Embassytown (19 page)

I’d learnt enough to know this trick, a collaborative faux-mendacity: the last was repeating the previous sentence but dropping its voices to near nothing at the final clause.
Of certain things
was said, but so quietly the audience couldn’t hear it. It was showmanship, fakery, a crowd-pleaser, and the crowd were pleased.

ArnOld stiffened and said together: “
”.

Beehive. It was swaying. Its giftwing circled, its fanwing stretched. It stepped up to the lying ground.

T
HERE WERE
two main ways the few Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. One was to go slow. They would try to conceive the untrue clause—near-impossible, their minds reacting allergically to such a counterfactual even unspoken, conceived without signification. Having prepared it mentally, however successfully or un-, they would pretend-forget it to themselves. Speak each of its constituent words at a certain speed, at a beat, separated, apart enough in the mind of a speaker that each was a distinct concept, utterable with and as its own meaning; but just sufficiently fast and rhythmic that to listeners, they accreted into a ponderous but comprehensible, and untrue, sentence. The liars I had thus far seen with any success were slow-liars.

There was another technique. It was the more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of noises before the untruth of their totality stole a speaker’s ability to think them.

opened its mouths.

Before the humans came
, it said in ornery staccato,
we didn’t speak.

There was a long quiet. And then a convulsion, a riot.

I wished very much that I had any understanding of Ariekene body language.
might have been exuding triumph, patience, or nothing. It hadn’t whispered the second half of any truth; or trudged sound-by-metronome-sound through a constructed-unconstructed sentence. What
had said was unquestionably a lie.

The audience reeled. I reeled.

T
HE
H
OSTS
woke in their third instar suddenly fluent, Language a direct function of their consciousness. “Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”

“The evolution of trust . . .” I started to say.

“There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers. “This Language is miraculous,” Scile had said. I was somehow repulsed by it, in fact. It was astonishing, given what Language needs to do, that the Ariekei had survived. That, I decided, was what Scile must have meant, so I agreed.

If evolution was morality they would be unable to hear lies, too, like two-thirds of the fabular monkeys, but it’s more random and beautiful, so that was only the case for those few who managed to speak them, of their own little untruths. Unbacked by signifieds, the lies of Language were just noises to their own liar. Biology’s lazy: if mouths speak truth, why should ears discriminate between it and its opposite? When what was spoken was, definitionally, what was? And by this hole in adaptation, though or because they were not built to say them, the Hosts
could
understand lies. And either believe them—belief being a meaningless given—or, where the falsity was ostentatious and the point, experience them as some giddying impossible, the said unthinkable.

It’s me who’s monomaniacal, here: it’s unfair to insinuate that all Hosts cared about was Language, but I can’t fail to do so. This is a true story I’m telling, but I am telling it, and that entails certain things. So: the Hosts cared about everything, but Language most of all.

R
ADICAL AND
cussed,
got that lie out into the world, a vomit of phonemes, against its own mind.

The public were rapturous. We’d witnessed a rare performance. I was delighted. Ambassador ArnOld was astonished. Hasser was bemused. Valdik and Scile were aghast.

Latterday, 8

K
EDIS AND
S
HUR
'
ASI
were being escorted to the Embassy. The newscasts’ little vespcams saw them.

Midlevel Staff gathered troikas and quads from the Kedis community, a few Shur’asi think-captains. Vehicles arced over our roofs, antennas and the girders of our construction, over the white smoke from our chimneys. One shot recurred on the bulletins: a young Staff member swatting at the cam through which we saw. He must have been very tense to be so unprofessional.

The newscasts, voice and text, were flummoxed. Perhaps to most locals there’d been no sense of crisis until this ingathering of our exots. The pods that took them to the Ambassadorial explanations flocked with birds, and fist-sized cams that rose and fell among them.

Beyond Embassytown, the oddness of angles and movements that had touched the city seemed to be spreading.

I
BUZZED
Ehrsul, RanDolph, Simmon, but could get through to no one. After a hesitation I tried Wyatt, but he didn’t answer either.

My handset still contained Hasser’s number, and Valdik’s, and several other similes’. It had been a long time. I considered calling one.
What does it matter now?
I thought, but I didn’t do it.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one doing so, but I’d begun to prepare, for whatever it was. I was copying what data I thought precious, hiding treasured objects, packing essentials into a shoulder bag. I’d always been fascinated at how my body ran things sometimes. While I felt like I was agonising, my limbs did what was needed.

Night would come without my noticing, and the aeoli-breath was still cool. Then at this crucial change-moment I remember there were night-bird noises and the gibbering of local animals. It wasn’t yet so late there was no traffic. I wasn’t tired at all. It was hard to make sense of the shots from Embassytown that I was watching. The newsware was still processing. A human commentator said, “We’re not sure what . . . we . . . we’re seeing something from the city . . . ah . . . movement from . . .”

The figures in cam-view were Ariekei. The Ariekei were moving. On my screen and through my window, I saw corvids frantic in several directions in the air. I heard things. I was already leaning out of my house and I saw their source. The Hosts were coming out of their city into Embassytown.

I
RAN TO
the interzone between Embassytown and the city. Lights came on as people woke to the noise, but though I was joined by more and more blinking citizens I didn’t feel part of anything. I passed under light globes whispering where moths touched them. Below arches I’d known all my life, and, tasting the thinning air, I knew I was only a street or two from the edge of the city. I was in Beckon Street, which swept downhill out of our enclave.

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!”