Embassytown - China Mieville [127]
“Yes, it really is,” he said.
Spanish Dancer and the other Ariekei surrounded it. It strained and failed to reach for them. They tottered back, came forward, morbidly curious, it looked like.
“How is it in Embassytown?” I said.
“They’re afraid,” he said. “They probably think you and I are working for the enemy. Or they’re saying they do.”
“The Absurd?” I said. “That’s …”
“Absurd, yes.”
“It’s crazy.”
“You know how they are,” he said. People would say it even as they knew it made little sense. They were right to be afraid. The Absurd were coming.
“How did you get it?”
“In all the ways you can imagine,” Bren said. “False papers, bribery, misdirection, intimidation. Creeping at midnight. Violence.
All that.”
“Now we can actually test things,” I said.
Bren took datchips from his bag. “Here,” he said. “This lot can have a bit of control over themselves. So you’re not totally beholden to the broadcasts. We can get them out of here.”
“Why exactly do you want them to lie?” Yl or Sib said. I stared at them. They hadn’t understood at all. They’d thrown their lot in with a plan just because it was a plan.
“It’s what the lying means,” Bren said to them. “Why do you think we’re leaving the city?” They shrugged.
“It’s about how symbols work for them,” I said. “I never thought we could shift that. But you know what made me change my mind? That there are already Ariekei who’ve done it.” I pointed at the captive. “They’ve managed to do what Surl Tesh-echer and Spanish Dancer and this lot have wanted to do for years. They’ve got new minds. And they’re using them to kill us.”
It was the freakish precision with which the Absurd coordinated attacks that had started me thinking. They were communicating: there was no other explanation for such efficient murder. Languageless, they still needed and made community, though they might not have known that’s what they were doing: each probably believed itself trapped in vengeful solitude even as the violence they committed together disproved it.
I’d seen them gesticulate. Their commandos or commanders indicating with their giftwings. The Absurd had invented pointing. With the point they’d conceived a that. They’d given the jag of the body, the outthrust limb, power to refer. That that was the key. From it had followed other soundless words.
That. That? No, not that: that.
Each word of Language meant just what it meant. Polysemy or ambiguity were impossible and with them most tropes that made other languages languages at all. But thatness faces every way: it’s flexible because it’s empty, a universal equivalent. That always means and not that other, too. In their lonely silent way, the Absurd had made a semiotic revolution, and a new language.
It was base and present tense. But its initial single word was actually two: that and not-that. And from that tiny and primal vocabulary, the motor of that antithesis spun out other concepts: me, you, others.
The code they’d created was quite unlike the precise mapping they’d grown up knowing. But it was Language that was the anomaly: this new crude thing of flailing fingers and murderous stamping was closer by far to what we spoke, was at last cousin-tongue to those of sentients across the immer.
“We could never learn to speak Language,” I said. “We only ever pretended. Instead the Absurd have learnt to speak like us. The Ariekei in this room want to lie. That means thinking of the world differently. Not referring: signifying. I thought that was impossible. But look.” I pointed at the thing that wanted to kill me. “That’s what they’ve done. Every time they point, they signify. So far the price is way too high. But now we know Ariekei can do it. And teaching this lot that without taking their wings means teaching them to lie.
“Similes start … transgressions. Because we can refer to anything. Even though in Language, everything’s literal. Everything is what it is, but still, I can be like the dead and the living and the stars and a desk and fish