Read Embassytown for Free Online

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.
    S O 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.
    What could I tell him? Protected by the everyday-field, that first time the Wasp splashed through and immersed it wasn’t even as if I had immer against my skin. Truth was you could say I’d felt more directly connected to the immer as a trainee in Embassytown, when I’d socketed to a