Embassytown (49 page)

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 eye-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 onto 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.

M
UCH 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.

I threw the chips to them, laughing, and they began to go through them. Our clearing was filled with overlapping voices of Ez and Cal.

“We changed Language,” I said. A sudden change—it couldn’t undo. “There’s nothing to . . . intoxicate them.” There only ever had been because it was impossible, a single split thinkingness of the world: embedded contradiction. If language, thought and world were separated, as they just had been, there was no succulence, no titillating impossible. No mystery. Where Language had been there was only language: signifying sound, to do things with and to.

The Ariekei sifted the datchips, listening with disbelief at how they heard what they heard. That’s what I think. Spanish Dancer remained bent, but its eyes looked up at me. Perhaps it knew now, in ways it could not have done before, that what it heard from me were words. It listened.

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and Spanish Dancer cooed and, harmonising with itself, said: “
"

27

O
NE BY ONE
as the night went on the Ariekei withdrew, and one by one they began to make terrible sounds. I fretted about the noise, but what could we do? Spanish Dancer, Baptist, Duck, Toweller, all but Dub and Rooftop, which looked on without a scrap of comprehension, went through what sounded like agonies. They didn’t all call out or scream, but all of them in different ways seemed as if they were dying.

YlSib was alarmed, but seemed neither Bren nor I were surprised by what we heard: the noise of old ways coming off in scabs. Pangs of something finishing, and of birth. Everything changes now: I thought that very explicitly, each word. I thought: Now they’re seeing things.

In the beginning was each word of Language, sound isomor-phic with some Real: not a thought, not really, only self-expressed worldness, speaking itself through the Ariekei. Language had always been redundant: it had only ever been the world. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

“Shouldn’t we . . . ?” Yl said, and had nothing with which to finish it.

The said was now not-as-it-is. What they spoke now weren’t things or moments anymore but the thoughts of them, pointings-at; meaning no longer a flat facet of essence; signs ripped from what they signed. It took the lie to do that. With that spiral of assertion-abnegation came quiddities, and the Ariekei became themselves. They were worldsick, as meanings yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.

No wonder it made them sick. They were like new vampires, retaining memories while they sloughed off lives. They’d never be cured. They went quiet one by one, and not because their crisis ended. They were in a new world. It was the world we live in.

“Y
OU HAVE TO
show the others,” I said to Spanish Dancer. Rudely interrupted its birth. It deserved a different passage but we had no time. It listened in its queasy awe and newness. “The deaf ones. You can talk to them. They think they’re beyond language at all, but you, you can show them what they’ve done.”
Language was never possible. We never spoke in one voice.

In the sun, we saw figures kilometres off. Humans rattling slowly towards us. Small ships went overhead, heading back toward the city. “Look,” Bren said. “That one’s wounded.”

As we got closer we could see that there weren’t many Terre, maybe thirty or forty, hauling equipment or urging on slapdash-looking biorigging, rocking in cars. We saw them see us, and for a moment they seemed to be preparing weapons. Then they calmed.

“They must have seen this lot first,” Bren said of the Ariekei with us. “Thought it was an attack. But with us here they think we’re an Embassytown squad. They’re plantation staff.” Wilderness dwellers who had only now cleared their homesteads and outland farmfactories. They’d been in the path of the Language-less army and lost their nerve as the Absurd came at their lands killing all the humans they met and tearing their houses to the ground, murdering or recruiting the country Ariekei alongside which the Terre had lived.

More boats went overhead. They would probably not look long enough to see the Ariekei in our party, or that we were heading in the wrong direction. In fact they wouldn’t notice us at all: they were busy returning to the city. Several of the vessels, I could see, were bleeding.

Spanish Dancer whispered, called the humans things it couldn’t have called them before. It was paying close attention, as it had for hours, to our captive.

We avoided the refugees. “Depending how fast the Absurd are going,” Bren said, “we’ll reach them tomorrow or the next day. Probably the next day—what is that, Muhamday, Ioday?” None of us had any idea.

“What about the Embassytowners?”

“We’ve avoided them. I think we went past them. They’ll still be stationed. Especially—” He pointed at the sky. “You saw the boats. The scouts’ve been wounded. EzCal knows they can’t win. They’ll have Ariekei and Terre at the front trying to negotiate.”

“Yeah, they’re not going to succeed, though,” Yl said.

“They won’t,” Bren said. “How can they? They don’t think the same at all.”

“Spanish understands what we have to do,” I said. “Have you seen how it’s being with the captive? It knows they
are
thinking the same, now. That they’re both
thinking
.”

I
T WAS A VERY
new ecosystem to us, there with the sparse trees, where we watched Spanish and the other Ariekei work. Here the key predator was not the
, with its big, nearly immobile body and limbs that could reach fast and far through trees, but fast
that hunted by night. Vaguely related to the Ariekei themselves, the rear two limbs of the bipedal
were ferocious weapons, as, of a more manipulable kind, was the arm that corresponded to the giftwing.
fanwings were immobile. They peered through the dark with eyes attuned to motion. They were social hunters. They worked in concert to corral the dog-sized prey-animals of the plain.