Embassytown

“Wait! Wait!” It was MagDa. “Pharos!” “We have to...” One of them gestured to Ez and Ra: Don’t speak again. MagDa conferred and shouted in Language. We must speak, they said.

Whether out of pity, courtesy, curiosity or whatever, and other leaders, if that’s what they were, of the gathering craned their eye-corals, twisted them backwards, looking behind them. I heard someone say, “Put it down, Officer. Christ, man...”

We have much to discuss, MagDa said. Please join us. May we ask you to enter?

Constables and SecStaff came through the crowd. “Go.” One stood before me. She held a stubby gun. She spoke to me rapidly, the same spiel she was giving everyone. “Please clear the streets. We’re trying to bring this under control. Please.”

Like everyone else, I obeyed my orders slowly. The Ariekei had arrived in strange coherence. Now most of them straggled away at random, leaving their scent and unique marks in the dirt. An urgent-faced boy in a constable’s uniform whispered to me to please fuck off right now, and I sped up a little. The Ambassadors were trying to usher a few Hosts, those which had hesitated, into the Embassy. They didn’t seem to be succeeding.

Part Three LIKE AS NOT

Formerly, 7

AFTER THE FESTIVAL, Scile disappeared. He wouldn’t answer my buzzes, or did so only with terse comments and promises to return. Wherever he was he might be blanking me, but he had conferred, I suspected, with unlikely people. I was with Valdik and Shanita a day after the festival when Valdik was buzzed; when he’d answered he shut up and glanced at me with wide-open eyes. I had been abruptly sure that Scile was on the line.

After a couple of days my husband came back to our rooms and we had the fight that had been simmering for a long time. As with most such, the specifics are uninteresting and largely beside the point. He was surly, and pissy, and made little quips about how I passed my time, barbs at least as anxious as they were nasty, not that I was in the mood to care about that. I’d had enough of his recent predilection for gnomic pronouncements, and his bad temper.

“Who do you think arranged that trip, Scile?” I shouted. He wouldn’t answer or look at me, and I didn’t put my hand on my hips or gesticulate, I folded my arms and leaned back and stared down my face at him like I had the first time I’d met him. “Some people might think thanks were in order, not days of this sulky shit. What makes you think you can behave like this? Where did you fucking go?”

He made some reference that made it clear he had been with Ambassadors. I stopped at that, halfway through a riposte. What in immer? I remember thinking. Who buggers off to high-level meetings when they’re having a hissy fit?

“Listen,” Scile said. I could see him deciding something, trying hard to calm our altercation. “Listen, will you please listen.” He waved a paper. “I know what it’s trying to do. Surl Tesh-echer. It practises, and it preaches, to its coterie. This is what it’s been saying.” He didn’t say how he’d got the transcript. “You, similes...” he said. “The Hosts aren’t like us, okay: it’s not exactly most of us who’d get excited to meet a... an adjectival phrase or a past participle or whatever. But it’s no surprise some of them would want to meet a simile. You help them think. Someone with reverence for Language would love that.

“But who’d want to lie? A punk, is who. Avice, listen. There are fans, and there are liars. And only Surl Tesh-echer and its friends are both.” He smoothed out the paper. “Are you ready to listen to me? You think I’ve just been sitting in a cupboard for the good of my health? This is what it’s been saying.”

“ ‘BEFORE THE HUMANS came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.” He glanced at me. “We didn’t walk on our wings. We didn’t walk. We didn’t swallow earth. We didn’t swallow.” Scile was reading nervously, quickly.

“ ‘There’s a Terre who swims with fishes, one who wore no clothes, one who ate what was given her, one who walks backwards. There’s a rock that was broken and cemented together. I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion. I’m like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I wasn’t not like the rock that was broken and cemented together.

“ ‘I do what I always do, I’m like the Terre who swims with fishes. I’m not unlike that Terre. I’m very like it.

‘I’m not water. I’m not water. I’m water.’ ”

No translations I’d ever seen of Host pronouncements were properly comprehensible, but this read different. I realised a counter-intuitive affinity. For all its strangeness it sounded a little, a tiny bit, more like, less unlike Anglo-Ubiq than most Language did. It didn’t have the usual precise and nuanced exactnesses.

“It’s not like most competitors, trying to force out a lie,” Scile said. “It’s more systematic. It’s training itself into untruth. It’s using these weird constructions so it can say something true, then interrupt itself, to lie.”

“It didn’t perform most of these,” I said.

“It’s been practising,” he said. “We’ve always known the Hosts need you, right? You and the rest of you. Like the split rock, like they need those two poor cats they stitched into a bag. They need similes to say certain things, right? To think them. They need to make them in the world, so they can make the comparison.”

“Yes. But...” I looked at the paper. I read over it. was teaching itself to lie.

“ ‘I’m like the rock that was broken,’ ” Scile said, “then ‘not not it.’ It can’t quite do it, but it’s trying to go from ‘I’m like the rock’ to ‘I am the rock.’ See? Same comparative term, but different. Not a comparison anymore.”

He showed me old books in hard or virtua: Leezenberg, Lakoff, u-senHe, Ricoeur. I was used to his odd fascinations, they’d helped charm me ages ago. Now they and he made me uneasy.

“A simile,” he said, “is true because you say so. It’s a persuasion: this is like that. That’s not enough for it anymore. Similes aren’t enough.” He stared. “It wants to make you a kind of lie. To change everything.

“Simile spells an argument out: it’s ongoing, explicit, truth-making. You don’t need... logos, they used to call it. Judgement. You don’t need to... to link incommensurables. Unlike if you claim: ‘This is that.’ When it patently is not. That’s what we do. That’s what we call ‘reason’, that exchange, metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Teshecher wants. To bring in a lie.” He spoke very calmly. “It wants to usher in evil.”

“I’m worried about Scile,” I said to Ehrsul.

“Avice,” she said to me at last, after I’d tried to explain to her. “I’m sorry but I’m not sure what you’re saying to me.” She did listen: I don’t want to give the impression that all she did was tell me not to tell her. Ehrsul listened but I’m not sure to what. I was hardly exact, I couldn’t be.

“I’M WORRIED about Scile,” I said to CalVin. I tried them instead. “He’s gone a bit religious.”

“Pharotekton?” one of them said.

“No. Not church. But...” I’d gleaned more scraps of Scile’s emergent theology. I call it that though he was adamant it had nothing to do with God. “He wants to protect the Ariekei. From changing Language.” I told CalVin about the temptation, what Scile thought planned. “He thinks a lot’s at stake,” I