Embassytown - China Mieville [55]
It had regular companions: Spanish Dancer; and one we called Spindle; and one Longjohn—it had a biorigged replacement hoof. Of what any of us understood it’s hard to approximate what they said in Anglo-Ubiq: think of people circling an exhibit in a gallery, staring at it, from time to time uttering a single word or short phrase, like “Incomplete,” or “Potential,” or “Intricacies of fact and uncertainties of expression,” and occasional longer opaque things.
“ ‘The birds circle like the girl who ate what was put in front of her,’ ” Hasser translated. “ ‘The birds are like the girl who ate what was put in front of her and are like the man who swims with fishes and are like the split stone …’ ”
The other Ariekei, those not of ’s party, loudly answered these garbled claims. They responded to the presence of and its companions with excitement or agitation. Contrariwise, , Spanish Dancer and the others didn’t acknowledge the critics at all, that I could tell. We called ’s group the Professors.
stretched the logic of analogy—the birds were not like me, having eaten the food given to me, as far as most of the other Ariekei could see. “They think it’s being disrespectful when it says they are,” Hasser said. He looked unhappy. The birds are like the girl who ate what she was given, one of the Professors said again. It stuttered as it spoke, it mangled its words, had to stop and start again and try again.
An early winter day I came to The Cravat—still attending, I noted wryly—dirty with leaf-muck and cold dust from Embassytown alleys. Valdik was the only other simile there. He was uncomfortable with me, less talkative even than usual. I wondered if perhaps he’d had some bad news about his outside life, of which I knew and wanted to know nothing. We sat in silence that was not companionable.
After one coffee I was ready to leave, when Shanita and Darius came in together. She was a taciturn simile I’d always sensed was a bit intimidated by me; he was frank and ingenuous, not very smart. They greeted me pleasantly enough.
“Why was Scile here?” Darius said as he sat. I was aware of Valdik sitting still and not reacting.
“Scile?” I said.
“He was here again, earlier,” Darius said. “A Host was here. Being really weird. Your husband, not the Host. He walked around putting little …” He fingered the air for the words. “Little nuts and bolts on all the tables. Wouldn’t tell me why.”
“Again? Here again?”
He had come once before when I was not there, it seemed, late at night, with three Hosts present. Darius hadn’t seen it but Hasser had, and told him. That time Scile had been strangely dressed, in clothes all one colour. Shanita nodded at the anecdote. Scile had, she said, while Valdik said nothing, laid down the same objects that first time, too.
“What’s that all about?” Darius said.
“I don’t know,” I said. I spoke carefully.
I suspected from his stillness that Valdik had an idea, in fact, as I did, what this might have been. That Scile, by these unnatural attention-getting rituals, was trying to stick in the mind. Trying to be good to think with, to be suggestive. To become a simile.
What the hell did he think he might mean? I thought, but corrected myself: that wouldn’t matter.
A corvid dropped us deep in the city, in astonishing rooms, catacombs in skin, alcoves full of house’s organs sutured in place.
The hall was full of the interplaited cadences of Language. I’d never seen so many young, just woken into their third instar and Language. They matched their parents in size and shape, but they were children and you could tell by the colour of their bellies and the way they were given to swaying. They were avid spectators while the liars tried to lie.
Most of the competitors could only be silent, failing in their