Embassytown - China Mieville [145]
You have never spoken before.
That was what Spanish Dancer said to its gathered people. It said more. It was much less clumsy with them than I’d been when I changed it: it understood much better the psyches it wanted to alter, and its words were surgery.
At first those in the square listened, not knowing what for. As its words grew more outlandish and impossible, there were brayings of consternation. They were raucous, as they would be at any virtuoso lies, then something much more. There was a hysteria of admiration and concern.
As Spanish spoke, Ariekei shouted in more than astonishment. These were the sounds of crisis. I remembered them from when I’d taught Spanish Dancer to lie. I was hearing minds reconfigured. Deaths: old thoughts dying. I saw the upthrown giftwings and fanwings of ecstasy, ecstasy in an old sense, not without pain and terror, of visions, and then the silence of the adult Ariekei new-born.
There were only a few that first time. Most who listened were left terrified perhaps, tremulous, having glimpsed something. When at last they calmed, some eventually clamoured for EzCal again, their need making them forgetful.
But there were others who tipped over, became new things, learnt language, at what Spanish Dancer said. I understood almost every word it spoke.
Sometimes when Spanish Dancer is talking to me in my own language, it doesn’t say but , or . I think it knows that pleases me. A present for me.
31
Poor Scile.
How do I tell this?
Most mornings I go to Lilypad Hill. The adjutants and I discuss plans. “Anything yet?” I say, and every morning so far they’ve checked the readings and shaken their heads, “Not yet,” and I’ve said, “Well, soon. Be ready.”
Can I say Poor Scile, after everything? I can. His actions disgust me—there are dead friends who’d be alive if it weren’t for him—but could you not feel pity to see him?
He’s in the jail we made from the infirmary. His neighbours are those failed Ambassadors still too broken to walk out of the doors when we opened them. Scile knows he’s alive because, criminal as he is, he didn’t do anything so very bad, so unforgivable as to warrant execution. We’ve decided we don’t have the death penalty just for murder.
I go to see him sometimes. People understand. It’s pity, concern, curiosity and the ghost of affection. He can’t believe what’s happened. He can’t believe he so failed.
It was pandemonium when he killed Cal. I’m surprised he wasn’t shot in turn, that we were able to take him alive.
“You will not do this,” he said. Cal still twitched on the ground. Scile swung his gun at Spanish Dancer. “They will not be like you.” We stopped him before he fired again. Spanish smacked his pistol away. Grabbed Scile’s shirt and said to him “?” Scile put his hands over his ears and called Spanish Dancer a devil.
It hadn’t been a suicide walk but a pilgrimage. He’d gone to find the Absurd army, to walk behind them a witness and apostle while they—what, cleaning fire, holy avengers who’d rather cut themselves than be tainted by lies?—purged the ruined Ariekei, got the world ready again, a nursery, for unborn pure-Languaged young.
It had been a brutal hope but it had been hope. I’m sure Scile heard when EzCal was born, no matter where he was. I don’t know how word could have reached him but word does. He must have known EzCal and their oratees couldn’t withstand the Absurd. But he didn’t reckon with me and Bren and Spanish Dancer. The horror he must have felt to see us and what we did, from the camps, beside the army. He was patient, waiting until the god-drug arrived before doing his holy work.
He sacrificed himself, he must have thought, for the Absurd. Perhaps he had in mind the child Ariekei that would one day walk through empty Embassytown, think of explanations for its ruins, and say them in Language. Scile was