Embassytown - China Mieville [63]
DRUMAN, it said, ON THE BATTLE AGAINST THE LIE. A time and place, not The Cravat but a little hall. With it brought to my attention, I noticed details of that and similar meetings guerrilla-coded into wallscreens, hacked nuisance trids. I went. I’d thought I’d find Scile, but no. I stayed at the back of the room.
Valdik wore a projector, and trids of him appeared throughout the temple, random and staticky. At the front of the room I saw Shanita, Darius, Hasser and other similes and tropes. Valdik preached. He was still a middling speaker. I don’t know how this mediocrity amassed a following—something about the doldrums. He expounded religiose foolishness—“two voices but one truth, because what is the truth but dual, bifurcated, not in conflict but two forms of one truth” and so forth.
The place wasn’t a quarter full. It contained indulgent friends, the curious, refugees from other cults. A convocation of the hopeless and bored. When I got home, Scile was speaking down the line. He smiled an unconvincing greeting at me as I came in, turned so that I couldn’t hear him nor see his mouth move. I wondered whether, if Valdik were removed from this self-appointed office, with what I was convinced was Scile’s instrument confiscated, his mania would dissipate.
“What should we do?” CalVin said. “These meetings aren’t illegal.”
“You can do anything you want.”
“Well …”
“We could have Druman taken for Administrative Detention …” “… but do you really want that?”
“Yes!” I said, but of course I didn’t, and of course they wouldn’t do it.
“Listen,” they said. “Don’t worry.” “We’ll watch Scile.” “We’ll keep him safe.” That they did, though neither in the way, nor from what, I’d assumed.
Formerly, 9
Someone released a viral ’ware into the vagrant automa of Embassytown that gave them Valdik’s mania. It made them preachers in his new church. Their eloquence depended on the sophistication of their processors: most were little more than ecstatics, but a few were sudden theologians. They ambled as they always had but now accosted us and exhorted us to defend prelapsarian language, Language, we poor sinners (the rhetoric was kitsch), doomed forever ourselves to speak with a deep structure of lie but at least granted service to the double-tongue of truth, and more like that.
Patches were programmed and released and did their job but the infection was tenacious, and for weeks these tramp priests proselytised, their catechisms changing as their ’ware degraded and threw up protestant, variant sects. “We are the stewards of the angels,” I was told by one machine that staggered like a supplicant. “We are the stewards of the speaking angels, of God’s language.” The virus shut down when its resultant theories strayed too far from emergent Drumanian orthodoxy.
I asked Ehrsul if she was concerned, if she’d felt the tickling of virtual germs. She dismissed the other automa as mental weaklings and told me that yes, though she’d felt it, she’d hardly been in danger herself. Of course Valdik and his radical similes were suspected, but no one could prove who had programmed it, and though it was a nuisance that was all it ultimately was. I knew Scile didn’t have the expertise to program, or I’d have thought it his doing.
When I went back to The Cravat, now, I did so for socially diagnostic reasons. Many previous regulars no longer drank there: alienated by Valdik’s vatic pronouncements, they set up refusenik simile salons. Others had taken their place. I went to hear Valdik speak, out of what I told myself was a pornography of doomed causes, and maybe to listen for grounds to demand some intervention. He hymned the Ambassadors (in his model, interceding hierophants); expressed gratitude at being simile, truths, Language in flesh.
was there, with Spanish Dancer and others, at the last of Valdik’s gatherings I went to. The Host had amassed more followers, too, so I thought it must be improving its technique, a better and better liar. They watched each other. Valdik glowered. I didn’t