by Embassytown
“How many are there?” I said. “Outcasts. In the city.”
Yl and Sib said nothing. My plans to save Embassytown were briefly part of what happened to DalTon and Shonas, and the drama of the revenge of the ex-Ambassador and their one-time vizier had happened to me. I was grateful to Shonas for my life.
“It’s on its way,” YlSib told me. “What do you call it? Spanish Dancer.”
“I know, it’s rude of me,” I said. “I’ll stop using that name.”
“Why?” “It doesn’t care and neither do we.”
The room was small. Windowless of course, illuminated by fronds that glowed.
“There’s power,” I said.
“No.” “The light’s emitted by a necrophage in the walls.”
“Come on,” I said. The building was dying and we were lit by that. I could only laugh.
I asked again, but YlSib wouldn’t tell me what had sent them hundreds of thousands of hours ago out of Embassytown, to live behind aeoli masks in that exile microculture. We waited. “More city-Hosts are leaving,” YlSib said. “And plenty of them are going to join the Absurd.” “There won’t be many left to guard, even if they’re prepared to.”
“They won’t have any choice. EzCal’ll order them to.”
“What’s your plan?” “What is it you want to do?”
“You know what,” I said. “Bren told you.” The truth was I didn’t know how to explain it. When Spanish Dancer arrived, I said, “Look. I’ll show you.”
I remembered the way the captive Languageless had moved. The Absurd were closing in and there was no point waiting for Bren. With YlSib’s help, their careful translation, very slowly at first, we started. I, against every inclination I’d had for many years, had no choice but to take control.
I don’t think urgency is a bacillus that can cross exotypes, but it was as if the Ariekei understood that something in me had changed. They and I fervently engaged. I remembered them in The Cravat, fascinated in me and all the other similes.
“You want to lie,” I said to Spanish Dancer. I spoke quickly. “Show me what you can do. How close are you? Let’s start again.” I spent hours listening to it and its group perform their little untruths, through YlSib’s translations. I made notes and strained to remember how had done what it had done. That seemed to me the key.
I’d talked about it with Bren. Often had wordplayed, eroding qualifying clauses until what was left was a sudden surprising lie. But that method, however well done, was a sideshow. ’s theoretical focus had been on me.
It had seen us—us similes made of Terre, not merely us similes—as key to some more fundamental and enabling not-truth. Its signature mendacity, spoken with dandy élan though only a word-trick, hinted at that shift born of contact. 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.
Through a dissembling made of omitted clauses it laid out its manifesto. Before the humans came we didn’t speak: so we will, can, must speak through them. It made that falsity a true aspiration. , insisting on a certain might-be, changed what was. It had learnt to lie to insist on a truth.
“So,” I said to Spanish Dancer, and the companions that had joined it. “Let’s follow Surl Tesh-echer.” YlSib translated. The Ariekei reacted. “It pointed where to go. You know me. I’m the girl hurt in darkness who ate what was given to her. Tell me what I’m like, and we’ll get to what I am.”
I gave them their nicknames. Spanish Dancer, Toweller, Baptist, Duck. I’d say their names and point and even smile—you never know, you don’t know what they have or haven’t clocked. Their battery-beasts skipped about as we worked. All these Ariekei could lie, a bit. They were followers of the greatest liar in their history. I helped them leave things out, whisper clauses, with wilful misde-scriptions.
Before the humans came. I had YlSib repeat ’s claim. The Ariekei failed: the lie code-jammed their minds. “What colour?” I’d say, holding up rags or plastic. They would bud and unbud their eyes.
After hours their attention went. Duck was shuddering, Toweller was humming and emitting piping sounds. I understood. We had no datchips. The Ariekei had to go to the street to wait for the loudspeakers. Inside, we couldn’t hear the broadcast but we felt the house quiver. Yl and Sib and I looked at each other, and I think we were all imagining our students stampeding to the nearest voice-point, perhaps fighting off the mindless, perhaps beating each other in their need, as EzCal spoke.
“How come you’re behind this?” I said to YlSib. “I mean, if it works, it changes things for you …”
“What do we lose?” “An expertise?” “And what’s gained? By everyone?” “What’s our expertise done for us?” They looked down again. Bren had told me he’d hated his doppel, with a quiet hate. The sight of YlSib’s exhaustion, how they didn’t look at each other, made me wonder if that was the condition of all Ambassadors.
When the Ariekei returned they were calm again. Continue, one said. I nodded exaggeratedly and said “Yes.” I said it again, slowly. What I was trying for was a break, a rupture, a move from before to after. A tipping point that, like all such, could only be a mystery.
“What am I like? What’s like me?” YlSib rendered my question and the answers.
“You’re the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her.” “The scavengers that come to our houses’ latrines to feed are like the girl eating what was given to her.”
“Charming.” I willed them to strive for poetry. Closed my eyes. They asserted similarities. I didn’t let them stop. After quite a time their suggestions grew more interesting. They overreached: the conversation was full with stillborn similes.
“The rocks are like the girl who was hurt in the dark because …”
“The dead are like the girl who …”
“Young are like the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate …”
Finally and suddenly, Spanish Dancer spoke. “We’re trying to change things and it’s been a long time and through our patience knowing it’ll end we’re like the girl who ate what was given to her,” YlSib translated. “Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl, eating not what she wanted but what was given to her.”
I opened my mouth. The tall Ariekes leaned over me, multiply unblinking. “Oh, my God, it knows,” I said. “What I’m trying to do. Did you hear?”
“Yes.” “Yes.”
“It made me two different, contradictory things. Compared them to me.”
“Yes.” They were more cautious than me, but I smiled till they couldn’t not smile back.
We broke off late, when the Ariekei grew so needy for the god-drug voice they couldn’t work anymore, withdrew into shaking confusion. I slept uncovered on the slightly giving floor, until Yl or Sib shook me awake and gave me some inadequate breakfast. I could tell by the translucence of the tower-skin that it was day again. My pupils were there, better: EzCal had given their morning broadcast.
YlSib told me EzCal had discovered I was gone. They were searching for me. Squads were in the city. “You aren’t just out alone anymore,” they said. “You’re on the run.” “You’re hiding.” They didn’t have to say One of us.
All day we worked at the inadequate similes of the Ariekei. It got me exhausted and impatient. As it grew dark I heard the moist opening of the room, and Bren came in. I took hold of him passionately, and he kissed me but held me back. I broke off when I saw what followed him. He had with him one of the Absurd.
“It’s been a bastard journey.” He laughed very shortly.
The thing was weak. Bren had it at the end of a rigid prod and shackles that coursed constantly with current. Otherwise it would easily have overcome him. The Languageless thing was wounded from that constant burning. Its giftwing was strapped to it, its legs were hobbled. I’d known this was the plan, but I couldn’t believe Bren had succeeded.
“Christ,” I said. “How did you do i
t? Oh, Jesus, look at it. This is horrible. You look like a torturer.”
“Yes, it really is,” he said.
Spanish Dancer and the other Ariekei surrounded it. It strained and failed to reach for them. They tottered back, came forward, morbidly curious, it looked like.
“How is it in Embassytown?” I said.
“They’re afraid,” he said. “They probably think you and I are working for the enemy. Or they’re saying they do.”
“The Absurd?” I said. “That’s …”
“Absurd, yes.”
“It’s crazy.”
“You know how they are,” he said. People would say it even as they knew it made little sense. They were right to be afraid. The Absurd were coming.
“How did you get it?”
“In all the ways you can imagine,” Bren said. “False papers, bribery, misdirection, intimidation. Creeping at midnight. Violence.
All that.”
“Now we can actually test things,” I said.
Bren took datchips from his bag. “Here,” he said. “This lot can have a bit of control over themselves. So you’re not totally beholden to the broadcasts. We can get them out of here.”
“Why exactly do you want them to lie?” Yl or Sib said. I stared at them. They hadn’t understood at all. They’d thrown their lot in with a plan just because it was a plan.
“It’s what the lying means,” Bren said to them. “Why do you think we’re leaving the city?” They shrugged.
“It’s about how symbols work for them,” I said. “I never thought we could shift that. But you know what made me change my mind? That there are already Ariekei who’ve done it.” I pointed at the captive. “They’ve managed to do what Surl Tesh-echer and Spanish Dancer and this lot have wanted to do for years. They’ve got new minds. And they’re using them to kill us.”
It was the freakish precision with which the Absurd coordinated attacks that had started me thinking. They were communicating: there was no other explanation for such efficient murder. Languageless, they still needed and made community, though they might not have known that’s what they were doing: each probably believed itself trapped in vengeful solitude even as the violence they committed together disproved it.
I’d seen them gesticulate. Their commandos or commanders indicating with their giftwings. The Absurd had invented pointing. With the point they’d conceived a that. They’d given the jag of the body, the outthrust limb, power to refer. That that was the key. From it had followed other soundless words.
That. That? No, not that: that.
Each word of Language meant just what it meant. Polysemy or ambiguity were impossible and with them most tropes that made other languages languages at all. But thatness faces every way: it’s flexible because it’s empty, a universal equivalent. That always means and not that other, too. In their lonely silent way, the Absurd had made a semiotic revolution, and a new language.
It was base and present tense. But its initial single word was actually two: that and not-that. And from that tiny and primal vocabulary, the motor of that antithesis spun out other concepts: me, you, others.
The code they’d created was quite unlike the precise mapping they’d grown up knowing. But it was Language that was the anomaly: this new crude thing of flailing fingers and murderous stamping was closer by far to what we spoke, was at last cousin-tongue to those of sentients across the immer.
“We could never learn to speak Language,” I said. “We only ever pretended. Instead the Absurd have learnt to speak like us. The Ariekei in this room want to lie. That means thinking of the world differently. Not referring: signifying. I thought that was impossible. But look.” I pointed at the thing that wanted to kill me. “That’s what they’ve done. Every time they point, they signify. So far the price is way too high. But now we know Ariekei can do it. And teaching this lot that without taking their wings means teaching them to lie.
“Similes start … transgressions. Because we can refer to anything. Even though in Language, everything’s literal. Everything is what it is, but still, I can be like the dead and the living and the stars and a desk and fish and anything. Surl Tesh-echer knew that was Language straining to … bust out of itself. To signify.” That’s why it had, with so strange a strategy, come at lying through us. I hadn’t brought Scile’s books with me but I’d gone over them many times, learnt from and argued with them, and I knew what I needed to. “I had to be hurt and fed to be speakable, because it had to be true. But what they say with me … That’s true because they make it.
“Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying. Just a route, though. But we can push them down it, even that last step, all the way.” It became clearer to me as I spoke. “To where the literal becomes …” I stopped. “Something else. If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else. We tell the truth best by becoming lies.”
Not paradoxes, I wanted to say; these weren’t paradoxes, they weren’t nonsense. “I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”
PART EIGHT
THE PARLEY
25
We heard strange sounds, and saw vessels rising, heading out of Embassytown and the city. Most were corvids crossbred of biorigging and bloodless tech. There were spiny church-sized hulks among them, older than Embassytown.
“I can’t believe they got those things up,” I said.
“They’re not as fierce as they look,” Bren said. “They were survey ships once. It’s all theatre. Even with the, whisper it, Bremen arsenal, we don’t have a hope.”
Bren had once, with his doppel, been party to hidden arrangements. They’d debriefed spies and double- and triple-agents. “Wyatt was clever,” he said. “He did exactly the right amount and kind of not talking about what he had access to to make it scary. But it was nothing.”
The fleet lumbered away on their doomed sorties. Taking off my aeoli in the sealed air-breathing room, seeing the Ariekei wait for me, I was exhausted, and had to close my eyes.
Our own flight from the city was complicated: between four Terre and the Ariekei we were able to push and pull our Absurd prisoner with us, but not easily. It had berserker strength. We had to administer charges to it often, and tug it hurting from the punishment.
“Let’s leave it,” said Yl.
“Can’t,” said Bren. He was the most assiduous of us in trying to communicate with it, whenever we stopped. He got nowhere. It hardly looked at him, focused its enraged attention on the addicted Ariekei.
“They’re going into battle,” Bren said, indicating the sky. “It’s pointless but I respect them for it a bit. EzCal are going to fight.” Efforts at negotiation were stillborn and the Absurd came closer. Refugee Terre from arable outposts were trekking to Embassytown. The journey overwhelmed many of them, and left their bodies to degrade from within in suits and biorigging, into mulch that wouldn’t fertilise this soil. “EzCal are wondering if they can just fight their way out of all this.” As if pugnacity could outweigh the simplicity of numbers.
“I’ll give them this,” Bren said. “EzCal will be on the field. It was Ez who insisted. The bloody convivials are over. Back home it’s … bad.” I’d left only a few tens of hours ago, but now it was the day after the parties. Poor Embassytown.
We took evasive ways but there were too many of us to be really secretive. We relied on the chaos that Embassytown and the city were accelerating in each other. We crawled through tunnels between bones, and waited and shocked our captive into stupor when we saw patrols of Ariekei, humans, or both, clearing the streets, shooting the mindless.
It was difficult, peering across skin plateaus to where constables of our race and Ariekei enforced a brutal order. YlSib had repeatedly to whisper You must be quiet to Spanish Dancer and its companions. I made frantic arm movements to hush them, which of course they didn’t understand. More flyers went over our heads. We hid from regiments on the way to the front.
I kept up ef
forts to teach. We tried to shield our Ariekene companions from the sounds of the speakers when EzCal’s (now prerecorded) utterings began—we holed up and they listened instead to the datchips we’d brought, dosing themselves in small triumph, defeating the tyranny of god-drug’s rhythms while their fellow-citizens stampeded for the voice. I don’t know how they kept track of which chip each of them had heard and was therefore spent to them.
Our prisoner could see what they were doing, as they hunched, fanwings spread. I imagine that it looked with disgust. Certainly it strained in its shackles.
We quickly had our catechism. I drew it from what Spanish Dancer had said. I whispered it in Anglo-Ubiq; YlSib spoke it in Language. Bren, I saw, mouthed the simile of me that he’d first spoken a long time ago.
“You’re trying to change things,” I said. YlSib repeated in Language. “You want change like the girl who ate what was given her. So you’re like me. Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her: they’re like me. You’re like that girl who ate. You are the girl who ate. You’re like the girl. You are the girl. And so are the others, who aren’t like you.”
The first time YlSib moved from you are like to you are the Ariekei started very visibly. That succulently strange lie you are, born out of the truth, you are like, that they’d already asserted. And its contradiction, too, their enemies as like me as they were. We showed them how their own arguments came close to making liars of them.
