Semiosis Read online

  She turned toward us. “Nye? Kung? Cedar? Anything to add?”

  Cedar stood up and blew Roland a kiss. “On behalf of the women of Pax,” she said, and shuddered and turned away.

  Kung stood stiffly. “He was kind to his animals, always kind.”

  I stood up, felt dizzy, and spoke anyway. “He wasn’t a friend. He was usually really annoying, but he was a good fippmaster, and he tried to be friendly, and I’ll miss him. I really will.”

  Marie took a spoon that had come with Roland and approached the friendly female. She pantomimed digging, made some Glassmaker noises, and tried to show that she needed something like a spoon but big. “We’re going to bury him,” she said. “It would go easier for all of us if you get us tools and selected a spot.”

  After a lot of confusion and kakking, a female slapped a major. There was more yelling, so loud my ears hurt, and some arm-waving, and a few more slaps. I looked at Marie.

  “I told them I’d mystify them.” But she didn’t say it as a joke.

  A worker finally ran toward us carrying a crab-shell spade. “Where?” said Marie again and again, pointing to different places, and after even more arguing, Plaid Blanket pointed to the edge of the area where we were, but he didn’t seem happy.

  “You start,” she told Kung, and pantomimed drinking and squawked, “Cheek!” and they all jumped, and a worker brought us water in bark buckets. It tasted sweet, so sweet, and I washed away the bile from my mouth and throat, and I knew right away it wouldn’t come up. Something that Marie had said had changed my feelings, but I didn’t know what it was. I cupped my hand and held out some water for the kat. It drank, then it went to help Kung dig.

  Very soon, I relieved him. I had to dig. I had to dig or I would start smacking Glassmakers in their immobile big-eyed faces. They didn’t need to be so horrible. They didn’t need to cook Roland. The spade chopped into the damp soil. The Glassmakers kept yelling at each other.

  If they were afraid of us, they should have treated us better. They should have fed us, they should have talked to us, they should have come with us to Rainbow City. They should have had a beautiful city of their own. They shouldn’t have burned Stevland. They should have sung, not squawked, and their squawks were making my head hurt. They should have kats and clothes and they should be understandable. They shouldn’t hit each other … and Cedar called my name and pointed. Six majors were punching and kicking each other, and then two females tried to break it up, and they started yelling and swinging their fists at each other, too.

  Marie was watching in a way that I knew meant she was learning something. I started digging again. Glassmakers weren’t at all like what I had come for. They were stinking, stupid savages. And Roland, what they did to Roland was horrible. I kept thinking the same things over and over again.

  I was panting hard. The kat had stopped to chew on a root. The Glassmakers were still yelling, but not fighting.

  Marie tapped me on the shoulder. “Cedar will dig for a while. She needs to do something,” she said quietly.

  “What if they don’t let us go?”

  “Think of the mission.” Her voice didn’t sound like she believed her own words.

  “I am. We were supposed to make friends. But I don’t want to.”

  “I understand. I’m not sure I want them as friends either, but we need to be at peace with them.”

  Marie herself finished digging the hole and lifted out the kat. We each picked up a corner of the mat where Roland lay and slid him in. He broke apart as he fell. Marie was fast in sprinkling dirt over him, and the kat joined in, kicking dirt into the hole with its big back feet. I went to my pack and got the silver bead seeds I was going to take back to try to find a girlfriend and I sprinkled them over Roland.

  We shoveled more dirt, and then it was done. The kat was hopping on the mound to flatten it. Marie turned toward the Glassmakers. The people who were fighting had separated into two groups. They started shouting louder than ever at each other and at us, waving hands, a few holding sticks. I looked around to see where to run if they attacked. But they could outrun us. I picked up my backpack as a shield.

  “Cheek!” Marie shouted. They began to quiet down. “Cheek!” she said again. She gave them the look that could light a fire. “Thank you for not interfering. I am sure you are confused. We are more confused and disappointed than I could tell you if we spoke the same language. This is unlikely to change soon, and I am very troubled about that.”

  She ordered me to play music again. I didn’t feel like it, but I did anyway, repeating Uncle Higgins’s song, this time letting my feelings fill the notes. It sounded like the Glassmakers, exactly like them, harsh and unmusical. We should never have come. That’s the song I was playing, living a day too many in the wrong place and seeing things I never wanted to know. They didn’t stop arguing even while I was playing.

  A couple of workers brought us food. Marie thanked them elaborately, although there wasn’t much food: four little flat loaves of nut bread, a dish of stew with onions and gritty snowflake bugs, and a basket with some velvet leaves and tomatoes. We gave the leaves to the kat. I was still hungry.

  “Will they let us go?” Cedar said. “If we don’t go back soon, we’ll never make it over the mountains in winter.”

  “I hope so,” Marie said. “Our job was to meet them and express our hope of friendship.”

  “We did that,” I said.

  “Yes, we did,” Marie said. She looked worried, maybe even afraid.

  As soon as the food was gone, they took us to a small tent. The ground was covered with onion leaves. “Perfume,” Kung said. “For them.” He shook his head. The tent walls kept out all fresh air. I was too tired to sleep, but I lay down in the onion leaves and fell asleep right away.

  When I opened my eyes, Kung was using the chamber pot. The air smelled worse than ever. Marie squirmed her hand through the tent flap until she could reach a peg and open it. The Sun was rising. The guards outside said something. “We need fresh air,” she said. I wouldn’t have argued with her.

  “Noisy at night,” Kung said. “Noisy now.”

  There were lots of kaks and cheeks and squeaks. They were apparently still arguing.

  Cedar looked out the door. “Rain for sure. We’re going to get a steady rain.”

  The kat was eating the onion leaves. I was thirsty. Marie asked for—demanded, actually—water, even said a squeak that she thought meant “water.” I smelled wood smoke and roasting nuts. I was hungry again.

  “We ought to go and warn the city,” Cedar said. “The Glassmakers are dangerous.”

  Marie didn’t answer.

  They didn’t seem to be in a hurry to talk to us. The kat made a game out of harassing the guards. At noon, three females and Plaid Blanket came with a squad of workers carrying spears.

  “We’re in trouble,” Cedar said. But Marie left the tent and greeted them as if they had come to make some sort of formal visit. I tried to imitate her self-confidence and stared at them, those stinking idiots.

  “Look at everything,” Marie said. “Learn what you can. Nye, count heads.”

  A female, the one who had played the flute, announced something. The Glassmakers became silent. They gestured for us to fall into a procession, drums ahead of us, drums behind us, all of them too loud. The kat in my arm tried to squirm away, and I held it tighter and covered its ears. I started counting as we were marched through the ugly little village. Five females, about forty majors, about sixty workers, maybe fifteen children, but they ran around a lot and were hard to count. Maybe one hundred twenty altogether, one hundred twenty disappointments.

  The procession turned toward the path out of town back toward the mountains. We had to scurry to keep up. They finally stopped at the edge of the forest and pointed on ahead. Yes! They were sending us home. But we had nothing. We couldn’t walk that far with nothing. They were sending us to die. Marie cleared her throat.

  Hooves sounded behind us from the vil
lage, and workers arrived with our packs and handed them to us. They gave Kung our canteens, filled with water, and gave Marie a battered basket filled with loaves of bread.

  “We must give gifts in return,” she said.

  “The kat,” Kung said. “They want the kat.” Marie nodded.

  I handed it over, soft and warm. I wondered if they would learn from the poor animal or if they would cook it.

  “One more thing,” I said. I took a flute from my pack and held it toward the female who had played before. Plaid Blanket grabbed it, then she grabbed it from him and yelled, waving it like a club. I suddenly hoped they choked to death trying to play it, if they ever did.

  Marie faced them, impassive. “We have enjoyed your hospitality and sincerely look forward to meeting you again. I am sure our peoples have much we can teach each other, and eventually we will have a long and peaceful and productive relationship. It has been a genuine privilege to be part of this mission and to meet Glassmakers face-to-face. I can speak for all of us in saying we will never forget this.”

  I wondered how much of that she believed. I didn’t believe a word.

  The female whistled something in return, then she turned her back, then another female turned away, although Plaid Blanket kept watching us. We took the hint and began walking. Far, far away through the trees, mountains rose like red walls, and the skies looked gray and ugly.

  After about two hours, it began to drizzle and the path got steeper, and in another hour, we found an overhanging rock to protect us. Cedar said a hard rain would start soon. I dug a trench to protect us from water pouring downhill. The women gathered firewood. Kung tore down some tree branches to make a lean-to and block the cold wind.

  We huddled around a fire and ate some bread. “We did our job,” Kung said.

  “What? We failed completely,” Cedar said, and began to list everything that had gone wrong. “Because of Marie—” she began at one point.

  “Marie did fine,” I interrupted. “I never liked her, but this was the job for her.”

  Marie was right there, but I couldn’t stand to listen to Cedar whine anymore.

  “It’s true,” I said, “a lot of things went wrong, and I hate these Glassmakers.”

  Kung grunted. I kept talking.

  “But I don’t think we could have done anything different. We tried to make friends. We tried hard. What more do you want?”

  Everyone was silent. Marie looked at me and, after a while, nodded. The rain started falling hard.

  “I wanted them to be what I expected,” I said. “That’s what went wrong. They weren’t what I wanted at all. They weren’t the Glassmakers I grew up with.”

  “We learned a lot,” Marie said. “They’re nomads. That’s a temporary camp. They got rid of us because we’d slow them down, and they’re not hanging on by much. And then we went and wasted all that meat. We aren’t compatible. Not at this point.”

  “But we didn’t communicate,” Cedar whined.

  “We did. They saw us. They saw that we’re strange, but we’re not going to hurt them.”

  “All that way to say that. And they might hurt us.”

  “They liked the music,” Marie said. “The music was a success.”

  “I hated playing for them,” I said. On an impulse, and one I’ll never regret, I reached into my pack and took out my flutes and burned them. No one stopped me. A mistake, that’s what this trip was, my mistake for wanting to come. One mistake, easy to make, and it cost so much. I would never play the flute again. I never wanted to see another Glassmaker ever. If I had children, I wouldn’t let them play with Glassmaker dolls.

  We had a long way to go, and the trip would be hard and cold and miserable. The worst thing would be arriving at the city, because we would have to tell everyone what had happened and what the Glassmakers were really like.

  LUCILLE AND STEVLAND

  YEAR 107–GENERATION 7

  The name of this Planet and Commonwealth shall be Pax as a reminder to ourselves for all time of our aspirations.

  —from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax

  LUCILLE

  Damn! Cedar walked into the gift center right after I did.

  “Lucille,” she muttered, without even a hello or a smile. What lizard was in her liver now?

  “Nice weather tonight,” I said. The words echoed around the gift center dome, and I ducked into a stall and pulled the straw curtain shut. I sat there, bare butt on a cold ceramic seat—nice weather if you like it chilly. She and I were liking each other less every day. Well, nobody likes to lose. I won the co-moderator election a week ago and she didn’t.

  I decided that if I moved quick, I could get out while she was still in her stall, but I heard her curtain open while I was still buttoning my pants. The spring had been dry, which meant poor groundwater flows, which meant the center smelled like poop, but still, I could wait and she’d leave. Then I could go back to Tatiana’s funeral and wonder what to do next.

  No such luck.

  “Did you notice what Stevland said about Tatiana?” she said, and she had to be talking to me because we were the only people there. “He said she argued with him and even got angry with him. Think about that,” she said, and without waiting for me to think, she added: “She was tough with him. That’s part of the job, keeping him responsible and reasonable.” Translation: You better do the same, girl.

  I decided to re-retie the knot on my belt. It was an old belt, of course—old clothes for a funeral—and it didn’t lie flat. I called back reasonably, “Pretty amazing about him dropping flowers into her grave.” Translation: There was more between them than you think. I peeked through the curtain. Cedar stood in the light of an oil lamp, not leaving. Damn.

  “You know,” she said, “Stevland thinks he should have found the Glassmakers instead of us. Everything has to be his doing.”

  Exactly. Stevland had an ego like a mountain. It sort of made him lovable. The knot on my belt was as perfect as it could be, the laces on the faded old vest were tight, the knife underneath it didn’t show, my socks were pulled up and the darned patches were rubbing my heels, my collar would never lie straight no matter what I did, and I was going to look like I was avoiding her if I stayed in the stall, so I smiled and walked out.

  “That’s the problem with our defense,” she said, standing by the crab-shell water basin. “We have to have a defense, right?” She pointed a finger at me: Answer if you dare.

  “Well, it can’t hurt to be prepared,” I dared to answer. Not everyone agreed, but there were all sorts of dangerous animals, so defense couldn’t hurt even if the Glassmakers weren’t hostile—and who believed they were? Well, a few people did. I edged up to the basin to wash my hands. She barely let me by, and even though she was only ten years older than me, she made it seem like more.

  “Our defense needs to be centered around what we can do,” she said, “not what Stevland can do for us.” She still shook that finger, and her battered old funeral beads rattled. “He’s part of it, of course. His outposts, his observations, his warning, that’s going to be crucial. But what can he do during an actual attack? I don’t think he understands offense. He thinks defense, defense, defense, and that’s not enough.”

  “Well, we need to balance his ideas. He was all for that. Balance, balance, balance.” I decided my hands weren’t dirty and rinsed them quick. The water was scented with orchids but frigid. I’d be out of there in no time. We’d talked about defense at Committee meetings lots of times, so why bring it up now?

  She leaned over the basin toward me. “We need a drill. A practice. Like a real attack.”

  “Well, we can talk about that again.” There would be a mountain of debate about that again.

  “Not just defending,” she said. “Attacking. Like Higgins’s Battle.”

  “Are there lions in the attack?”

  “Seriously!” She never had a real sense of humor.

  Footsteps clopped on the wood walkway up to th
e gift center door. Someone was coming, maybe someone who’d provide a distraction and I’d get away.

  “A full and complete drill,” she said. “With an attack.”

  Marie walked in. Cedar liked her even less than me. I tried to look serious. “It’s on the agenda for the next Committee meeting.” Glassmakers were always on the agenda.

  “Good.” She turned and saw Marie. “Yes, a drill of a counterattack against the Glassmakers, just in case our next encounter isn’t a diplomatic success.”

  Marie was enough of a diplomat to ignore what needed to be ignored. I hoped.

  “What do you think, Marie?” Cedar said.

  She looked her straight in the eye. “I’ll hope for success.”

  Marie seemed a lot older than when she left on the mission. She’d lost weight on the hike home last fall—all four of them did—and she had bright green hair now, the color that comes from dye over pure white. She sighed. This was a tired debate. Cedar had argued all winter that we didn’t really know anything about the Glassmakers except that they had weapons and abused each other a lot, so that meant they’d fight, and Marie had argued back that we had a more realistic picture of them, and obviously we’d need to protect ourselves, especially Stevland, but we didn’t need to be aggressive, since aggressive plans would make aggressive acts easier to commit.

  Their only truce was the moment when Tatiana awarded eagle feathers to the mission members, including one for Roland. That one was on display in the museum.

  And here in the gift center, Cedar told Marie, “Kids don’t play with Glassmaker dolls as much anymore.” Snottiness dripped from her voice.

  “That might be good,” she answered softly. “We’ll expect less.”

  “They’re not our special friends anymore,” Cedar said.