“Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying. Just a route, though. But we can push them down it, even that last step, all the way.” It became clearer to me as I spoke. “To where the literal becomes...” I stopped. “Something else. If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else. We tell the truth best by becoming lies.”
Not paradoxes, I wanted to say; these weren’t paradoxes, they weren’t nonsense. “I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”
Part Eight
THE PARLEY
25
WE HEARD STRANGE SOUNDS, and saw vessels rising, heading out of Embassytown and the city. Most were corvids crossbred of biorigging and bloodless tech. There were spiny church-sized hulks among them, older than Embassytown.
“I can’t believe they got those things up,” I said.
“They’re not as fierce as they look,” Bren said. “They were survey ships once. It’s all theatre. Even with the, whisper it, Bremen arsenal, we don’t have a hope.”
Bren had once, with his doppel, been party to hidden arrangements. They’d debriefed spies and double- and triple-agents. “Wyatt was clever,” he said. “He did exactly the right amount and kind of not talking about what he had access to to make it scary. But it was nothing.”
The fleet lumbered away on their doomed sorties. Taking off my aeoli in the sealed air-breathing room, seeing the Ariekei wait for me, I was exhausted, and had to close my eyes.
OUR OWN FLIGHT from the city was complicated: between four Terre and the Ariekei we were able to push and pull our Absurd prisoner with us, but not easily. It had berserker strength. We had to administer charges to it often, and tug it hurting from the punishment.
“Let’s leave it,” said Yl.
“Can’t,” said Bren. He was the most assiduous of us in trying to communicate with it, whenever we stopped. He got nowhere. It hardly looked at him, focused its enraged attention on the addicted Ariekei.
“They’re going into battle,” Bren said, indicating the sky. “It’s pointless but I respect them for it a bit. EzCal are going to fight.” Efforts at negotiation were stillborn and the Absurd came closer. Refugee Terre from arable outposts were trekking to Embassytown. The journey overwhelmed many of them, and left their bodies to degrade from within in suits and biorigging, into mulch that wouldn’t fertilise this soil. “EzCal are wondering if they can just fight their way out of all this.” As if pugnacity could outweigh the simplicity of numbers.
“I’ll give them this,” Bren said. “EzCal will be on the field. It was Ez who insisted. The bloody convivials are over. Back home it’s... bad.” I’d left only a few tens of hours ago, but now it was the day after the parties. Poor Embassytown.
WE TOOK EVASIVE ways but there were too many of us to be really secretive. We relied on the chaos that Embassytown and the city were accelerating in each other. We crawled through tunnels between bones, and waited and shocked our captive into stupor when we saw patrols of Ariekei, humans, or both, clearing the streets, shooting the mindless.
It was difficult, peering across skin plateaus to where constables of our race and Ariekei enforced a brutal order. YlSib had repeatedly to whisper You must be quiet to Spanish Dancer and its companions. I made frantic arm movements to hush them, which of course they didn’t understand. More flyers went over our heads. We hid from regiments on the way to the front.
I kept up efforts to teach. We tried to shield our Ariekene companions from the sounds of the speakers when EzCal’s (now prerecorded) utterings began—we holed up and they listened instead to the datchips we’d brought, dosing themselves in small triumph, defeating the tyranny of god-drug’s rhythms while their fellow-citizens stampeded for the voice. I don’t know how they kept track of which chip each of them had heard and was therefore spent to them.
Our prisoner could see what they were doing, as they hunched, fanwings spread. I imagine that it looked with disgust. Certainly it strained in its shackles.
We quickly had our catechism. I drew it from what Spanish Dancer had said. I whispered it in Anglo-Ubiq; YlSib spoke it in Language. Bren, I saw, mouthed the simile of me that he’d first spoken a long time ago.
“You’re trying to change things,” I said. YlSib repeated in Language. “You want change like the girl who ate what was anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her: they’re like me. You’re like that girl who ate. You are the girl who ate. You’re like the girl. You are the girl. And so are the others, who aren’t like you.”
The first time YlSib moved from you are like to you are the Ariekei started very visibly. That succulently strange lie you are, born out of the truth, you are like, that they’d already asserted. And its contradiction, too, their enemies as like me as they were. We showed them how their own arguments came close to making liars of them.
ADDICTED VEHICLES galloped by us into the wilderness. In the morning YlSib took us to a transporter. It was blunt and ugly but full of breathable air. We rode an unseen pillow of vented particles following the tracks of the Embassytown-and-city troops.
In empty suburbs were scattered gangs of zelles, their Ariekei dead, looking forlornly for things to power. Bren drove our mongrel conveyance. It was nowhere near as fast as the military craft that had gone out, but it exceeded our walking pace, punted on its way by swinging side-limbs like gondoliers’ poles. Through hollowed-out window-eyes I watched the city recede. At first there were outskirt dwellings and warehouses descending into muck, but they ended and the sky came down to meet us.
We raised dust. Spined bushes shuffled out of our way, so paths opened for us in the fields, stretching for many metres ahead then began to fracture, to branch off in the possible directions we might take. The Ariekene battery-beasts moved around my legs. Behind us the shrubs crawled back to their previous positions. The city was a line of towers, rotund halls like unplanted bulbs. It receded.
I looked at it a long time. I shielded my eyes as if that made for magic binoculars, but I couldn’t see through it to the smoke or Terre towerblocks of Embassytown. I wondered if there were travellers among the Ariekei, and where if anywhere were other cities from which and to where they might go. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know.
The zelles grew restive before their owners: they were less able to fight their addiction. Over the hours, the Ariekei huddled as low as their intricate bulks allowed against the pipes and lights in the vehicle. One by one they enfolded their fanwings over datchips.
YOU ARE LIKE the girl, you are the girl. They are like the girl, they are the girl.
“
,” YlSib said to them: Repeat it.
We are like the girl, the Ariekei said. You are the girl, YlSib said, and the Ariekei scuttled, an excitement that pleased me. They couldn’t do it but understood, in some alien abstract, what they were trying to do. The girl... some said, and some... we... or... us... or... it’s like... Poor YlSib, poor Spanish. I was relentless.