Embassytown - China Mieville [111]
“Scupper what? What are you trying to do?”
“Not me,” Bren said.
“All of you. You, you,” I said to YlSib, “these Hosts. What are you plural trying to do?”
“MagDa’s way won’t work,” Bren said. “Just to stave things off. That’s why they won’t take on Cal. It’s not enough to try to keep everything going until the ship gets here. We have to change things.” While he spoke, the Ariekei moved around me like flotsam in a current, and they said the phrase I was and tried to make it into new things, to think of new things they could insist that it, I, my past, was like.
“EzCal’s not the only one we have to be careful of,” Bren said. “You have to keep this quiet.” I remembered the parting of Ariekei when Hasser had come and killed .
“You’re worried about other Ariekei,” I said.
“These speakers were dangerous before,” Bren said. “Scile was right about them, and so were their …” He shrugged and shook his head so I would know whatever phrase he used was inexact. “Ruling clique. And I don’t know where they are now, yet, but I bet EzCal have an idea. Or Cal does. They’ve done business before. Why do you think he’s so keen to get into the city?”
I’d thought Cal’s eagerness was newly visionary fervour. But back then, there in the Festival of Lies, Cal, and Pear Tree, looking at me. “Jesus Pharos.” Scile had watched too. A conspirator then, Scile would approve of EzCal now. Their priorities, like CalVin’s before them, were power and survival; Scile’s were always the city and its stasis. Those had overlapped once, but history had left Scile behind. Hence his hopeless walk.
“Cal might already have found his friends again,” Bren said. “This lot …” He indicated the room. “They were a threat once. You saw. Now …” He laughed. “Well, everything’s changed. But they might still be a threat. Different: but maybe even more. Cal might not know this group still exists. If he ever knew. But the Ariekei he worked with before do. So if he finds them, this lot here had better keep very quiet. So we have to, too.”
“How are they a threat?” I said. “I never understood. Why are they doing this? Whatever it is they’re doing.”
Bren struggled. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know how to say.”
“You don’t know,” I said. He bobbed his head in a half-yes-half-no.
“How’s your Language, Avice?” said one of YlSib. They spoke to Spanish Dancer and it answered. I could follow some, and when I shook my head Yl or Sib would translate a few clauses.
It’s not good that we are this. We wish to be other than this. We’re like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her because we imbibe what is given to us by EzCal. There was a long silence. We want instead to be like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her in that we want to be … and then there was silence again, and Spanish Dancer shook its limbs.
“It tried to use your simile twice, contradictorily,” Sib said. “But it couldn’t quite manage.”
Now, Spanish Dancer went on, it’s worse. We didn’t expect this. It was a bad thing when we were made intoxicated and helpless by the god-drug’s words, lost ourselves, but now it’s different and worse. Now when the god-drug speaks we obey. Yes, it said that with modulations that meant nothing to me, but no matter how alien the Ariekene mental map, sense of self, I thought that must be truly terrible. I’d seen the crowds respond instantly to EzCal’s instructions, choiceless about it. We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey. We want Language to put to our use.
They resented their new druggy craving and their newer inability to disobey. This conclave could hardly be unique in that. But it dovetailed with what they had always wanted to achieve: their longtime striving for lies, to make Language mean how they wanted. That older desire seemed to make them execrate their new condition even more than other conscious