Embassytown - China Mieville [61]
“I’m worried about Scile,” I said to CalVin. I tried them instead. “He’s gone a bit religious.”
“Pharotekton?” one of them said.
“No. Not church. But …” I’d gleaned more scraps of Scile’s emergent theology. I call it that though he was adamant it had nothing to do with God. “He wants to protect the Ariekei. From changing language.” I told CalVin about the temptation, what Scile thought planned. “He thinks a lot’s at stake,” I said.
I still love this man and I’m afraid of what’s happening, I was saying. Can you help me? I don’t understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, what’s making him afraid, how he’s able to make it even get to me. Something like that.
“Let me talk to him,” CalVin said. The one who hadn’t spoken looked with raised eyebrows at his doppel, then smiled and looked back at me.
Formerly, 8
CalVin, as they’d promised me, spent time with Scile. My husband’s research was intense, antisocial, his memos to himself were everywhere and mostly not comprehensible, his files scattered across our datspace. The truth is I was a little scared. I didn’t know how to react to what I saw in Scile now. The fervour had always been there, but though he tried to disguise it—after that one conversation he didn’t talk about his anxieties to me—I could see it was growing stronger.
That he tried to hide it confused me. I wondered if he thought his concerns were the only appropriate ones to the shifts in some Hosts’ practice, and if the lack of such anxiety from the rest of us was devastating. If he thought the whole world mad, forcing him into dissimulation. I went through those of his thesis notes, appointment diaries, textbook annotations I could access, as if looking for a master code. It gave me a better sense, if still partial and confused, of his theories.
“What do you think?” I asked CalVin. They looked put out by my uncharacteristic pleading. They told me there was no question that Scile was looking at things in an unusual way, and that his focus was, yes, rather intense. But overall, not to worry. What a useless injunction.
To my surprise Scile started coming to The Cravat with me. I’d thought we would do less, not more, in each other’s company. I didn’t tell him I knew he’d been previously on his own. I saw no evidence of more efforts to persuade the Hosts to speak him. Instead, he began to exercise a subtle pull on some of the similes. He took part in the discussions, would imply certain of his theories, especially those according to which similes represented the pinnacle and limit of Language. Communication making truth. Slightly to my surprise, no one made him, unsimile outsider, other than welcome. The opposite, really. Valdik wasn’t alone in listening. Valdik wasn’t an intelligent man and I was worried for him.
I mustn’t exaggerate. I think Scile seemed himself, only perhaps more focused than previously, more distracted. I no longer thought we could stay together, but I wanted to know that he was alright.
These were in other ways not bad times for me. We were between reliefs. It was always deep in those days that Embassytown became most vividly itself, neither waiting for something, nor celebrating something that had happened. We called these times the doldrums. Of course we knew the more conventional use of the term, but like a few other uncanny words, for us it meant itself and its own opposite. During those still, drab days, cut off on our immer outskirt, without contact, a long time after and before any miabs, we turned inward.
Fiestas and spectaculars, on the spareday at the end of each of our long months, our crooked alleys interwoven with ribbons and full of music. Children would dance wearing trid costumes, their integuments of light overlapping and crystalline. There were parties. Some formal; many not; some costume; a few naked.
This doldrums culture was part of our economy. After a visit,