Embassytown - China Mieville [23]
Of the epiphany itself, there’s only Urich and Becker’s written testimony. In the way of these things, others from their party later denounced the record as misrepresentative, but it was the Urich-Becker manuscript that became the story. I’d seen the children’s version long ago. I remembered the picture of the moment; Urich’s features a delight to the caricaturist, him and subtler-faced Sura Becker both rendered with pop-eyed exaggeration, staring at a Host. I’d never read the unbowdlerised manuscript till Scile pulled it up for me.
We knew a great number of words and phrases [I read]. We knew the most important greeting: . We heard it every day and we repeated it every day—the latter without effect.
We programmed our voxware and had it speak the word repeatedly. And repeatedly the Ariekei ignored it. At last in frustration we looked at each other and screamed half the word each like a curse. By chance they were simultaneous. Urich yelled “suhaill,” Becker “jarr,” at once.
The Ariekes turned to us. It spoke. We didn’t need our ’ware to make sense of what it said.
It asked us who we were.
It asked what we were, and what we had said.
It had not understood us, but it had known that there was something to understand. Before, it had always heard the synthesised voices just as noise: but this time, even though our shouts were much less accurate than any ’ware renditions, it knew that we had tried to speak.
I’ve heard versions of that unlikely story many times. From that moment, or from whatever really happened, via misjudgements and wrong directions, within seventy-five kilohours, our predecessors understood the language’s strange nature.
“Is it unique?” I asked Scile once, and when he nodded I, for the first time, really felt astonishment at it, as if I were an outsider, too.
“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” he said. “Eh, nee, where. It isn’t about the sounds, you know. The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives.”
There are exots who speak without speaking. There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts. The Hosts are not like that. They’re empaths of another kind.
For humans, say red and it’s the reh and the eh and the duh combined, those phonemes in context, that communicate the colour. That’s the case whether I say it, or Scile does, or a Shur’asi, or a mindless program that has no sense that it’s speaking at all. That is not how it is for the Ariekei.
Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.
“If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.”
Hosts’ minds were inextricable from their doubled tongue. They couldn’t learn other languages, couldn’t conceive of their existence, or that the noises we made to each other were words at all. A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words. That was why those early ACL pioneers were confused. When their machines spoke, the Hosts heard only empty barks.
“There’s no other language that works like this,” Scile said. “ ‘The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself.’ ”
“Who was that?” I said. I could tell he was quoting. “I can’t remember. Some philosopher. It’s not true anyway and he knew it.”
“Or she.”
“Or she. It’s not true, not for the human voice. But the Ariekei … when they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got …” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them.