Semiosis Read online

  “Maybe you’re overreacting,” Georg said. I was about to reply but he saw the look on my face. “Never mind. Sorry. I’ll head a search party if you want.”

  What did he believe I was thinking? He had been fueling the furnace at the glass foundry when Harry died. It was a lengthy job involving teamwork, so he wasn’t a suspect. His search party was out of the gate headed downriver in mere minutes.

  I went to ask Stevland where Rose had been. After searching his roots, he said he had last seen her that morning outside the riverside gate with Roland, the fippmaster.

  Roland had volunteered to join Georg’s search party, bringing sniffing kats for what would seem to them like a game of hide-and-seek. I waited for his return in the Meeting House, aware that the blue fruit, which I had eaten again, made time move slowly and made remembering too easy. The suspect list still numbered one hundred and included Roland.

  I had mixed emotions about him, and sharp memories.

  Several years ago, after too much truffle, he and I snuck away from a late-night childbirth party at the Meeting House, and we hurried through the dark streets to the city walls. Early spring lizards peeped, looking for mates. He spread his fringed coat on the walkway on top of the wall, and we fumbled with ties and buttons and made love half-undressed.

  The next morning, I blamed it on the truffle, on the fascination that fippmasters have, on Uncle Higgins’s legend, on the lion pheromone that clings to his clothes and sexually excites humans, on anything I could think of. He was elegantly handsome, small, and strongly built with a lush beard, and he was an accomplished, exciting lover. But I could not excuse myself for having sex with a man in a different generation, his hair as green as his kats. I am the commissioner of public peace.

  Maybe that was his main attraction: his age. The growth and success of Rainbow City has allowed younger generations to create in ways we could not imagine. Consider Harry. Young people are becoming what Sylvia had hoped for.

  Several days later Roland and I met by chance outside the city and made love again in a little dale surrounded by budding wild tulips. Almost a year of “accidents” followed. I can’t blame him. I’m responsible for what I do, but even now I don’t know why I did it. It’s a wonder no one noticed. Maybe it was the thrill of taking a risk and breaking the rule that bans sex between members of different generations.

  Guilt finally stopped me. I said “enough,” and he kissed my hands and said he would obey with regret, and then I felt guilty for stopping, and I wished I had someone to talk to about it—to talk to about all the secrets of my life and my job. Instead I write them down like this and then I burn my writing, and the ashes that fill a jar in a corner of my office serve as my confession.

  So I waited for news about Rose, hours made bitter by memories and doubt.

  The search party returned in the midafternoon. They had found nothing. Roland wanted to get fresh kats and try again. He hurried to take the tired animals to their hutches and get new ones, and I followed.

  “Did you see Rose today?” I said, hoping I could somehow rule him out as a suspect.

  “This morning … yes, Rose and I,” he said. He talked in quiet, soothing tones, directing the sound at the kats, but his face was flushed and gleamed with sweat. “We went to the shed near the cotton fields. She was so lonely without Harry. I wanted to make her feel better, to feel loved, and we … we made love. Then she said she was going to pick flax from some thistles. She should have come back right away.”

  He set the kats down and called two others, urging them to come quickly. Rose was from the Bead Generation, not the Green Generation like Roland. I thought I felt anger, then realized it was jealousy.

  “I don’t know,” he continued. “There aren’t any eagles around, the lions tell me that, but we have to find her.” He picked up the kats and looked at me. “We looked down one trail. Now we’ll try the other. The path toward the pecan patch.”

  He almost ran out of the city. I hurried along with him down the path on the river bluff past onions and tulips until we reached the cotton field shed, trying to think only about finding her, but instead wondering whom Roland hadn’t had sex with, and noticed how genuinely worried he was, but why? We followed another path and stopped at a fork. He set the kats down. He pulled Rose’s nightshirt out of his backpack for them to sniff, then they sniffed around until they found her trail, which they followed into the woods.

  We found Rose in a clearing dominated by quitch grass and low pines. She lay on the reddish-gray grass with one end of her belt around her neck and the other end tied to a pine branch that had apparently broken off from her weight. Next to her lay her basket. It looked as if she had dumped the thistles from her basket and stood on it, tied the belt to her neck and the branch, then jumped, and the branch broke. The kats sniffed her, confused. Roland sank to his knees and called them to his arms, his voice tight with anguish. I approached her.

  I saw marks on her neck right away, bruises and abrasions, especially the nape, showing that she had been strangled by a narrow cord or rope. Her bead-embroidered belt would have left different marks. I covered her blood-darkened face and bruised neck with my head scarf. I looked at her fingernails to see if she had scratched at her attacker, but they were clean. Washed? The grass was too tough to show any footprints or marks of struggle. I couldn’t see where the branch had broken from the tree above and suspected it had been brought from somewhere else. This might mean the killer lacked the strength to lift the corpse to tie it to a real branch. Roland could have lifted her. Or Lief.

  I realized I was stamping as I walked on the stiff, raspy grass, angry with the killer for killing again and with myself for being unable to protect Rose. I should have acted quicker. I had given the killer another chance.

  Roland sat on the ground, head down. The kats in his arms rocked back and forth to comfort him. I went to the city to fetch a crew to take Rose home.

  No one has ever committed suicide on Pax before, although some of the old and ill have sought euthanasia, but that’s entirely different. Field teams left their work as we marched past with the stretcher, and they offered to help carry her or to run ahead with the news that she was coming. By the time we got to the gate, a hundred people waited.

  “Why?” I heard that question whispered as we walked through the gate. At the bathhouse I recruited some weak-eyed matrons who would care for her body but who wouldn’t study the marks on her neck. They were more likely to fuss over making her look nice. I left her corpse among the brick tubs filled with soapy water and the scent of wet cotton. Her mother, the former moderator, had died in the scarlet fever epidemic this past spring. Rose’s father had heard the news before I came to visit him, and after seeing him, I urged his relatives and friends not to leave him alone, as if they hadn’t realized that themselves. If I told him she had been murdered, would it ease his burden or add to it?

  And then I was called to the Commonwealth Committee meeting. Twelve people, including me, help the moderator with day-to-day decisions. I arrived a little late. The Committee had already decided that I should become the new moderator. It was the last thing I expected to hear.

  “At least for the time being,” Bartholomew added, and I couldn’t tell if he was saying that to me or to the others. “You have the experience to handle the situation efficiently. Pax needs that.”

  Or maybe Bartholomew would make a good moderator: an older Greenie, a skilled woodworker, a widower who had never remarried and who seemed to find strength in solitude, a reservoir of good sense delivered with an exaggerated fussiness that made him disarming. I am far less likable. But I didn’t argue. The position might give me opportunities to find the killer faster, and it was only temporary, in some ways in name only. I asked Bartholomew to help Rose’s father and make arrangements for the evening’s wake, asked the head of the Philosopher’s Club to hold an open discussion on grief, and left to talk to Stevland.

  “I now welcome Tatiana.” The words appeared befo
re I had the door closed and the brushes ready to write.

  “Someone kill Rose,” I scribbled, and then explained everything, including my own lack of timeliness, ignoring Stevland’s interruptions about “sorrowful” or “wrongness replicated.” I finished with, “You in morning see Roland and Rose. You will tell-me other observations.”

  We discussed suspects and their movements, and we reached two conclusions. First, the killer may have hidden his or her movements from Stevland as well as from Pacifists. Second, we could not rule out Roland. My crime manual says that criminals who act in an organized fashion are often sexually competent, charming, and stereotypically masculine. They may return to the crime scene, volunteer information, and anticipate being questioned. Of course, that was the case on Earth, but this was Pax.

  “Roland lies perhaps,” Stevland said. “I make-you fruit for truth. Lie be-it think twice. Fruit make thinking be-it only once, so thinking less smart. Bad imbalance, very bad, but very temporary. It will grow near smart fruit, with stripes.”

  “Perhaps you explain-me bad imbalance?”

  “Less smart be-it bad because be-it less thinking,” Stevland repeated unhelpfully. Intelligence fruit has been making me feel odd, so what could truth fruit do? But I will use this new fruit. The killer will kill again if I don’t stop him or her.

  At the Meeting House, Bartholomew and the Philosophers had done a fine job, and I complimented them. I asked Roland, who was suffering horribly, to see me first thing in the morning. Hathor and Forrest had decided that Rose had killed herself because her heart was broken over Harry’s death—and the art show, which was still on display in the Meeting House, seemed to support the guesswork.

  I talked with many people and eliminated two dozen suspects. It would have been easy to eliminate more if I hadn’t wanted to avoid creating suspicion and warning the killer. The lie about Rose’s broken heart began to trouble me. I couldn’t learn anything more, so I left.

  On my way to my office to begin writing tonight, I saw the truth fruit developing. If Roland admits to killing, I don’t know how I will react. I am angry with the killer beyond expression. I am also angry with Stevland. He can make us smarter or more honest, but seems to be content to give us fruit that usually makes us a bit more alert and sometimes cures our illnesses—that keeps us balanced. But if he was altering the fruit from time to time, we would never notice. What is in the salve for my skin rash?

  The manual says destructive behavior is motivated by desire for power, and Stevland has always wanted power, to be the biggest and smartest bamboo in the history of Pax and to have the best service animals ever. Great-Grandmother was wrong. He’s not naturally altruistic. He naturally seeks control.

  Truth may come in a fruit, but lying is my life. I lie to protect the privacy of others, I ignore lies for the same reason, I lie to protect myself, and I lie to my husband to protect him from feeling that some inadequacy on his part caused me to visit Roland.

  I want to be with my husband now. I want to pretend I know nothing special, that no killer is hovering over us like the imaginary giant child-snatching bat that children think they see when some flaw in a glass brick in a roof makes an odd flash. In our little city, everyone thinks we know everyone else, and we are wrong.

  * * *

  Day 375. Roland stumbled to my office early this morning to talk to me. He had deteriorated during the night, was shaky and pale with lack of sleep, unwashed and uncombed, and the truffle I smelled on his breath probably hadn’t helped him. If he was the killer, would he attack me? In his condition, he might not be able to fight hard. He seemed ready to confess even before I served him breakfast, tea and striped truth fruit. I had already eaten my special fruit and had a fine steel knife in easy reach, so I was smart and ready.

  “It’s my fault she died. Mine,” he babbled hoarsely. “I did it. I … I know it was wrong. It was wrong with you, too. It’s just, I love all kinds of women, I know I’m not supposed to, but you’re—you, you’re tall and smart and not like other women. You care about me. You care about me, Tatiana, don’t you? You watch out for me, like yesterday, and Rose felt so bad, I wanted to make her feel better, but I know it was wrong. So did she, and she felt guilty, I know she did. You did, I know you did. But you’re strong. She … she … she…”

  He is Generation 5. She was Generation 6. He thought she had committed suicide because of him.

  It got worse as the fruit took effect and made him even more painfully honest, and he confessed to being with other members of taboo generations, many women and some men. He neglected to train the fippokats and failed to do his share of the fieldwork. He didn’t make truffle. He ate lotus root. As a child, he had stolen toys and goofed off in school.

  “I should have died instead of her. Pax would be better off without me. It deserves a better fippmaster. I’m too selfish for this job. I only got it because of my looks.”

  Sniveling, woebegone, he seemed more attractive than ever, or perhaps it was the pheromones on his clothes and skin again. I could easily imagine the shape of the muscles of his shoulders under the fringed collar of his coat, and the strength of his thighs.

  But I make excuses. I meant only to talk him out of suicide, and my assurances of his self-worth became explanations of my former sexual interest in him, which had never ceased: taboo love, not in keeping with my office, but breaking that taboo had hurt no one, hadn’t it? He said, truthfully, if I could believe Stevland’s fruit, that he had always felt more real when he was with me, more sure of himself, never felt better than when he made me happy. And I was happy and relieved that he had not killed Rose. Age means nothing, really, we agreed—by then we were hand in hand and flushed with excitement.

  We made love on the same table where I’m writing now. The intelligence fruit didn’t help me think twice about what I was doing.

  I felt stupid at Rose’s funeral later that morning. The killer was somewhere among the people in the plaza, unless it was Lief, and why would Lief kill Rose? Or Harry? At least she wasn’t tortured. Maybe. Most hunters won’t use choke snares because they think that strangling is cruel.

  At Rose’s funeral, I lit several of her candles and spoke the traditional words about the numbers of Pax. I praised her honestly, but who besides me at that moment believed that she had fortitude? People sat quietly, stunned. I am cruel to let them think she died by her own hand. The killer mocks Pax and mocks me.

  Stevland, when I spoke to him after the burial, said we should use the truth fruit on more people, since Roland hadn’t killed Rose. I thought a moment. “You will tell-me means of you know such fact of Roland.” The bamboo outside my office couldn’t have seen anything.

  He hesitated, and I knew enough about hesitations to know I had asked something he did not want to answer. “You will keep-me my secret,” he ordered. I wasn’t sure I would, and I’m still not sure I should. The Glassmade words faded and were replaced by words in English. “I have learned your language. I have duplicated auditory organs in many places around the city. They are more useful than I expected.”

  “You can hear me?” I wrote in Glassmade, too stunned to realize I didn’t have to.

  “Yes, however with difficulty,” the words on the stem said in human language.

  “How long?” I said, and wrote, this time in English, two small words that felt entirely unseemly, like doing mathematics with a fippokat.

  “I learned by reading your language over many years. I watched school classrooms, but hearing is new this year. I sense many sounds at once and must separate each. This is my difficulty.”

  I sat still for a long time. It was no theatrical pause. He knows what we say, what we do, and has the information about our biochemistry to control us by fruits and scents. He has long been willing to issue threats and commands. What was the scent in the greenhouse doing to me? It could be doing a lot and I would never know. His secrets and power would protect Pax lives only as long as we served him.

  “We can wor
k together better,” he wrote to break the silence. “We must find the killer.”

  “I will question more people with the fruit,” I said. But that was not enough for Stevland, not at all.

  “We must use the truth fruit for the entire population.”

  “No. Social peace requires lies. Trivial, necessary lies. We must find the killer without destroying Pax.”

  “We must find the killer. Then I will give you fruit to kill that person.”

  “The punishment will be decided by the people of Pax,” I said, and wrote to show to him so he would have to understand, but I wrote so fast that my writing was almost illegible.

  “I want the killer’s blood,” he said.

  “You already have the victims’.”

  “You speak of logic. I speak of desire. I am deeply motivated.”

  “Perhaps you can present your desire to the people of Pax for their judgment.” He did not answer me, which was just as well, because I might not have answered constructively. After a period of unhappy silence, we discussed where to begin my questioning. Stevland suggested Rose’s best friend, Tami, a glassblower named Kung, and my husband. I could not bear to ask for his reasoning about my husband.

  Rose’s friend Tami liked the fruit. She likes almost everything. She hadn’t killed anyone, and the subject of their deaths turned her into a loud puddle of self-recriminating tears because she should have seen that her friends were suffering and helped them. Kung, a big, gruff, slow man who I always suspected was more sensitive than he seems, enjoyed the new fruit and hadn’t killed anyone, but he got so depressed over the idea of senseless death that he spent the rest of the day sitting on the city wall staring at nothing.

  My husband hadn’t killed anyone but had noticed that I have seemed troubled and angry lately, and wanted to assure me that he honored and respected my work completely. He said I help people who in turn often disrespect me, and it broke his heart. He confessed to having sex with Moon and begged for my forgiveness. I assured him he had it and did not mention that I already knew about the affair and could hardly complain. Moon belongs to our generation.