Embassytown

by China Miéville

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia.

no matter how travelled people are, no matter how cosmopolitan, how biotically miscegenated their homes, they can’t be insouciant at the first sight of any exot race.

Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

You don’t have to understand something to blame someone for it,”

The sun still rose, and the shops sold things, and people went to work. It was a slow catastrophe.

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.

Embassytowners’ foolish discussions were as meaningless right then as the sounds of birds.

So what if my neighbours don’t like me? So what if they see something crippled? No one likes a cleaved showing off their injury. We’re stumps.” He smiled. “That’s what we are.

“Ambassadors are orators, and those to whom their oration happens are oratees. Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.”

Every Host, everywhere, would become hardwired with need, do anything, for the blatherings of a newly trained bureaucrat. “Sweet Jesus Pharotekton Christ light our way,” I said. “It is,” said Bren, “the end of the world.”

Counterrevolution through language pedagogy and bureaucracy.

“You don’t put a lighthouse where no one’s going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go.

We didn’t expect this. It was a bad thing when we were made intoxicated and helpless by the god-drug’s words, lost ourselves, but now it’s different and worse. Now when the god-drug speaks we obey.

We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey. We want Language to put to our use. They resented their new druggy craving and their newer inability to disobey.

Language was incapable of formulating the uncertainties of monsters and gods common elsewhere,

Language, for the Ariekei, was truth: without it, what were they? An unsociety of psychopaths. “So even if they didn’t want to be part of the rebellion,” I said, “with their fanwings taken, they’re …” “Insane.” “Or something like it.” “Maybe some don’t take part.” “Maybe they drift. Get lost.” “Maybe they die.” “But they’re not what they were.” “It’s no surprise that most of them join.” “… The bandits.”

There were constables on the streets but not much for them to do except wait for the war: they didn’t police with fervour. They didn’t clear out the proselytisers, the, I don’t know, Shakers, Quakers, Makers, Takers, each with their own theology damning or rescuing us.

“Similes start … transgressions.

“I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”

“We’re insane, to them: we tell the truth with lies.”

You are the girl who ate. I’m . I’m like you and I am you.

I have markings. I’m a Spanish dancer. I didn’t take my eyes off it. I’m like you, waiting for change. The Spanish dancer is the girl who was hurt in darkness.

We are the girl who was hurt. We were like the girl … We are the girl …

With the boisterous astonishment of revelation they pressed the similes by which I’d named them on until they were lies, telling a truth they’d never been able to before. They spoke metaphors.

But the others spoke in new ways. I’m not as I’ve ever been, Spanish Dancer told us.

Something in the new language. New thinking. They were signifying now—there, elision, slippage between word and referent, with which they could play. They had room to think new conceptions.

“We changed Language,” I said. A sudden change—it couldn’t undo. “There’s nothing to … intoxicate them.” There only ever had been because it was impossible, a single split thinkingness of the world: embedded contradiction.

In the beginning was each word of Language, sound isomorphic with some Real: not a thought, not really, only self-expressed worldness, speaking itself through the Ariekei. Language had always been redundant: it had only ever been the world. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

They didn’t understand each other but they knew there was something to understand. And that was liberation.

Now we have the drugs, the voices, to keep them alive, and no more gods.