by Embassytown
Addicted vehicles galloped by us into the wilderness. In the morning YlSib took us to a transporter. It was blunt and ugly but full of breathable air. We rode an unseen pillow of vented particles following the tracks of the Embassytown-and-city troops.
In empty suburbs were scattered gangs of zelles, their Ariekei dead, looking forlornly for things to power. Bren drove our mongrel conveyance. It was nowhere near as fast as the military craft that had gone out, but it exceeded our walking pace, punted on its way by swinging side-limbs like gondoliers’ poles. Through hollowed-out window-eyes I watched the city recede. At first there were outskirt dwellings and warehouses descending into muck, but they ended and the sky came down to meet us.
We raised dust. Spined bushes shuffled out of our way, so paths opened for us in the fields, stretching for many metres ahead then began to fracture, to branch off in the possible directions we might take. The Ariekene battery-beasts moved around my legs. Behind us the shrubs crawled back to their previous positions. The city was a line of towers, rotund halls like unplanted bulbs. It receded.
I looked at it a long time. I shielded my eyes as if that made for magic binoculars, but I couldn’t see through it to the smoke or Terre towerblocks of Embassytown. I wondered if there were travellers among the Ariekei, and where if anywhere were other cities from which and to where they might go. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know.
The zelles grew restive before their owners: they were less able to fight their addiction. Over the hours, the Ariekei huddled as low as their intricate bulks allowed against the pipes and lights in the vehicle. One by one they enfolded their fanwings over datchips.
You are like the girl, you are the girl. They are like the girl, they are the girl.
“,” YlSib said to them: Repeat it.
We are like the girl, the Ariekei said. You are the girl, YlSib said, and the Ariekei scuttled, an excitement that pleased me. They couldn’t do it but understood, in some alien abstract, what they were trying to do. The girl … some said, and some … we … or … us … or … it’s like … Poor YlSib, poor Spanish. I was relentless.
“What’s that?” I’d seen something scatter a trail kilometres behind us. There was another motion mark, to the west, and soon overhead was another tiny gusting machine. A very few other transports followed us, got closer and visible. A many-wheeled cart on liquid suspension; a truck all Terretech but for biorigged weapons; one-person centaurs, headless equine frames at the front of each of which sat an aeolied woman or man. A glider climbed thermals. Bren stopped us. YlSib got out as the exodus approached.
Other vehicles slowed too. Other drivers and pilots peered out of their windows. Behind me, hidden in our machine, the Absurd hissed, unhearing its own self. The escapees were like YlSib: city exiles. Runaway Staff, I imagined, as well as those not fleeing such grandiose pasts. The glider landed and Shonas leaned out. I wondered where DalTon were. The city-dwellers were wary, but they mostly knew each other, greeted each other and swapped brief information about the Absurd, and the Embassytown and city forces.
When we drove on again, we did so together in a little entourage. The glider overhead signalled to us with its wings and wing-lights. “Tell Spanish to come here,” I said to YlSib. “Tell it what I say.” I pointed out of the chariot’s eyes. Spanish Dancer didn’t look in the direction of my gesture. “Look out and upward at the machine above us,” I, then YlSib, said. Sometimes when I spoke for the Ariekei, I unthinkingly mimicked the precision of Language as translated into Anglo-Ubiq. “The vessel overhead, the colours on its wings, the way they move—it’s telling us things. It’s talking to us.”
Spanish Dancer looked with some of its eyes at the plane, with some of them at YlSib, and with one at me. I stared at that eye. Yl-Sib’ve told you, but do you know it’s me speaking? I thought.
“It doesn’t understand,” Yl or Sib said. “It can tell I’m not lying, I think, but it can tell that the plane’s not talking to us either.”
“But it is,” I said.
When dawn came we veered, to avoid EzCal’s force, to bypass the camp.
“Come on, come on,” Bren said to himself. We were desperate to reach the Absurd before the combined troops did. “They’re in no hurry,” said Bren. “We’ll overtake them. They don’t want to fight anyway—they’re going to try to negotiate.”
“The problem is,” I said, “they can’t.”
I could still see the glider. The other craft were behind, close enough for us to wave at their drivers. By midmorning gas-trees filled the plateau ahead, a canopy of thousands of house-size flesh-bags bobbing in breezes, straining at the ground. One by one the other craft peeled away from behind us. “Hey,” I said.
“They can’t come through here,” Bren said. Only the three centaurs were with us now. YlSib looked nervously at each other.
“Bren,” said one. “They’re little, we’re not.” “We can’t go through here either.” “Not secretly.” “We’ll leave tracks …”
“Have you not been listening?” he said. He yanked at the controls and if anything accelerated. “We don’t have any time. We have to get there fast. So please get to work. You should be teaching. Because it isn’t enough for us to get there: we have a job to do when we do.”
But it was impossible to concentrate as we approached the forest. Some of the trees moved weakly out of our way, hauled by roots, but most were too slow. I braced. The carriage’s jutting legs scythed through rope trunks. In our passing trees soared straight up, dangling their broken tethers. We left a line of them accelerating skyward as we cut into the woodland. Through the rear windows I saw the centaurs carrying their riders over the coiled stumps we left behind. There wasn’t much debris: it had flown away.
“Beyond this forest and then a few kilometres,” Bren said, voice shaking with our motion. “That’s where the armies are.”
Bloated treetops buffeted each other above. There were darks and shadows of layered variety around us, in which, I abruptly thought, there might be anything: Ariekene ruins, such impossible things. In our wake was a wedge of sky into which the dislodged trees rose in strict formation until they reached wind and scattered. It was because of that gap in the forest that I saw the plane twisting in dogfight turns.
“Something’s happening,” I said. We craned to see it curve up and the weapons below its nose flare, against another, attacking flyer.
“Fucking Pharotekton damn,” Bren said.
We couldn’t hide. Wherever we veered we’d announce our route in soaring trees, so we did nothing but try to increase our speed, the centaur-riders jabbing rifles behind us. Detonations sounded and from the tops of explosion clouds bobbed trees and their ragged remains tugging tails of smoke-matter and vegetation.
Shonas, in his glider, fired. For a moment I thought we were being chased down by his enemy DalTon, that I was collateral in someone else’s drama, but the attacker flew jackknifes no human could have piloted. EzCal had ordered an Ariekene vessel to take us, to stop us reaching the army they must realise was our destination.
The centaurs scattered into bladdery undergrowth. I heard YlSib jabbering Language. They were telling Spanish Dancer what was happening.
“Maybe I can …” Bren said, and I wondered what plan he had. The glider caromed across our field of vision into the ground, burst in a splash of rising trees. Yl and Sib howled to see Shonas’s death.
I hadn’t believed, not really, that EzCal would spare a craft for this, for us, now. I screamed and the ground under us burst.
I woke to noise. I coughed and cried out and looked into the many eyes of an Ariekes. Above it I saw our ripped-up chassis letting the sky and swaying vegetation through. Beside me was the motionless face of another Ariekes, dead. I thought for moments I was dying. I pulled my aeoli mask up, as the living Ariekes tugged me with its giftwing and pulled me from the overturned vehicle, through a big rip.
It wasn’t many seconds since we’d been wrecked, I realised. I stumbled and le
aned on Spanish Dancer. We were in a crater, edged by vegetation stretching up on frayed stems.
There was more than one Ariekene dead. The living were hauling out of the hollow, dragging Bren and Yl and Sib with them. The Absurd stumbled disoriented, and one of the wounded Ariekei shoved it, sent it towards us, jabbed its giftwing in our direction. We heard a gasp, and up from the forest at the edges of our brutal clearing went another tree, this one dangling a tangled man, one of the centaur outriders, whose mount had thrown him. He clung, but he was tiny-high very fast, and whatever had snared him gave and he abruptly fell, without a cry I could hear as the plant kept rising. We didn’t see him land but he couldn’t have lived.
I stumbled over wrecked biorigging. By the time the murderous flyer was back above the bombsite it would have seen no life. We watched it from our hide a few metres of forest in. It circled several times and headed out, toward the Languageless army.
26
“We have to walk,” Bren said. “A couple of days, maybe. We have to get through the forest.” The Embassytown army were ahead, but we knew they would delay engaging, and we still hoped to reach the attackers before them. Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to. Every couple of hours we stopped on our limping, blistered way, and repeated a lesson or tried a new one. Neither the Ariekei nor their batteries seemed to tire. I don’t know if or how they mourned their companions. Even our captive tramped before us stolidly, seemingly subdued by the environs or the attack or something.
Bren guided us with some handheld tech. I was conscious of the forest’s darkness, coloured by the bruisey flora. The wood was full of noises. Things of radial and spiral form moved around us. We bewildered the animals—we didn’t read as predators to the prey nor vice versa, and they were neither afraid of nor threatening to us. They watched us quizzically, those with eyes. Once one of the Ariekei said something dangerous was near us. A , big as a room, opening and closing its teeth. It would surely have attacked the Ariekei had they been alone, but its confusion at the sight of us aliens, uncoded in its instinct, stilled it, so we saved them.
They’d rescued a clutch of the datchips, but not all. They would have to husband them. One by one, as they had to, the Ariekei took themselves into the privacy of the wood and listened hard to EzCal’s voice, catching us up, a little high but clearer-headed.
We kept on into the evening, and the forest got sparse, until it was tree-flecked grassland under the glimmer of Wreck. We granted ourselves a little sleep: mostly, though, my priority was to teach.
You are like the girl, you are the girl.
“Sweet Jesus,” I said. “Just fucking say it.” Their urgency, in fact, I’m as certain as I can be, was at least as great as mine.
“YlSib,” I said. “Ask them this. Do they know who I am?” Language. The Ariekei murmured. She’s the girl who was … I interrupted. “Really know, I mean. Do they know what a girl is? They know I’m a simile, but do they know that the girl is me? What do they think you are, YlSib? How many?”
“You know what she’s asking,” Bren said. “Tallying Mystery.” Did the Ariekei think an Ambassador one person or two? Staff had always told us it was a pointless, untranslatable, impolite question.
“I’m sorry but I need them to understand that you’re two people because I need them to understand that I’m one. That these bloody squawks I make are language. That I’m talking to them.” The Ariekei watched one meat-presence emitting noises more quickly and loudly than usual to the others.
After a silence Bren said, “It’s never been something Ambassadors have been exactly keen to make clear.”
“Make it clear,” I said. “Ambassadors don’t get to be the only real people anymore.”
I don’t believe we could have overturned generations of Ariekene thinking, even with so avant-garde a group as this, had they not known somewhere, to some degree, that each of us was a thinking thing. Spanish and its comrades responded at first as if of course, so what; then slowly as YlSib pressed the point many times, with growing fascination, confusion, or what might be anger or fear. At last I saw what I hoped was a fitting sense of revelation.
She is speaking, YlSib said to them. The girl who ate what was given to her. Like I speak to you.
“Yes,” I said, as the Ariekei stared. “Yes.”
Language was the unit of Ariekene thought and truth: asserting my sentience in it YlSib made a powerful claim. They told them that I was speaking, and Language insisted then that there must be other kinds of language than Language.
“Make them say it,” I said. “That what I’m doing is speaking.”
Spanish Dancer said it. The human in blue is speaking. The others listened. They struggled, but one by one managed to repeat it.
“They believe it,” I said. This was where it began to change.
“Translate,” I said to YlSib. “You know me,” I said to the Ariekei. “I’m the girl who ate, etcetera. I’m like you, and you’re like me, and I’m like you. I am you.” One of them shouted. Something was happening. It spread among them. Spanish Dancer stared at me.
“Avice,” said Bren in warning.
“Tell them what I say,” I said. I looked at Spanish. I met its almost-eyes as urgently as if I were talking to a human. “Tell it. I waited for things to be better, Spanish, so I’m like you. I am you. I took what was given to me, so I’m like the others. I am them.” I shone a torch on myself. “I glow in the night, I’m like the moon. I am the moon.” I lay down. “They know how we sleep, yeah? I’m so tired I lie as still as the dead, I’m like the dead. I’m so tired I am dead. See?”
The Ariekei were staggering. Their fanwings flared, folded and opened. They reached for me with their giftwings, making Bren gasp, but they didn’t touch me. They said words and noises.
“What’s happening?” Yl or Sib said.
“Don’t stop translating,” I said. “Don’t you dare.” The Ariekei sounded together, a moment’s horrible choir. They retracted their eyes. “Don’t stop. I’m the girl who ate blah blah. What have you said with me all this time? Everything you said’s like me is me. You’ve already done it. It’s all just things in terms of other things.” I stood before Spanish Dancer. “Tell it its name. Say: There were humans a long time ago who wore clothes that were black and red like your markings. Spanish dancers.” I heard YlSib neologise “.” “I can’t speak your name in Language, so I gave you a new one. Spanish Dancer. You’re like, you are a Spanish dancer.”
One by quick one the Ariekei shouted, then went silent. Their eyes stayed in. They swayed. No one spoke for a long time.
“What’ve you done?” whispered Sib. “You’ve driven them mad.”
“Good,” I said. “We’re insane, to them: we tell the truth with lies.”
Like sped-up film of plants in the sun, Spanish’s coral at last budded. It started to speak and said two trickles of gibberish. It stopped and waited and started again. Yl and Sib and Bren translated but I didn’t need them. Spanish Dancer spoke slowly, as if it was listening hard to everything it said.
You are the girl who ate. I’m . I’m like you and I am you. Someone human gasped. Spanish craned its eye-coral and stared at its own fanwing. Two eyes came back to look at me. I have markings. I’m a Spanish dancer. I didn’t take my eyes off it. I’m like you, waiting for change. The Spanish dancer is the girl who was hurt in darkness.
“Yes,” I whispered, and YlSib said “,” Yes.
Other Ariekei were speaking. We are the girl who was hurt.
We were like the girl …
We are the girl …
“Tell them their names,” I said. “You move like a Terre bird: you’re Duck. You drip liquid from your Cut-mouth, so you’re Baptist. Explain that, YlSib, can you? Tell them, tell them the city’s a heart …”
I’m like the liquid-dripping man, I am him …
With the boisterous astonishment of revelation they pressed the similes by which I’d named them on until
they were lies, telling a truth they’d never been able to before. They spoke metaphors.
“God,” Yl said.
“Jesus Christ Pharotekton,” said Bren.
“God,” said Sib.
The Ariekei spoke to each other. You’re the Spanish dancer. I could have wept.
“Jesus Christ, Avice, you did it.” Bren hugged me for a long time. YlSib hugged me. I held on to them all. “You did it.” We listened to the Ariekene new speakers call each other things in unprecedented formulations.
There were two poor bewildered remnants that could not, no matter what I said, that stared at their companions uncomprehending. But the others spoke in new ways. I’m not as I’ve ever been, Spanish Dancer told us.
Much later, when we’d been hours in our camp, I took a datchip, slowly, mindful of how long it had been since a fix, and played it. It was EzCal saying something about the shape of their clothes. Those two still unchanged, Dub and Rooftop I’d called them, which hadn’t shifted with the others, responded with the usual addict fervour to the sounds.
None of the others did. I looked at the Ariekei and they at us. They took slow steps, at last, in all directions. I don’t feel … one said. I am, I am not …
“Play another,” Bren said. EzCal spoke thinly to us about some other nonsense. The Ariekei looked at each other. I am not … another said.
I picked up another and made EzCal mutter the importance of maintaining medical supplies, and still only those two reacted. The others listened with nothing more than curiosity. I tried more, and while Dub and Rooftop stiffened the altered Ariekei made querying noises at EzCal’s ridiculous expositions.
“What happened?” YlSib stuttered. “Something’s happened to them.”
Yes. Something in the new language. New thinking. They were signifying now—there, elision, slippage between word and referent, with which they could play. They had room to think new conceptions.
