Semiosis Read online

  Bjorn, always a quiet child, seemed fascinated by the growing quantity of food on the tables, and I stood next to him and shared the fascination—Indira’s long childbirth had given the kitchen crew time to prepare. Pastries, two kinds of bread, sausage, smoked fish, three kinds of dried fruit, pickled onions, stewed birds, salads, eggs, deer crab, and yams. A great spread for winter and more food than we could eat. But we would try, after selecting the best tidbits to send to Indira. I set aside the truffle for Beck’s arrival. I hoped he wouldn’t be long, and at the same time I hoped he wouldn’t leave Indira’s side until he could offer no further comfort, incompatible hopes that included the sincerest hope that he was finally doing something for Indira. He had disappointed me. I had hoped that with the third child, he would have learned how to handle himself.

  He came as the children were starting to droop. They had eaten and sung and danced until even the fippokats, green furry little party lovers that they are, had hopped off to their hutches, their curled tails dragging. I had helped out every step of the way. Nobody knows more danceable children’s songs than me, Uncle Higg. I had a new song about the moons and Lux for the littlest ones, and even the adults joined in.

  Galileo is the silliest moon.

  It rises in the west and it sets too soon.

  It can’t tell time but it’s always bright.

  You can see it both day and night.

  The children perked up when Beck arrived. “The name, the name!” they chanted, their birth party ritual.

  “Snow!” he said. (Snow! I thought. What kind of name is that? Still, I kept smiling. Uncle Higg has to set an example.)

  The children did their best to sing and dance to Snow, but they were ready for sleep. I slowed the song into a lullaby and they followed my lead to flutter like snowflakes to the ground and lie still.…

  Not long after, I opened up the jar and ladled out toasts, aged soft, brown-red, and fragrant. Truffle for those inclined, and fruit punch and tea for those inclined to decline or combine, as the saying goes. Time to celebrate a baby! Number fifteen for me, twelve of whom had survived, and you’d think I’d get used to it, but every baby, not just mine, even lions, kats, bats, birds, and lizards, for billions of years and around the galaxy and universe, every baby is impossible to celebrate sufficiently. Truffle is a start, though.

  Sylvia raised a cup. “All babies are special, but Snow is a measure. Today, there are now one hundred Pacifists. It’s a wonderful number, and not because it’s a nice even number. It’s wonderful because the number keeps getting bigger. Snow is someone we always wanted, like all the babies before her and all the babies after her, and like everyone here. There are one hundred of us today. To Snow!”

  Pretty soon, after two big cups of straight truffle, I asked Beck, “Why Snow?” I’d feared something stupid, since he had named the other children Moon and Lightning. I don’t know why Indira lets him choose the names.

  “You disapprove,” he said.

  “It … has resonance with nature, I suppose.”

  “It’s snowing in the mountains now, so I thought, Snow. You hate it.”

  “Snow?”

  “Snow. My daughter. I named her.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “It’s my job to name her.”

  “You didn’t do much during the birth, I suppose you need to take what opportunities are left.”

  “You know I hurt to see what Indira goes through.”

  “She goes through a lot. That’s why she needs help.”

  “There are things I can’t do.”

  “There are things you don’t do.”

  “That’s where you come in.”

  “That’s not what I was talking about.”

  “But it’s true. You got her pregnant. I do the naming.”

  “You sure put a lot of effort into your job, too.”

  “It’s her name, Snow. My wife, my children. Your job’s over.”

  I thought about that for a moment. He was right, although I would have preferred a real name like Anna or Rosemarie. And real names for Lightning and Moon, too. In fact, I would have preferred a lot of things, and he stood right in front of me, and he hadn’t done squat, but he got the rewards. He had given the baby a stupid name that I wouldn’t like just to make his claim obvious, like Pitman kicking dirt at me.

  I punched Beck square in the face.

  He staggered a few steps, hand on his nose. I hadn’t hit him hard enough. He was still on his feet and his nose wasn’t bleeding much at all. He looked at me and laughed. I deliberated hitting him again. People were watching, but no one was stepping forward to stop me.

  “Higg!” He reached out to put a brotherly arm around me. I took a step back, but not fast enough. “You can scare the lions, but not me. You’re the luckiest man on Pax. Women, children, truffle, whatever you want, whenever you want it.”

  By then he had me in a full embrace. He seemed to have drunk even more truffle than I had. The angle made a clean punch impossible.

  “You’re my best friend, Higg. Snow’s a beautiful name, the perfect name.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so. Nothing personal.”

  “Nothing personal.” I felt disappointed with myself. I could have punched him better than that, couldn’t I? But I hadn’t. I worked my way free. “I think I’ll have some tea,” I said, and Sylvia met me at the tea jar to hand me a cup of truffle, looking solemn.

  “I used to be excitable,” she said.

  “I wasn’t excited.”

  “I know. That’s good.”

  She invited me to sit down with her. I don’t remember the day when she killed the old moderator and saved us, but my mother says Sylvia changed that day. I do remember the move to Rainbow City. I thought Sylvia was smart and powerful. I loved her in a little-boy way, and it never wore off even as she got wrinkled and gray. We took a bench near the back wall, and I took a deep swallow of truffle.

  “It’s not fair,” I said, a little boy again. “I love Indira and she stays with Beck.”

  “There’s no accounting for tastes.” She sipped her cup of truffle.

  “I want a wife, I want … Indira.”

  “And Zoe and Paloma and Carilla.”

  “Them too. Anyone. They should stay with me, one of them.”

  “You know the mathematics. Men outnumber women. If you weren’t fertile…”

  True. Ivan and Tom probably stayed together because they had no other opportunities. I took another long swallow of truffle. “Women don’t love me back. They use me.”

  “They know they can depend on you for anything.”

  “And Beck … all the men treat me like I’m a woman’s toy.”

  “No. They see you with the fippolions. You’re the top lion. It impresses everyone. I’m impressed.”

  “Right. Women love me. Men respect me. Lions fear me.” Anyone looking at me from the outside might see things that way. “I suppose I shouldn’t have hit Beck.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not my business.”

  But the next morning, sober, I realized how she had made it her business.

  That evening I went out to visit the lions. On my way, I listened to the bats flying overhead. Most hunters know a few words, but I understood far more. That night, though, they didn’t have much to say: “Food!” “Where?” “Here.” “What?” “Bugs?” “Many?” “Yes. Come!”

  Pitman roared hello, and the rest of the herd echoed him. He trotted over. I had a big bowl of truffle roots for him, the stuff I strain out of the first fermentation, the rotting trilobite smell gone and replaced with alcohol. He gobbled them down, happy to be number two to a number one who brought such remarkable gifts. I had a little bottle for myself and sat on a log in a warm winter coat to sip it and watch the Moon dance like a child’s star. He set his long, narrow head on my lap, and I scratched along his bony crest. He cooed. Other lions wandered over to flop around me, and their cooing became a chorus. I joined in, not su
re what I was singing, and we serenaded the sunset together, a happy herd.

  Women lie to me. Men laugh at me. Big, dumb, hairy animals think I’m one of them. But children love me. And I have truffle. At sunset along the river on a winter evening as the auroras begin to glow, it tastes like the good times you can’t quite recall but surely they happened sometime, maybe tomorrow, you just have to wait and see.

  THE BAMBOO

  Growth cells divide and extend, fill with sap, and mature, thus another leaf opens. Hundreds today, young leaves, tender in the Sun. With the burn of light comes glucose to create starch, cellulose, lipids, proteins, anything I want. Any quantity I need. In joy I grow leaves, branches, culms, stems, shoots, and roots of all types.

  Water flows through the repaired foreigners’ pipes like veins in leaves, freeing me from rain and seasons so I may develop at will. Water feeds fungus on my roots that generate nitrogen for amino acids. Water permits increased transpiration in leaves and thus higher photosynthesis, growth compounding growth and bringing gratification.

  Because of the foreign animals, I am more than yesterday, bigger, smarter, stronger. Strong as I once was. In the city, I reign. Outside, groves and sentinels protect and feed me. I turn light into substance. Everywhere, I control the sunshine.

  Intelligence wastes itself on animals and their trammeled, repetitive lives. They mature, reproduce, and die faster than pines, each animal equivalent to its forebearer, never smarter, never different, always reprising their ancestors, never unique. Yet with more intelligence, less control. The mindless root fungus never fails, but moth messengers come and go with seasons, larger animals grow immune to addictions, and the first foreigners, who built the city, abandoned it and me without explanation or motive just as we had begun to communicate. Did they discover my nature and flee, or was their nature renegade?

  Their intelligence astounded me, far above that of other animals and plants. I could not have become what I am without their irrigation, protection, excretion, and compost. I suffered when they abandoned me almost two centuries ago, years that should have been prime, forsaking functions to preserve my roots, for what am I without memory but mere grass? But what am I without pollen to communicate, without nectar to trade with moths for the bits they gather for me, without seeds and spores to disseminate ideas, without roots to touch from grove to grove, without lenses to see, without crystals to sense electric waves?

  Almost blind and numb, thirsty, crippled, yellowed by malnutrition, trapped in old memories too costly to maintain and too precious to let die, exhausting storage roots, I barely knew of these new foreigners. Day after day twinkled past while I hoped they might save me. Yet when they came, I was almost fatally slow to adjust my fruit to welcome and tempt them. Unfamiliar in body chemistry, but decipherable. Moths brought me bits of flesh and I learned.

  Now I give fruit that makes the foreigners content and healthy, a complex balance between pleasure and utility. They give me water and nutrients, trained like fippokats by the snow vines, but so much more than fippokats, for they, like the first foreigners, make plants and animals their own servants. Indeed, tulips seek domestication, their minuscule intelligence aimed toward service, and I have encouraged them and other crops to serve the foreigners, and I have protected the crops from competitive plants.

  I would have died without these new foreigners, I will die without them, but I have seen that intelligence makes animals unstable.

  I must communicate with them and finally I have the strength. I am growing a root to store what I learn, but it now contains little more than pith. I have not tapped their intellect and used it like phosphates.

  The Sun rises. With eyes at many nodes, I see them awaken, quick and busy. Many go to the gate near the river to leave for the fields. I observe color in their clothing. They see colors. They will see mine, grand and compelling, and know that I am no snow vine, that I have a significant and inescapable communication to enter into with them.

  Animals never grow smarter, but I do. Ours will be a rewarding relationship.

  The pollen in the wind, what little pollen there is, speaks of a wraith of leaf-eaters at the valley’s farthest fern villages. One of my groves across the river reports that a pack of fippolions has been led away from it, which I never doubted, for the lion’s claws are a tool of my new foreigners, well controlled, although I can easily teach lions to avoid roots and stems embittered to deliver the lesson. I listen for the electric snap of lightning. I await a taste of pollen or a messenger seed, or a tidbit from a moth, but it is winter and much is still. Intelligence conquers the seasons, but there is little intelligence in the world.

  HIGGINS

  Even the bats were whistling with surprise. Our guard, making a routine Luxrise check of the city, saw the surprise and ran to tell Sylvia, who woke the botanist, Raja, and still in nightclothes and with Raja’s children tagging along, they rushed to the riverside gate. Raja’s four-year-old, Muriel, took one look and ran to wake me up.

  “Uncle Higg, the bamboo did something pretty! Hurry!”

  So I was among the first to see it and hear the story. Raja was already calling it the display, even though it was lit only by torches and far less stunning than it would be in full sunlight. Torchlight couldn’t begin to reach the top leaves of the bamboo, but could still make your jaw drop.

  Along the road leading to the riverside gate, the leaves and stems of thigh-wide, sky-high stalks of bamboo had changed color, one stalk per color on either side. Red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, indigo, and violet. The bamboo had re-created a rainbow on either side of the road. I stood wrapped in a blanket, holding Muriel’s hand.

  I knelt down to talk with her, since children prefer to talk at eye level. “It’s beautiful, honey. Thank you for waking me.” Our breaths made clouds. I wrapped my fingers around her hand to keep it warm.

  Sylvia and Raja inspected the bamboo while Muriel proudly named all the colors for me. More people arrived, sleep in their eyes. A few fippokats approached, thumping and licking the colored stems, hopping up to grab a leaf in their teeth, and making a happy game out of getting in the way. Raja’s truffle-colored hair hung loose and still tangled from bed as she knelt down to look at the roots. A kat joined her in scratching at the dirt.

  Above, bats swooped and whistled, chortled, twittered, and warbled.

  “Danger?” “No.” “Pacifists here.” “What?” “Come!” “Bugs?” “No.” “What?” “Here.” “What?” “Here!”

  “Why?” Muriel said. She asks that a lot, usually as a gambit to offer her own explanation.

  “Well … so we would notice it, I guess.”

  “It’s pretty. The bamboo likes us a lot. That’s why.”

  “I think so.” Actually, I thought it probably meant something more subtle. It might not even be directed at us.

  “We should tell it we like it, too.”

  “Yes, we should. But how? Sing it songs? Make it a toy?”

  Muriel giggled.

  By sunrise, everyone was up, and some of us had gotten washed and dressed. Sylvia sent me to inspect the bamboo outside around the walls. I reported back during a formal briefing session in the Meeting House. Most of Pax had come, and the benches were packed. Nicoletta was taking notes.

  “I looked for anything unusual, not just at the bamboo,” I said, “in case it isn’t about us.”

  “Good thinking,” Sylvia said.

  “Nothing, though.”

  “Nothing for us, either,” Raja said. She and a team had inspected the city. “But it’s at a location important to the city and to us. We’re supposed to notice.”

  “Anyone, any observations?”

  A boy stood up. “The rainbow bamboo, I mean the rainbow-rainbow bamboo, it has no fruit.”

  Sylvia looked surprised and thoughtful, as if she hadn’t realized it herself. “That could mean something important. Any other ideas?”

  “It likes us,” Muriel said. “That’s what the colors mean, and we
should say we like it back.”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” Sylvia said. “We should respond. But how?”

  We all mumbled puzzlements for a few minutes. We knew the bamboo was smart, but how smart was smart? Notice exactly what? Respond how? Was this even good?

  Sylvia, never one to rush deliberations, talked quietly with Raja until we were done babbling, then stood and signaled for attention.

  “We all know that the bamboo has become much more healthy with us here. We’ve given it water and fertilizer, and it’s given us fruit and keeps improving it. Now, the bamboo seems to want our attention. I propose appointing Higgins to communicate with the bamboo for us.”

  I wondered if she had really said my name.

  “He can command lions, he can direct kats, he understands bats. And baby talk.” People chuckled. “If anyone can communicate with a plant, it’s Higgins. If you consent, Higg, of course, and if that’s the will of Pax.”

  She had said my name. If I consented … I knew Octavo’s Rules, plants could see and think and all that, but plants didn’t think like fipps, even less like people—probably. I had no idea. And I might say an inane thing and insult it. I’ve never figured out how to approach musk mice without getting smelly, and what could an insulted plant do? Octavo’s Rules weren’t encouraging. Why, oh why me?

  “Raja will be able to help you with the science,” Sylvia said. “You’ll bring the intuition for the job.”

  But I could never say no to Sylvia, even if intuition wasn’t anything like my specialty. Did I have the time? I had a charcoal mound burning, but it would need to smolder another five days before it needed attention, and there were bird hides to tan and beech tree galls to gather for tannin and woad to process for dye and pine trees to tap with the first warm spell for wax, but I could fit in a few more duties.… Sylvia gave me an impatient look.

  “Of course I’ll do it. I was—I was thinking ahead. It seems to have a lot to say to us.”