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 truth.”
I’d studied the immer a long time, but my first moment of immersion had been as impossible to describe as I insisted. With the handful of other carta-passed new crew and emigrants, and Bremeni Embassy Staff who’d finished their commissions, I’d come by ketch to my vessel. My first commission was with the Wasp of Kolkata. It was quasi-autonomous, a cityship, immersing under the flag of itself, subcontracted by Dagostin for this run. I remember I stood with all the other greenhorns in the crow’s-nest, Arieka a wall across the sky through which we moved, with beautiful care, toward our immersion point. Somewhere beneath the world’s static-seeming cloud was Embassytown.
The steersperson took us close to Wreck. It was hard to see. It looked at first like lines drawn across space, then was briefly, shabbily corporeal. It ebbed back and forth in solidity. It was many hundreds of metres across. It rotated, all its extrusions moving, each on its own schedule, its coagulated-teardrops-and-girder- filigree shape spinning complexly.
Wreck’s architecture was roughly similar to Wasp’s, but it was antiquated, and it seemed many times our dimensions. It was like an original of which we were a scale model, until abruptly it altered its planes and became small or far off. Occasionally it wasn’t there, and sometimes only just.
Officers, augmens glimmering under their skins, reminded us first-timers what it was we were about to do, of the dangers of the immer. This, Wreck, showed that and why Arieka was an outpost, so hard to reach, so underdeveloped, satelliteless after that first catastrophe.
I would have been professional. Yes I was about to immerse for the first time, but I would have done anything I was ordered and I think I’d have done it well. But the officers remembered what it was like to be a rookie, and they had us, the handful of new immersers, at a viewing place. Where we could react as we had to, the skills we’d practised never a guarantee that the first time wouldn’t sicken you. Where we could take a moment with our awe and experience it however we experienced it. There are currents and storm fronts in the immer. There are in the immer stretches it takes tremendous skill and time to cross. Those were among the techniques I now knew, along with the somatic control, the mantric thoughtfulness and instrumentalised matter-offactness that made me an immerser, allowed immersers to stay conscious and intentional when we immersed.
On a map, it’s not so many billions of kilometres from Dagostin or other hubs. But those Euclidian star charts are used only by cosmologists, by some exoterres whose physics we can’t work, by religious nomads adrift at excruciating sublux pace. I was scandalised to first see them—maps were discouraged on Embassytown—and anyway such charts are irrelevant to travellers like me.
Look instead at a map of the immer. Such a big and tidal quiddity. Pull it up, rotate it, check its projections. Examine that light phantom every way you can, and even allowing that it’s a flat or trid rendering of a topos which rebels against our accounting, the situation is visibly different.
The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where we live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on. Here in the everyday, in light-decades and petametres, Dagostin is vastly more distant from Tarsk and Hodgson’s than from Arieka. But in the immer, Dagostin to Tarsk is a few hundred hours on a prevailing wind; Hodgson’s is in the centre of sedate and crowded deeps; and Arieka is very far from anything.
It’s beyond a convulsion where violent streams of immer roll against each other, where there are shallows, dangerous juts and matterbanks of everyday space in the always. It sits alone at the edge of known immer, so far as the immer can be known. Without expertise and bravery, and the skill of the immersers, no one could get to my world.
The stringency of the final exams I’d sat makes sense when you see those charts. Raw aptitude was hardly enough. Certainly there were politics of exclusion, too: of course Bremen wanted to keep careful control of us Embassytowners; but only the most skilled crew could safely come to Arieka in any case, or could leave it. Some of us were socketed to link us to ship routines, and immerware and augmens helped; but none of that was enough to make an immerser.
The way the officers explained it made it seem as if the ruins of the Pionier, which I had to stop calling Wreck now it was no longer a star to me but a coffin for colleagues, were a warning against carelessness. As a parable that was unfair. The Pionier had not been so horribly beached between states by officers or crew underestimating the immer: it was precisely care and respectful exploration that had destroyed it. Like other vessels across various tracta cognita in the early hours of it all, it had been lured. By what it had thought a message, an invitation.
When immernauts first breached the meniscus of everyday space, among the many phenomena that had astounded them was the fact that, even on their crude instruments, they had received signals, from somewhere in the ur-space. Regular and resonant, clear evidence of sentience. They had tried to go to the sources. For a long time they’d thought it was lack of skill, neophyte immersion, that kept bringing their ships to disaster on those searches. Again and again they wrecked, bursting ruinously half-out of the immer into the corporeal manchmal.
The Pionier was a casualty of that time, before explorers had understood that the pulses were put out by lighthouses. They were not invitations. What the ships had striven toward were warnings to stay away.
SO THERE ARE lighthouses throughout the immer. Not every dangerous zone is marked by the beacons, but many are. They are, it seems, at least as old as this universe, which isn’t the first there’s been. The prayer so often muttered before immersion is one of thanks to those unknown who placed them. Gracious Pharotekton watch over us now.
I didn’t see the Ariekene Pharos that first time out, but thousands of hours later. To be precise I’ve never seen it, of course, nor could I; that would require light and reflection and other physics that are meaningless there. But I’ve seen representations, rendered by ships’ windows.
The ’ware in those portholes depicts the immer and everything in it in terms useful to crew. I’ve seen pharoes like complex clots, like crosshatching, contoured and shaped into information. When I returned to Embassytown, the captain, in what I think was a gift to me, had the screens run tropeware: as we approached gnarls of immer into the dangerous buffetings that surround Arieka, I saw a beam in the fractal black, a pointing arm of light as a lamp seemed to turn. And when the pharos came into view, floating in the middle of the unplace, it was a brick lighthouse topped with bronze and glass.
I TOLD HIM about these things when I met him, and Scile, who would later be my husband, wanted me to describe my first immersion. He’d been through immer, of course—he wasn’t indigene to the world on which we slept together—but as a passenger of modest income and no particular immunities, he’d remained in sopor. Though he had, he told me, once paid to be woken a little early, so he could experience immersion. (I’d heard of people doing that. A crew shouldn’t allow it, and surely only would in shallow shallows.) Scile had been violently immersick.