Embassytown

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.

“YOU 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.”

IT 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.

We were too large for them to come for us, but they still watched. Flying things skittered at our torches: burrowing eaters of phosphorescent rot, used to honing in on glowing ground, emerged and gnawed confused at the pooled light.

We didn’t take the leash off our prisoner—we didn’t trust it or know how to decide if it became trustable. But we’d been treating it with less fear for days, and did so with even less now. The new ex-Host liars regarded it, and whispered to each other in words they’d used countless times, that now did very different things. By early morning something was changing. The Ariekei were circling the captive. It wasn’t gasping or lunging at them, or at me, or Bren or YlSib: it was watching us, and watching the other Ariekei.

28

SPANISH DANCER and our captive circled. The others ringed them. Every few seconds one of the two would shove out its giftwing like a knife-fighter looking for an opening. It would sketch out some outline in the air: there would be a pause and the other would follow suit. Spanish’s fanwing frilled open and shut. The Languageless’s stub trembled.

The gesticulations were information, motion telegrams. Talking. They didn’t understand each other but they knew there was something to understand. And that was liberation. When they did make communication—something ridiculous, Spanish throwing a pulpy bud then pointing into the muttering wildlife where it lay, and the Absurd picking it up—their euphoria, even alien, was palpable.

Signifying Spanish could speak through gesture now. For our captive that no longer had a name, perhaps the strangeness was greater. It had thought that without words, it had no language. Its comrades communicated with each other, never knowing they did, not across the chasm with untorn Ariekei; and mostly what they expressed to each other was the very hopelessness that made them believe they were incommunicado.

But in the panic of the attack and our escape, it had understood shove-and-point instructions to flee. It had watched Bren, YlSib and me speak and listen to each other with gestures for stress and clarity. The rest of the Absurd army never had to reflect on these behaviours. Spanish had learnt it could speak without speaking: the Absurd had learnt that it could speak, and listen, at all.

“They were yanking it around,” Bren said. “It was impossible for it not to know what they meant: they were shoving it and pointing the same way. They madeit obey them. Maybe you need violence for language to take.”

“Bren,” I said. “That’s crap. We were all running the same way. We were all trying to get out. We had the same intentions. That’s how it knew what we were doing.”

He shook his head. Formally, he said, “Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.”

“Bullshit. It’s cooperation.” Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren’t as contradictory as they sounded.

“Look,” I said. Pointed above the horizon. There was smoke, stains in the sky.