Several Ambassadors—RanDolph, MagDa, EdGar, I saw—emerged from the dark, constables and Staff around them. They shouted greetings, but the Hosts didn’t pause or acknowledge them.
The Ambassadors said, “
!” Stop. Wait. Stop.
Friends, they shouted, tell us what we can do, why are you here? They retreated at the head of the Ariekene crowd, ignored. Someone had turned on the light of a church, as if it were Utuday, and its beam rotated overhead. The Hosts began to speak, to shout, each in their two voices. A cacophony at first, a mix of speech and sounds I think weren’t speech, and out of that came a chant. Several words I didn’t know, and one I did.
“
... ... ...”
THE ARIEKEI spread out before the black stone steps of the Embassy. I walked among them. The Hosts let me in, moving to accommodate me, glancing with eye-corals. Their spiky fibrous limbs were a thicket, their unbending flanks like polished plastic. My littleness was hidden, and unobserved I watched the Ambassadors panicking. “,” the Hosts kept saying. The people of Embassytown were saying it as best they could, too—“EzRa...” An undeliberate chant of the same word in two languages, the name.
JoaQuin and MayBel debated in furious whispers. Behind JasMin and ArnOld and MagDa I saw CalVin. They looked stricken. Staff were bickering too, and the constables around them looked close to panic, their carbines and geistguns dangerously at ready.
A Host stepped forward. “
,” it said: I am 
.
One of those that had greeted EzRa, at the Arrival Ball.
Hello, said. We are here for . Bring . And on. JoaQuin tried to speak, and MayBel, and the Host paid no attention. Others joined in with it, its demand. They came slowly forward, and it was impossible not to have a sense of their bigness, the sway of their shell-hard limbs.
“... we have no choice!” I heard Joa or Quin, and I thought it was to MayBel but saw with shock that it was to Quin or Joa. The Ambassadors unhuddled, and stepping out from among them, coming forth as if in a conjuring trick, was EzRa.
EZ LOOKED anxious; Ra was cardsharp blank. As their colleagues parted for them Ez gave them a look of hatred. At the top of the stairs EzRa looked down at the congregation.
The Ariekei spread the tines of their antlers of eyes wide to take in the two men.
“.”
spoke again. The Language-fluent among us meant what it said was quickly communicated.
EzRa, it said. Talk.
EzRa will speak to us or we will make it speak.
“You can’t do this,” someone from Staff or Ambassadorial ranks shouted, and someone else answered, “What can we do?” EzRa looked at each other and murmured a preparation. Ez sighed; Ra’s face remained set.
Friends, they said. Ez said “curish” and Ra “loah”—friends. There was a snap of Ariekei thoraxes and limbs.
Friends, we thank you for this visit, EzRa said, and the Ariekei reeled, buffeting me. Friends, we thank you for this greeting, EzRa said, and the ecstasy went on.
Ra continued to mutter occasionally but Ez had gone silent, so Language decomposed. The Hosts hubbubbed. Some flailed their giftwings and wrapped themselves within them, some entwined them with others’.
shouted speak and spoke again. They said pleasantries, emptinesses, polite variants of Hello, hello.
The Ariekei concentrated, as if asleep or digesting. Around the plaza I saw hundreds of Embassytowners, and soundless hovering cams.
“You stupid, stupid bastards,” someone said on the Embassy steps. The words were as ignored as the ivy. Everyone was looking at the Hosts. They were coming back from whatever it was that had happened to them.
Good, said one. It wasn’t . Good. It turned. did so too. The Ariekei all turned back the way they had come.
“Wait! Wait!” It was MagDa. “Pharos!” “We have to...” One of them gestured to Ez and Ra: Don’t speak again. MagDa conferred and shouted in Language. We must speak, they said.
Whether out of pity, courtesy, curiosity or whatever, and other leaders, if that’s what they were, of the gathering craned their eye-corals, twisted them backwards, looking behind them. I heard someone say, “Put it down, Officer. Christ, man...”
We have much to discuss, MagDa said. Please join us. May we ask you to enter?
Constables and SecStaff came through the crowd. “Go.” One stood before me. She held a stubby gun. She spoke to me rapidly, the same spiel she was giving everyone. “Please clear the streets. We’re trying to bring this under control. Please.”
Like everyone else, I obeyed my orders slowly. The Ariekei had arrived in strange coherence. Now most of them straggled away at random, leaving their scent and unique marks in the dirt. An urgent-faced boy in a constable’s uniform whispered to me to please fuck off right now, and I sped up a little. The Ambassadors were trying to usher a few Hosts, those which had hesitated, into the Embassy. They didn’t seem to be succeeding.
Part Three
LIKE AS NOT
Formerly, 7
AFTER THE FESTIVAL, Scile disappeared. He wouldn’t answer my buzzes, or did so only with terse comments and promises to return. Wherever he was he might be blanking me, but he had conferred, I suspected, with unlikely people. I was with Valdik and Shanita a day after the festival when Valdik was buzzed; when he’d answered he shut up and glanced at me with wide-open eyes. I had been abruptly sure that Scile was on the line.
After a couple of days my husband came back to our rooms and we had the fight that had been simmering for a long time. As with most such, the specifics are uninteresting and largely beside the point. He was surly, and pissy, and made little quips about how I passed my time, barbs at least as anxious as they were nasty, not that I was in the mood to care about that. I’d had enough of his recent predilection for gnomic pronouncements, and his bad temper.
“Who do you think arranged that trip, Scile?” I shouted. He wouldn’t answer or look at me, and I didn’t put my hand on my hips or gesticulate, I folded my arms and leaned back and stared down my face at him like I had the first time I’d met him. “Some people might think thanks were in order, not days of this sulky shit. What makes you think you can behave like this? Where did you fucking go?”
He made some reference that made it clear he had been with Ambassadors. I stopped at that, halfway through a riposte. What in immer? I remember thinking. Who buggers off to high-level meetings when they’re having a hissy fit?