Semiosis Read online

  Her voice was rising. She would call the eagles whether she meant to or not.

  “I want you to stop, too,” I whispered.

  “I will after you’re dead.” She was whispering again. The smoke smell had become undeniable. “I want peace. I want you dead.” The jabber and twitter became louder again, voices calling to each other as if they were on the move. “Here they come. I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to see it this time. I just want it to happen.” She closed the shutter on the arrow slit.

  I didn’t move, I didn’t breathe. Some creatures can see heat. Maybe eagles could. I waited and watched the aurora lights glimmer in the sky. Animals rustled in the trees. A bat flew past, and I caught the words “fire” and “beware, beware.”

  Jersey sobbed.

  And I couldn’t lie to myself. I was afraid.

  How would I explain her at a General Assembly of Pax? What is justice? We don’t have written laws about murder.

  But she’s not well.

  What would I say? That I lied to everyone, that I was afraid of mistakes, I was afraid to lose control of the investigation, that I was afraid of manipulation by Stevland, and so I said nothing. Rose died because I kept secrets and acted too slowly.

  No one will respect me. That’s what I live for, really. Respect. Power. I have it now. I’m the moderator and the commissioner of public peace. Sylvia’s knife means that I’m special. I’m different. I’m a little better than everyone. But I let Rose die. Then I took her place and was happy to do it.

  I crawled to the bamboo grove. Stevland opened his guard thistles for me, and here I wait for dawn, crouched in the grove in the cold night. The truth fruit and the smart fruit won’t let me sleep. I shiver and think. I’m different from Jersey only in why I did what I did. And in that I know how to stop. The aurora has brightened again. I could almost read by this light. If anything looks for me, it will find me, and Stevland can’t protect me. He’s only a plant.

  The difference between Jersey and me is that I will deal with things the right way. I will try to survive, and then I will be the best moderator I can be. I lied, I made mistakes, they can vote me out as moderator, as commissioner, and I’ll still be me, knife or not.

  * * *

  Day 377. I have never tried to go without bamboo fruit before, and I didn’t know I would be so miserable. I’m hungry and thirsty, but not for food and drink, and in fact I feel too queasy to eat. My head aches. I feel as if something bad is going to happen, some sort of attack or storm or accident, although I am at home, and my husband has fallen asleep watching the fire burn to embers waiting for me to go to bed, and I will sleep eventually only because I didn’t sleep last night.

  I won’t eat any more fruit or use any more salve. I need to be free of Stevland.

  Last night, crouched in the bamboo grove, I was too afraid to sleep. My muscles stiffened and cramped but I was too afraid to stretch, even to shiver, and in the aurora light, I could see my breath. Three times I heard eagle footsteps rustling through leaves and grass, gibbering at each other with whistles and rattles and snaps like sticks breaking. The smoke of their campfire wafted past from time to time. They were cooking meat. I crouched there and thought about myself and how I have always been true to what people asked me to do, not what I wanted to do. I have always lied to myself.

  I finally understood why I slept with Roland. I used him to get even with all the moderators I have served and with Pax itself for demanding a job that made me suffer. I broke the rules to rebel against Sylvia.

  Eventually I glimpsed Lux through the treetops. The east became brighter. Turkey clans and boxer birds began barking to claim their territories. The scent of wet ashes arrived on the breeze. I hoped it meant the eagles had broken camp. I waited. If they were leaving, they didn’t seem to be coming down the path toward me. I finally stood, or tried to. My hips scraped like cracked pottery, weak and painfully rough-edged at the joints. I had to pull myself up by grabbing the bamboo.

  Stevland was watching. The guard thistles relaxed so I could pass through. I thought I heard a faint whistle from the north and froze. Eagles? Hawk bats? I heard it again, still faint but more clear, a Pacifist clay whistle, two low tones. A rescue team whistle. Stevland must have sent help. I inched through the thistles, and then hurried to the shelter. I had to keep Jersey inside until the search party came. A shutter in an arrow slit opened.

  “The—” I said.

  “I heard it,” she interrupted. I could barely see her face and a glint of green-dyed hair in the shadows. “They’re coming from the city.” She sobbed. “Those eagles—”

  “They’ve left.”

  Something wooden clattered on the floor inside the building as if it had been kicked. “Kill me,” she said in a pitiful voice. “I want you to kill me. Please. I’ll come out, and you have a bow or a knife or something, right? Use it, will you?”

  I didn’t answer. If I killed her, I could easily claim self-defense and I would spare the citizens from the task of deciding what to do with her. Inside, wood rasped on wood as she took the bar from the door. The leather hinge squeaked open. She stood on the sill, looking at me with puffy eyes and hands wringing a tangled lock of hair.

  She leaped out headfirst.

  It was only three meters to the ground, but her intent was obvious, and she seemed to fall forever as I watched with a stopped heart. Truth fruit causes despondency, and she had eaten a lot of it. A severe blow to the head this far from medical help could be—was meant to be—fatal. This was suicide.

  But she jumped too hard and flipped over slightly as she fell, landing on her shoulders. Something cracked: her bones or sticks on the ground or both. She yelped, tried to rise, and fell back, panting. A trick? I walked around her.

  Her fingers dug into the ground. Her legs twitched. Her eyes begged. “Kill me. I want you to kill me. Do it.”

  “Why?” I kept my distance. She may have been injured but perhaps not crippled. “I know you have a reason.”

  “I’m hurt.”

  “But you’d rather be dead. Why?”

  She groaned and twitched and looked me in the eye. “My children. My children. They’ll find out why I did it. I don’t want them to think I would hurt them. If you kill me, they’ll never find out.”

  A reasonable wish. But this problem belonged to Pax, not to me. Let Pax solve it. Still, as a mother, even a cold one, I could understand wanting to protect her children. The whistles were getting louder.

  “Say you did it for fun,” I said. “Tell them that’s what you told me. Or that you did it because you got angry with your father and Harry and Rose, because you argued. Tell them you don’t even remember doing it. I’ll tell them that you said whatever you want me to.” She looked up at me unbelieving.

  She said nothing.

  “It’s not my job to judge people. It’s my job to try to keep the peace. That’s all. The people of Pax have their job.” Voices were calling our names, and I shouted back to them.

  Roland ran up the path, sweating in the cold morning, breathless.

  “Tatiana! You’re here, you’re safe!” He hugged me tightly, then looked at Jersey, still lying on the ground, and looked back at me.

  “She fell and hurt herself.”

  The rest of the party arrived. A medic examined her, then they lashed her to a stretcher, asking questions faster than I could answer if I had wanted to.

  With Roland and the two strongest men in the party, we went to examine the eagle camp. We approached cautiously, keeping the scent of wet ash ahead of us, listening. The eagles had gone, leaving behind a clearing full of trampled grass, a wet firepit containing small bones, a few feces, and footprints. Split-hoof footprints, not eagle footprints. Like the split-hoof footprints in the museum, the footprints on the ceramics Harry had made.

  “Glassmakers,” one of the men whispered, then turned toward the shelter and shouted. “Glassmakers! Come and look!”

  “Are you sure?” Georg asked. “Could
be deer crab.”

  “Nah, deer crabs are little U shapes. Look, it’s a clean split, two rectangles, sharp edges. Lots of ’em.”

  I stared at the prints and the camp debris and eventually realized that I had stopped breathing. I had nearly met Glassmakers. They existed. We’d wondered if they would come back since Sylvia discovered the city. And now we knew.

  “Let’s find them!” Roland looked at me with the face of a delighted child.

  I thought a long moment. “No. They could have found us if they wanted, but they didn’t. If we followed them, they’d think we were chasing them. They might be afraid of us.”

  He dropped his gaze to the ground. “Yeah, afraid.”

  “Maybe they know we hunt,” Kung agreed, unhappy.

  I was unhappy, too. Glassmakers! “We’ll have to think of a way to meet them. Later, but soon.”

  The walk back to the city took hours, slowed by my exhaustion and the difficulty of carrying the stretcher, and after we tired of discussing the Glassmakers, questions about the murders began to surface. Jersey, on strong painkillers, didn’t talk. I showed them where Lief was buried. A group could return later to bring his remains back to the city for interment. We arrived at the city to exclamations of relief and confusion. Jersey’s children and husband came running. I took him aside.

  “She fell from the door of the fortress.” He stood gape-mouthed. “Tell the children she needs to see the medic and will be at the clinic for a while. Take them indoors and keep them there. Your family will help you.” He obeyed mechanically.

  I called a Commonwealth General Meeting and explained—briefly and incompletely—what had happened, confessing that I may have caused Rose’s death by keeping the secret and acting too slowly. “It is your duty to decide what to do now.” Murmurs. “Unless there is objection, I will set another meeting for tomorrow evening, so we all may have time to think about this. We must return to the harvest.” I paused. Murmurs, lots of murmurs. “In the meantime, I am available for questions, and will be in the Meeting House tonight.”

  Jersey’s mother rose and spoke so softly that someone had to repeat the question: “Why did she do it?”

  “I don’t know, but she might not be mentally well.”

  In the afternoon, I talked to Stevland, too tired to want to fight, but it happened.

  I sat down in the little greenhouse glittering in the Sun, and Stevland began with flattery. “I am unable to express how happy and relieved I am that you are alive and you have found the killer. I watched, and you were very brave and intelligent. Eagles will kill without reason.”

  “Those were Glassmakers.”

  “Glassmakers? Are you certain? Did they see you? Did they follow you? I will question my furthest outposts. This is worse than eagles.”

  “Worse?”

  “Worse. I do not wish to see them again. They left me without an explanation, as if they were seasonal moths. They left me to suffer and wonder and wait. I have no interest in them, and they have no interest in me. They were at the shelter and I did not know about it because they deliberately avoided my outposts. This is sinister behavior.”

  But we wanted to see the Glassmakers. He would have to get used to the idea, and I needed to ease him toward that realization. “Don’t you want to find out why they left?”

  “Understand my position. Mutualism and selfishness. Protection and abandonment. Trust and betrayal. This is not a dualism that allows for a middle path. Glassmakers brought me tragedy. Do they want to know the consequences of their irresponsibility? How I nearly died?”

  We were going to have a problem. I thought about what to say, but he changed the subject: “Jersey, why did she kill?”

  “I think she is mentally unwell,” I said. That was becoming the official story.

  “I can cure illnesses. I want to examine her before she is put to death.”

  “The people of Pax will decide what to do.”

  “They must not allow her to live. Killers have no place in my city. She did not even kill as a hunter kills, with minimal suffering of the animal. She is like an eagle within the walls. The decision is clear.”

  His city! I considered and discarded a lot of thoughts, so by the time I answered I had an idea that seemed constructive. “You could become a citizen of Pax. You could vote, and you could take part in debates.”

  “I am not an animal.”

  I decided not to ask what he meant by that. “Has anyone shown you our Constitution…? No? I will order someone to do it.” I took the opportunity to leave, and went to Bartholomew’s workshop to ask him, a legal scholar, to educate Stevland. I explained that the bamboo could hear and understand English, especially if Bartholomew spoke slowly—he almost dropped the cabinet door he was making. I left after answering only a few of his questions. It was his problem now.

  At the clinic, they said Jersey had broken several vertebrae, and injured and swollen neural tissues caused paralysis and uncontrollable pain. They had given her some painkillers that left her barely responsive. I told them to do what seemed best for her.

  I checked on her family, knocking softly at the door. Her husband let me into the immaculate little house.

  “Will she be all right?” Bram asked.

  “Probably not.”

  He closed his eyes and shuddered. The boys glared at me, the bearer of bad news.

  “But she and I talked when we were in the forest,” I said, “and she wants you to know that she loves you, all of you, more than anything, and you mean more to her than anything. I don’t have a way to tell you how true that is, but it is the complete truth. No matter what happens, I hope you will always believe that.” The boys had begun weeping. I left.

  I was tired. I hadn’t eaten any fruit and the lack of stimulants was becoming clear to me. In the greenhouse, Bartholomew was almost finished talking to Stevland. “Sympathy with the spirit means, well, Article Two, principles and purposes,” Bartholomew was saying slowly and distinctly when I entered. “I can read it again for you.”

  “How is sympathy demonstrated?” Stevland spelled out on his wide, pale stem. “Greetings, Tatiana.”

  Bartholomew turned, smiling. “Hi, Tat. In fact, we have no precedent for demonstrating sympathy. Mutual trust and support, undeniably, you’ve been undeniably supportive, but on the issue of mutual trust, why have you kept your ability to listen and understand English secret? Now, don’t answer, just think about it. But listen carefully. The Constitution says, ‘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.’ I would say, although it’s just my considered opinion, that all you need to do is explain why you are in sympathy and willing to share our goals, write an essay, I suppose, with the final line, ‘And therefore I now declare myself a citizen of the Commonwealth of Pax.’ Hmm. Perhaps we should have had a more stringent procedure, not in your case, Stevland, because I can’t imagine any objections, but in some future situation this could create difficulties. The Constitution was written by idealists and it has its flaws, like giving children the right to vote. What do you think, Tat? What else does our friend have to do?”

  “I think that’s right,” I said, actually unsure, then added a bit pointedly, “Stevland would be an equal citizen.”

  “Equal,” Stevland wrote. “Not like a fippokat.”

  “Equal, of course.” Bartholomew stroked his green, braided beard. “Sentient beings are specified. Fipps aren’t entirely unintelligent, of course, but they don’t seem especially self-aware. I’ve never had much of a conversation with one, at least. I suppose an operational definition of sentience is saying that you have it.”

  “I will be a full and equal citizen?”

  “Of course. Like anyone else. I think you might consider additional means of communication, perhaps in the Meeting House, for citizenship duties.”

  “With a great effort I can grow another stem like this one by tomorrow. You
must open a space in the floor.”

  They worked out the details, and Bartholomew left to tear up mosaic floor tiles. I sat down.

  “Jersey is sick,” Stevland said. “The medics gave me a blood sample to analyze. She still has active antibodies to the parasite that caused the scarlet fever this spring. Her body is fighting something. I believe the parasites are present within the cerebral membrane.”

  “She told me she couldn’t control her thoughts.”

  “Like a root infection. I have had to destroy roots. It is terrifying.”

  I wondered if he still wanted her executed. I didn’t get the chance to ask.

  “I want you to resign as moderator. When I am a citizen, I will take the job.”

  From citizen to leader immediately. Equality wouldn’t do. He wanted control—perhaps so we couldn’t leave him like the Glassmakers? Or so we couldn’t contact them? He began to tell me how he was more committed to our peace and success than we ourselves were, and above all was more intelligent, quoting phrases from the Constitution—learned so fast!—and explained that our goals, such as justice, could be even better served since he was beyond the interpersonal relationships and hypocrisies that …

  I walked out. I went to my husband’s workshop, and eventually I napped despite the noise of metalworking. He woke me in the evening, and we walked to the meeting, aware that at every few paces I passed a bamboo stem. Stevland was everywhere. At the Meeting House, a section of flooring toward the front had been lifted up and temporarily fenced off to protect it from being trampled, although not even the children seemed frisky. I saw a mound and crack in the soil. The new stem was growing.

  Questions for me centered on exactly what happened and when—a lot of exacting questions and second-guessing. I explained about the intelligence fruit and truth fruit. Hathor wanted to know exactly whom I had considered as suspects, and seemed offended when I replied, “Everyone, at first.” There would be even more second-guessing now, I thought.