Embassytown - China Mieville [22]
The Hosts listened, and did not understand a single sound.
“How many of you get away?” Scile asked me.
“You make it sound like a prison-break,” I said.
“Well, come on. As I recall, you’ve said to me more than once that you made it out. As I recall you may have told me that, ahem, you’d never go back.” He looked a sly look.
“Touché,” I said. We were about to start on the last leg to Embassytown.
“So how many of you?”
“Not a whole lot. You mean immersers?”
“I mean anyone.”
I shrugged. “A couple of non-immersers must get cartas every so often. Not that many people bother applying, even if you do pass the tests.”
“You in touch with any of your classmates?”
“Classmates? You mean the immersers in my batch, who left with me? Hardly.” I made finger motions to indicate our dispersal. “Anyway. There were only three others. We weren’t close.” Even had the practicalities of miab-hauled letters not made it near impossible, I wouldn’t have tried and nor would they. A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn’t expecting any of them to return.
On that journey to Embassytown, Scile had had his sopor amended, spiked with gerons so he would age while under. It’s an affecting gesture, to ensure that the sleep of travel doesn’t keep you young while your working partner grows older.
In fact he didn’t spend all his time under. With the help of medicines and augmens, he spent a little of the journey awake and studying, where immer allowed, breaking off to retch or fend off panic with chemical prophylactics as necessary. “Listen to this,” he read to me. We were at the table, passing through very calm immer shallows. In deference to his always-sickness I was eating dried-up fruit, a nearly odourless food. “ ‘You are of course aware that every Man has two mouths or voices.’ In this”—he prodded what he was reading—“they have sex by singing to each other.” It was some antique book about a flat land.
“What’s the point of that nonsense?” I said.
“I’m looking for epigraphs,” he said. He tried other old stories. Looking for invented cousins to the Hosts, he showed me descriptions of Chorians and Tucans, Ithorians, Wess’har, invented double-tongued beasts. I couldn’t share his enthusiasms for these grotesques.
“I could have Proverbs 5:4,” he said, staring at his screen. I didn’t ask for an explanation: we used to joust like that sometimes. Instead I uploaded a Bible when I was alone, to find: “But in the end she’s bitter as wormwood, sharp as a sword with two mouths.”
The Hosts aren’t the only polyvocal exots. Apparently there are races who emit two, three or countless sounds simultaneously, to talk. The Hosts, the Ariekei, are comparatively simple. Their speech is an intertwining of two voices only, too complexly various to be pegged as “bass” or “treble.” Two sounds—they can’t speak either voice singly—inextricable by the chance coevolution of a vocalising ingestion mouth and what was once probably a specialised organ of alarm.
The first ACLers listened and recorded and understood them. “Today we heard them talk about a new building,” the bewildered figures on the old trid told Scile and me. “Today they were discussing their biowork.” “Today they were listing the names of stars.”
We saw Urich and Becker and their colleagues, neither of them yet famous at the time we spied on, mimicking the noises of the locals, repeating their sentences to them. “We know that’s a greeting. We know it is.” We watched a long-dead linguist play sounds to a waiting Ariekes. “We know they can hear,” she said. “We know they understand by hearing each other; we know that if one of its friends said exactly what I just played, they’d understand each other.” Her recording