Embassytown - China Mieville [56]
Scile was with me. He was talking, tentatively, with my simile companions. It had been a fair time since he’d seen Language in its home; it was for him I’d asked for this: he knew it, had been shy with gratitude. We were not nearly so close as we’d been at the time of our first festival, and I think the present surprised him. I hadn’t heard of any more efforts to enLanguage himself. I’d said nothing about any of them to him.
Before now the humans came. A Host, a lie-athlete, one of the Professors, I realised, was speaking.
Before the humans came we were … and it stalled. One of its companions continued. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. A sensation went through the audience. It was followed by another speaker: Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much …
I’d learnt enough to know this trick, a collaborative faux-mendacity: the last was repeating the previous sentence but dropping its voices to near nothing at the final clause. Of certain things was said, but so quietly the audience couldn’t hear it. It was showmanship, fakery, a crowd-pleaser, and the crowd were pleased.
ArnOld stiffened and said together: “.”
Beehive. It was swaying. Its giftwing circled, its fanwing stretched. It stepped up to the lying ground.
There were two main ways the few Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. One was to go slow. They would try to conceive the untrue clause—near-impossible, their minds reacting allergically to such a counterfactual even unspoken, conceived without signification. Having prepared it mentally, however successfully or un-, they would pretend-forget it to themselves. Speak each of its constituent words at a certain speed, at a beat, separated, apart enough in the mind of a speaker that each was a distinct concept, utterable with and as its own meaning; but just sufficiently fast and rhythmic that to listeners, they accreted into a ponderous but comprehensible, and untrue, sentence. The liars I had thus far seen with any success were slow-liars.
There was reputed to be another technique. It was the more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of noises before the untruth of their totality stole a speaker’s ability to think them.
opened its mouths.
Before the humans came, it said in ornery staccato, we didn’t speak.
There was a long quiet. And then a convulsion, a riot.
I wished very much that I had any understanding of Ariekene body language. might have been exuding triumph, patience, or nothing. It hadn’t whispered the second half of any truth; or trudged sound-by-metronome-sound through a constructed-unconstructed sentence. What had said was unquestionably a lie.
The audience reeled. I reeled.
The Hosts woke in their third instar suddenly fluent, Language a direct function of their consciousness. “Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”
“The evolution of trust …” I started to say.
“There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers. “This language is miraculous,” Scile had said. I was somehow repulsed by it, in fact. It was astonishing, given what language needs to do, that the Ariekei had survived. That, I decided, was what Scile must have meant, so I agreed.
If evolution was morality