Semiosis Read online

  Some trees had bark of cellulose acetate plastic that peeled off in sheets with razor-sharp edges. Maybe someday we could process it into rayon cloth or lacquer. One by one, I was finding fruits, seeds, roots, stems, and flowers that might prove useful or edible, which was the pressing issue. Moreover, as the colony’s botanist, I had to devise a taxonomy. Every scrap of information would help as we looked for a niche in this ecology for ourselves.

  * * *

  A little before we left Earth, we rehearsed our arrival. Supposedly we did not know where we were, but within minutes after the trucks had left us on a dirt road in a forest, we had guessed.

  I noted majestic white pines with long bluish-green needles, coniferous tamaracks, and quaking aspens, their flat leaves rattling in the hot breeze. “This is northern United States, east of the Mississippi,” I said. “If we were in Canada, the trees would still be healthier.”

  Merl listened to birds squawk and sing. “Sure enough. Grackles and Carolina chickadees.” He shrugged his wide shoulders. “That doesn’t mean we’re in the Carolinas. They’ve been moving around a lot on account of the heat.”

  Paula looked at the clouds. “Thunderheads. Let’s think about shelter.”

  Eventually, we got more precise, identifying it as Wisconsin even before we ran into a pair of Menominee women gathering vines to make baskets. The tribal council supported our project and was allowing us to spend two months trying to survive in their reservation’s forest, and the women were sorry to spoil our isolation. But before they left, they suggested coating our skin with wood ash and grease to repel the clouds of mosquitoes, advice we badly needed.

  Other than that, survival held no major challenges because we already knew a lot about the environment. Deer were edible, for example. Instead, the rehearsal deepened our commitment as we witnessed the disaster of the forest despite the Menominees’ careful stewardship. Global warming was turning the forest into a prairie. All around us the trees were dying of heat and thirst and disease, bringing down the ecology with them. But the flora and fauna weren’t simply moving north. The disaster was at once too fast and too slow. In southwest Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold’s treasured Sand Counties were becoming sand dunes, and their prairie species were going extinct. The forests in northeast Wisconsin hadn’t yet become prairies to welcome them, so when the forests finally became grasslands, there would be no surviving prairie species to welcome.

  I got to know Uri in the Menominees’ forest. His English was even worse then. For both of us, English was a second language, but the colony was strictly monolingual. We would avoid the disputes over language that were poisoning so much of Earth.

  “Of course I volunteer for army,” he said. “I work for food. Like now, but not so nice food.” We were knee-deep in a swamp collecting cattail pollen, which could be used like flour to make pancakes. Actually, every eighteen-year-old in Russia had to serve. He had been a marksman.

  He pulled a cattail head horizontal and batted it while I held a clay bowl underneath to catch the falling yellow pollen.

  “Rifle is not antique. Is fallback, what we use if high tech would be jammed. And very entertaining. My unit gave shows like circus, even with horses, and was when I decided to join this project after my duty is finish. I saw too much of Mother Russia during travel and give shows. They are raping her. I not can endure stay and see it.”

  That was true everywhere on Earth, environmental devastation that we wished we could fix, but the best we could do was try again elsewhere.

  “I wonder if there will still be humans on Earth when we get to Pax,” Vera said one evening after dinner as we worked on the many tasks that survival required. It had been harder than we thought but also more rewarding.

  “The people on this planet don’t deserve to survive,” Bryan said as he made fishhooks out of wire.

  “The thing is, we can learn,” Merl said. “We’ll just have to do better. And how hard will that be?”

  We were all in our twenties, selected for our skills and personalities. Merl, a sandy-haired Texan, had scored low on anxiety and high on agreeableness. I was responsible and self-disciplined. We were all glad to have something to hope for.

  * * *

  We awakened, cold and dizzy, with our muscles, hearts, and digestive systems atrophied from the 158-year hibernation on a tiny spaceship. The computer had brought us into orbit, sent a message to Earth, then administered intravenous drugs.

  Two hours later I was in the cramped cabin trying to sip an electrolyte drink when Vera, our astronomer, came flying in from the control module, her tightly curled hair trailing like a black cloud.

  “We’re at the wrong star!”

  I felt a wave of nausea and despair.

  Paula was spoon-feeding Bryan, who was too weak to eat, and she seemed calm, but her hand trembled. “The computer could pick another one if it was better,” she said.

  “It did!” Vera said. “It is. Lots of oxygen and water. And lots of life. It’s alive and waiting for us. We’re home!”

  We were at star HIP 30815f instead of HIP 30756, at a planet with a well-evolved ecology and, I noted, abundant chlorophyll. The carbon dioxide level was slightly higher than Earth’s but not dangerous. Seen from Earth, both stars were pinpricks in the Gemini constellation near Castor’s left shin. As planned, we named the planet Pax, since we had come to live in peace.

  Stevland Barr never awoke, dead years before from a failure in his hibernation system. Krishna Narashima developed pneumonia and died on board. Hedike’s kidneys had failed, although he was recovering with regrown medulla cells.

  Waking up was just the start. Two of the six landing pods crashed. One crash broke Terrell’s collarbone and crushed Rosemarie Waukau’s chest, killing her. The other, a disaster, killed all twelve people on board and destroyed irreplaceable equipment, including the food synthesizer, too heavy and bulky for backup units.

  The gravity, one-fifth stronger than Earth’s, caused misjudgments. When I left our landing module, I became dizzy and fell, twisting my ankle but nothing worse, although our bones had lost calcium and grown brittle during hibernation. Breasts and scrotums weighed more and ached, and our hearts labored.

  We suffered rashes from Pax-style poison ivies, welts from bug-lizard bites, and diarrhea until we artificially stimulated new digestive enzymes and our intestinal flora adapted. A Pax fungus caused hyaline membrane disease, collapsed lungs. It had killed Luigi Dini, the other botanist, before Ramona found a fungicide. Wendy mangled her foot fixing a tractor, the wound got infected, and the medics had to amputate up to the tarsus bone. Always sturdy, she renamed herself “Half-Foot” Wendy.

  Then Carrie, Ninia, and Zee died from poison fruit. We still had enough people to populate a planet, since we had a cache of frozen ova and sperm to fall back on. We did not need genetic material as much as we needed hands to work.

  * * *

  Now, a month after we had arrived, I had to figure out what the snow vines were doing. I paced along the east thicket behind the homes of our village. Between the aspens, thorny vines wider than my thumb looped like barbed wire made of bone. I searched for a way in: a tree-fall clearing or an animal path. I told myself I was not afraid of a vine, not me, not a botanist. I walked past one of our outhouses and startled a fippokat. It raced into the thicket. I found its narrow path, dropped to my knees, and, with a shove, shouldered my way in. It was like a cage inside.

  Knobby white vine roots and gray tree roots covered the ground, hard as stones beneath my hands and knees. Vines arched across the tunnel and grazed my head. The air in the thicket hung motionless and smelled of exhausted soil. I crawled slowly, bowed to avoid a thorn, and shifted my weight onto a knee already throbbing against a nodule on a root. The thorn slipped across my hair—and stabbed into my scalp. It yanked backward, pulling me up onto aching knees. I groped for the thorn and found it, and its razor edge slit my fingers. The thorn in my scalp jerked again. I fumbled until I could grab it by its sides and trie
d to back it out. Barbs tore my scalp, and my fingers slipped, wet with blood. Finally, I gritted my teeth and pulled.

  I whirled back to see what had bit so deep: a fishhook-sized white thorn, now smeared red. It hung from a tendril that curled like a spring. A sharp little thorn, that was all, just like thorns on Earth, attached to the same kind of tendril that had hoisted bean plants in my mother’s garden. These were natural tools for a climbing vine. Their movements were normal on Earth and Pax. Nothing personal, and nothing to be frightened of. Plants don’t attack botanists. I tugged on the tendril to test its strength. It could have supported my machete.

  Around me stretched vines and parasitized trees but nothing else, silent and empty, with no moss, no ferns, no grass, no competing plants of any type. The vines had eliminated them.

  I wasn’t sure I could do this job anymore. On Earth, my botany degree had won me work on an industrialized farm to monitor engineered corn. For four years I had watched the near-infrared satellite images of the fields for dark patches that might signal the root blister blight that had caused corn crops to wilt from the top down and had started a war when I was a boy. Sometimes the war had been all I could see, my family running, trying to hide from the spy planes, drones disguised as birds or insects that would call in bigger, armed robot airplanes. If they didn’t kill us, we might die of hunger anyway. We were just farmers, no one’s enemy, but if we lived, we might join the enemy’s forces, so we had to die.

  Now I had a planet to explore and people to keep alive, and I was afraid again. Maybe the other planet, the one we had aimed for, would have been better. Here, I was kneeling inside a thicket of a plant wholly unlike docile domesticated corn.

  But I was our colony’s sole botanist. I had a big job, and I had to do it properly regardless of my fear.

  I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I spotted some moss, a patch of green in the bole of a root. It moved again. It was a fippokat. I looked at more boles. They made perfect fippokat homes. Fippokat feces littered the ground, black raisins melting into the sandy soil. Perhaps this was symbiosis—two life-forms helping each other—with the snow vines providing housing and the fippokats providing fertilizer, like bromeliads and ants on Earth. That didn’t explain why the west vines had suddenly made fruit that could kill a fippokat.

  I needed samples. With a pocketknife and plastic sample bags that I had been carefully cleaning and reusing since we had arrived, I took bits of vine, aspen, fruit, soil, fippokat feces, dead leaves, and bark, then very carefully I crawled out to uncramped sunshine.

  I took samples from Snowman and from the west thicket—which stabbed me just as the east vine had. I tested the samples, and the results explained some things, but not the most important thing. The east thicket and Snowman were genetically the same individual. Snowman must have been a daughter plant from a shoot or underground stem. The west plant was the same species but a different individual. I could not explain why it had become poisonous. I could not predict whether the east fruit would remain safe. I had accomplished nothing.

  * * *

  That afternoon, we buried Ninia, Carrie, and Zee where we had buried the others, just south of the village in a little patch of ground next to the east thicket, where a mat of flowering turf covered the soil like a garden. Weeping, we rolled up the fragrant yellow blooms like sod, dug three holes, and lowered in the bodies. Everyone dropped in a handful of soil before we filled the graves and replanted the turf. Hedike led a song. Jill poured water onto the graves and recited a poem about rivers and oceans in a quaking voice. We each recalled our best memory of the women.

  Zee had carved the other markers with names and the number of days since landing. This time Merl set plain stones at each grave.

  “No names or dates,” he said, brushing soil from his hands.

  “We need a Pax calendar,” Vera said. “And a Pax clock.” She pointed to Lux in the western sky. “That sets three hours before the Sun, and it rises three hours before the Sun. That’s one way to measure time.”

  She pointed at another starlike light, an asteroid-sized moon called Chandra.

  “That orbit’s almost the same as Pax’s rotation. It’s no good for telling time, except for seasons. But Galileo,” she said, pointing to a light in the northeast, “is perfect. It goes backwards, west to east, so anyone can spot it. It orbits two and a half times a day.”

  Paula squinted at the sky. “Thank you. This—”

  “Now we have it,” Vera said. “We have our own way. Our own clock, our own sky, our own time. It’s what we came here for.”

  With that reminder of our hopes, we returned to our daily tasks for survival. A Pax day and night lasted about twenty Earth hours, and a Pax year about 490 Earth days. A year seemed like such a long time.

  * * *

  A week passed, busy for both the zoologists and me. A flock of tiny moth-winged lizards arrived, flying as gracefully as a school of fish, and we watched with wonder until suddenly, as a group, they swooped down and began to bite us. Ashes and grease worked again, then suddenly the moths disappeared.

  Hunting teams found half-eaten birds and fippokats and thought they saw giant birds running away, but what bothered them more were the pink slugs twenty centimeters long they found eating old carcasses. The slugs would attack anything and dissolved living flesh on contact. Grun dissected one.

  “Nothing but slime. No differentiated tissue. If you chop it into twenty bits, you have twenty slugs.”

  Merl discovered the source of the three-note roaring songs. “I believe I’ve found us the big-time cousin of our friends the fippokats.” He had arrived just before the evening meal and sat at a table talking calmly enough, but sweat soaked his shirt as he petted a fippokat on his lap as if to assure himself that it was docile. Everyone knew he was not an anxious man, so we listened closely.

  “If I had to use one word, I’d say kangaroo, but that’s not quite it either. Giant kangaroo to use two words, a good sight taller than me, and judging from the nests they had, they can knock over trees. I believe they’re vegetarians like our friend here, root-eaters very possibly, and I’d like to believe that the claws are for digging, but they’re the size of machetes. I saw a pack of around ten of them, but I didn’t get too close. And I wouldn’t recommend getting close.”

  Most colonists tended to focus their attention on animals. Merl got many more questions about his day’s finds than I did, which I tried not to let bother me, but I knew that plants with their poisons and chemicals were as dangerous as animals, and because there were so many more plants than animals, they were more important.

  “The plants here aren’t like anything on Earth,” I tried to explain one night. “They have cells I can’t explain. On Earth, all seeds have one or two embryonic leaves, but here they have three or five or eight.”

  “And RNA,” Grun said, “not DNA. Nothing has DNA except us.”

  “But it looks the same,” Vera said.

  “No,” Half-Foot Wendy said, “I mean, floating cactuses? Blue ones? But they have thorns like Earth.”

  “Yes,” I said, “thorns. They need to protect themselves like Earth cacti, so they grow thorns. Plants that need to get water from soil develop roots.”

  “Not like Earth,” Uri said. “No earthworms. We have sponges instead.”

  “But they do the same thing,” Vera said.

  “We don’t really know what they do,” I said.

  “But we know what plants do,” she said. “They grow. They’re useful or they’re not. And that’s all we need to know.”

  I knew we needed to know much more, and I wished Luigi Dini had survived so I would have someone to work with and to talk to.

  * * *

  We had already realized from the disaster on Mars that transplanting Earth ecology wouldn’t work. Crops would not grow without specific symbiotic fungi on their roots to extract nutrients, and the exact fungi would not grow without the proper soil composition, which did not exist without cer
tain saprophytic bacteria that had proven resistant to transplantation, each life-form demanding its own billion-year-old niche. But Mars fossils and organic chemicals in interstellar comets showed that the building blocks of life were not unique to Earth. Proteins, amino acids, and carbohydrates existed everywhere. The theory of panspermia was true to a degree.

  I had found a grass resembling wheat on our first day on Pax, and with a little plant tissue, a dash of hormone from buds, and some chitin, we soon had artificial seeds to plant. But would it grow? Theory was one thing and farming was another.

  Then a few days before the women had died from poisoned fruit, Ramona and Carrie had seen the first shoots, and whooped and squealed until we all came to look. They were twirling around the edges of the field, hair and skirts flying, and grabbed more of us by the hands until everyone in the colony, all thirty-four of us, danced with low, slow steps at the first evidence that we might survive.

  * * *

  The east fruit remained plentiful—alarmingly, it became more nutritious, another mystery I should have been able to explain but could not. The west fruit rotted on the vines. Uri toiled in the fields as if he could work out his grief through his hands and his tears through irrigation water from a spring between our fields and the west vines. We had planted a second crop, a yamlike tuber, and I prayed it would remain safe to eat.

  “Someday we will have to clear that west thicket for more fields,” Uri told Paula after breakfast one morning. We both heard stress tightening his voice.

  “I don’t think we’ll need to clear the thicket anytime soon,” Paula said in a deliberately offhand way. We were watching the fippokats play tug-of-war with a length of bark twine in their pen. “We don’t want to do anything unnecessary until we understand the effect on the ecology. We’re the aliens here.”

  “But this is necessary. The vine is a danger to us.”

  “Are you still angry over Ninia’s death?” she asked, leaning back and gazing at his face.

  Uri looked away. “I want peace. We all want peace.”