Embassytown

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn’t expecting any of them to return.

It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition so not war at all really but something more pathological.

I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.

There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex.

“And there aren’t any.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable.