Embassytown - China Mieville [43]
“Hold on,” he said. “One of them’s saying about you: ‘It’s a comparison, and … it is something new.’ I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
“Alright, my love, just …”
“Hey,” Scile whispered. “They’re using the other figures of speech.” He indicated our Embassytown companions, at whom the Hosts stared. He turned his head in surprise. “If I understand them … that man Hasser—he lied to us. He’s not an example: he’s a simile, like you.”
Whatever the question marks over my efficacy, I must have had my uses: for the several weeks these events were in vogue, the Hosts kept bringing me back.
Something soured between CalVin and me. For weeks during our sex I’d teased them that I could tell the difference in the way they touched me: they probably knew there was a little truth to it. When we’d first got together I’d been immaturely excited that I was sleeping with an Ambassador. But that rather performed giddiness didn’t last long.
I remember the feel of them, the cool of their links in their necks, minimalist jewellery amplifying their thoughts into each other. I remember watching them touch each other—peculiar, unique erotics. Afterward, I might grin salaciously when I distinguished them, but it was an edgy game. “Cal,” I would say, pointing at one, then the other. “Vin. Cal … Vin.” They might smile, might look away. I could sometimes, especially in the mornings, see differences. The marks of nighttime—a face imprinted by a pillow, particular bags below eyes. CalVin never left long before ablutions, locking the door to the correction chamber and emerging with all those tiny differences effaced or copied.
They didn’t like that I was being asked back to the conferences and conventions. But Staff would hardly turn down Host requests like that. Once one of CalVin told me in sudden fury, apropos of nothing I’d noticed, that Ambassadors had no bloody power at all, that the other Staff and viziers and the rest made all the bloody decisions, that he and his doppel had less say than anyone.
I argued with them, now, sometimes. After one really unpleasant altercation I swear I did not start, Cal or Vin stayed for seconds in the doorway staring at me, with an expression I couldn’t read, while his doppel walked away. Perhaps I wouldn’t have liked it if they could immerse, I supposed. I doubted I would have cared, though.
“It’s not the same,” I said to the one still there. “You speak Language. I am it.”
There were Hosts who favoured my simile above all others, and came to every event at which I was present. They extolled my uses, over all the allegories or rhetorical devices embedded in varying ways in men and women and other things present. “You have fans,” Scile said. These were my months of simile fame.
I saw Hasser several other times; we would stand and wait while we were deployed in harsh arguments. There were Language dissidents, urging a reconception of what I and the other similes might have been. From the reactions of the other Hosts, this thought-experiment was in bad taste. After one such, I asked Scile if he’d heard the Hosts speak Hasser, and if so what he was about.
Scile understood Language as well as an Ambassador, but “I don’t know how you bloody things work,” he said. “I never see any relation between what you mean and what they’re talking about, what they compare you with and use you for. So are you asking what do they think with Hasser? I’ve no idea.”
“That isn’t what I mean.”
“You mean literally what does he mean?”
“Right. Like, foundation-fact, like I mean girl who ate … well, you know.”
Scile hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it was, is … what they said was it’s like the boy who was opened up and closed again.” We stared at each other.
“Oh God,” I said.
“Yes. I can’t be sure so don’t … but, yes.”
“Jesus.”
In the corvid, being hauled back to Embassytown, I said to Hasser, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a simile?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Overheard, then?” He smiled. “It’s complicated. It’s something