Semiosis Read online

  “We could have saved Snow’s life if the equipment still worked,” I snapped. I didn’t mean to interrupt her, and I didn’t know how angry I was until that moment.

  “Yes. We could have given her artificial lungs until the infection was cured. We could have identified the infectious agent and its antibiotic within an hour with an Earth laboratory. Yes, we might have spotted the eagles faster if the orbital satellite still worked, but its solar panels died and we can’t get up there to fix them. Yes, we could have kept the computers running if we could have replaced the gallium arsenide chips, and we can’t even make silicon chips. We can barely make glass bricks. We know what’s possible and we know why we can’t do it, but the thought of it makes us feel like failures, and it’s not our fault!”

  She cut a reed with a stone blade, then glared at the stone. “We could do a lot of things if we had iron. But we don’t. We can’t find any, except for a few meteor fragments and we have to use them for nutrition. Maybe it would be better if we forgot all about Earth. But we can’t because someday we’re going to be able to do all those things again and we don’t want to waste time rediscovering how to do it. But we’ll do it the Pax way, not the Earth way, because we know what the Earth way was like.”

  She worked for a while, lips pursed, silent, tugging at the reeds. I had never seen her angry, but of course she was angry enough to make and burn an Earthling during every spring festival.

  “The Pax way,” she repeated. “The parents didn’t even tell us everything about the Earth way. Religion. Ideologies. Economics. War. Just words to us! They didn’t trust us with those things. They’re dead and gone, and they still decide how we live and how much we can know, because they thought they knew better than us, and they left us impaired, and worst of all we know we’re impaired. All those books we copied from the computers before they failed, that’s a tiny fraction of what there is to know, a very tiny fraction. I once saw a mention of a library on Earth with a million books.”

  I thought about that, about what there was to know, how to learn it, and who to learn it from, while she finished the lower part of the basket—about all the things we’d like to know if we knew they existed. “The bamboo is trying to talk to us about opposites,” I said. “I think we ought to answer.”

  She looked up, suddenly less angry. “Opposites. I would love to talk to the bamboo about opposites. Or anything.” She set down her tools, put the reeds for the upper part in a vat to soak, and we left.

  On the way, we passed Zoe.

  “I’m sorry about … about Snow,” she said.

  I thanked her, and then I hugged her because she seemed to be expecting it—and I liked it.

  I looked her right in the face. “Leave Fitzgerald and come live with me.”

  She stood petrified, then shook her head. “Oh, I know it’s hard when children die.”

  “I’ve wanted this for a long time. I want to live with you. I’ll be better for you than Fitzgerald could be. I love you. You’ll see. I’ll make you happy.”

  She didn’t answer right away. Thinking it over? She looked away. “I love you, too. I … I’ll think about it. I will. You’re a good man, Higg. I’ll … I’ll think about it.”

  I knew she wouldn’t, but I let her go and watched her walk away. She’d always be around, she might even come to my bed again, but she’d never stay. She’d said she’d think about it just to be kind.

  I had forgotten that Sylvia stood next to me and tried to think of how to explain myself, but she just took me by the hand and talked about the latest Glassmaker archaeology and about the way the city had been enlarged over time as we walked on toward the bamboo display.

  We examined the flowers. The white ones had died and dried out. The dark ones had died and become a wet mess. Some thistles were alive, some dead. Black and white, up and down, wet and dry, dead and alive. Obvious opposites. We found Raja and reviewed our idea and began to work.

  At the base of a white-flower stem we buried a spoon of acid from the lab, and at the base of a black stem, an alkali. We set an ember and a piece of ice against two opposite stems, small enough not to hurt the plant but large enough to be noticed. We planted a tulip roots-up and another roots-down. We dug holes and left one dry and filled the other with water. I carved a horizontal slash on one stem, a vertical on its neighbor. We wrapped white cloth around a black stem, black cloth around a white stem. We planted fertile seeds and sterile seeds.

  And as we worked, we talked about other opposites that we could not express. Happy and sad. Earth and Pax. Young and old. Day and night. Health and sickness. Plants get sick, too. They probably get some sort of infection in their stoma, the pores they use to breathe. A plant has millions of stoma on each leaf. Snow had millions of alveoli, the tiny sacs in her lungs. Plants can grow new leaves. She could not replace her lungs.

  Plants, Raja said, produce an endless variety of compounds, including antibiotics. On Earth, genetic engineering had created fruits and grains that contained medicines. We already knew the bamboo made vitamins and other chemicals to keep us healthy. If it could create those, she said, it could create whatever we could ask it to do. Old Earth technology was almost dead. If we could ask for what we needed …

  We were a long way from that level of exchange, but we might have made a start. Someday, all babies might survive.

  Raja left. Sylvia and I gathered up our tools.

  “Good work,” she said. “We may not have said much, but I enjoyed saying it.”

  “Talking to the plants. I like it.”

  We were about to leave, but she paused.

  “Each generation sets its own rules,” she said. “The women of your generation have worked things out, and they have their own agreement about you. They haven’t told me but I know about it and I’m sure they haven’t told you but you’ve probably guessed. They prefer sterile husbands because they can control how often they get pregnant. Too often and they’d bear less healthy babies. And you have good genes, very good genes, and they think they’re lucky to have you. They share you, they use you, and I think it’s cruel and I know you don’t like it but I can’t interfere, and it’s harder to do nothing than I ever thought it would be.”

  “I’m happy.”

  “Really?”

  “I want to be happy, so I am.”

  She didn’t look like she believed me, but she wasn’t going to interfere.

  I’d been up all night, so I went home to sleep, but I paused at Indira and Beck’s house on the way. His father told me they were resting. “They really appreciate everything you’ve done. I do, too. You’re a good man, Higg.”

  I thought about that at home as I stared at the afternoon Sun shining through the roof. I had a little of what I wanted. I could be kind if I tried. I could be happy if I didn’t try to be someone else. Children loved me, and I had some fine children. Men didn’t laugh at me anymore. Women still lied to me, but they wouldn’t if I stopped asking them to do the impossible. Big, not-so-dumb, hairy animals knew I was one of them.

  I would go out to share some truffle with Pitman soon, and I would sing him a sad song about fear and hope, failure and healing, about sweet and fresh sap in leaves evergreen with grief. Maybe I could teach the pack to coo along. Music the Pax way. Cross-species communication. They never did that on Earth. Singing fippolions. Dancing fippokats. Helpful, talkative plants with a sophisticated appreciation of abstract ideas. Good times. They can happen. Wait and see.

  THE BAMBOO

  Fire and ice? A duality? Perhaps. Consider the thermodynamics: rapid heat-producing oxidation of wood, and a change of state of water brought about by absorption of heat. They understand dualities. This is communication, for they did more than mimic me, they extended my idea.

  How high they can count? Numbers are infinite. Can they grasp that idea? They miscalculated the equinox this year. Perhaps this indicates a weak intellect that would make them more malleable and more likely to remain with me.

  Perhaps
I can adapt the electric language of the first foreigners to a pigment-based language. I know they understand visual communications. How big would a variable pigment display need to be for their visual acuity?

  We have so much to say. What communication system did the plants that trained them use? Why did they fail to bring their plants with them? Perhaps the plants on their spheres were at war. Perhaps they escaped. Do they understand that the future can be more than a new cycle, the future can be a new way to live, an opportunity for accomplishments never done before?

  A newborn among my new foreigners has just died, a significant loss for slow-breeding animals. Animals deserve good health, and I can aid with nutrition and medications.

  We bamboo once had a vast civilization, with flowers that bloomed in concert to create works of art, and with root networks that enmeshed knowledge that has been lost forever. Cooperation had allowed us to colonize the desert, the sea, the soil that freezes in the winter, even the coral plains. I have the chance to rebuild.

  Springtime. I am free of the seasons, yet I feel the splendor of longer days and clement weather. Neighboring plants awaken, seasonal animals return. It is a time for celebration. I have iron. I have the stamina and will to grow into this adventure, but it will take time. I must be patient. These foreigners are only animals.

  We can begin with simple counting: 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 100.

  TATIANA

  YEAR 106–GENERATION 4

  The Commonwealth of Pax is a voluntary association of the citizens of Pax. Any sentient beings who have expressed their sympathy with the spirit of our Commonwealth and are willing to share in its goals may declare themselves citizens.

  —from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax

  Day 371, autumn. Georg had been looking for a specific locustwood tree to cut down when he found a corpse in a ravine. He ran to tell Rose, the new moderator, who asked me to help investigate. She’s still unsure of herself, as young as my grandchildren and barely old enough to hold office, and she trusts me. I have served under four moderators, five counting Sylvia, and today for the first time I have betrayed one. I told Rose utter falsehoods, but my job as commissioner of the public peace comes first, and I’ve always had to lie for that job.

  We put on hiking gear, arranged for a stretcher team to follow us—although with the harvest, we had few spare hands—and headed west toward the hills with Georg. Rain showers threatened, and my old hips ached with the weather. Rose had all the energy of youth and an anxious need to talk.

  She thought Georg had probably found Harry rather than Lief because the corpse wore brightly colored clothes. Lief disappeared three months ago, Harry disappeared four days ago, and everyone worried endlessly about both of them.

  “Lief wouldn’t wear bright clothes,” she said. “Lief had to camouflage himself. I mean, he was an explorer. Who knew what he was going to find? And he found a lot of things, didn’t he? Harry liked in-between colors best, blue-green, red-violet, yellow-green. He called them interpretive colors, like his art. Interpretive art. Finding the spaces between things.”

  And so on. She spoke to quiet her nerves. Harry had been her close friend—and mine? I think so. Whether the body was Harry or Lief, we were about to lose all hope for one of them. I am no good at consoling people, and I hoped her talk would help her console herself, the way that remembering someone at a funeral eases grief. I believed I could handle my own feelings. Four days had allowed us to work out some of our emotions for Harry—that is, the emotions we expected to feel.

  “This caught my eye,” Georg said, pointing to a red-violet rag tied to a shrub next to the stream where he had found it, a stream leading toward one of the damp, rank ravines in the foothills of the west mountains. We had followed increasingly overgrown deer crab paths as smaller crabs in the brush rattled and hissed at us. A branch of the path covered by low, flat corals alongside the stream led into a ravine, a quagmire that herbivores without armored legs avoided. We wore oil-tanned leather gaiters and high-topped wood sole clogs, and carried spears. Georg led, Rose followed, and I guarded the rear. Slugs noticed us but we kept them at bay.

  The remains lay on the ground between two trees. Purple slugs and lacy, clear slime hummed and writhed among soggy bones, rotting shreds of flesh, silverish beads, and rags of clothing—bright, in-between colored clothing. Rose took a tense breath, although her face remained bravely calm. I took a few steps closer and raised my spear against the slugs. What had killed him? A large predator would have dismembered him, but he lay neatly stretched out among the tree roots, limbs spread, face-up. Those were Harry’s clothes, his hat, and his bushy brown hair. The glass beads of a bracelet lay on the moldy ground at a tree root. The thong, like his flesh, had been mostly eaten away. Incised bright orange and pink beads were scattered among the wrist bones.

  Had he fallen from a heart attack? Despite his youth, he had heart trouble. A poisonous lizard bite? Poison lizards liked quaggy woods. But why had he flopped down like a man enjoying a cozy bed? Harry could be theatrical. Or drunk or drugged. I walked slowly around the body. And then I noticed.

  The ground was covered with tree roots, and one arched out of the soil next to the heap of wrist bones and beads, and its bark had recently been worn off in one spot. As I bent to look, a slug sprang humming from poor Harry’s esophagus. I stabbed it and held my breath against the putrid whiff. The root at his other wrist was draped in a tatter of skin. I moved it with my spearhead and saw the same mark on the bark. Was that damp shred actually human skin, or was it a wide leather strap? I poked it again and studied the texture. Lizard skin, probably gecko, tough as it comes. What could that mean?

  I stood to inspect his ankles. Rose, several meters from the corpse, had turned away, retching and, I think, sobbing, and Georg was comforting her, holding a kerchief.

  Harry’s half-eaten gaiters, clog laces, and socks lay in a wet tangle, but a root near his ankle showed a wear mark, and the root at the other ankle was draped by a half-digested scrap of leather. The heels of Harry’s clogs had dug into the mucky soil again and again. Moisture and four days had softened the marks, but there they were, deep. All around the body, dead leaves and sticks had been shoved aside as Harry struggled. He had been tied down and fed live to the slugs.

  I backed away toward Rose, turned, and fought a wave of nausea. I hoped I was imagining things. I looked again, my kerchief over my mouth. No, it was obvious.

  “I hope it wasn’t an eagle,” Rose said after taking a deep, shaky breath. “It wasn’t an eagle, was it?”

  I considered my answer. I have trained moderators to expect me to answer slowly. Was she trying to deflect suspicion? I couldn’t imagine Rose hurting anyone intentionally, but someone had killed Harry. Or something? No, no animal could or would do that.

  “It’s so sad,” she said, “dying and then being … eaten like that.”

  “Eagles would take apart the bones,” I said.

  “A lizard?” Georg asked.

  I inspected the body again. I saw no clear footprints around it besides mine, but I saw what might have been some indistinct ones, several days old. Nearby, half-hidden by a dead coral bush, was an empty truffle jar. Harry drank a bit, chewed coca seeds, and ate lotus roots, although he tried to conceal all that; and, in truth, he used them moderately. We had discussed it, he and I, and we found no disagreement on that or many other subjects. It would slander his good name to allow people to think that he died of intoxication.

  But I allowed it. The crew with the stretcher came and, with difficulty, separated him from the slugs and slime and took him home. We mourned at the Meeting House and will bury him tomorrow. I should have told someone the truth. Instead I studied the sad faces and work-reddened hands of the mourners, wondering who did it. Who could? After almost forty years of working as commissioner of public peace and seeing things that neighbors do not know about each other, I have learned I can’t enter people’s heads to know why they sometimes abuse
each other or steal from each other. At times I have not understood my own actions.

  Murder. I had to check the spelling of that word because I have never written it before. “The unlawful killing of one human being by another, especially with premeditated malice,” says the crime manual in my office—that is, the little guardhouse near the west gate, a private place to talk to people when I have to. Malice. Harry had struggled. Hard. I hope his heart gave out fast.

  I have never investigated a murder before. The Earth methods prescribed in the manual won’t work on Pax, of course. I don’t know whom to trust, so I have told no one. Not even the moderator, and I want to trust Rose. How would Pax react if I announced that Harry was tortured to death? A public investigation would spread panic and make the guilty person even more furtive.

  I should go to bed, but I won’t sleep well. My consolation has always been to write down my thoughts each night, to empty my secrets onto paper and then burn them.

  My husband has seen me sleepless before. He’ll probably talk to me as we stare at the stars sparkling through the roof. He’s working with a recently found meteorite, a kilo of fairly pure iron we can use for tools, compasses, and nutrition: a treasure. We can talk about the possibilities, and he can help me forget the here and now. My first marriage was a mistake, but with him, I can share almost everything, and when he senses that I must keep a secret, he merely says, “Ah,” as if he’s discovered a pleasant surprise. Sometimes we both laugh, but not tonight. I can’t.

  * * *

  Day 372. The facts: Harry disappeared five days ago. He left for a morning stroll to plant bamboo seeds. His absence wasn’t noted until the next morning, and a search found nothing because we believed he had gone in another direction—how did he get to the ravine? He had no obvious enemies, although Pax surges like a spring river with squabbles, pointless arguments, imagined insults, real insults, jealousies, grudges, childhood rivalries maintained over decades, family aggressions, sexual tensions, and gossip—endless gossip. Do the gossipers know how much I admired Harry?