Embassytown

by China Miéville

I look stronger than I am, I was always quickish, and like many middling scrappers I’d become good at insinuating more skill than I had. I could avoid confrontations without obvious cowardice.

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

Proverbs 5:4,” he said, staring at his screen. I didn’t ask for an explanation: we used to joust like that sometimes. Instead I uploaded a Bible when I was alone, to find: “But in the end she’s bitter as wormwood, sharp as a sword with two mouths.”

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.

As well as the Languageless and the SM, for self-mutilated, at first we called the incoming army the Deaf. Embassytown’s human deaf objected hard to that; they were right and we were ashamed. Then someone named the attackers according to an antique language. It meant that same word, deaf, but rendered the Surdae any insult seemed diluted; particularly because, fast bastardised or misunderstood, the term became the Surd and then misprisioned into the Absurd. Hosts, coming to kill us for sins we’d committed, if at all, without intent.

That. That? No, not that: that. Each word of Language meant just what it meant. Polysemy or ambiguity were impossible and with them most tropes that made other languages languages at all. But thatness faces every way: it’s flexible because it’s empty, a universal equivalent. That always means and not that other, too. In their lonely silent way, the Absurd had made a semiotic revolution, and a new language.

“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.”