Semiosis Read online

  When we were almost there, Marie said, “City friendship gift. It’s for us. See?” The message had been painted on one side of the box in mud. The top was open. We got close and leaned over to look inside. Thirty or forty fippokats squirmed around inside and looked up at us. Latticework over the top kept them from hopping out, but one jumped up, grabbed a slat with its front paws, and hung on for a while. Carl shouted the news back to the city: “Kats!”

  “Why kats?” Marie said.

  I was going to say, “Because it’s friendly,” but I began to sneeze.

  Nye screamed from the city: “It isn’t a gift! Don’t bring it in! Don’t touch it!”

  I backed away so I wouldn’t sneeze on the kats and waved at Nye to show him I’d heard.

  “Smells funny,” Kung said.

  “Lucille,” Nye shouted, “come talk to Stevland!”

  So I ran back to the city. They let down a ladder so I could climb up the wall, and then I climbed down on the other side and went to the greenhouse, ignoring all the people looking at me with big doubting eyes. Nye sat inside with his head in his hands staring gray-faced at Stevland’s stem. Words were already waiting for me.

  “I suspect that the fippokats are being used in the same way that crabs infest a bluebird reef with slug larvae to eliminate the birds,” Stevland said. “I must be clear that I merely suspect. I do not know.”

  “They think the kats will eat us?” I said.

  “You might eat the kats. Poison also can be absorbed through the skin, or inhaled, or the fippokats could be infected with disease.” The words came fast. “But the poison might not affect you. Poisons can be specific to species, and they do not have experience with your physiology. I can assure you of nothing. I do not even know if they are poisoned. I do not believe the fippokats should be let in, but I do not know why I believe that. I am extrapolating from the behavior of crabs, but other animal behaviors may be more parallel. I am not offering ideal moderator behavior, for I have emotional prejudices against the Glassmakers. But if Glassmaker behavior is benign, then—”

  He was babbling, so I interrupted. “Seen anything else suspicious?”

  “They are waiting some distance away, still hidden by the forest, by my estimate approximately one hundred, probably a full social unit. All castes and ages are present, but with possible overrepresentation of nonbreeding castes and underrepresentation of juveniles, as was the case with the village that the mission discovered. They have obvious internal disputes. It may be the same group. That one had not been harmonious, either.”

  “They don’t have to be friends with each other, just with us.”

  “An interesting idea. Possibilities for dialogue may depend on whether the fippokats are poisoned or not. I would like to analyze the fippokats, although I do not know if it will be possible.”

  “The kats made me sneeze. Kung said they smell funny.”

  “Your olfactory sense is a limited but effective method of chemical analysis.”

  “Well, what do we do? I don’t want to act unfriendly.”

  “A brief wait may tell us much. I am sorrowful that this response seems appropriate.”

  I left the greenhouse, climbed up and down the ladders at the city wall, ran to the box, and started talking to our diplomats. Waiting wasn’t a popular idea, that’s for sure.

  “Who would poison kats?” Carl said.

  “This could seem impolite,” Bartholomew said.

  Cedar had come running behind me, and her eyes scared me. “I knew it. It used to be their city, right? We’re just some weird animal that they need to clear out. That makes perfect sense. But it’s our city now.”

  We sent for Flora, the veterinary medic, to come and check the kats. “They’re listless,” she said. “That’s not good.”

  Stevland said, via Nye shouting back in the city, that Glassmakers were still watching us from the forest. “Their response to our refusal of their gift may tell us more than an analysis of the fippokats.” Nye’s tone of voice predicted something bad would happen soon.

  “Look,” the vet said. “Shallow breathing.”

  “We’re in big trouble,” Cedar said. “Lucille, we have to be ready. We should have drilled.”

  The vet said, “They’re bleeding from their noses.”

  Marie began to cry.

  I touched my vest and felt the knife hidden beneath it. It was a mistake to elect me, and I couldn’t go back to a week ago and change it. What would Tatiana do? “Let’s get inside and start getting ready.” Words don’t have taste, do they? But these did: like poop.

  At first, I thought people would stage a revolt like Sylvia’s against me, and maybe they should have. “Get ready for what?” “You promised friendship!”

  Then Daisy climbed down the ladder and ran to look at the kats. She came back squalling in a way that changed a lot of minds. “Those poor dear things! Oh, I wish I could help them! But it’s too late for them. We have to save ourselves!”

  “The Glassmakers are preparing to move,” Stevland announced. “I am sorrowful, sorrowful that they have returned. We have found joy in our community, and they must not replace it with barbarism.” That didn’t improve anyone’s mood. Parents hustled their children home.

  The Greenies and the Beadies started shouting at each other about how we could have prevented this, Beadies up on the wall, Greenies down below, and I had to stop them, so I said, “Hey, if we can show them that they can’t win, then they’ll have to talk, right?”

  “How do we show them that?” Daisy said.

  “We use arrows, stupid,” a Beadie said.

  “I’m not going to kill a Glassmaker,” a Greenie shouted back.

  “We have to. If we had been prepared—” another Beadie said. Cedar came running down the wall to join the argument.

  “I helped build up the wall,” the Greenie said. “Don’t blame me.”

  Leadership. Here goes. “Let’s use blunt arrows, all right?” I said. “At first, at least.”

  “What?” Cedar said. “What will that prove?”

  “Hey, that’s a great idea,” said a young Greenie. “Lucille is right. Blunt arrows! We could hurt them but we won’t.”

  “But if they keep fighting?” Cedar said.

  “If we do it right the first time,” I said, “they’ll see we want to be friends.”

  And so on, and that’s how I finally got everyone up on the walls, ready, and just in time.

  Stevland and bats and sharp-eyed guards on the walls said that Glassmakers were sneaking up through the woods, a whole lot of them. We heard screeching Glassmade, and it kept getting louder, and there they were. Twenty or thirty majors scurried down the riverbank, and I yelled at them, “Chek-ooo.” Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to say, but I wanted them to know we knew they were there.

  They didn’t come near the city, running full speed across the bridge to the other side of the river to set up camp, not the ideal place, but they hadn’t asked us.

  Glassmakers kept dashing out of the forest, dropping heavy side baskets at their new camp. Some of them started looking at the children’s flower garden around the statue of Higgins that marks the place where he fought with the eagles. The wind carried their odor. Even from so far away, they stank like rot.

  A Glassmaker worker in a black blanket picked a flower. Another ran over to grab it, then a third, and a scuffle broke out with a lot of pushing and shoving. Glassmakers who were arriving dropped their baskets in the middle of the road and rushed over to watch. The fighters had cheering sections, and I could make out at least three sides. They trampled the garden. Then a major in a plaid blanket—“Him. That’s the one, the leader,” Kung said—raised a club and shouted, “Chooo-a-reeee,” and the struggle ceased.

  “Just like before,” Cedar said.

  Down the road, they kept coming. The adults set up domed tents and unpacked their baskets. Plaid Blanket shouted something and little workers scrambled to greet four females—big, slow, and
clumsy, just like the mission said. With them were other Glassmakers—about six—that were so tiny they had to be children, and they ran around in the garden tearing up what was left of it and chasing the jewel lizards that lived in it.

  “It’s the group we visited,” Marie said. Shabby, like she’d said. “There’s one fewer female and a lot fewer children. Could the young ones mature that fast?”

  “You look like you don’t think so,’” I said.

  “Something’s wrong. They weren’t hanging on by much. That might be the answer.” From the look on her face, she didn’t like that answer. And me, too. But what exactly was wrong?

  The attack came soon. Some of them sneaked up through the trees with catapults built out of what we had thought were tent poles and began launching glass vials of poison over the walls, and some splashed on an old man, Bjorn. He got a fever and almost stopped breathing, but the medics acted fast and saved him.

  Our bows took them by surprise—or rather, the range of our bows—and they retreated quick, but a few got hit. Even blunt arrows can hurt. Cedar and other sharpshooters destroyed the catapults, but the Glassmakers had balls tied on ropes, and they could throw well, with two elbows swinging like a crack-the-whip, so their attacks had range, too.

  “It’s time for real arrows now,” Cedar said. “We outnumber them. We’ll win.”

  A Beadie agreed: “Right. Let’s kill one and see if they roast the corpse and eat it.”

  “We don’t want revenge,” a Greenie answered. “We want peace.”

  “We get peace,” Cedar said through gritted teeth, “by winning.”

  To decide the matter, we held an impromptu Committee meeting in the greenhouse, which is near the wall. Marie led the group against real arrows. “Diplomatic,” Cedar called it, an insult. Stevland didn’t know what he wanted. Eventually—because I’d had enough pointless shouting—we decided that everyone could decide for themselves. So some shot real arrows, some shot blunted ones. They seemed as effective either way. Cedar entertained herself for a while lobbing flaming arrows at the footbridge. Finally an old hunter told her that if she kept missing, the Glassmakers would figure out our range versus accuracy the way the mountain spiders had, and we’d lose an advantage.

  This situation lasted for five days. We launched arrows now and then when Glassmakers tried to sneak up to the wall. Trained bats carried messages to Monte and flew reconnaissance, and the bats understood the situation, so the damn things tripled the amount of food they demanded per trip. People looked at me, wondering what to do.

  What would a fippokat do? When owls and spiders attack, fippokats run and hide. They’re green. They know how to stand still. They can dig a hole in seconds flat. They can jump high enough to land in tree branches. They can slide down a wet grassy hill faster than a ball can roll. And us, the big fippokats, we were trapped with no way to run and hide. It was my job to lead, and I didn’t know what to do besides act happy, helpful, playful, and gentle. What good was that? I was useless.

  Glassmakers had taken to drumming and singing day and night to harass us, when they weren’t screaming at each other. Our children whined that they couldn’t leave the city, and that it was too noisy to sleep—true. Endless, mind-rattling noise, because the Glassmakers meant to make us suffer. Our children made earplugs. We adults wondered what to do and debated too much. The old hunters and Stevland spent their time observing: social order, eating habits, and fighting techniques. And we were learning things, but not fast enough. We couldn’t wait inside the city forever. We’d go nuts.

  There was nearly a fistfight tonight. “It’s time to kill the musicians,” Cedar said at the Committee meeting.

  “The noise is keeping the Glassmakers awake, too,” Daisy said.

  “What?” Cedar said. “Do you want me to feel sorry for them?”

  “You can survive hardship,” Carl said.

  “Hardship? This is torture. Torture for me, for my children, for everyone.”

  “Right, it’s making you crazy,” someone whispered in the hall.

  “Who said that?” Cedar jumped to her feet, looking hard at the people on the benches, and someone snickered.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Carl told Cedar.

  “I am not a fool.”

  More snickers, including someone at the Committee table. Cedar looked like she knew who and took a step in that direction. Time to be happy and helpful, my one true talent.

  “Well,” I said, standing up, “I’m with Cedar. I mean, who doesn’t want to kill the musicians? Voice vote, purely advisory, all those in favor, cheer and stomp your feet. Let’s hear it!” An overwhelming vote yes. “Is it making you crazy?” Cheers and stomps. “Cedar said what we all think, right?” Cheers and stomps. “Thank you, Cedar. It’s what we needed to hear.” I led applause for her as I sat down. She looked confused but sat down, too.

  Nye rarely left the bakery or spoke except to Stevland. The kats in the box outside festered, and the smell upset the kats inside the city. Our crops were being pillaged or suffering from neglect, but at least the Glassmakers hadn’t set fire to Stevland. We sent them letters tied to blunt arrows asking for friendship and peace, and they looked at the papers, but if they could read, they didn’t bother. What else could we do?

  STEVLAND

  My leaves complete their nightly turn toward the east in anticipation of sunrise. Water pressure from roots and the night’s high humidity result in guttation, and water seeps from pores on leaves like imitation dew. I ache with turgor, yet I desire to wilt. Fighting is disaster, flood and drought together.

  With my eyes in the grove across the river, I see the Glassmaker musicians, their bodies radiating infrared light in the cool night, as they pause to lap up water before reluctantly picking up their drums and raising their voices for another noisy song. They are small Glassmakers, the worker caste. “The overworked caste,” my humor root suggests, and humor contains truth. They wish to sleep, but when the Sun rises, they will be sent to the fields to gather tulip roots, though this is not harvest season, and the tulips resent it.

  Indeed, they will gather any food, in season or not, all the while generating more resentment. While the damage they do to the life of our valley is sad, equally sad is the fact that the workers will eat only what larger castes fail to consume. Parasites and hosts constitute a common biological relationship, but in this case parasitism occurs within a single species rather than cross-species, a perversion of mutualism, a barbaric relationship.

  Were Glassmakers always thus? I had fewer roots when they built the city and I understood too little, far less than I realized at the time, and my communication with them was brief and limited to specific individuals. I should have but did not fully recognize that the different sizes of animals, specifically of the Glassmakers, meant something distinct from different sizes among plants. Plant size depends on our environment and age. Animal size is fixed by their type, like the genders among humans. Type can affect function and social standing. Equality among types is an ethical rather than universal practice. It is not practiced among Glassmakers.

  Up on the city wall, a pair of Pacifist guards patrol in soft-soled slippers, heeding any rustle that might warn of a Glassmaker attempting to approach. In the greenhouse, a young woman watches my stem for warnings. Earlier this night, fippmaster Monte dissuaded his pack from a quest to find and eliminate the source of the annoying noise—that is, the Glassmaker musicians. It was a tragedy avoided, since the Glassmakers would have killed all the lions, but would have suffered losses themselves, and I do not want any deaths.

  This is all I can report to the young woman as Lux rises and sunrise approaches. She and I pass the time chatting. Talking stems are costly to maintain, and chatter depletes my immediate stores of adenosine triphosphate, so I would prefer to remain silent in this time of great trouble, but Pacifists find inaction difficult, and she must remain alert. Five days of confinement within the walls have unbalanced the Pacifists, who require activity.
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  Cacti and ribbons, still holding on to their winter hibernation anchors, release zygospores to grow into new air plants. Flowers bloom everywhere, and pollen and perfume traverse the winds. Spring is the most beautiful and the most impatient season. Plants must grow fast or perish, even those of us who have enlisted animal help to overcome the seasons. Spring losses can rarely be recovered, and this has been a dry spring, adding to the urgency.

  Within the city, humans know this. Their own resources become depleted during winter and must be renewed. They are impatient, too, and fearful because they can imagine disaster and death. They displace their fear and anger at the Glassmakers by growing angry with each other. Cedar provoked an argument last night when her proposal to kill the Glassmaker musicians was turned down. Without Lucille’s intervention like water to put out a fire, there might have been violence.

  “We can’t take much more,” Lucille confessed to me later. We are lucky to have such a resourceful and sociable co-moderator. I have an idea that may resolve the situation, though not easily.

  I must be brave and share courage like a mental gift. I have strong roots and innumerable leaves. The Sun rises. Photons rush down, and I begin to split water into oxygen, hydrogen ions, and energy. I am large. My roots, laid end to end, would reach the Sun. Instead, my roots are spread throughout our valley, and I know that as the day progresses, they will draw in a din of chemical complaints from other plants that increases day by day. Our helper animal has been replaced by a pest. Forward-looking plants worry. Our ecosystem is disturbed and angry, as well as thirsty.

  The most fragile is me, for I can see the stars for what they are. They are suns, and they have their planets, and travel to them would be longer and more complex than I once believed, and yet the more I know, the more real the idea becomes, and these desires are unbalancing. My wants are no longer simple.

  Pacifists see the stars and dream of travel, too. I ask them when, and they say, “Someday,” and they mean it. When that day comes, we will go together, their descendants and my seeds and plantlets and roots. Pots are confining, but I can withstand hardship. This will be a sweet fruit of civilization. The combined efforts of humans and Glassmakers would make it arrive sooner.