Valdik wore a projector, and trids of him appeared throughout the temple, random and staticky. At the front of the room I saw Shanita, Darius, Hasser and other similes and tropes. Valdik preached. He was still a middling speaker. I don’t know how this mediocrity amassed a following—something about the doldrums. He expounded religiose foolishness—“two voices but one truth, because what is the truth but dual, bifurcated, not in conflict but two forms of one truth” and so forth.
The place wasn’t a quarter full. It contained indulgent friends, the curious, refugees from other cults. A convocation of the hopeless and bored. When I got home, Scile was speaking down the line. He smiled an unconvincing greeting at me as I came in, turned so that I couldn’t hear him nor see his mouth move. I wondered whether, if Valdik were removed from this self-appointed office, with what I was convinced was Scile’s instrument confiscated, his mania would dissipate.
“What should we do?” CalVin said. “These meetings aren’t illegal.”
“You can do anything you want.”
“Well...” “We could have Druman taken for Administrative Detention...” “... but do you really want that?”
“Yes!” I said, but of course I didn’t, and of course they wouldn’t do it.
“Listen,” they said. “Don’t worry.” “We’ll watch Scile.” “We’ll keep him safe.” That they did, though neither in the way, nor from what, I’d assumed.
SOMEONE RELEASED a viral ’ware into the vagrant automa of Embassytown that gave them Valdik’s mania. It made them preachers in his new church. Their eloquence depended on the sophistication of their processors: most were little more than ecstatics, but a few were sudden theologians. They ambled as they always had but now accosted us and exhorted us to defend prelapsarian language, Language, we poor sinners (the rhetoric was kitsch), doomed forever ourselves to speak with a deep structure of lie but at least granted service to the double-tongue of truth, and more like that.
Patches were programmed and released and did their job but the infection was tenacious, and for weeks these tramp priests proselytised us, their catechisms changing as their ’ware degraded and threw up protestant, variant sects. “We are the stewards of the angels,” I was told by one machine that staggered like a supplicant. “We are the stewards of the speaking angels, of God’s language.” The virus shut down when its resultant theories strayed too far from emergent Drumanian orthodoxy.
I asked Ehrsul if she was concerned, if she’d felt the tickling of virtual germs. She dismissed the other automa as mental weaklings and told me that yes, though she’d felt it, she’d hardly been in danger herself. Of course Valdik and his radical similes were suspected, but no one could prove who had programmed it, and though it was a nuisance that was all it ultimately was.
I knew Scile didn’t have the expertise to program, or I’d have thought it his doing.
WHEN I WENT back to The Cravat, now, I did so for socially diagnostic reasons. Many previous regulars no longer drank there: alienated by Valdik’s vatic pronouncements, they set up refusenik simile salons. Others had taken their place. I went to hear Valdik speak, out of what I told myself was a pornography of doomed causes, and maybe to listen for grounds to demand some intervention. He hymned the Ambassadors (in his model, interceding hierophants); expressed gratitude at being simile, truths, Language in flesh.
was there, with Spanish Dancer and others, at the last of Valdik’s gatherings I went to. The Host had amassed more followers, too, so I thought it must be improving its technique, a better and better liar. They watched each other. Valdik glowered. I didn’t know if the Hosts felt his hostility. Hasser was there—one of the few who retained friends on both sides of the emergent simile split. He acknowledged me, his face displaying an emotion for which I’ve no name; it reminded me of my own. An unease, is as close as I can get to it.
“Aren’t you worried?” I asked Ehrsul.
“I told you,” she said, “I’m immune.”
“No I mean... what do you reckon? Do you ever think about it? I mean, does it ever make you feel anything one way or the other, that some of the Hosts are learning... well, can talk their way around truth, now?” She said nothing, so I said: “Can lie.”
We were in a bar in one of Embassytown’s shopping streets. Ehrsul in her minor notoriety was being glanced at by slightly moneyed youth. We spoke quietly under music and the clatter of glasses. Ehrsul did not answer me. “Something’s changing. Which may or may not be a good thing,” I said finally.
She looked at me with a projected face that, by design or a coincidence of ambiguous stimuli-responses in her ’ware, was inscrutable. She said nothing. I grew more and more uncomfortable in that enigmatic silence, until I talked about something else, to which she responded as normal, with all the exaggerated intimacies of our friendship.
It never meant that much to me one way or the other that I was simile; I didn’t care what Valdik preached.
“SO WHAT’S being done?” I asked CalVin. Even the Ambassadors were concerned, now, I gathered. The new philosophy couldn’t have had more than a score or two of serious devotees, but fervour unnerved us in Embassytown. The Hosts must surely have picked up some atmosphere: I’d seen more Ariekei than usual in the aeolian breath of our quarter.
“We’re talking to the Hosts,” CalVin said. “We’re going to organise...” “... a festival.” “Here, in Embassytown.” “To stress that it’s theirs too, to speak in.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. I’d never heard of an Ariekene event in Embassytown. “But is that supposed to... What are you doing about Valdik?”
One of CalVin stared at me, the other looked away. I was angry and I tried to work out with whom. Scile was ensconced somewhere, with radical similes or the Staff, and would never respond to me now, and that seemed to concern no one. There I was, between cliques and secrets. I couldn’t tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
“It’s the doldrums, Avvy,” Ehrsul said to me later. “This is what happens. You’re talking as if it’s end-time. I think...” She paused. “You’re upset because of Scile. You care about him, and he’s gone from you.” She stumbled exactly like someone who thought would.
ARIEKEI REPRESENTATIVES came in flyers, to plan this hybrid festival. I was often in the Embassy, floaking, and I came to know them all. One tall and thickset Ariekes had a mark on its fanwing like a bird in a canopy of leaf, so I called it Pear Tree.
“This is what we need,” CalVin said. “We’re all too tense.” “There’ll be a parade, and stalls and games for Terre...” “... and a Festival of Lies for the Hosts.”
“What about Valdik?” I said again. “And what about Scile?”
“Valdik’s nothing.” “Scile we’ve not seen for a couple of weeks.”
“So where
“Don’t worry.” “It’ll be okay.” “Honestly, this event’ll put paid to a lot of these problems.”
I thought it was absolutely absurd. No one agreed with me. In all my life I’ve never felt so alone.
The festival was to take place in a piazza near the southern edge of Embassytown. It was christened the Licence Party: a pun on Lies and Sense, I was told. I never got what the “sense” referred to. Signs went up displaying that idiot name, and a necessary explanation.
VALDIK LIVED in Embassytown’s east. There was a balcony in front of his door overlooking a leisure canal, and a garden full of flowers and birds, altbirds, local fauna.
“Avice,” he said, slowly, when he opened the door to me. If he was surprised he hid it.
“Valdik,” I said. “Can you help me? I need to find Scile.”
