Embassytown - China Mieville [46]
There were places where, pushed through the foliage, embedded in bricks and plastone, pipes siphoned information from or fed illicit and troublemaking opinions to the screens. I walked in the glimmer of hacked denunciations of Bremen, threats of violence to Wyatt and his small staff. A demagogic trid ghost muttered about freedoms, democracies and taxation. Even Wyatt would hardly have been very concerned about this halfhearted radical’s display, though I’m sure he would have excoriated the constabulary for failing to take such graffiti offline.
I was in a shopping street specialising in leather and altleather. I smelt tanning and guts by a shop where ripe purses were being harvested from a biorigged tree. The butchers cut them with skill, making a slit to which they would attach a clasp, scooping out innards and readying the skins for sealing. In the rear was a crop of immature umbrellas, silly luxuries weakly flexing their vespertilian canopies. The altleather goods were simple, mouthless, arseless things that couldn’t have lived: the viscera that slopped in the shop’s gutter were vague and meaningless.
At least a dozen similes were gathered in the wine-café called The Cravat, to where I’d been directed. Its trid sign stalked endlessly in front of it, a figure failing to do up its neckpiece. I stepped through it (an unexpected flourish of tridware making it look up as if startled before reverting to its loop) and inside.
“Avice!” Hasser was delighted. “Introductions … Darius, who wore tools instead of jewellery; Shanita, who was kept blind and awake for three nights; Valdik, who swims every week with fishes.” He went round the room like that. “This is Avice,” he said, “who ate what was given to her.”
Of course we were hardly all the similes the Ariekei spoke. Some were animal or inanimate: there was a house in Embassytown out of which, many years before, the Hosts had taken all the furniture, then put it back, to allow some figure of speech. The split stone, made so they could speak the thought, it’s like the stone that was split and put together again. Most, though, were Terre men and women: there was something in us that facilitated.
Many similes, of course, were uninterested in their status. There were, I gathered, one or two among Staff. Even Ambassadors. They never came.
“They don’t like being Language,” Hasser said. “It makes them feel vulnerable—they like speaking Language, not being it. Plus they’d have to hobnob with commoners.” He spoke with the complicated amalgam of respect and resentment I’d heard before and would again, many times.
We talked about Language, and what it meant to be what we were. They talked: mostly I listened. I tried to keep the irritations their blather raised to myself. I’d come, after all. A disproportionate number of the similes seemed, to varying degrees, to be independencers. They said this and that about Bremen’s benighted hand and ruthless agents. Having met Wyatt, this in particular made me snort.
“I don’t see any of you turning down anything from the miab,” I said.
“No,” someone answered, “but we should trade, instead of handing over bloody taxes and aid.”
Hasser gave me sotto voce information about my interlocutors as they spoke, like a vizier in the ears of an Ambassador. “She’s just bitter because she doesn’t get called very often. Her simile’s too recondite.” “He’s less a simile than an example, honestly. And he knows it.” When I went home I was peppery about them all. I told Scile how ridiculous a scene it was. But I went back. I’ve thought a lot about why I did. Which does not mean I could explain it.
On my second trip, Valdik, who every week swam with fishes, told the story of his similification. He was an ongoing: his status depended not on something that he had