Embassytown - China Mieville [36]
So Scile saw Language spoken. He listened. He asked quick questions of CalVin between their exchanges with the Host, which they, to my surprise, put up with.
“What? Is he insinuating that you couldn’t agree …?”
“No, it’s …” “… more complicated than that.” “Hold on.”
Then CalVin would speak together. “,” I heard them say at one point; they were saying please.
“I got almost all of it,” Scile told me afterward. He was very excited. “They shift tenses,” he said. “When they mentioned the negotiations they—the Ariekei, I mean—were in present discontinuous, but then they shifted into the elided past-present. That’s for, uh …” I knew what it was for, I assured him. He’d told me already. How could you not smile at him? I’d listened to him with affection, if not always with interest, over hundreds of hours.
“Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible, Avice?” he said. “Im, poss, ih, bul. It makes no sense. They don’t have polysemy. Words don’t signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language? How do their numbers work? It makes no sense. And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There’s not one mind behind Language when they speak it …”
“They’re not twins, love,” I said.
“Whatever. You’re right. Clones. Doppels. The Ariekei think they’re hearing one mind, but they’re not.” I raised one eyebrow and he said, “No they’re not. It’s like we can only talk to them because of a mutual misunderstanding. What we call their words aren’t words: they don’t, you know, signify. And what they call our minds aren’t minds at all.” He didn’t laugh when I did. “You have to wonder,” he said. “Don’t you? What it is they do—Staff I mean—to make two people think they’re one.”
“Yeah, but they’re not two,” I said. “That’s the point about Ambassadors. That’s where your whole theory falls down.”
“But they could have been. Should have been. So what did they do?”
Unlike monozygots’, even doppels’ fingerprints were moulded and made identical. On principle. Every evening and morning Ambassadors corrected. Artmind microsurgery found whatever tiny marks and abrasions each half of each pair had uniquely picked up over the preceding day or night, and if they couldn’t be eradicated, they were replicated in the untouched half. Scile meant that, and more. He wanted to see the children: young doppels in the crèche. He could still scandalise me with stuff like that. Not that such requests got responses. He wanted to watch how they were raised.
Staff and Ambassadors went into the city regularly, but only the young or gauche would ask for details. As naughty children we hacked communications and found pictures and reports we thought were secret (that of course weren’t very), that gave us insinuations of what occurred.
“Sometimes,” CalVin told us, “they call us in for what we call moots. They chant—not words, or words we don’t know.” “And when they’re done, one by one we take a turn, singing to them.”
“What’s it for?” I asked, and simultaneously CalVin replied, “We don’t know,” and smiled.
Everyone was in his or her best again, for another event. Very different from any previous. I wore a dress studded with oxblood jade. Scile wore a tuxedo and white rose. The flyer that came for us was a biorigged mongrel, Ariekene breed-techniques but its quasi-living interior tailored to Terre needs, and piloted by our artminds.
It had been a huge shock to us when CalVin had told us we could accompany them. This wasn’t a party in the Embassy. We were going into the Host city, to a Festival of Lies.
I’d spent thousands of hours in the immer. I’d been to ports on tens of countries on tens of worlds, had even experienced that travellers’ shock we floakers called the retour, when after preparations for the alterity of a new world, one walks a quite inhuman capital and stares at intricate indigens,