Semiosis Read online

  Fistfights occur, mostly among boys and young men, although girls and women can be violent, too. I ignore fights if the injuries are minor and no one complains. But no one ever kills anyone.

  I hope to eliminate suspects one by one. It takes two hours to walk to the ravine, two hours to walk back. Additional time would have been required to immobilize him. The killer may have stayed to be sure he died and perhaps to observe his death. No one has ever been killed by slugs and slime, so I don’t know how long that would take. In all, though, the killer would be gone at least for a full pass of Galileo. Who couldn’t account for their time? And who would want to torture him or anyone to death? Is this related to Lief’s disappearance?

  “The more you know about the victim, the more you know about the criminal,” says my crime manual. I have seen allusions to a vast body of information about criminal investigations on Earth, ranging from scientific databases to popular fiction. Crime fiction? Earth was strange. I have one slim manual copied in occasionally illegible handwriting from the computers before they broke down, a book not meant for general readership because it talks about human nature in a way that many on Pax would find disturbing. I find it disturbing. I’m glad I’m not on Earth. This book answers a lot of my questions about the Parents.

  So I tried to learn about Harry. His mother is grieving ostentatiously and said she couldn’t bear to clean his home. Rose and I did it first thing this morning. She met me at his door with puffy eyes, looking frail. We exchanged hugs, as usual, hers tighter than usual. What was wrong?

  She had dressed appropriately for a funeral in old clothes, a wraparound skirt of coarse brown fabric from the old village whose frayed edges had been bound and patched repeatedly, and a much-scuffed kat leather vest, the fur worn off long ago but the green color lingering. She had tied up her bouffant hair, brown like her skirt, in an old scarf. Strings of silver seeds used as beads, the marker for Generation 6, hung from her neck, wrists, and belt, so many that she rattled. But what did that tell me? Little or nothing.

  My own clothes were also properly old. My generation, Generation 4, has no marker, but I had worn my oldest bamboo jewelry, pieces the Children had made when they first arrived, so old that the color had worn off some of them. A bamboo diadem that had once belonged to Sylvia held my hair in place.

  As we ducked under the doorway to enter, I noted the way Rose moved. She looked around the house as intensely as I did but was distracted first by one thing, then by another, as if something had a meaning she could not bear, or as if the next thing had an even more compelling meaning. Harry’s things spoke to her. And to me.

  I had been inside before, in the small dome near the east wall, so his lack of housekeeping did not surprise me: clothes here and there, several racks of drying sheets of art paper, stacks of sketches, a frame of half-finished lace, baskets of mosaic tiles, baskets of beads, pots of paint with brushes carefully cleaned alongside them, a wood carving of a kat ready for polish, another piece of wood carved into a stamp for fabric or clay, a vase of wilting flowers sitting on a table, a bucket of clay, and more.

  Harry had declared in his early teens that he would be the artistic bridge between Pacifists and Glassmakers, a ridiculous self-aggrandizement except that he had not lied. The Glassmakers’ style shone everywhere, their love of light, their distinctive curves, their colors and patterns, their script. Not copies, though. Harry made interpretations. He maintained the Glassmaker Museum, and his familiarity with its contents showed.

  Nothing needed immediate attention, like food that might attract lizards or worse, a kat expecting his return, a chamber pot that needed to be emptied. Nor were things as disorganized as they seemed. I looked to see if some last-minute visitor had left behind footprints or a clue. I stripped his bed, ostensibly to send the sheets and blankets to the laundry, looking for telltale hairs or marks. Nothing.

  Rose attended to the clothing on the floor. She tried to sort things and gave up each time. “Aunt Tatiana…”

  My attention had been caught by a bone-white ceramic goblet with Glassmaker curves and inscribed with Glassmaker numbers from zero to ten, the first of the Glassmaker writing that the bamboo had taught us. Harry had interpreted the symbols in Pacifist handwriting. Once, about two years ago, he had sat down with me in my damp stone office to explain the meaning of that goblet and other pieces of art he had brought with him, then taken me outside to explain Glassmaker architecture and what it told us about the Glassmakers, and it was as if I had never opened my eyes before. His own eyes had been dilated with lotus. It seemed to make him cheerfully patient. I couldn’t object to that.

  “Yes, dear?” I answered Rose. She looked up from the floor where she sat, eyes round with fear. Of what?

  “At the funeral, what should I say? What should I do about his family? About everything?”

  Reasonable questions: she had never presided at a funeral before. I gathered my thoughts into simple, clear instructions. “Your job is to praise him. Use the traditional words, then add anything you can, and invite others to do the same. Listen to what people say. They want to be listened to, and they can always tell if you’re listening.” She was listening to me. “Talk about his art, for example. His friendship. The more specific and heartfelt, the better. Don’t talk for more than fifteen minutes. I’ll gesture like this”—and I brushed my left ear with my right hand—“if it’s time to stop.” She does love to talk. “Keep centered on him. Don’t talk about replacing him.”

  “Replacing him? We can’t do that.”

  “We have to. His work mattered. It will be hard to find someone as talented, and you shouldn’t start looking right away. But the art mustn’t stop here.”

  She burst out laughing; grief sometimes makes people laugh inappropriately. I sat down on the floor beside her. “You liked his art!” she said as tears welled in her eyes. “Not everyone did. Not everyone liked him.”

  Who? Clues, I wanted clues. “The more I knew him,” I said slowly, “the more I liked him. When we realized he was missing…” I tried to find the right word. My first husband often called me unemotional, and he was right, so I have tried to become more warm, at least in my speech. “I felt guilty because I thought I should have noticed sooner.”

  “I know, I know. I should have noticed, too. I spent the whole day in the yam fields and was too tired to visit him.”

  That would exculpate her. And the entire yam field crew, for that matter.

  “I was going to marry him,” she said, smiling and weeping at once. “We were going to announce it soon.”

  A jealous would-be lover might have killed him.

  “You’ve been very brave,” I said. No one loves more acutely than a bride-to-be. How could I tell this wet-eyed girl that her beloved’s death had been a nightmare? I took a characteristic pause, and finally said, “I can’t imagine who wouldn’t like him.”

  “Not everyone sees the need for interpretive art.”

  Who? I wished with all my heart I could replay people’s reactions to him, and then realized I could make it happen. After another pause, I said, “We should organize a show of his art as a memorial.”

  She grinned and wept even harder and nodded yes. “Art was his best.”

  Best. Her generation has created an idea of individual excellence that some people ridicule as “bestism.” Everyone is the best at something unique, although their thing may be only a shade different from that of the next person. Ideally, this thing is surplus to survival, like fine arts or elaborate baking, although surpassing skill at a necessary task will do, like casting flawless glass construction bricks. Rose makes more varieties of candles than I could have imagined: colored, scented, shaped, or suited to some specific task or occasion. They burn steady and smokeless no matter how plain or fancy they are. Bestism has enriched Pax. I admire it.

  We cleaned up a little and spent most of our time planning the art exhibit. She had specific ideas about lighting. Then it was time for the funeral. We walked t
o the plaza, reviewing her duties.

  I can remember when the plaza had been heaped with debris from a three-story tower that stood there during Glassmaker times. We cleaned it when I was a young adult, reusing the stone, brick, and glass to make the plaza. We needed a big space for public events because the population had grown. The Meeting House, despite additions, was too small. So we created a wide area paved with a mosaic of glass block and edged by thick, waist-high walls of brick and stone that had once been the debris of the tower. A garden of cacti was tethered to the walls.

  Pacifists in old clothes had begun to fill the benches. Harry’s mother was not coming, said her husband, Lightning Junior. I asked why. She would have been the center of attention, and she had a love of attention like her son. But before he answered, I had realized that absence might be the most prominent presence of all.

  “Daisy insists that she killed him,” he explained with a sigh, long ago resigned to the melodramatic personalities closest to him.

  “Killed him?” She had to have meant that metaphorically—hadn’t she?

  “If she blames herself, then she can’t blame…” He struggled to finish the sentence: she couldn’t blame Harry for fatal irresponsibility, which I knew was not true, and I had known that lie would hurt people. Now Lightning, a kind and gentle man, ached right in front of me, pain that I had inflicted.

  “There’s no point in blame,” I said, weak words of comfort and yet another lie because there was someone to blame, I just didn’t know whom.

  Still, I would have to talk to Daisy to see exactly what she meant.

  Harry’s basket, closed, stood near the stage in front. I met my husband and we added the flowers he had brought to the piles around it. There were even floating flowers on strings tied to the basket, although they are hard to find this time of year. We found space on a stone bench at the side of the plaza near the front, where Rose could see me and I could see everyone.

  She opened the ceremony with a voice that quavered but carried. “Numbers are a measure, and we are less now.”

  Except for a nurse, two hospitalized children, one guard minding the front gate, and Daisy, everyone had come. I studied them one by one, except for those too young or too ill to trek to the ravine, trying to remember whom I had seen, and when and where, on the day Harry died.

  “This loss, the loss of his art, is a loss to the future of Pax,” Rose was saying, “and his loss is a loss to my future. His laugh was the same laugh I wanted to hear in the voices of my children.”

  Hathor and Forrest whispered to each other, brother and sister who seemed to want to be identical twins rather than mere fraternal twins with their hair worn in identical short curls that made their round cheeks and fat hips look disproportionate. Sometimes they entertained themselves by waging gossip campaigns to wreck a romance or ruin a vocation. I have had to intervene occasionally, and I have been a target of their rumors at least once, but I did nothing, knowing it would merely inflame them. Nearby, Nevada dried the tears of her daughter, Harry’s age and generation. A disappointed lover?

  Lief’s wife rose to say something, failed, and sat again, surrounded by her children and grandchildren.

  Lightning rose and faced her. “The only thing worse than how I feel now is if I knew nothing about the fate of someone I loved. I grieve for you and your family more than anything. Everyone does, and we won’t stop looking until we find Lief.”

  People murmured approval. Lief had beaten his wife and children until I intervened, another of the secrets I carry for my job.

  The ceremony went on for some time because Harry had many friends and admirers who wished to speak. After the burial, I went to see Daisy. She lived not far from Harry and kept a colorful house. She had, as usual, dressed in sumptuously embroidered clothes, but her face looked exhausted. Her hair was bushy like his but, of course, dyed green, and the dark brown roots were flecked with gray. Her face looked like an older, female version of her son’s: full lips, cleft chin, curved nose, arched eyebrows—nothing I hadn’t known, but suddenly her appearance seemed unnerving.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said.

  She muttered, “Thank you,” with narrowed eyes. Everyone knows what my job is. I might have come to deliver an ultimatum for her to change her behavior or else face public charges. And perhaps she thought that I disliked her, and I do act coldly to her sometimes, but I don’t dislike her, although her personality and mine don’t mesh. I respect her medical work sincerely, and her need to be the center of attention has motivated her to solve problems and gain the gratitude of the ill, bestism of a sort, and a very good sort.

  She works with the rainbow bamboo to protect our health. This spring, she and the bamboo found the cure to the scarlet fever epidemic that killed seven people and would have killed many more of us, and they rescued us from disaster. She worked even though she was ill, too, knowing that by going without rest she might be killing herself, and she earned an eagle feather and deserved the title “hero.” Over the years, she and the bamboo have saved many lives and solved much suffering. For example, they created the salve that soothes my chronic skin rash, a triviality that had won my daily gratitude long before the epidemic, which I spent in bed delirious with fever.

  I don’t dislike her. I dislike the bamboo, Stevland, even though it does so much for our health and our crops. It earned a human name in honor of its importance, and pretty soon we started calling it “him” as if he were a man and not a hermaphrodite plant.

  I hadn’t disliked him as a child. I remember Uncle Higgins’s first efforts to communicate, when Stevland gave lessons in the same math that I was learning in school. I felt a childish affinity for the bamboo that increased as his ability to express himself acquired more sophistication and mirrored the progress of my studies. I learned Glassmade, the language that the bamboo uses, and as a young adult, I began to communicate with him. And soon I stopped, and I have never wanted to deal with Stevland since. But that’s not Daisy’s fault. My job this morning was to discover who had murdered her son.

  “It was sad how he died,” I said.

  “Planting bamboo seeds,” she said with bottomless regret in her voice. Stevland likes to have his seeds dispersed to grow outposts. She sank into a chair, half sobbing, half whining melodramatically. “Harry died for Stevland!”

  “He wanted Harry to plant his seeds?” I found myself a chair.

  “I should have planted them myself. Stevland asked me, and I made Harry go, poor Harry. I went to the baths, and then I went to the clinic. And then … You didn’t know that he used coca seeds, no one did. I should have made him stop. He died all alone, a loss, a terrible, tragic loss.” She looked at me defiantly through her rehearsed words and tears as if to say that I should have known and made him stop.

  I could confirm her activities with the bath custodian and the medic. The melodrama continued.

  “I can’t face Stevland again. He would remind me of Harry. Oh, poor Harry!”

  Harry had made many of the decorations and utensils in her home, and his designs had been embroidered on her dress, so she had no escape from him. I asked a few more questions about his friends “in case they need special consolation,” listened to a speech that would have been self-pitying except that the truth was worse than her presumptions, and offered my sympathy again, trying to assure her with all sincerity that she hadn’t killed her son. I left.

  I stopped at the gift center, sat in a stall, and breathed the incense that masked the earthier smells. Stevland had an inquisitorial interest in Pacifist behavior, which he had wanted to regulate by directing my work as commissioner. His interest could help me now, and my dislike for him hardly mattered as much as finding the killer.

  A little after lunch, after talking with the bathhouse custodian, the medic, and the head yam farmer, legitimate work but avoidance mechanisms all the same, I sat down in a little greenhouse, which, in addition to the clinic, is where Stevland “talks.” The roof was clear bricks. Leaves
cascaded from the very top of a wide, pale stem that rose in the center of the room. The stem, seemingly devoid of pigment, carried Stevland’s messages, and the stem had grown bigger over the two—no, three decades since we had spoken last.

  A slight perfume embellished the warm air. I sat at the writing table and fidgeted with the lacquered whitewood palette. A pot of cream ink stood ready. The felt brushes and cleaning rags were clean. What would I say? “I’m back, you nosy tulip”? That would be inappropriate.

  Words began to form on the stem. Thousands of cells twitched tiny beads of pigment into view—red chromoplasts, dozens in each cell—to create Glassmade triangles and lines that took shape like objects drawing near through a fog. When I was young, the sight had amazed us all.

  “I now welcome Tatiana again, happy you serve Pacifists well for many years.”

  At each node on the stem, tiny black dots almost too small for human eyes to see, Stevland’s eyes, thousands of them, were trained on me.

  “You and I now relate with mutualism,” I wrote, wasting no time on niceties. I had not written Glassmade for a long time, and struggled with vocabulary and grammar although it is a simple language; in fact, he says he doubts he learned it thoroughly before the Glassmakers left. But it serves. I held the board up for Stevland to see. He answered quickly.

  “I happy make-you mutualism. I remember long ago we discover mutualism difficult. I remember I perhaps be-me tulip.”

  That stopped me. Stevland had learned humility, or at least how to fake it.

  He continued, “I learn truffle hurts not peace.” That had been the last straw, when he had wanted me to eliminate truffle on the grounds that we did not understand our own biology well enough to use alcohol responsibly. Truffle can be used irresponsibly, but it wasn’t Stevland’s business. Nor was I about to ban the boat races, as if I could, after Tiffany drowned. Nor would I participate in schemes to identify and tranquilize overly aggressive Pacifists, nor report all misdemeanors to Stevland and consult with him over punishments, nor order marriages between individuals that he deemed most genetically favorable, including my own. I chose my first husband to spite Stevland.