Embassytown (18 page)

Embassytowners were free not to believe. I wasn’t used to thinking about evil.

B
EEHIVE'S NAME
was
, we gleaned from its conversations with other Hosts. I told CalVin, mangling the name with my monovoice, saying the Cut and Turn one after the other. “Can you find out when it’s competing at another Festival of Lies?” I said. “It’s a loyal fan of mine, and I’d like to . . . return the favour.”

“You want to go . . .” “. . . to another festival?”

“Yeah. Me and another couple of the similes.” It had occurred as a whim, mere curiosity about my observer, but having thought of it I could not let the idea go. When I’d mooted it to Hasser and a couple of the others, they’d been enthusiastic. “Do you think we could do that? Think you could get us in again?” It had been a while since we’d been summoned to any Languagefests, and though I was alone among them in being more intrigued by the lying than by my own deployment, the other Cravateers would hardly say no to any entry.

CalVin did pursue this, though not with the best grace. I wondered at the time why they were indulging me at all. One or the other always behaved with surliness to me. The differences in their demeanours were tiny, but I was used to Ambassadors and could sense them. I thought that they were taking turns to be colder and warmer, in a variant of traditional police procedure.

In The Cravat, conversations between the Hosts illuminated disagreements. They had camps, constituted by theories and arcane politics. Some seemed to love us—of course I shouldn’t use that word—as spectacle. Some rated our various merits: we called them the critics.
The man who swims with the fishes is simple
, one said.
The girl who ate what was given to her is like more things.
Valdik laughed but wasn’t happy to hear that the trope of him was trite. Beehive, which I started to call “Surl Tesh-echer”, a failure closer to its name, was the guru of another group. Champion liar.

It had regular companions: Spanish Dancer; and one we called Spindle; and one Longjohn—it had a biorigged replacement hoof. Of what any of us understood it’s hard to approximate what they said in Anglo-Ubiq: think of people circling an exhibit in a gallery, staring at it, from time to time uttering a single word or short phrase, like “Incomplete”, or “Potential”, or “Intricacies of fact and uncertainties of expression”, and occasional longer opaque things.

“ ‘The birds circle like the girl who ate what was put in front of her,’ ” Hasser translated. “ ‘The birds are like the girl who ate what was put in front of her and are like the man who swims with fishes and are like the split stone . . .’ ”

The other Ariekei, those not of
’s party, loudly answered these garbled claims. They responded to the presence of
and its companions with excitement or agitation. Contrariwise,
, Spanish Dancer and the others didn’t acknowledge the critics at all, that I could tell. We called
’s group the Professors.

stretched the logic of analogy—the birds were
not
like me, having eaten the food given to me, as far as most of the other Ariekei could see. “They think it’s being disrespectful when it says they are,” Hasser said. He looked unhappy.
The birds are like the girl who ate what she was given
, one of the Professors said again. It stuttered as it spoke, it mangled its words, had to stop and start and try again.

A
N EARLY
winter day I came to The Cravat—still attending, I noted wryly—dirty with leaf-muck and cold dust from Embassytown alleys. Valdik was the only other simile there. He was uncomfortable with me, less talkative even than usual. I wondered if perhaps he’d had some bad news about his outside life, of which I knew and wanted to know nothing. We sat in silence that was not companionable.

After one coffee I was ready to leave, when Shanita and Darius came in together. She was a taciturn simile I’d always sensed was a bit intimidated by me; he was frank and ingenuous, not very smart. They greeted me pleasantly enough.

“Why was Scile here?” Darius said as he sat. I was aware of Valdik sitting still and not reacting.

“Scile?” I said.

“He was here again, earlier,” Darius said. “A Host was here. Being really weird. Your husband, not the Host. He walked around putting little . . .” He fingered the air for the words. “Little nuts and bolts on all the tables. Wouldn’t tell me why.”

“Again? Here
again
?”

He had come once before when I was not there, it seemed, late at night, with three Hosts present. Darius hadn’t seen it but Hasser had, and told him. That time Scile had been strangely dressed, in clothes all one colour. Shanita nodded at the anecdote. Scile had, she said, while Valdik said nothing, laid down the same objects that first time, too.

“What’s that all about?” Darius said.

“I don’t know,” I said. I spoke carefully.

I suspected from his stillness that Valdik had an idea, in fact, as I did, what this might have been. That Scile, by these unnatural attention-getting rituals, was trying to stick in the mind. Trying to be good to think with, to be suggestive. To become a simile.

What the hell did he think he might mean? I thought, but corrected myself: that wouldn’t matter.

A
CORVID DROPPED
us deep in the city, in astonishing rooms, catacombs in skin, alcoves full of house’s organs sutured in place.

The hall was full of the interplaited cadences of Language. I’d never seen so many young, just woken into their third instar and Language. They matched their parents in size and shape, but they were children and you could tell by the colour of their bellies and the way they were given to swaying. They were avid spectators while the liars tried to lie.

Most of the competitors could only be silent, failing in their struggle to say something not true. I was with Hasser, Valdik and a few others chosen from among our regulars I don’t know how. We were chaperoned by ArnOld. They were there to perform and made it clear that they resented this babysitting duty. Hosts greeted them by their correct name: “
”.

Scile was with me. He was talking, tentatively, with my simile companions. It had been a fair time since he’d seen Language in its home; it was for him I’d asked for this: he knew it, had been shy with gratitude. We were not nearly so close as we’d been at the time of our first festival, and I think the present surprised him. I hadn’t heard of any more efforts to enLanguage himself. I’d said nothing about any of them to him.

Before now the humans came
. A Host, a lie-athlete, one of the Professors, I realised, was speaking.

Before the humans came we were . . .
and it stalled. One of its companions continued.
Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things.
A sensation went through the audience. It was followed by another speaker:
Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much . . .