Semiosis Read online

  People voted yes and slowly left, still babbling. I stayed to work out the details with Sylvia and Raja, hoping I’d get hit by an intuition lightning bolt.

  “What do bats say?” Raja asked.

  “Not much. Come here, go away, bugs, sex, things like that.” At the mention of sex, I realized that I had never slept with Raja, and her breasts would fit nicely into my hands.

  “You trained the fipps,” Sylvia said.

  I think she meant to encourage me, but I couldn’t help being honest. “No. Someone else did that. Snow vines, maybe.”

  Sylvia frowned. She insists that she doesn’t mind any reminder of the original village, but she does, and I’d forgotten about that.

  “There’s not much to it,” I said quickly to say anything, “I just watch them and figure them out. Your father left some good notes on domestication and fipp behavior.” Praise might smooth things over.

  She didn’t look smoothed, but she talked like she was. “What makes you think the plant has a lot to say?”

  “That looks like a shout to me.”

  “Intuition.”

  “I suppose. It’s too big. The size worries me.”

  “It’s not like flowers,” Raja said, smiling at me, a smile sweeter than nectar. “The colors were made probably by withdrawing the chlorophyll and unmasking colors that were there, although we’ve never seen it do that before.”

  “Something like it happened once,” Sylvia said. “When I first visited the city, although it was just a small branch with colored leaves.”

  My intuition had me ask: “This is the same bamboo in the display as the rest of the city, right?”

  Bad move. Raja looked annoyed by my ignorance. “All the bamboo is the same plant, all connected by roots.”

  “Octavo’s Rules say plants always want something from animals,” I said, and I managed to annoy Sylvia again, since she had a high opinion of the bamboo. “I mean that in a good way. When I call the kats, I want them to play, that is, do some work, or to let them know I brought food. It might want to give us something.” She looked placated. “A new round of sharing, maybe. I mean, the fruit keeps getting better for us bit by bit.” That actually charmed her. “Let me take another look and think on it this morning.”

  I took another look and couldn’t think of a single thing. What did it want? If the plant had been watching us and figured us out, it might want to take something. And why so big? If it was meant to impress, it had succeeded.

  Orson had asked me to take some kats out to weed a cotton field, so I did that instead. I went to the kat hutches, played a tune on a panpipe made of rainbow bamboo—useful stuff, that bamboo—until about twenty decided to pay attention, and led them past the display (where we had to pause and look up in wonder) and we left the city dancing, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four glide! I minded my back. Last fall, in a moment of inspired teamwork, they had pushed me off the new bridge, a nice wide sturdy log bridge, the pride of the city’s civil engineers. But transporting fipps had been worse before we finished the bridge. I used to have to get them across by boat, and they figured out much too fast how to make boats tip.

  Burdock was sprouting in the cotton field. Kats will gobble tender burdock shoots and refrain from doing much damage as long as they’re having fun, and fun for them means jumping at each other, jumping on me, chasing each other, chasing me, chasing lizards, hiding, and sometimes playing leapfrog. I taught them leapfrog. I even trained kats to work as hearing guides for Honora, who is deaf. Their limit is their attitude. Life must be fun.

  I thought about this as I chased around with them, jumping over dormant cotton trunks, singing, and dancing. Sunshine warmed the air, and the dewdrop corals smelled sweet. (Well, smelled hungry, really, but that was their problem.) Newly hatched caterpillars crawled around, eating dirt and avoiding the corals. I kept an eye out for the giant hawk bats that eat kats. A soft wind rattled the rope palms that edged the field. A herd of deer crabs sneaked behind them, avoiding us.

  A stand of rainbow bamboo stood at the edge of the field, surrounded by the thistle bushes it uses as guards. We were being watched by eyes small as dust-motes on the bamboo’s stems. It had made the display, made colors, so it had to see (another of Octavo’s Rules). We were being observed. Trained. Rewarded. Evaluated. A kat’s highest value is fun. What did Pacifists want? What did I want? Women, truffle, music, children, food, a sturdy roof over my head.…

  A kat jumped, grabbed the fringe on my collar, and swung around, and before I caught it, three more had decided to try that trick, then all of them, and I gave up and sank to the ground, fippokats all over me. I was laughing too hard to stand up.

  Sure, I have a gift of cross-species communication. I have the sense of humor of a fippokat.

  When the weed feast was done, we danced back to the city, and a kat named Pea took the lead and hopped backward, not something any of us could do well, which was the fun of it, and I didn’t accidentally step on anyone, so we made it home safe.

  If I wanted to train an animal from the beginning, how would I start? No, wrong question. If I were an animal that wanted to be trained, what would I do? First of all, I would want to react fast so the trainer knew I wasn’t hopeless, even if I wasn’t catching on right away. That meant I ought to respond to the bamboo that day—somehow. Even if this wasn’t good, we couldn’t ignore it.

  I studied the display a bit more, not catching on to the lesson but that might be all right, then I found Raja in a greenhouse setting tulip leaf cuttings for spring planting, the soil and sap on her hands making them even more touchable, but, always a gentleman, I kept my hands to myself. “Can bamboo roots sense their surroundings?”

  “Of course.” At least she didn’t look annoyed by the question. “They never come up through pavement or foundations or block the water pipes. The bamboo knows where it is and what’s around its roots.”

  “How about planting thistles by the display? Would it notice?”

  She slowly smiled. I had hit an intuitive nail on the head. “It knows thistles,” she said. “It likes thistles.”

  We scouted thistles in the woods, put on gloves, and transplanted them, one at the base of each colored stalk. By chance or design, our fingers touched a few times, a fine feeling even through the gloves. Romance grows from small things, like bats chirping “here.” She didn’t seem interested in me, though. She had a fertile husband and seemed to be happy with him.

  “Plants do things slowly,” she said. “It might take a few days or weeks before we get a response.”

  “I can wait,” I said. She might change her mind.

  That evening, I put sturdy fences around the thistles and organized games for the toddlers and youngest children. Everyone run to orange! Sierra, find the purple one. What color is the sky? Where is that color? The bamboo, I hoped, was watching.

  After the children’s bedtime, I gathered a branch of each color into an extravagantly large bouquet (the bamboo wouldn’t mind, I hoped) and brought it to Indira. She thanked me quietly. Her hair needed combing. Their home was neat as usual, from the dome down to the floor tiles, but that was probably the work of friends and neighbors who had come in to help. Beck sat next to her, whittling a spoon. He’d asked me to come and be cheerful, and by the way he’d asked, I knew what he meant even before I got there.

  “How’s Snow today?” I asked, grinning.

  “Good. I think. It’s hard to tell. She’s not like the other babies.”

  “Every baby’s different, that’s what I like about them. How are you?”

  “Good. A little tired.”

  She wasn’t good, I could tell just by looking at her. “Have you seen the bamboo?”

  She hadn’t, of course. Beck had told me she wouldn’t leave the house, even to go to dinner, so I described it enthusiastically, told her about my new assignment and about the children and the thistles. Beck and I made jokes and puns, since she always liked puns, the sillier the be
tter. She smiled, but we couldn’t make her laugh. Snow began to cry.

  “She’s hungry,” I said. “Should I bring her to you?”

  “Hungry? Are you sure?”

  “I’m an expert at communications.”

  Snow wiggled in my hands as I picked her up, red-cheeked, impatient, and unafraid to bend the world to her will. I handed her to her mother. Snow suckled loudly, concentrating on the complex business of eating. It’s a beautiful thing, babies and mothers still linked as life creates life, one person becomes two, a process almost fulfilled with childbirth, but real independence takes years.

  The baby was fine. The mother had postpartum depression. Childbirth is hard, and not quite over when the umbilical cord is cut, not for the baby or the mother. I gave Indira a kiss on the cheek, and Beck walked me to the door and thanked me for coming. I ducked outside, where the night air was coldly clean, and I breathed deep. His baby, his wife? Only mostly. My work was far from done.

  THE BAMBOO

  Pollen grains, tiny and oily with urgency, land on nectared stamens, pollen that carries messages. The grains fill with water and sugar, and I absorb and read them. The outer wall displays sculptures to identify the sender: a bamboo that grew from seeds dispersed years ago to create sentinels. It barely survives in the southwest mountains, hideously stunted by wind and cold, starved almost to stupidity, small and lonely, an endless talker despite the poverty that should limit its ability to create messages.

  The message was split into nine to send, then duplicated and released in clouds. The distance is long and winds are fickle. The inner walls of the first eight grains sketched an image of a ground eagle. The interior cells said a pack has left the mountains. After waiting hours, I capture the final grain. It says the pack contains at least forty eagles. Forty.

  I have seen eagles drum their air sacs before they attack. Their hooked beaks rip apart animals as easily as fippolions destroy trees. A corm-root from an ancestor says eagles visit mountains in late winter, retrieving caches of food they left in summer and hunting animals that hibernate in caves. But normally smaller packs. Forty can deplete a mountain.

  I have tasted eagles. The first foreigners buried their bodies, their meat rich with iron. I know eagles.

  I also tasted the first foreigners. When they arrived, I misjudged them. They built shelters like mere birds, lived in colonies like mere fippokats, used fire like mere eagles. But they controlled fire and made it intense and transformative. Their first kiln glowed like the Sun, and from that kiln came glass, an artificial and amazing stone, and the foreigners surrounded me with my own colors and watered me and fed me. I gave them fruit.

  We communicated with electric waves, what they called radio. We shared simple ideas about mathematics and meteorology, and progressed from there. I explained the animals and plants. They told me I live on a sphere of soil and stone of unimaginable size that tilts as it rotates and revolves around the Sun, which explains not just the day but the differing lengths of days as the seasons change. They had once lived under a different Sun.

  These second foreigners have reacted to my display promptly, a simple message in response to a simple message, and I have hope like a germinating seed. I want to continue, but will we have time? Will they understand the scent of eagles if I reproduce it?

  Eagles destroy. Foreigners create. So few things create and so many destroy.

  HIGGINS

  The bamboo answered thistles with flower buds, and each stem of buds contrasted with the color of the rest of the stalk—orange buds on a blue stalk, yellow on purple—so we had to notice. Raja and I took our time examining the buds, not because we found much to look at, although of course I enjoyed the company, but because we wanted the plant to know that we had noticed. A language of flowers! Imagine.

  We tried hard. We imagined different scents for different colors or chemicals that would not just make you feel ever so slightly uplifted, as bamboo flowers usually do, but might make you smarter. Plants use all sorts of chemicals to communicate (Raja explained), so it might try that with us, or it might use different colorations or markings to create a vocabulary, or different shapes, not the usual floral trumpet surrounded by a wide whorl of longer petals.

  The next morning, the buds had opened. I saw the flowers from far away, colorful in the sunlight and bigger than my hand with the fingers outstretched, but when I got close, they were a disappointment, solid-colored and rather normal. Maybe they held some other surprise. I smelled one. It stank, they all stank. A couple of kats were out nosing around, so I picked one up to smell the flowers, which they usually enjoy, but one whiff and it kicked and scratched and almost bit me trying to get away.

  Raja broke into a run when she saw that the flowers were open, and her pretty nose wrinkled as soon as she smelled them. She didn’t recognize the scent, but she reminded me that some flowers smelled worse—and always with a purpose. Carrion flowers smell like rotting flesh to attract scavenger lizards. “And Euphorbia faeceus.”

  “What?”

  “The poop plant.”

  “Oh.” I blushed a bit. (The poop plant has proven possibilities for mischief. It looks like a pile of brown plump stems.)

  But the bamboo flowers probably meant to tell Pacifists something more complex than “food,” if only because the bamboo had to know what we wouldn’t eat. We asked for help, and a lot of people sniffed around for us.

  Sylvia recognized the smell instantly. Eagles.

  I had never seen eagles, but she had. A few hunters had, and they confirmed the smell. She organized a meeting to teach me everything everyone knew for a fact about eagles, as opposed to the fanciful stories swapped to pass the time. Sketches were passed around of meaty-legged birds a little bigger than humans with bark-patterned spiny feathers, huge hooked beaks, long flexible necks, and clawed hands on short forelimbs. They could run fast and jump high, right over our city walls, and wreak all kinds of havoc once they were inside. At least Pax birds didn’t fly like Earth birds. Earth must have been a dangerous place.

  Ivan and Tom, both hunter-explorers, told how eagles sometimes played with their food before killing it. Ivan slid close on the bench to use me to intimately illustrate nipped hamstrings, gouged eyes, nibbled soft and tender parts. He laughed at my discomfort. I was the guy who entertained women and children and fipps. I couldn’t handle a real man’s unmerciful world.

  “How do eagles communicate?” I asked, trying to look like I would not be shocked if he said they wrote out words with intestines torn from living Pacifist babies.

  “I don’t try to communicate with eagles. I try to kill them.” He grinned in a deliberately annoying way, his perfectly trimmed beard close to mine.

  “I’ve seen them drum their air sacs and dance,” Sylvia said a little loudly to interrupt him, and told her story, about how they hated water but understood fire—Ivan interrupted: “They use campfires and cook food”—and told how a pack had killed her father. She passed around a spiny feather.

  I had an intuition that scared me bad. “You’ve seen rainbow bamboo everywhere, right?” I asked Ivan.

  “Everywhere,” he said with a swagger so I would know that he really had been everywhere.

  “Plants communicate,” I said, hoping I could sound tough about flowers. “They can send chemicals in the air and who knows what else to share information. I think our friend wants us to know that eagles are headed toward us.” Desperately important information, I thought.

  “Maybe it’s trying to attract eagles,” another hunter said.

  “Then the scent would be outside the city, too,” Tom said. “We can check that.”

  “Or maybe it just thinks we’d like the smell,” someone else said.

  “Then it’s not a very smart plant,” Ivan sneered.

  I said, “I think it means danger.”

  Ivan didn’t. “Packs are small. Three, maybe five members. They’re stealthy and smart, but they don’t want to take on big prey like us. It’s good
to have a warning, though, if that’s what it is. Nice work, Higg. We’ll take it from here.”

  Nice work, now go and play with the children and talk to the flowers. Real men will take it from here.

  But they didn’t find anything all day, not eagles or eagle-scented flowers.

  I spent the evening playing with a bottle of truffle, and halfway through it, I realized that the display—sixteen full-size plants, bigger altogether than the Meeting House—was just too big for a few eagles. The bamboo was warning of a whole lot of eagles. I hurried to tell Ivan, and found him with Beck, Tom, Aloysha, and some other men in a garden about to be tilled. They were playing a knife-tossing game by lamplight.

  “It’s all right,” Tom said, putting a patronizing arm around my shoulder. “We’re a lot smarter than eagles. Even if there are what, ten of them, we can handle it.”

  Ivan laughed. “You’re hearing the truffle talk, not the bamboo. And you should share that truffle. Get some for everyone.”

  I got them some, and they let me watch them play. The point of the game was to throw a knife in certain ways and have it stick into a target on the ground, but soon I got bored and left.

  In the morning, without truffle in my belly, I looked at the bamboo and still heard it yelling about eagles. Ivan and Tom spent the day looking through the forest and fields for eagles or flowers and found nothing.

  “Finding a few eagles in a big forest, that’s not easy,” Ivan said. “Higg, have your lions knock down a lot more trees.”

  They went out the next morning and came back for lunch, having seen a whole lot of nothing, not even spoor. There was talk about a false alarm and patronizing looks for me.… I decided to skip lunch and pass a little time with my lions, but I listened to the bamboo and strapped on a knife and slung a bow and full quiver of arrows over my shoulder before I went.

  Just outside the city walls I noticed that the noontime was far too quiet. No birds barked in the underbrush. I crossed the bridge, listening to my boots clump, and walked along the riverbank.

  Bats were singing. “Danger?” “Danger!” “Come?” “Coming.” And a note I didn’t know. Maybe “eagles.” Or maybe “venomous lice.” It might all have been a false alarm, but I couldn’t help remembering that I was a terrible archer.