Embassytown - China Mieville [24]
“Like me,” I said.
“Like you but not just like you. They made similes long before you lot ever touched down. With anything they could get their hands on. Animals. Their wings. And that’s what that split rock’s for.”
“Split-and-fixed. That’s the point.”
“Well quite. They had to make it so they could say ‘It’s like the rock which was split and fixed.’ About whatever it is they say that about.”
“But they didn’t make as many similes, I thought. Before us.”
“No,” Scile said. “That is … No.”
“I can think things which aren’t there,” I said. “And so can they. Obviously. They must, to plan the similes in the first place.”
“Not … quite. They’ve no what-ifs,” he said. “At best, it must be like a pre-ghost in their heads. Everything in Language is a truth claim. So they need the similes to compare things to, to make true things that aren’t there yet, that they need to say. It might not be that they can think of it: maybe Language just demands it. That soul, that soul I was talking about’s what they hear in Ambassadors, too.”
Linguists invented notation like musical score for the interwoven streams of Hostspeak, named the two parts according to some lost reference the Cut and the Turn voices. Their, our, human version of Language was more flexible than the original of which it was a crude phonetic copy. It could be sounded out by ’ware, it could be written, neither of which forms the Hosts, for which Language was speech spoken by a thinker thinking thoughts, could understand.
We can’t learn it, Scile said. All we can do’s teach ourselves something with the same noises, which works quite differently. We jury-rigged a methodology, as we had to. Our minds aren’t like theirs. We had to misunderstand Language to learn it.
When Urich and Becker spoke together with shared, intense feeling, one the Cut and the other the Turn, a flicker of meaning was transmitted, where zettabytes of ’ware had failed.
Of course they tried again, they and their colleagues practicing duets, words that meant hello or we would like to speak. We watched their recorded ghosts. We listened to them learn their lines. “Sounds flawless to me,” said Scile, and even I recognised phrases, but the Ariekei did not. “U and B had no shared mind,” Scile said. “No coherent thoughts behind each word.”
The Hosts didn’t react with quite the same blankness with which they had heard synthesised voices. They were uninterested in most, but listened hard to a few of these stuttering couples. They didn’t understand it, but they seemed to know that something was being said.
Linguists, singers, psychospecialists had investigated those pairs who had the most obvious impact. Scientists had striven to work out what they shared. That was how the Stadt Dyadic Empathy Test was created. Attain a certain threshold together on its steep curve of mutual understandingness, fire up machines to connect various brainwaves, synching and linking them, and a particular pair of humans might just be able to persuade the Ariekei that there was meaning to their noises.
Still, communication remained impossible for megahours after contact. It was a long time after those early revelations that researches into empathy got us anywhere. Very few pairs of people scored well on the Stadt scale, scored highly enough to mum a unified mind behind the Language they ventriloquised. That was the minimum it would take to speak across the species.
What the colony needed, someone had joked, were single people split in two. And to put it like that was to suggest a solution.
The first interlocutors with the Hosts were exhaustively trained monozygote twins. Few such siblings could make Language work any better than the rest of us, but those that could were a slightly larger minority than in any control group. They spoke it horribly, we now know, and there were innumerable misunderstandings between them and the Ariekei, but this meant trade, too, at last, and a struggling to learn.
In my life, I’d met one other pair