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, we had luxuries and new technology to invigorate our markets and production: when one was due there was a rash of spending and innovation, out of excitement and the knowledge that our commodities would soon change, that new-season goods would be in expensive vogue. Between, in the doldrums, things were static, not desperate but pinched, and these fetes were punctuations, and meant small runs on certain indulgences.
One night I was in bed with CalVin. One of them was asleep. The other was stroking my flank, whispering conversation. It was a rare thing, to be with one doppel only. I felt a strong urge to ask his name. I think now I know which it was. I was running my finger over the back of his neck, the link in him, beautifully rendered in the hollow below his skull’s overhang. I looked at its twin, on the sleeping half of the Ambassador.
“Should I be worried about Scile?” I said. The sleeper shifted and we were still a second.
“I don’t think so,” my companion whispered. “He’s onto something, you know.”
I didn’t understand. “I’m not worried that he’s wrong,” I said. “I’m worried that he’s... that...”
“But he’s not wrong. Or at least—he’s pointing out something.”
I sat up. “Are you saying—?” I stood and paced, and the sleeping doppel woke and looked at me mildly. Cal and Vin conferred in whispers, and it didn’t sound like simple agreement. “What are you saying?” I said.
“There are some persuasive elements to what he says.” It was the newly woken doppel who spoke.
“I can’t believe you’re telling me—”
“I’m not. I’m not telling you anything.” He spoke impassively. His doppel looked at him and then at me, uneasily. “You asked us to keep a watch on him, and we are, and we have. And we’re looking into some of the things he’s saying. An eccentric he may be, but Scile’s not stupid, and there’s no question that this Host...” He looked at his doppel and together they said, “
.” The half of CalVin who had been talking continued: “... is definitely pursuing some odd strategies.”
I stood naked at the edge of the bed and watched them: one lying back and looking up at me, the other with his knees drawn.
I ADMIT DEFEAT. I’ve been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don’t know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn’t pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn’t a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn’t want to be what I want to make it.
IN THE STREETS OF Embassytown, a congregation was forming. Valdik appeared to be at its centre. It was Valdik who expounded the theories, now. My husband was a canny man, even in his obsessions.
“Valdik Druman’s at the centre of it now?” CalVin said. “Valdik? Really?”
“I know it sounds unlikely...” I said.
“Well, he’s an adult, he’s making his own choices.”
“It’s not that simple.” I knew CalVin were right and wrong at the same time.
Most Embassytowners did not know or care about any of these debates. Of those who did, most would consider them pretty unimportant, secure—and there was security in it—in the certainty that Hosts could not lie, whatever a few agitated similes insisted. For those who knew about the festivals, a few Hosts determined to push at the boundaries of Language was too obscure a phenomenon to be any kind of problem, let alone a moral one. That left only a tiny number of Embassytowners, disproportionately the credulous. But their number was growing.
Valdik speechified at The Cravat on the nature of the similes and the role of Language. His arguments were confused but passionate and affecting.
“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” Valdik said. “No other language anywhere in the universe. Where what’s said is truth. Can you imagine what it would be to lose that?”
“It isn’t fair what you’re doing to Valdik,” I told Scile, on one of his rare visits to what had been our home.
“He’s not a fucking child, Avice,” Scile said. He was collecting clothes and notes. He did not look at me as he rummaged. “He decides what he wants.”
WALKING NEAR the ruins I was handed a flyer on cheap nantech paper that flashed a trid as I unfolded it. It made me start: it was Valdik’s face, apple-sized, in my hand.
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 us, 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.