Embassytown - China Mieville [129]
Our prisoner could see what they were doing, as they hunched, fanwings spread. I imagine that it looked with disgust. Certainly it strained in its shackles.
We quickly had our catechism. I drew it from what Spanish Dancer had said. I whispered it in Anglo-Ubiq; YlSib spoke it in Language. Bren, I saw, mouthed the simile of me that he’d first spoken a long time ago.
“You’re trying to change things,” I said. YlSib repeated in Language. “You want change like the girl who ate what was given her. So you’re like me. Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her: they’re like me. You’re like that girl who ate. You are the girl who ate. You’re like the girl. You are the girl. And so are the others, who aren’t like you.”
The first time YlSib moved from you are like to you are the Ariekei started very visibly. That succulently strange lie you are, born out of the truth, you are like, that they’d already asserted. And its contradiction, too, their enemies as like me as they were. We showed them how their own arguments came close to making liars of them.
Addicted vehicles galloped by us into the wilderness. In the morning YlSib took us to a transporter. It was blunt and ugly but full of breathable air. We rode an unseen pillow of vented particles following the tracks of the Embassytown-and-city troops.
In empty suburbs were scattered gangs of zelles, their Ariekei dead, looking forlornly for things to power. Bren drove our mongrel conveyance. It was nowhere near as fast as the military craft that had gone out, but it exceeded our walking pace, punted on its way by swinging side-limbs like gondoliers’ poles. Through hollowed-out window-eyes I watched the city recede. At first there were outskirt dwellings and warehouses descending into muck, but they ended and the sky came down to meet us.
We raised dust. Spined bushes shuffled out of our way, so paths opened for us in the fields, stretching for many metres ahead then began to fracture, to branch off in the possible directions we might take. The Ariekene battery-beasts moved around my legs. Behind us the shrubs crawled back to their previous positions. The city was a line of towers, rotund halls like unplanted bulbs. It receded.
I looked at it a long time. I shielded my eyes as if that made for magic binoculars, but I couldn’t see through it to the smoke or Terre towerblocks of Embassytown. I wondered if there were travellers among the Ariekei, and where if anywhere were other cities from which and to where they might go. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know.
The zelles grew restive before their owners: they were less able to fight their addiction. Over the hours, the Ariekei huddled as low as their intricate bulks allowed against the pipes and lights in the vehicle. One by one they enfolded their fanwings over datchips.
You are like the girl, you are the girl. They are like the girl, they are the girl.
“,” YlSib said to them: Repeat it.
We are like the girl, the Ariekei said. You are the girl, YlSib said, and the Ariekei scuttled, an excitement that pleased me. They couldn’t do it but understood, in some alien abstract, what they were trying to do. The girl … some said, and some … we … or … us … or … it’s like … Poor YlSib, poor Spanish. I was relentless.
“What’s that?” I’d seen something scatter a trail kilometres behind us. There was another motion mark, to the west, and soon overhead was another tiny gusting machine. A very few other transports followed us, got closer and visible. A many-wheeled cart on liquid suspension; a truck all Terretech but for biorigged weapons; one-person centaurs, headless equine frames at the front of each of which sat an aeolied woman or man. A glider climbed thermals. Bren stopped us. YlSib got out as the exodus approached.