Embassytown - China Mieville [42]
They spoke rapidly, craned their eye-corals. They spoke me every day, Scile told me afterward. That was what they said to CalVin. I do not know, one Host said to CalVin, about me, how I did without her, how I thought what I needed to think.
Her? This was the question that we called the Tallying Mystery: did the Hosts consider each Ambassador one mind, double-bodied people? And if so, did they think the rest of us half-things, irrelevances, machines? A city full of the Ambassadors’ marionettes? When they knew me as simile, they asked for me to come back, but I was never sure if I was guest, exhibit, or something else. When we went, the Hosts took care of us, whether or not they understood that we were people.
I accepted their invitations because Scile could always come with me. A present to him, for which he was effusive, though I think he wanted to talk, to debrief, after the events more than I would. We would be ushered to the Hosts’ halls. There were usually Ambassadors and viziers and others there too, and these glimpses of secrets that had gone on all my life, the toing and froing of Staff in the Host city, were almost as disturbing to me as anything else that happened. I’d keep spotting Ambassadors walking flesh corridors in conversation with Ariekei, places I couldn’t imagine any human having a purpose.
These events, to which they had no in, were titillations to most of my friends. “A festival? Of lies?” Gharda said at a party after the first one. “The Hosts asked for you?” They were all gathered around me demanding to know what the city was like, and I laughed because someone said That’s import! exactly as we had when we were children.
My occasional presence in the city was troubling, I could tell, to the Ambassadors. They didn’t like seeing me there. This was their mystery. Staff debriefed me exhaustively after each of these trips, asking what I’d seen, what I’d understood.
The second time I entered the city, into another hall with a crowd of Hosts, I was left near a collection of obscure objects and anaesthetised Ariekene animals, and with four other humans, enzymatic lights bowing in the curves of their aeoli helmets. Two were Ambassador LeNa, who ignored me. The other two were young men, commoners like me.
“Hello,” said one. He smiled enthusiastically and I did not smile back. “I’m Hasser: I’m an example. Davyn’s a topic. You’re Avice, aren’t you? You’re a simile.”
Neither this, nor any of the other times I went in, was an event the same as the first gathering I’d attended. They were more chaotic, and, I learned, less focused. There had for a while been a vogue among the Hosts for what were, more or less, conventions. Celebrations of Language, with broader remits than just the rare lies. They would gather as many of the necessary constructed facts as they could in one place, as many enLanguaged elements as possible—animate, inanimate, sentient and not—and come to look at us, use and theorise us, without consensus. We sat polite through wheezing, stuttering, sung arguments around and about us. I found it less compelling than the devoted lying I’d first seen.
I was lulled by the roar and whisper of the Cut and the Turn mouths, while Scile tried to translate. Hosts stamped back and forward, disagreeing in factions. Something like a polemic, I gathered, went on between those who thought me a useful figure of speech, and those who did not.
It was a crippled, strange debate, I think. There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was, they would have asserted, like. But those critics of course couldn’t say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have them.
“But …” said Scile. He was unhappy.
“They must be in the back of their