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Linguists.
    I was drunk in the bar with a bunch of temporary stopover friends, all now thoroughly hazy memories. We were being obnoxious. I went from half-heartedly flirting with a bartender to mocking a table of scholars from CHEL, no less drunk or boisterous than we. We’d eavesdropped on them, then told them with immerser swagger that they didn’t know anything about life or even languages in the out, and so on.
    “Go on then, ask me something,” I said to Scile. That was the first thing I ever said to him. I know exactly how I’d have looked: leaning back in my high chair, turned so resting my back against the bar top, my head back so I could look down at him. I was surely pointing at him with both hands and smiling a bit pinch-mouthed so as to not yet give him any satisfaction. Scile was the least gone at his table, and he was refereeing the teasing on both sides. “I know all about weird languages,” I told him. “More than any of you buggers. I’m from Embassytown .”
    When he believed me, I’ve never seen a man so astonished, so delighted. He didn’t stop playing but he looked at me very differently, the more when he discovered none of my companions were my compatriots. I was the only Embassytowner, and Scile loved it.
    It wasn’t just his attention I liked: I was pleased with how this compact, tough-looking guy fenced with me, and kept everyone raucously amused while asking questions with actual content. We stumbled off after a while and spent a night and a day trying to enjoy sex together, sleeping, trying again, several times, with good-humoured lack of success. After that over breakfast he badgered and blandished and begged me; and I, pretending disdain and having a lovely time, acquiesced, and let him take me, tired but, as I teased him, not sore enough, to the conference.
    He presented me to his colleagues. The CHEL was for the Terre study of all exot languages, but it was those generally considered most strange that fascinated its members. I saw slapdash temporary trids advertising sessions on cross-cultural chromatophore signalling, on touch communication among the unseeing Burdhan, and on me.
    “I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?” said one young woman to me, apropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.”
    I noticed my own trid in the background. Embassytowner guest! On life among the Ariekei. “That’s wrong,” I told the conference organisers, “they’re Hosts.” But they told me: “Only to you.”
    Scile’s colleagues were eager to talk to me: no one there had met Embassytowners before. Nor Hosts, of course.
    “They’re still quarantined,” I told them, “but in any case they’ve never asked about coming out. We don’t even know if they could take immersion.”
    I was willing to be a curio but I disappointed them. I’d warned Scile I would. The discussion became vague and sociological when they realised that I wouldn’t be able to tell them almost anything about Language.
    “I hardly understand any,” I said. “We only learn a tiny bit, except Staff and Ambassadors.”
    One participant pulled up some recordings of Hosts speaking, and ran through some vocabulary. I was pleased to be able to nuance a couple of the definitions, but honestly there were at least two people in the room who understood Language better than I did.
    Instead I told them stories of life in the outpost. They didn’t know about the aeoli, the air-sculpting that kept a breathable dome over Embassytown. A few had seen some bits of exported biorigging, but I could talk them through the out-of-date trids they had of the vaster infrastructure, the herds of houses, timelapse of a young bridge maturing from its pontoon-cell to link city regions for no reasons I could give. Scile asked me about religion, and I told him that so far as I knew the Hosts had