Embassytown (22 page)

“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 said.

I still love this man and I’m afraid of what’s happening
, I was saying.
Can you help me? I don’t understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, what’s making him afraid, how he’s able to make it even get to me.
Something like that.

“Let me talk to him,” CalVin said. The one who hadn’t spoken looked with raised eyebrows at his doppel, then smiled and looked back at me.

Formerly, 8

C
AL
V
IN
, as they’d promised me, spent time with Scile. My husband’s research was intense, antisocial, his memos to himself were everywhere and mostly not comprehensible, his files scattered across our datspace. The truth is I was a little scared. I didn’t know how to react to what I saw in Scile now. The fervour had always been there, but though he tried to disguise it—after that one conversation he didn’t talk about his anxieties to me—I could see it was growing stronger.

That he tried to hide it confused me. I wondered if he thought his concerns were the only appropriate ones to the shifts in some Hosts’ practice, and if the lack of such anxiety from the rest of us was devastating. If he thought the whole world mad, forcing him into dissimulation. I went through those of his thesis notes, appointment diaries, textbook annotations I could access, as if looking for a master code. It gave me a better sense, if still partial and confused, of his theories.

“What do you think?” I asked CalVin. They looked put out by my uncharacteristic pleading. They told me there was no question that Scile was looking at things in an unusual way, and that his focus was, yes, rather intense. But overall, not to worry. What a useless injunction.

To
MY SURPRISE
Scile started coming to The Cravat with me. I’d thought we would do less, not more, in each other’s company. I didn’t tell him I knew he’d been previously, on his own. I saw no evidence of more efforts to persuade the Hosts to speak him. Instead, he began to exercise a subtle pull on some of the similes. He took part in the discussions, would imply certain of his theories, especially those according to which similes represented the pinnacle and limit of Language. Communication
making
truth. Slightly to my surprise, no one made him, unsimile outsider, other than welcome. The opposite, really. Valdik wasn’t alone in listening. Valdik wasn’t an intelligent man and I was worried for him.

I mustn’t exaggerate. I think Scile seemed himself, only perhaps more focused than previously, more distracted. I no longer thought we could stay together, but I wanted to know that he was alright.

These were in other ways not bad times for me. We were between reliefs. It was always deep in those days that Embassytown became most vividly itself, neither waiting for something, nor celebrating something that had happened. We called these times the doldrums. Of course we knew the more conventional use of the term, but like a few other uncanny words, for us it meant itself and its own opposite. During those still, drab days, cut off on our immer outskirt, without contact, a long time after and before any miabs, we turned inwards.

Fiestas and spectaculars, on the spareday at the end of each of our long months, our crooked alleys interwoven with ribbons and full of music. Children would dance wearing trid costumes, their integuments of light overlapping and crystalline. There were parties. Some formal; many not; some costume; a few naked.

This doldrums culture was part of our economy. After a visit, we had luxuries and new technology to invigorate our markets and production: when one was due there was a rash of spending and innovation, out of excitement and the knowledge that our commodities would soon change, that new-season goods would be in expensive vogue. Between, in the doldrums, things were static, not desperate but pinched, and these fetes were punctuations, and meant small runs on certain indulgences.

One night I was in bed with CalVin. One of them was asleep. The other was stroking my flank, whispering conversation. It was a rare thing, to be with one doppel only. I felt a strong urge to ask his name. I think now I know which it was. I was running my finger over the back of his neck, the link in him, beautifully rendered in the hollow below his skull’s overhang. I looked at its twin, on the sleeping half of the Ambassador.

“Should I be worried about Scile?” I said. The sleeper shifted and we were still a second.

“I don’t think so,” my companion whispered. “He’s onto something, you know.”

I didn’t understand. “I’m not worried that he’s
wrong
,” I said. “I’m worried that he’s . . . that . . .”

“But he’s
not
wrong. Or at least—he’s pointing out something.”

I sat up. “Are you saying—?” I stood and paced, and the sleeping doppel woke and looked at me mildly. Cal and Vin conferred in whispers, and it didn’t sound like simple agreement. “What
are
you saying?” I said.

“There are some persuasive elements to what he says.” It was the newly woken doppel who spoke.

“I can’t believe you’re telling me—”

“I’m not. I’m not telling you anything.” He spoke impassively. His doppel looked at him and then at me, uneasily. “You asked us to keep a watch on him, and we are, and we have. And we’re looking into some of the things he’s saying. An eccentric he may be, but Scile’s not stupid, and there’s no question that this Host . . .” He looked at his doppel and together they said, “
.” The half of CalVin who had been talking continued: “. . . is definitely pursuing some odd strategies.”

I stood naked at the edge of the bed and watched them: one lying back and looking up at me, the other with his knees drawn.

I
ADMIT DEFEAT
. I’ve been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don’t know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn’t pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn’t a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn’t want to be what I want to make it.

I
N THE STREETS OF
Embassytown, a congregation was forming. Valdik appeared to be at its centre. It was Valdik who expounded the theories, now. My husband was a canny man, even in his obsessions.

“Valdik Druman’s at the centre of it now?” CalVin said. “Valdik? Really?”

“I know it sounds unlikely . . .” I said.

“Well, he’s an adult, he’s making his own choices.”

“It’s not that simple.” I knew CalVin were right and wrong at the same time.

Most Embassytowners did not know or care about any of these debates. Of those who did, most would consider them pretty unimportant, secure—and there was security in it—in the certainty that Hosts could not lie, whatever a few agitated similes insisted. For those who knew about the festivals, a few Hosts determined to push at the boundaries of Language was too obscure a phenomenon to be any kind of problem, let alone a moral one. That left only a tiny number of Embassytowners, disproportionately the credulous. But their number was growing.

Valdik speechified at The Cravat on the nature of the similes and the role of Language. His arguments were confused but passionate and affecting.

“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” Valdik said. “No other language anywhere in the universe. Where what’s said is truth. Can you imagine what it would be to lose that?”

“It isn’t fair what you’re doing to Valdik,” I told Scile, on one of his rare visits to what had been our home.

“He’s not a fucking child, Avice,” Scile said. He was collecting clothes and notes. He did not look at me as he rummaged. “He decides what he wants.”

W
ALKING NEAR
the ruins I was handed a flyer on cheap nantech paper that flashed a trid as I unfolded it. It made me start: it was Valdik’s face, apple-sized, in my hand.

D
RUMAN
, it said,
ON THE
B
ATTLE AGAINST THE LIE
. A time and place, not The Cravat but a little hall. With it brought to my attention, I noticed details of that and similar meetings guerrilla-coded into wallscreens, hacked nuisance trids. I went. I’d thought I’d find Scile, but no. I stayed at the back of the room.

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.

Formerly, 9

S
OMEONE 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.