Embassytown - China Mieville [146]
He wasn’t quite wrong: there had been a fall. The Ariekei are different now. It’s true that now they speak lies.
Poor Scile, I’ll say it again. He must think he’s fallen among Lucifers.
Recently a miab incame to Lilypad Hill. We were no longer the people to whom it had been sent. I think that’s why I felt what I can only call naughtiness, opening it. I felt what only I would recognise as the faintest immerdamp around it. Like bad children we pulled out treats. Wine; foods; medicine; luxuries: there were no surprises. We opened our orders, and Wyatt’s sealed instructions too. He didn’t try to stop us. They were no surprise either.
The New Ariekei can speak to automa, and can understand them.
“I don’t want to go in,” I said.
“It’s fine, it’s just …” Bren nodded.
He and Spanish Dancer took longer than I expected. I waited in the street, watched hoardings move. The products they advertise aren’t sold anymore.
They rejoined me. “She’s there,” Bren said.
“And?”
“.”
“And …?” I said. “Did she speak to you?” I said to Spanish. It and Bren looked at each other.
“.”
I looked up at her building. There must be cams at points; there are cams everywhere, and my friend had always been part of her surroundings. I didn’t wave.
“Ehrsul I know that you can understand the words I’m saying, Spanish said,” Bren said. “In Anglo. And she doesn’t even look back. She goes: ‘No, you can’t speak to me; Ariekei can’t understand me.’ ‘Avice would like to know how you are,’ it says. ‘What you’ve been doing.’ She says, ‘Avice! How is she? And you can’t speak to me. You don’t understand me, and you can’t speak anything but Language.’ ”
We passed an avenue of outdated trids, a grassroots market, while I said nothing, and Bren did not insist. In the command economy of our reconstruction, our basics are provided, but extras, luxuries, throw up such barter. They make me think of markets in other cities, on other places.
The blockades have been taken down. Some city-dwellers say that as they can breathe our air but we can’t breathe theirs, the Embassytown atmosphere should be extended over the whole city. Where there are new additions being grown, Ariekene buildings are subtly unclassic. Here a spire; an angled window; a familiar kind of buttress: our Terre topography’s become fashionable.
can’t be found; and DalTon can’t be found: or no one who knows where they are, human or indigenous, will say. Of course their disappearances made me suspect club justice. But I’m in informing networks as good as any, and if something like that has happened, it’s been very quiet. Which is no way to encourager les autre. I think probably either that they were some of the many killed and effaced by the war, or that one is or both are hiding—it’s not as if you can’t still do that in the city—waiting for whatever. I suppose we’ll have to be vigilant.
DalTon’s one thing, as far as I’m concerned. As for , though, I don’t think revenge of lynch or any other kind is what most New Ariekei want, if they even say they lived under . No Ariekei I know have been able to answer my questions, about what it was like, about whether they remember how they thought, before. About Language. Spanish Dancer’s first speech, about that change, was as much inflection as exposition. I don’t say they don’t remember; I say that they can’t tell me how it was if they do.
No one knows why some Ariekei are immune to metaphor. No attention from Spanish or its growing number of deputies, its proselytisers, altering their listeners with careful, infectious, ostentatiously lie-filled sermons, works on all of them. Each meeting there are successes: Ariekei staggering out of Language, into language and semes. Others come close, to go next time or the next. And there are those who refuse to; and those that, like Rooftop, sick with purity, just can’t. They still can’t speak to me, only to Ambassadors. They only understand a dying Language. Now we have the drugs, the voices, to keep them alive, and no more gods.
EzSey, I heard one oratee tell YlSib, was its favourite,