Embassytown - China Mieville [60]
“Listen,” Scile said. I could see him deciding something, trying hard to calm our altercation. “Listen, will you please listen.” He waved a paper. “I know what it’s trying to do. Surl Tesh-echer. It practices, and it preaches, to its coterie. This is what it’s been saying.” He didn’t say how he’d got the transcript. “You, similes …” he said. “The Hosts aren’t like us, okay: it’s not exactly most of us who’d get excited to meet a … an adjectival phrase or a past participle or whatever. But it’s no surprise some of them would want to meet a simile. You help them think. Someone with reverence for language would love that.
“But who’d want to lie? A punk, is who. Avice, listen. There are fans, and there are liars. And only Surl Tesh-echer and its friends are both.” He smoothed out the paper. “Are you ready to listen to me? You think I’ve just been sitting in a cupboard for the good of my health? This is what it’s been saying.”
“ ‘Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.’ ” He glanced at me. “ ‘We didn’t walk on our wings. We didn’t walk. We didn’t swallow earth. We didn’t swallow.’ ” Scile was reading nervously, quickly.
“ ‘There’s a Terre who swims with fishes, one who wore no clothes, one who ate what was given her, one who walks backward. There’s a rock that was broken and cemented together. I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion. I’m like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I wasn’t not like the rock that was broken and cemented together.
“ ‘I do what I always do, I’m like the Terre who swims with fishes. I’m not unlike that Terre. I’m very like it.
“ ‘I’m not water. I’m not water. I’m water.’ ”
No translations I’d ever seen of Host pronouncements were properly comprehensible, but this read different. I realised a counterintuitive affinity. For all its strangeness it sounded a little, a tiny bit, more like, less unlike Anglo-Ubiq than most Language did. It didn’t have the usual precise and nuanced exactnesses.
“It’s not like most competitors, trying to force out a lie,” Scile said. “It’s more systematic. It’s training itself into untruth. It’s using these weird constructions so it can say something true, then interrupt itself, to lie.”
“It didn’t perform most of these,” I said.
“It’s been practicing,” he said. “We’ve always known the Hosts need you, right? You and the rest of you. Like the split rock, like they need those two poor cats they stitched into a bag. They need similes to say certain things, right? To think them. They need to make them in the world, so they can make the comparison.”
“Yes. But …” I looked at the paper. I read over it. was teaching itself to lie.
“ ‘I’m like the rock that was broken,’ ” Scile said, “then ‘not not it.’ It can’t quite do it, but it’s trying to go from ‘I’m like the rock’ to ‘I am the rock.’ See? Same comparative term, but different. Not a comparison anymore.”
He showed me old books in hard or virtua: Leezenberg, Lakoff, u-senHe, Ricoeur. I was used to his odd fascinations, they’d helped charm me ages ago. Now they and he made me uneasy.
“A simile,” he said, “is true because you say so. It’s a persuasion: this is like that. That’s not enough for it anymore. Similes aren’t enough.” He stared. “It wants to make you a kind of lie. To change everything.
“Simile spells an argument out: it’s ongoing, explicit, truth-making. You don’t need … logos, they used to call it. Judgement. You don’t need to … to link incommensurables. Unlike if you claim: ‘This is that.’ When it patently is not. That’s what we do. That’s what we call ‘reason,’ that exchange, metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Tesh-echer wants. To bring in a lie.” He spoke very calmly. “It wants to usher in evil.”
“I’m worried about Scile,” I said to Ehrsul.
“Avice,” she said to me at last, after I’d tried to explain to her. “I’m sorry but I’m not sure what