Embassytown - China Mieville [50]
I liked Wyatt but he was naïve. He was Bremen’s man, when the lights went out. I understood that and what it meant, even if he did not.
Formerly, 5
Hosts would sometimes bob into view, alone or in small groups, zelles at their feet, walking their slowed-down scuttle through our alleyways. Who can say what their errands were? Perhaps they were sightseeing, or taking what, according to odd topographies, were shortcuts, into our quarter and out again. Some came deep into the aeoli breath, right into Embassytown neighbourhoods, and of these some were looking for the similes. These Ariekei were fans.
Every few days one or two or a little conclave would arrive with dainty chitin steps. They would enter The Cravat, their fanwings twitching, wearing clothes for display—sashes fronded with fins and filigrees that each caught the wind with a particular sound, as distinct as garish colours.
“Our public demands us,” someone said the first time I saw such an approach. Despite the faux-weary joke anyone could tell that this audience meant a great deal to the similes. The one time I persuaded Ehrsul to come with me, ostensibly to store up anecdotes so we could later laugh at my new acquaintances, the arrival of some Hosts seemed to discombobulate her. She ignored my whispers about the Ariekei, did not speak much except in brief polite non sequiturs. I’d been with her in Hosts’ company before, of course, but never in so informal a setting, never according to their unknown whims, not terms requested by Embassytown panjandrums. She never came back.
The owners and regular clientele of The Cravat would courteously ignore the Hosts, which would murmur to each other. Their eye-corals would crane and the tines separate, looking us over as we looked back. Waiters and customers stepped smoothly around them. The Hosts would talk quietly as they examined us.
“Says it’s looking for the one who balanced metal,” someone would translate. “That’s you, Burnham. Stand up, man! Make yourself known.” “They’re talking about your clothes, Sasha.” “That one says I’m more useful than you are—says he speaks me all the time.” “That’s not what it says, you cheeky sod …” So on. When the Hosts gathered around me, sometimes I had to suppress a moment of memory of child-me in that restaurant.
I didn’t find it hard to recognise repeat visitors, by that configuration of eye-corals, those patterns on the fanwing. With the exhilaration of minor blasphemy we christened them according to these peculiarities: Stumpy, Croissant, Fiver. They, it seemed, recognised each of us as easily.
We learnt the favourite similes of many. One of my own regular articulators was a tall Host with a vivid black-and-red fanwing, just enough like a flamenco dress for us to call it Spanish Dancer.
“It does this brilliant thing,” Hasser said to me. He knew I was hardly fluent. “When it talks about you.” I could see him groping for nuances. “ ‘When we talk about talking,’ it says, ‘most of us are like the girl who ate what was given to her. But we might choose what we say with her.’ It’s virtuoso.” He shrugged at my expression and would have left it, but I made him explain.
In the main my simile was used to describe a kind of making do. Spanish Dancer and its friends, though, by some odd rhetoric, by emphasis on a certain syllable, spoke me rather to imply potential change. That was the kind of panache that could get Hosts ecstatic. I had no idea whether many of them had always been so fascinated by language, or whether that obsession resulted from their interactions with the Ambassadors, and with us strange Languageless things.
Scile always wanted details of what had happened, who had said what, which Hosts had been there. “It’s not fair,” I told him.