Semiosis Read online

  “Tulips learn not,” I wrote, able to do my own sweet-talking. “You learn every day.”

  “New roots every day. Pacifists teach-me much.”

  Enough sweet talk. “I come with great sorrow,” I wrote. “I come with secret of my work. Someone five days ago kill Harry. I desire know killer. I desire you help-me protect well.”

  I may as well have said plans existed to chop Stevland down. Sentences began appearing and disappearing so fast I could hardly read them. “Great sorrow, yes, great surprise. Great loss of peace. Pacifists never kill fellow Pacifists. Behavior create imbalance. Great sorrow, yes. You will tell-me all of kill.” I began to write. “Pacifist lives equal to my life,” he added. “Perhaps killer act in emotion and not kill someone again?”

  I answered, “Unknown,” and tried to finish my first few sentences about the murder.

  “Killing be not plan perhaps?” he flashed.

  “Yes, be-it plan,” I wrote. “You will not interrupt me and I will tell-you all.” I needed to consult the dictionary many times. I filled one board, let him study it, and wrote more, six boards in all. He did not respond immediately. “I now finish tell-you all,” I finally wrote.

  He responded after another wait. “I see slugs kill small animals. Killing surely be sorrowful sorrowful slow for large animal. But slugs be-them not intelligent, we be-us intelligent, and making sorrow be-it wrong for intelligences. I learn from wrongnesses, and will prevent more.”

  He didn’t sound like the Stevland I had known, but he hadn’t lost his hectoring. After a long pause, he said, “Harry be-him artist, and buried today. We talk Harry and I of Glassmakers and art. Art be-it happiness like rainbows on bark, thus I will grow-me art using him from cemetery and extend-me his happiness tomorrow with artful flowers.”

  If I liked Stevland more, I might have appreciated that tribute, of using Harry as fertilizer to create flowers—what would Harry have thought?

  “I need-me knowledge of who five days ago have time to kill,” I said. At his request—no, insistence—I explained the nature of a criminal investigation, and added something about the nature of teamwork. He said he would review his memories overnight as capillary pressure reached all parts of his roots.

  “Help and harm make duality,” he said. “We understand-us perhaps, and understanding make balance. Large and slow plant, small and quick Pacifist, I and you will find killer. I thank you because you today come and ask-me help. You be-you wise commissioner for Pacifists and for me.”

  He had learned flattery over the years. So had I. Perhaps a relationship can be based on flattery. “You help us Pacifists with many problems,” I wrote. “You and I will find killer. I happy you and I talk and I desire more talk without sorrow.” I added, “Tomorrow we make-us much mutuality.” I wished him water and sunshine. He wished me warmth and food.

  I had time before dinner to join a work team that had often included Harry. We went out to the rocky ridges a little northwest of the city to harvest chrysalises from butterfly bushes for their flavored oil and to check them for parasites or other problems. The weather threatened rain, but the mellow light made the fields and forest look richer, full of notes of ocher and gold—the cones high up on the pines, the leaves on the onions and tulips in the fields along the riverbanks. The pods on lentils and locustwoods rattled in the wind, nearly dry. It hadn’t been a great year for crops, but we would make it through the winter without hardship.

  Often my presence dampens conversation, but I encouraged them to talk by broaching the irony that we had led normal lives on the day he died.

  “I was weaving,” Nevada said. Weaving is her best. “You know, it has meaning, weaving does. It symbolizes the connections every Pacifist has with each other. A single missing thread and you ruin a brocade. Harry, he was a warp thread, dyed in the fiber.” Et cetera. Bestism can inspire talkativeness. She eventually named everyone in the weaving room that day, and it included her daughter.

  If that and all the other comments of the members of the work group prove true, I can rule out twenty-one suspects.

  Now, in my office, I can see a stand of bamboo through the open door. My anger with Stevland so long ago might have been little more than displaced anger over my job as commissioner. I could not quite bear to blame Sylvia, my great-grandmother. When I was just a teenager, she called me to her deathbed, her body swelling as her kidneys failed her. She gave me a knife that had been made on Earth with a blade almost as long as my hand. I had been impressed by the steel itself, shiny and wonderful, but then she told me she had killed Vera with it. She described the days leading up to the revolt, a long story, and she got angry remembering it. I couldn’t imagine the things she told me about, beatings and killings and rape. No one had ever told us about it.

  “I did not, not, not want to die there,” she said, “did not want to lead a hard, ugly life under the dictates of lying murderous Parents and finally be carried in rags through desolate fields and be left to feed the greedy, stupid snow vine.” The Parents had betrayed the Children.

  And finally she told me:

  “We’re here in Rainbow City now, and it’s the job of the moderator to help us choose what to do as a group and to do things the Pax way. A moderator can’t keep the peace between individuals. I’ve tried, and it’s too much. Moderators must be public. But Tatiana, you can be private, you can keep secrets, I know you. This knife is your first secret.”

  So she appointed me commissioner of public peace, and I was too young and flattered to realize that the job would eventually set me apart from everyone, and that the secrets I learned would make me freeze my heart to protect it. Still, the job must be done and done well. I kept working for a time when I was young simply to spite Stevland, to prove that he was only a plant and couldn’t control me.

  I still have the knife and keep it sharp. I wear it almost always, slipped into a boot or tucked inside my vest in a sheath of thin, tough lizard skin. When Great-Grandmother died, everyone wondered where her steel knife was. They still do.

  * * *

  Day 373. Stevland had been paying less attention to daily activities than I thought and supplied less information about who was where than I had hoped, but we ruled out twenty-two more people today. Added to the children, ill, incapacitated, and individuals that I had already ruled out, I am left with 160 suspects, almost two-thirds of all Pax, although Stevland had some distant roots he wished to check.

  “Investigation resembles hunting,” he enthused. “Animals hunt-them food, most plants not. Many times Pacifists tell-me hunting give-them pleasure. Now I understand. We hunt killer using stealth, using secrets, and for good end, not for gluttony.”

  Someone tapped on the door. “Whenever you’re ready. No hurry,” Jersey called amicably from the other side of the door. She is translating an Earth book for Stevland, A History of Mathematics, and spends an hour most afternoons with him.

  “We hunt killer with ideas and information,” he said, “and with intelligence. I grow more roots. I give-you more intelligence, give-you blue and small fruit high on stem near office gate. Good for animal brain.”

  Intelligence fruit? I had to think about that. Stevland gives fruit tailored for specific individuals to cure infections or ease childbirth or provide extra nutrients or enzymes, among so many other things. But he has always whined about our limited mental capacity. Starting with my smallest suspicion, I asked, “Perhaps you explain-me why intelligence fruit now and not such fruit yesterday.”

  The answer came slowly. “Best intelligence increase be good nutrition for children. Balance create best health, and extra intelligence through fruit create unbalance. Sickness create imbalance, thus medicine seek balance. Body enhance medicine because body also seek-it balance. Extra intelligence fruit opposite of medicine fruit. I test-it intelligence chemical in fescue with fippokats and learn of risks and benefits. You Tatiana have strong health, so you have strong balance for such risks. You will not give-others fruit, perhaps. Searc
h for killer balance risk from fruit, perhaps.”

  The risk would balance the need. He thinks like that, in terms of balance, as if in some root he places ideas on a tiny double scale. Such a grand intelligence. Would he have told me about the risk without asking? Doubtful. He knows what was best for us—he has always been sure of that.

  “I make fruit carefully,” he added. “I examine your physiology with detail. You perhaps talk with medics of hip pain.”

  How did he know that? He hadn’t been watching everyone, but he had been watching me. I answered very slowly, after I had entertained some irrational thoughts, and they all led to the sight of Harry’s corpse and the feel of Rose’s anguish and the tragedy of Pax’s loss and the danger we were in and what my duties were.

  “I eat fruit today,” I said. A taste, at least. Perhaps we could find the killer before it did me too much harm. Stevland wouldn’t want to harm me, would he? “Jersey be here.” I needed to exit gracefully before I said something confrontational that would make my job harder, no matter how much he deserved it.

  “Jersey tell-me Earth mathematics memories. I learn amazing amazing much. Human create book intelligence, not fruit intelligence or root intelligence. Animals exceed limits creatively cleverly, learning rather than repeating. I feel surprise.”

  I did not feel flattered. “Water and sunshine.”

  “Warmth and food.”

  Jersey had found a bench nearby and was studying her book—patiently, of course. She has an odd kind of patience, more like timidity, and a kind of generosity that approaches appeasement. It makes sense knowing how Lief treated her as a child, but I might also be seeing things that aren’t there because I know about her childhood. She treats her own children well as far as I can discover.

  She sat on a bench made of a split locustwood log with a checkerboard grain. The ends had been carved to look like a cluster of locustwood seedpods. Stevland had negotiated a deal with the locustwood community, and the bench commemorated our pact. The trees agreed to give us strong, decorative wood and seedpods containing potassium and the amino acid methionine in exchange for limited logging, protection against pests and competitors, and seeds sown in ideal locations. Stevland thought the trees were eager to deal and shrewdly forward-looking. So is Stevland. As our negotiator with plants and crops, he has made himself essential. People trust him to help us.

  Jersey looked up slowly as I approached, and a hint of a frown passed across her face. I’m used to that kind of reaction. Maybe she thought I had news about her father, Lief.

  “Stevland enjoys the book,” I said.

  She smiled, looking relieved, and nodded. Her pretty little nose has fewer freckles than when she was a child, and now she has two boys, freckled and blond like her. You can tell she’s originally a blonde by her hair’s bright shade of green.

  “It’s hard to read to him,” she said as she stood. “Glassmade doesn’t have a big vocabulary. Well, it must, though, because Glassmakers did a lot of science.” She giggled self-consciously.

  Math is her best, math so far advanced that it becomes abstract, and she enjoys teaching it. Nevada had woven the rust-red brocade for her sheath dress that incorporated multicolored numbers and symbols in its pattern. The style seems a bit cute to me, but they both love the dress and it is very well made.

  “He knew square roots,” she said. “On Earth, they’ve been using them for four thousand years. That shocked him. And the name fascinated him. No one told him we call them roots, and roots mean a lot to him.”

  “Shocked him?” I felt myself smile.

  “Yes. He can do all sorts of analytic geometry and tangents because of how he grows, so that was easy, but now we’re up to imaginary numbers and complex roots. I don’t know how to tell you how surprised he is, especially by how useful they are. Wait till I get to non-Euclidean geometry.”

  Even I had a vague idea of what an imaginary number was, something about negative square roots, and Stevland hadn’t. “He says he’s learning a lot,” I said. “He’s amazed.”

  Jersey is on the suspect list. I tried to imagine her carrying out the murder. She’s small and slight, but if Harry was drunk, she could overpower him. I couldn’t imagine the two being alone together, but that may speak to my imagination. And, selfishly, I didn’t want someone who was shocking Stevland with the accomplishments of human intelligence to be the murderer. He has non-Euclidean geometry yet to learn from us.

  The intelligence fruit was waiting for me, high on a stem growing just inside the rarely used west gate near my office. To pick it, I had to climb to the top of the wall and lean over. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if Stevland hadn’t told me about it.

  I ordinarily eat two bamboo fruits, one early in the morning and one in midafternoon. More makes me light-headed, less makes me sluggish. I still had doubts, but I ate a blue fruit and waited. It was faintly bitter but mostly tasteless. Nothing happened until evening.

  My husband and I went at Luxset to the Meeting House for Harry’s posthumous art show. On the way, the city seemed more interesting, more detailed. I spotted fippokat runs between the houses and low smudged handprints on doors of homes where children lived. Overhead, bamboo branches were arranged to capture the most sunlight possible, leaves arranged in whorls that diminished in length along stems, making efficient cone shapes. Jersey could probably write the equation.

  When we arrived, I noticed new things about the people, about who really paid attention to whom or to what: to children or food or the art itself. They stood in patterns like the groups in a flock of moths, the cliques and age groupings and work teams, some with hard feelings against each other, and they all looked at me as I entered as if I knew everything they wanted to hide, and I wished I did.

  The Meeting House now includes two smaller domed buildings in addition to the main one, connected by wide arched halls. Rose had arranged the art carefully on tables in front of bays to take advantage of the light. The main room housed household objects.

  I pretended to look at the art, hoping to conceal some eavesdropping, but I actually looked at the art in spite of my plans and saw things I had never seen before. The fur of a carving of a kat mimicked the texture of the stones and bricks of a house. A square pottery box, incised and glazed, showed Pacifists and Glassmakers dancing together, and I realized that the pattern around the rim was their swirling footsteps. I even recognized the dance. The carved lid to a child’s chamber pot made me laugh out loud, but no one was in a mood to laugh, so no one looked pleased.

  “It’s the pattern,” I explained. It looked at first like the intricate pattern of lines on a Glassmaker tile mural. Subtle differences in the height of certain parts of the pattern revealed a small, low plant. “It’s a poop plant,” I said. “Camouflaged.” Curious people looked and saw it themselves for the first time, and a few chuckled. I pointed to the other art. “A box waltz. A house kat.” Slowly, more smiles.

  “Harry was a good man,” I said loudly. I realized I could move my investigation forward if I kept talking. “I’ll miss him. I’ll miss his art.” I gestured at the white goblet. “I wish I could have done something to help him. I wish I had known.” I had tears in my eyes. That surprised me. And I realized that the intelligence fruit had taken effect. Did being smarter make me less cold?

  My outburst affected people. They began talking about what they were doing that day and about what they could have done. I could listen to two, even three conversations at once and remember what I heard. I eliminated sixty people. And I made the evening a real tribute to Harry, and a chance for the fabric of Pax to heal a bit, although when I find the killer I will tear it open wider than ever.

  And now, back in my office, I have been studying my crime manual. Generally, murderers fall into two classes. The first kills for passion—in the heat of an argument with a loved one, for example—and tends not to repeat the crime. The second type kills for pleasure. These people plan the attack, use restraints, and control the event
carefully. Pleasure killers will kill again.

  Harry was killed by the second kind. I can’t afford to waste days.

  I wonder about Lief. Is he alive? Nearby? A schoolteacher had come to me fifteen years ago to say that she saw odd bruises on Lief’s children. I confronted him, and his wife made excuses. He said nothing, and I agonized over how to proceed and whether to make a formal public complaint. But the next day he announced that he planned to go exploring alone, a foolhardy idea that no one could talk him out of. He left, headed due south. Had I sent him to his death? I lay awake for many winter nights wondering.

  He returned the next spring with a tree-dwelling fipp on his shoulder and useful information about uncharted lands. The trip, he proclaimed, had changed him. His family had grown less subdued while he had been gone, and as far as I could observe, they remained happy. Perhaps he had changed. He organized more exploration trips that discovered many useful plants, animals, and resources, as well as an extraordinarily beautiful waterfall just over the east mountains that everyone has now visited at least once. The Glassmakers themselves had built a few domed buildings there, perhaps a resort.

  But Lief never spoke to me again after the initial confrontation. He never looked me in the eye.

  He’s been missing for three months, and he could live off the land for that long.

  * * *

  Day 374. Rose, the moderator, was supposed to meet Hathor and Forrest for lunch but did not show up. They waited, then began to look for her, thoroughly miffed. I was about to talk to Stevland when I heard about their complaints. I immediately organized search parties.