Embassytown - China Mieville [37]
I watched through boat windows as we flew over the ivy and roofs of my little ghetto city. I breathed out when we crossed over the zone where the architecture went from the brick and ivied wood of my youth to the polymers and biorigged flesh of the Hosts, from alley-tangles to street-analogues of other topographies. Buildingthings were coming down and being replaced. Construction sites like combined slaughterhouses, puppy farms and quarries.
There were about twenty of us: five Ambassadors, a handful of Staff, and we two. Scile and I smiled at each other through our masks and breathed in the exhalations of our little portable aeoli. Quickly, very quickly, we were touched down on a roof, and followed our companions out and down and into an edifice, in the city.
A complex, many-chambered place the angles of which astonished me. Everyone who had ever talked about my poise would have laughed to see me literally stagger backward in that room. Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs. A kind Staff member steered Scile and me. Our party walked without Ariekene chaperone. I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart. I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them. More than I’d ever seen.
The rooms were alive, cells rainbowing as we entered. Ariekei were speaking in turn, and the Ambassadors sung in alien politeness. Through a swallowing corridor, several Hosts in their final instars milled in dignified mindlessness. A bridge whistled to us.
For the first time in my life I saw Host young: steaming nutrient broths effervesced with elvers. Farther off was the fight-crèche, where the savage little second instars played with and killed each other. In a hall crisscrossed with walkways on tendons and platforms on muscular limbs were hundreds of Ariekei, giftwings extended, fanwings pretty with inks and natural pigments, gathered for the Festival of Lies.
For Hosts, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.
Our Ambassadors, though, were human. They could lie as well in Language as in our own language, to Hosts’ unending delight. These eisteddfods of mendacity had not existed—how could they?—before we Terre came. The Festivals of Lies had occurred almost as long as Embassytown had existed: they were one of our first gifts to the Hosts. I’d heard of them, but never expected to see one.
Our Ambassadors went among the hundreds of whickering Ariekei. Staff, Scile and I—we who couldn’t speak here—watched. The room was punctured with ventricles: I could hear it breathing.
“They’re welcoming us,” Scile told me, listening to all the voices. More. “It’s saying that, uh, they’ll see, I think, miracles, now. He’s asking our first something to step forward. It’s a compound, wait, uh …” He sounded tense. “Our first liar.”
“How do they make that word?” I said.
“Oh, you know,” he said. “Sayer-of-things-that-are-not, that sort of thing.”
Furniture was extruding into the room as it self-organised into a vague amphitheatre. Ambassador MayBel, elderly, stylish women, stood before an Ariekes, which raised what looked like a big fibre-trailing fungus in its giftwing. It inserted the dangles into the sockets of the zelle jigging by its legs, and the mushroom-thing made a sound and glowed, quickly changing colours, cycling to a nacreous blue.
The Host spoke. “It says: ‘describe it,’ ” Scile whispered. MayBel answered, May in the Cut, Bel the Turn voice.
The Ariekei stepped up and down, a sudden unanimity. A tense excitement. They tottered and chattered.
“What did they say?” I said. “MayBel?