Embassytown - China Mieville [134]
YlSib was alarmed, but neither Bren nor I were surprised by what we heard: the noise of old ways coming off in scabs. Pangs of something finishing, and of birth. Everything changes now: I thought that very explicitly, each word. I thought: Now they’re seeing things.
In the beginning was each word of Language, sound isomorphic with some Real: not a thought, not really, only self-expressed worldness, speaking itself through the Ariekei. Language had always been redundant: it had only ever been the world. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.
“Shouldn’t we …?” Yl said, and had nothing with which to finish it.
The said was now not-as-it-is. What they spoke now weren’t things or moments anymore but the thoughts of them, pointings-at; meaning no longer a flat facet of essence; signs ripped from what they signed. It took the lie to do that. With that spiral of assertion-abnegation came quiddities, and the Ariekei became themselves. They were worldsick, as meanings yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.
No wonder it made them sick. They were like new vampires, retaining memories while they sloughed off lives. They’d never be cured. They went quiet one by one, and not because their crisis ended. They were in a new world. It was the world we live in.
“You have to show the others,” I said to Spanish Dancer. Rudely interrupted its birth. It deserved a different passage but we had no time. It listened in its queasy awe and newness. “The deaf ones. You can talk to them. They think they’re beyond language at all, but you, you can show them what they’ve done.” Language was never possible. We never spoke in one voice.
In the sun, we saw figures kilometres off. Humans rattling slowly towards us. Small ships went overhead, heading back toward the city. “Look,” Bren said. “That one’s wounded.”
As we got closer we could see that there weren’t many Terre, maybe thirty or forty, hauling equipment or urging on slapdash-looking biorigging, rocking in cars. We saw them see us, and for a moment they seemed to be preparing weapons. Then they calmed.
“They must have seen this lot first,” Bren said of the Ariekei with us. “Thought it was an attack. But with us here they think we’re an Embassytown squad. They’re plantation staff.” Wilderness dwellers who had only now cleared their homesteads and outland farm-factories. They’d been in the path of the Languageless army and lost their nerve as the Absurd came at their lands killing all the humans they met and tearing their houses to the ground, murdering or recruiting the country Ariekei alongside which the Terre had lived.
More boats went overhead. They would probably not look long enough to see the Ariekei in our party, or that we were heading in the wrong direction. In fact they wouldn’t notice us at all: they were busy returning to the city. Several of the vessels, I could see, were bleeding.
Spanish Dancer whispered, called the humans things it couldn’t have called them before. It was paying close attention, as it had for hours, to our captive.
We avoided the refugees. “Depending how fast the Absurd are going,” Bren said, “we’ll reach them tomorrow or the next day. Probably the next day—what is that, Muhamday, Ioday?” None of us had any idea.
“What about the Embassytowners?”
“We’ve avoided them. I think we went past them.