Embassytown - China Mieville [35]
They were on duty, but CalVin hosted well, that first party. Scile stood by the table of delicacies, human and Ariekene, waiting. “Fraternising with the locals, at last?” Ehrsul had come quietly up behind me. She spoke suddenly, made me start and laugh.
“He’s so well behaved,” I said, nodding in Scile’s direction.
“Patient,” she said. “But then, you don’t have to be, you’ve already met the Hosts.”
She was only passing through, she said, supposedly on some upgrading errand. She swivelled and rolled past Scile with a whispered word, and he greeted her and watched her go. “You know what CalVin told me?” he said quietly to me. He gestured with his glass towards Ehrsul’s retreating form. “She can speak it. It sounds flawless. All the Ambassadors know exactly what she’s saying. But if she tries it with the Hosts, they don’t get a word.” He met my eyes. “She’s not really speaking Language at all.”
He continued his effort to cover his impatience—he was, at least, not rude about it. CalVin made sure to introduce him to those Staff and Ambassadors present he didn’t know. And of course, finally, when they arrived, with that usual shift in the room, to the Hosts.
It was the first time for thousands of hours I’d seen them so close. There were four. Three were in prime, in their third instar, and their tall outlines quivered with whiskers. The last was in finis—its dotage. Its abdomen was massive and pendulous and its limbs spindled. It walked firmly but was mindless. Its siblings had brought it as a kind of charity. It followed them under instinct, by sight and chemical trail. It was an evolutionary strategy on Arieka shared by more than one phylum that an animal’s last incarnation was as a food store for the young. They could gnaw at the nutritional swathings of its abdomen for days without killing it. Our Hosts had done so, in their early history, but they had given up the practice generations before as, we inferred, a barbarism. They mourned when their fellows entered their penultimate form, when their minds died, and respectfully shepherded the ambulatory corpses till they fell apart.
The undead thing bumped the table, upsetting wine and canapés, and HenRy, LoGan, CalVin and the other Ambassadors laughed politely as if at a joke.
“Please,” CalVin said, and brought Scile forward, toward the honoured indigens. I could not read Scile’s face. “Scile Cho Baradjian, this is Speaker—” and then in Cut and Turn at once they said the lead Host’s name.
It looked down at us from its jutting coralline extrusion, each random bud studded with an eye.
“,” CalVin said, together. Only Ambassadors could speak Host names.
Waving on a stalk-throat by its neck, its Cut-mouth terribly like human lips, the Host muttered: and at the level of our chests, where its body swelled, its Turn-mouth opened and coughed, emitting little rounded vowel sounds, tao dao thao.
It wore the organs of tiny animals coiled about its neck. Something wound between its stiletto feet, a companion animal. One accompanied all the Ariekei but the brain-dead old-timer. It was the size of a baby, a grub-thing with stump legs and filigree antennae, its back punctuated with holes, some ringed with inlaid metal. Its locomotion was between a scamper and a convulsion. It was a zelle, a biorigged battery-beast, into which leads and wires could be slotted, and out of which, depending on what its owner fed it, different power would flow. The Ariekene city was full of such sources.
stepped forward on four legs a little like a spider’s, long, too-jointed, dark-haired, and extended its wings: from its back its auditory fanwing, in many colours; from its front, from below its larger mouth, its limb of interaction and manipulation, its giftwing.
We would like to shake your giftwing with our hands, CalVin