Embassytown (47 page)

“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.”

I
T 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 out-thrust 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
that
ness 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 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

W
E 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.

O
UR 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.

W
E 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 efforts 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 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.

A
DDICTED 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.

Y
OU 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.