Embassytown - China Mieville [128]
“Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying. Just a route, though. But we can push them down it, even that last step, all the way.” It became clearer to me as I spoke. “To where the literal becomes …” I stopped. “Something else. If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else. We tell the truth best by becoming lies.”
Not paradoxes, I wanted to say; these weren’t paradoxes, they weren’t nonsense. “I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”
PART EIGHT
THE PARLEY
25
We heard strange sounds, and saw vessels rising, heading out of Embassytown and the city. Most were corvids crossbred of biorigging and bloodless tech. There were spiny church-sized hulks among them, older than Embassytown.
“I can’t believe they got those things up,” I said.
“They’re not as fierce as they look,” Bren said. “They were survey ships once. It’s all theatre. Even with the, whisper it, Bremen arsenal, we don’t have a hope.”
Bren had once, with his doppel, been party to hidden arrangements. They’d debriefed spies and double- and triple-agents. “Wyatt was clever,” he said. “He did exactly the right amount and kind of not talking about what he had access to to make it scary. But it was nothing.”
The fleet lumbered away on their doomed sorties. Taking off my aeoli in the sealed air-breathing room, seeing the Ariekei wait for me, I was exhausted, and had to close my eyes.
Our own flight from the city was complicated: between four Terre and the Ariekei we were able to push and pull our Absurd prisoner with us, but not easily. It had berserker strength. We had to administer charges to it often, and tug it hurting from the punishment.
“Let’s leave it,” said Yl.
“Can’t,” said Bren. He was the most assiduous of us in trying to communicate with it, whenever we stopped. He got nowhere. It hardly looked at him, focused its enraged attention on the addicted Ariekei.
“They’re going into battle,” Bren said, indicating the sky. “It’s pointless but I respect them for it a bit. EzCal are going to fight.” Efforts at negotiation were stillborn and the Absurd came closer. Refugee Terre from arable outposts were trekking to Embassytown. The journey overwhelmed many of them, and left their bodies to degrade from within in suits and biorigging, into mulch that wouldn’t fertilise this soil. “EzCal are wondering if they can just fight their way out of all this.” As if pugnacity could outweigh the simplicity of numbers.
“I’ll give them this,” Bren said. “EzCal will be on the field. It was Ez who insisted. The bloody convivials are over. Back home it’s … bad.” I’d left only a few tens of hours ago, but now it was the day after the parties. Poor Embassytown.
We took evasive ways but there were too many of us to be really secretive. We relied on the chaos that Embassytown and the city were accelerating in each other. We crawled through tunnels between bones, and waited and shocked our captive into stupor when we saw patrols of Ariekei, humans, or both, clearing the streets, shooting the mindless.
It was difficult, peering across skin plateaus to where constables of our race and Ariekei enforced a brutal order. YlSib had repeatedly to whisper You must be quiet to Spanish Dancer and its companions. I made frantic arm movements to hush them, which of course they didn’t understand. More flyers went over our heads. We hid from regiments on the way to the front.
I kept up efforts to teach. We tried to shield our Ariekene companions from the sounds of the speakers when EzCal’s (now prerecorded) utterings began—we holed up and they listened instead to the