Read Online Embassytown by China Miéville - Free Book Online Page B

where. It isn’t about the sounds, you know. The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives.”
    There are exots who speak without speaking. There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts. The Hosts are not like that. They’re empaths of another kind.
    For humans, say red and it’s the reh and the eh and the duh combined, those phonemes in context, that communicate the colour. That’s the case whether I say it, or Scile does, or a Shur’asi, or a mindless program that has no sense that it’s speaking at all. That is not how it is for the Ariekei.
    Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.
    “If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.”
    Hosts’ minds were inextricable from their doubled tongue. They couldn’t learn other languages, couldn’t conceive of their existence, or that the noises we made to each other were words at all. A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words. That was why those early ACL pioneers were confused. When their machines spoke, the Hosts heard only empty barks.
    “There’s no other language that works like this,” Scile said. “ ‘The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself.’ ”
    “Who was that?” I said. I could tell he was quoting.
    “I can’t remember. Some philosopher. It’s not true anyway and he knew it.”
    “Or she.”
    “Or she. It’s not true, not for the human voice. But the Ariekei . . . when they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got . . .” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to be Language. That’s why they make similes.”
    “Like me,” I said.
    “Like you but not just like you. They made similes long before you lot ever touched down. With anything they could get their hands on. Animals. Their wings. And that’s what that split rock’s for.”
    “Split-and-fixed. That’s the point.”
    “Well quite. They had to make it so they could say ‘It’s like
    the rock which was split and fixed.’ About whatever it is they say that about.”
    “But they didn’t make as many similes, I thought. Before us.”
    “No,” Scile said. “That is . . . No.”
    “I can think things which aren’t there,” I said. “And so can they. Obviously. They must, to plan the similes in the first place.”
    “Not . . . quite. They’ve no what-ifs,” he said. “At best, it must be like a pre-ghost in their heads. Everything in Language is a truth claim. So they need the similes to compare things to, to make true things that aren’t there yet, that they need to say. It might not be that they can think of it: maybe Language just demands it. That soul, that soul I was talking about’s what they hear in Ambassadors, too.”
    Linguists invented notation like musical score for the interwoven streams of Hostspeak, named the two parts according to some lost reference: the Cut and the Turn voices. Their, our, human version of Language was more flexible than the original of which it was a crude phonetic copy. It could be sounded out by ’ware, it could be written, neither of which forms the Hosts, for which Language was speech spoken by a thinker thinking thoughts, could understand.
    We can’t learn it, Scile said. All we can