still: the immer was indescribable. But he wouldn’t let me have that either. “You’re fooling no one with this stuff. You think I haven’t listened to how you talk? I know, I know, you’re not one for the gab, you’re just a floaker, blah blah. As if you don’t read your poetry, as if you take language for granted.” He shook his head. “Anyway, you’ll do me out of a job with talk like that. ‘It’s beyond words ,’ indeed. There’s no such thing.”
    I put my hand over his mouth. That was just how it was, I told him. “Now, granted,” he continued through my fingers, performing the same teacherly tone, now muffled, “words can’t actually be referents, that I grant you, there’s the tragedy of language, but our asymptotic efforts at deploying them aren’t nothing, either.” Hush up, you, I told him. It’s all true, I said, I say it like a Host. “Well then,” he said, “I withdraw, in the face of