China Miéville

by Embassytown

  It was an old part of Embassytown. There were plaster griffins at the edges of the eaves. Not far away, our architecture was overcome, the ivy that tugged it smothered by fronds of fleshmatter and Ariekene business. The biorigging probed plastone and brick in a rill of skin.

  The Hosts filled the road, jostling each other with odd motion. A single Host had grace but en masse they were a herd, in slow stampede. I’d never seen so many. I could hear the slide of their armour, the tap-tapping of thousands of their feet. Zelles scuttled.

  As they came into the human reach the streetlamps and the colours of our displays made them a psychedelia. Rumpled women and men in nightclothes lined the walkways, so the Ariekei entered Embassytown with us either side as if to greet them, as if this were a parade. Cameras darted overhead, little busybodies.

  There were Hosts in all their sentient stages, from the newly conscious to those about to slip into mindlessness. Hundreds of fanwings fluttered, and I wanted to be above looking down at that, a camouflage of shuddering colours. They passed me; I followed them.

  Many Terre watching could understand Language, but of course none of us could speak it. Some couldn’t restrain asking in Anglo-Ubiq: “What are you doing?” “Where are you going?” We trailed the Ariekei north, climbing the incline toward the Embassy, on the roadways and verges, crabgrass and our debris. Constables had arrived. They waved their arms as if moving us on, as if they were protecting our aging walls. They said things that had no meaning at all: “Come on now!” or “Move away there!”

  Human children had come to stare. I saw them play Ambassador, dueting nonsense noises and nodding wisely as if the Ariekei were responding. The Hosts took us a coiled route, amassing onlookers, cats and altfoxes bolting before the aliens. We came past the ruins.

  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 the 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 for instants 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 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 backward, 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 who’d 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 abruptly 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?

  “Listen,” Scile said. I could see him deciding something, trying hard to calm our altercation. “Listen, will you please listen.” He waved a paper. “I know what it’s trying to do. Surl Tesh-echer. It practices, and it preaches, to its coterie. This is what it’s been saying.” He didn’t say how he’d got the transcript. “You, similes …” he said. “The Hosts aren’t like us, okay: it’s not exactly most of us who’d get excited to meet a … an adjectival phrase or a past participle or whatever. But it’s no surprise some of them would want to meet a simile. You help them think. Someone with reverence for language would love that.

  “But who’d want to lie? A punk, is who. Avice, listen. There are fans, and there are liars. And only Surl Tesh-echer and its friends are both.” He smoothed out the paper. “Are you ready to listen to me? You think I’ve just been sitting in a cupboard for the good of my health? This is what it’s been saying.”

  “ ‘Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.’ ” He glanced at me. “ ‘We didn’t walk on our wings. We didn’t walk. We didn’t swallow earth. We didn’t swallow.’ ” Scile was reading nervously, quickly.

  “ ‘There’s a Terre who swims with fishes, one who wore no clothes, one who ate what was given her, one who walks backward. There’s a rock that was broken and cemented together. I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion. I’m like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I wasn’t not like the rock that was broken and cemented together.

  “ ‘I do what I always do, I’m like the Terre who swims with fishes. I’m not unlike that Terre. I’m very like it.

  “ ‘I’m not water. I’m not water. I’m water.’ ”

  No translations I’d ever seen of Host pronouncements were properly comprehensible, but this read different. I realised a counterintuitive affinity. For all its strangeness it sounded a little, a tiny bit, more like, less unlike Anglo-Ubiq than most Language did. It didn’t have the usual precise and nuanced exactnesses.

  “It’s not like most competitors, trying to force out a lie,” Scile said. “It’s more systematic. It’s training itself into untruth. It’s using these weird constructions so it can say something true, then interrupt itself, to lie.”

  “It didn’t perform most of these,” I said.

  “It’s been practicing,” he said. “We’ve always known the Hosts need you, right? You and the rest of you. Like the split rock, like they need those two poor cats they stitched into a bag. They need similes to say certain things, right? To think them. They need to make them in the world, so they can make the comparison.”

  “Yes. But …” I looked at the paper. I read over it. was teaching itself to lie.

  “ ‘I’m like the rock that was broken,’ ” Scile said, “then ‘not not it.’ It can’t quite do it, but it’s trying to go from ‘I’m like the rock’ to ‘I am the rock.’ See? Same comparative term, but different. Not a comparison anymore.”

  He showed me old books in hard or virtua: Leezenberg, Lakoff, u-senHe, Ricoeur. I was used to his odd fascinations, they’d helped charm me ages ago. Now they and he made me uneasy.

  “A simile,” he said, “is true because you say so. It’s a persuasion: this is like that. That’s not enough for it anymore. Similes aren’t enough.” He stared. “It wants to make you a kind of lie. To change everything.

  “Simile spells an argument out: it’s ongoing, explicit, truth-making. You don’t need … logos, they used to call it. Judgement. You don’t need to … to link incommensurables. Unlike if you claim: ‘This is that.’ When it patently is not. That’s what we do. That’s what we call ‘reason,’ that exchange, metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Tesh-echer wants. To bring in a lie.” He spoke very calmly. “It wants to usher in evil.”

  “I’m worried about Scile,” I said to Ehrsul.

  “Avice,” she said to me at last, after I’d tried to explain to her. “I’m sorry but I’m not sure what you’re saying to me.” She did listen: I don’t want to give the impression that all she did was tell me not to tell her. Ehrsul listened but I’m not sure to what. I was hardly exact; I couldn’t be.

  “I’m worried about Scile,” I said to CalVin. I tried them instead. “He’s gone a bit religious.”

  “Pharotekton?” one of them said.

  “No. Not church. But …” I’d gleaned more scraps of Scile’s emergent theology. I call it that though he was adamant it had nothing to do with God. “He wants to protect the Ariekei. From changing language.” I told CalVin about the temptation, what Scile thought planned. “He thinks a lot’s at stake,” I said.

  I still love this man and I’m afraid of what’s happening, I was saying. Can you help me? I don’t understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, what’s making him afraid, how he’s able to make it even get to me. Something like that.

  “Let me talk to him,” CalVin said. The one who hadn’t spoken looked with raised eyebrows at his doppel, then smiled and looked back at me.

  Formerly, 8

  CalVin, as they’d promised me, spent time with Scile. My husband’s research was intense, antisocial, his memos to himself were everywhere and mostly not comprehensible, his files scattered across our datspace. The truth is I was a little scared. I didn’t know how to react to what I saw in Scile now. The fervour had always been there, but though he tried to disguise it—after that one conversation he didn’t talk about his anxieties to me—I could see it was growing stronger.

  That he tried to hide it confused me. I wondered if he thought his concerns were the only appropriate ones to the shifts in some Hosts’ practice, and if the lack of such anxiety from the rest of us was devastating. If he thought the whole world mad, forcing him into dissimulation. I went through those of his thesis notes, appointment diaries, textbook annotations I could access, as if looking for a master code. It gave me a better sense, if still partial and confused, of his theories.

  “What do you think?” I asked CalVin. They looked put out by my uncharacteristic pleading. They told me there was no question that Scile was looking at things in an unusual way, and that his focus was, yes, rather intense. But overall, not to worry. What a useless injunction.

  To my surprise Scile started coming to The Cravat with me. I’d thought we would do less, not more, in each other’s company. I didn’t tell him I knew he’d been previously on his own. I saw no evidence of more efforts to persuade the Hosts to speak him. Instead, he began to exercise a subtle pull on some of the similes. He took part in the discussions, would imply certain of his theories, especially those according to which similes represented the pinnacle and limit of Language. Communication making truth. Slightly to my surprise, no one made him, unsimile outsider, other than welcome. The opposite, really. Valdik wasn’t alone in listening. Valdik wasn’t an intelligent man and I was worried for him.

  I mustn’t exaggerate. I think Scile seemed himself, only perhaps more focused than previously, more distracted. I no longer thought we could stay together, but I wanted to know that he was alright.

  These were in other ways not bad times for me. We were between reliefs. It was always deep in those days that Embassytown became most vividly itself, neither waiting for something, nor celebrating something that had happened. We called these times the doldrums. Of course we knew the more conventional use of the term, but like a few other uncanny words, for us it meant itself and its own opposite. During those still, drab days, cut off on our immer outskirt, without contact, a long time after and before any miabs, we turned inward.

  Fiestas and spectaculars, on the spareday at the end of each of our long months, our crooked alleys interwoven with ribbons and full of music. C
hildren would dance wearing trid costumes, their integuments of light overlapping and crystalline. There were parties. Some formal; many not; some costume; a few naked.

  This doldrums culture was part of our economy. After a visit, we had luxuries and new technology to invigorate our markets and production: when one was due there was a rash of spending and innovation, out of excitement and the knowledge that our commodities would soon change, that new-season goods would be in expensive vogue. Between, in the doldrums, things were static, not desperate but pinched, and these fetes were punctuations, and meant small runs on certain indulgences.

  One night I was in bed with CalVin. One of them was asleep. The other was stroking my flank, whispering conversation. It was a rare thing, to be with one doppel only. I felt a strong urge to ask his name. I think now I know which it was. I was running my finger over the back of his neck, the link in him, beautifully rendered in the hollow below his skull’s overhang. I looked at its twin, on the sleeping half of the Ambassador.

  “Should I be worried about Scile?” I said. The sleeper shifted and we were still a second.

  “I don’t think so,” my companion whispered. “He’s onto something, you know.”

  I didn’t understand. “I’m not worried that he’s wrong,” I said. “I’m worried that he’s … that …”

  “But he’s not wrong. Or at least—he’s pointing out something.”

  I sat up. “Are you saying—?” I stood and paced, and the sleeping doppel woke and looked at me mildly. Cal and Vin conferred in whispers, and it didn’t sound like simple agreement. “What are you saying?” I said.

  “There are some persuasive elements to what he says.” It was the newly woken doppel who spoke.

  “I can’t believe you’re telling me—”