Semiosis Read online

  “I never knew until now that she had to kill people to get the colony to move.”

  “That’s not what they teach in school, is it?”

  “I did everything I could to get Sylvia to return. I wanted a colony of service animals here. I did not wish to make her kill. That would be highly, highly uncivilized.”

  “She decided to kill Vera, you didn’t. And you tried not to kill Glassmakers, and mostly, you didn’t. I visited the old village in the big history tour for kids. We walked around on stilts and pretended we were Earthlings, and we studied the old storm cellars and the barrens where snow vines grew. It wasn’t a great place to live. Sylvia did what she had to do. So did you. We can make mistakes, but you didn’t. Sure, some of them died, but you know what slaughter is, and it wasn’t slaughter.”

  “There were more deaths than I expected.”

  “More deaths than you’d hoped for. Balance these words: expect and hope.”

  He was quiet for a while. “The difference is emotion.”

  “Exactly. But feelings aren’t facts.” I picked up the knife. “I’m here to give this to you. Where can I put it?”

  “Plants do not have personal possessions.”

  “Moderators do.” After a while, when he saw that I wasn’t going to change my mind, he decided to have me put it in a glass box, like an artifact at the museum, then bury it under a floor tile in the Meeting House. He said he would weigh more feelings against facts.

  And he must have, because soon he began directing autopsies of Glassmakers. “I will learn from my error, for if I can do great harm, I can do great good. The Glassmakers will see the difference between conflict and mutualism.” Et cetera, again.

  Nye and Kung organized elaborate funeral ceremonies, burying the Glassmakers in the cemetery grove in full view of the surviving Glassmakers “so they see we won’t eat them,” Nye said. Marie had said Nye had never given up on the Glassmakers.

  We put the females and children on our side of the river under a wide, open tent alongside the city wall next to a bamboo grove with lots of eyes and ears. The majors and workers went on the far side in an open corral, eating food laced with tranquilizers that didn’t calm them down nearly enough. They moved like they were sleepwalking. They also sleep-hit each other, kicked, scuffled, and brawled. Not to overlook the sleep-attempts to attack the guards.

  We took the females off tranquilizers because everyone on the mission (Cedar included) thought the females had leadership roles and were a lot more reasonable than Plaid Blanket. Well, they were. They didn’t hit each other, they just yelled a lot really loud. They didn’t threaten us, they ignored us in an arrogant and superior way.

  We started taking females on tours of the city. Well, actually, we had to plead with them and half drag them to get them to come. I started calling them queens. I’d found that word in an old Earth book. It meant women who rule arrogantly and act superior. Queens!

  On the fourth day of Operation Domesticate I wanted to lead a tour for the gray-eyed one and another that we called Bellona because she bellowed so much. She was a bit bigger than Gray-Eyes, with a faint striped pattern in her brown fur.

  A warm morning breeze flapped the tent, and the guards waved at me. “Chek-ooo!” I called. “Good morning! Let’s go!”

  The children jumped and ran away to huddle next to the grove. The queens didn’t move. Gray-Eyes was sitting on a mat. I took her tough-skinned hand and tugged gently, keeping my fingers away from her claws. “Come on, it will be fun. We’ll even give you dinner.” At first she ignored me, but finally she stood up. I gave her hand to Piotr, who often came with me on tours along with some guards. He was Tatiana’s grandson, sixteen years old, but his real job was to run and get more help if we needed it.

  Bellona took a few steps back as I approached and said something unfriendly. “You haven’t seen our city,” I said. “Well, your city, too.” I took her hand and didn’t let her snatch it back. “You know we’re not going to hurt you. Kak kak! Time to go.” I tugged. I tugged harder. Another queen said something, and they had a brief, hostile exchange. Then Bellona started moving.

  We began hiking toward the gate, and two guards fell behind us. Bellona took a couple of quick steps just to show that she could elude all of us if she tried. But when we entered the walls, she stopped dead and stared.

  “Hey, it’s beautiful!” I said. “I told you. Come on, we’ll show you more.”

  The kids had put signs in Glassmade on buildings to welcome them. “Clinic.” “Meeting House.” “Gift Center.” “Bathhouse.” “Dining House.” “Glassmaker Museum.” But the queens didn’t seem to notice. Gray-Eyes occasionally grumbled at Bellona, and Bellona grumbled back. No reaction, until finally they took deep sniffs in the kitchen. Deer-crab stew with onions. It smelled great, and I had the cooks give each of them a bowl of it, which they gobbled down, and when they were done, Bellona threw the bowl on the ground.

  She had reacted! So, I thought, silly me, because Gray-Eyes had visited the city already, she might not be impressed, but this was Bellona’s first time, and we had her attention. She’d like the museum. We went there and I opened the door. It’s full of bits of machinery, old dishes, a steel cup, scraps of fabric, and other artifacts that are pretty amazing. Best of all, there’s a diorama of the ruined city in one of the bays of the building, and in another bay there’s a gallery of the two dozen ceramic portraits of Glassmakers from the cemetery, everything labeled in Glassmade as well as Pacifist. Bellona would see that they were honored and they were our friends, or at least that they could be our friends.

  We walked in, footsteps echoing, and I pointed out the diorama and gallery with all the enthusiasm that I’d use for teaching a class of small children. “We’re especially proud of these.” They couldn’t understand, but it was the noise and gesture that counted. “This was your city, and it can be your city again.”

  She didn’t care. I don’t think she looked at anything. With those faces that never move, who could know? I decided to skip Harry’s Gallery a few buildings down, another tribute to the Glassmakers. She wouldn’t care, and besides, children and kats were waiting to dance for them. Our message couldn’t be clearer: We want to be your friends, so get domesticated. And their answer was clear: Drop dead.

  But as I watched the kids and kats sing and waltz around, I thought about looking at things from the queens’ point of view. After everything that had happened, the attack and deaths and now having to live naked in a cold tent, Gray-Eyes probably hated my guts.

  The kids and kats finished the show for Gray-Eyes and Bellona—a great performance with some amazing acrobatics. All us Pacifists applauded and cheered. The queens could have been statues. A solemn-faced little boy brought them necklaces of flowers and said in his best imitation of Glassmade, “Cong-wee, cong-wee.” We slipped them around the queens’ necks.

  Later, at a Committee meeting in the Meeting House, I said, “Gray-Eyes sniffed the flowers. Roses, really fragrant, and Bellona said something like rotrotrotrot, and that was all we got out of them, which was pretty much nothing. I took them back to the tent. Then the queens all started yelling at each other.”

  “They were reviewing the visit,” Bartholomew said. “They don’t agree on their interpretations of events.” He spent most of his time at the tent, observing and ready to communicate if they wanted to try, which they didn’t. “I think Bellona has an especially divergent opinion.”

  “Not domesticating very fast,” Cedar said. “I separated the workers and majors this morning into different corrals. We thought that would help.”

  “It helped, hmmm?” Kung said. “Less fights, more fair fights. And the same ones fight, same ones against others, certain others.”

  “Right, there are sides,” Cedar said, and then imitated Bartholomew. “Divergent opinions. Especially Plaid Blanket, but what would you expect?”

  “Then let’s separate them some more,” I said. “The different factions of majors, like th
at.”

  “Sure,” she said, “get me people to build corrals. But everyone’s working the fields, and they should be, because we have fields to tend. We don’t have enough people to make this work.”

  “It will take time,” Stevland said, “but the rewards will be great.”

  “How long? We’re not as slow as plants.”

  Stevland answered after a pause. He’d been pausing a lot lately, probably thinking, the way Tatiana used to. “Intelligence makes predictions difficult, but there is only one intelligent outcome.”

  “There are a lot of stupid outcomes,” she said.

  “By acting intelligently we limit the opportunities for stupidity, like pruning a tree to direct its growth.”

  “I need a lot more pruners if we’re going to make this work,” Cedar said. Some Beadies nodded.

  After a pause, Stevland answered, “I suggest hobbling those Glassmakers inclined to fight to limit their ability to walk and kick, perhaps by tying back legs together.”

  “They’ll untie it,” she said.

  “Glue the knot.”

  Cedar flushed. I guess she didn’t want to be outthought by Stevland, and I knew I needed to keep the meeting moving. If she didn’t like Operation Domesticate, fine, we all have opinions, but she was starting to remind me of a queen. “We’ll get the leatherworkers on this,” I said. “They have some tough old hides and glue. Flora, can you work with them?”

  “You need to know,” Cedar said, “that it’s going to storm tomorrow. They’re going to be out there in the rain. They won’t like it.”

  “They get hobbles, they cooperate, they get a roof,” Kung said. “I can build roofs, thatch roofs, separate ones, and we separate them quick that way. Behave, stay dry.”

  “Offering rewards for good behavior will be a major step toward domestication,” Stevland said, and Kung grinned. “The medics and I have concluded that they communicate by scent using various volatile chemicals and pheromones. This explains the relative poverty of their spoken language. During the autopsies we discovered that their olfactory organs are enormous, and they have significant scent creation and diffusion glands. Their sensory abilities far exceed yours and mine, which is why you have not noticed these smells, and I must grow more sensitive organs quickly. We must analyze and learn their chemical language.”

  “Maybe there’s a slapping language, too,” I said, hoping people would laugh. They did.

  “Violence is a form of communication among animals, although your abilities to communicate render violence too crude for routine social relationships.”

  “They don’t have as many rules,” Bartholomew said.

  “They might just be nasty by nature,” Cedar said.

  “Maybe,” Marie said diplomatically, “their social order has broken down. It takes a lot to maintain a society. I’ve been thinking about that. They’re all sick, even the children. They have lots of chronic illnesses, and they have injuries that haven’t healed well. There aren’t enough children, and there probably aren’t enough females. An imbalance in workers and majors—Cedar, you see how they behave. They’re sick, and their population is skewed. But why? We can treat their symptoms, but we can’t cure them if we don’t know why. It might be environmental, like a toxin in the environment or nutritional deficiencies. It might be an epidemic. Nye and I both counted more Glassmakers last fall. They’re dying. They need help.”

  She was looking sicker but seemed energetic. Stevland had told me the toxins in her blood acted as stimulants.

  There were a few more reports: Farmers were trying to help the crops recover, but some fields needed complete replanting. Hunters were too busy guarding the Glassmakers to be able to do their jobs, so the cooks would be using dried meat or meat substitutes. No happy reports. Some of us stayed afterward for a lesson in making Glassmaker sounds. Waaak! Tsee! Chik-a-chik-a ugh! But we were all tired and went home soon.

  As I walked through the city, Stevland’s leaves rustled in the wind over my head. Plants got tired, like me, and he was still negotiating with the other greenery to keep making stupefiers in more refined doses, and the plants he had to deal with weren’t necessarily cooperative or smart. Imagine a plant like Cedar.

  So, the Glassmakers were still prisoners. Not symbionts. Not partners. Not domesticated. Nothing close to that mutualism friendly stuff. We needed to be patient, patient, patient. Damn, I’d be the queen of patience.

  Well, that was the situation on the fourth day of Operation Domesticate, a warm spring morning, tall storm clouds on the horizon, bats singing, “Rain coming!” overhead, the streets full of people starting their day or finishing their night. We didn’t work that hard even during harvest. A few children marched down the street, firewood on their backs. They chattered like Glassmakers, “Curtlcurtlcurtl.” Maybe it was a game to them, but they should have been in class learning multiplication, and when they delivered their wood, they’d have to go work in the fields while the adults kept an eye on our prisoners.

  I hustled to the bakery to help deliver bread. One way to domesticate an animal, Stevland said, was to give it food: bread, stews, fruit, salads, soups, tea, roasts, whatever we had.

  The bakery smelled of sweet smoke and bread, all wonderful. The three bakers were up to their elbows in dough. All the ovens were fired up. Sweat made Nye’s shirt stick to his arms and back as he lifted stone baking trays of nut-studded bread for the Glassmakers from the oven. I didn’t know he had such muscles. Lifting, kneading, hauling bags of flour and grain, it all added up, I guess. The other two bakers had strong arms and shoulders, too, once I looked.

  “Of course, we’ll run out of wheat,” one of them said. She was shaping loaves from a wad of dough the size of a four-year-old boy.

  “We’d have gotten a little low on wheat anyway,” the senior baker called as he formed lentil turnovers.

  “Low?” she said. “We have a ten-month supply, at least we did before we had to feed more mouths.”

  “Five days, eleven sacks of flour. Do the math. If this harvest doesn’t come in, we’re short.”

  “Firewood, too,” the woman said. “We’ll need extra firewood.”

  The senior baker looked up, and his bald head wrinkled as he raised his eyebrows. “Maybe a couple of helping hands. It’s one thing to work every day, but from Luxrise to sunset? I’m too old for that.”

  “An apprentice,” the woman answered. “How about that Jewel girl? She’s old enough.”

  “Jewel likes cooking, not baking,” the man said. “There’s a difference.”

  Nye finally said something. “A worker. A Glassmaker worker. They’re smart. They’re fast.”

  We all stared at him. He stacked nut loaves into a basket. They had been baked to perfection.

  “I thought you didn’t like them,” the head baker said.

  “What I like doesn’t matter. It’s what we need. We have to make them be part of us. That means they have to do what we do. I’ll work with them, I’ll teach them, I’ll eat with them, I’ll talk with them. Because I have to.”

  No one said anything for a while, then the senior baker said, “They already know how to bake. They make bread. It won’t take much to get them used to this place.”

  “Yeah, a Glassmaker,” the woman said.

  “Well, that’s mutualism,” I said. “You want firewood, and a worker, and that’s what you’ll get.” I flashed them a smile, especially at Nye. He helped me put loaves into a basket for the queens and children.

  I slipped through the front gate in the city wall. We kept it halfway closed just in case. It felt good to be out, to be seeing the city’s glazed brick wall and the rainbow bamboo rising tall inside it like a giant garden, and I understood why they wanted us out. It was a beautiful city.

  Across the river, the majors and workers stumbled around inside their corrals, fenced in by wide hedges of brambles and thorns. Guards, including Cedar, watched them, bows in hand, backed up by more guards on the far side of the river, and F
lora talked with the guards, pointing out individuals to hobble. Kung walked out of the woods with a load of palm leaves, thatch for roofs.

  Eagle feathers. I was going to have to award a boatload of eagle feathers when this was done.

  We needed to find a worker to become a baker’s apprentice. How?

  I tried not to look at the trampled children’s garden and the muddy fields that used to sparkle with tulips. Stevland had said the plants would recover fast with our help and would be more loyal than ever since we’d proved that we cared about them, especially the pineapples. I sure hoped so. I felt really small when I looked at the fields and forest all around us. What if all the plants decided they didn’t like us? They knew what to do.

  The queens’ tent had mats on the ground and food. No clothes, no furniture, nothing extra, and it was going to rain and get cold soon. Would they want their blankets back? We’d explained in a letter that they had only to ask. It lay on the ground, as far as we knew unread. But someone among the Glassmakers could read and write, we knew that. All they had to do was communicate. Not even agree, just scribble a note. Just ask. Just call us idiots. Anything. Damn queens.

  “Chek-ooo, Bartholomew!” I screeched as I entered the tent.

  “That’s a matter of opinion,” he said. He sat on a mat playing a game of Go with himself. The queens were talking to each other and didn’t seem to look our way, even when I set the basket of bread in the center of the tent. The children ran up and took loaves as soon as I stepped back.

  “I’m still ignored like a piece of poop,” he said.

  “Poop is a gift. Ask Stevland. You’re a gift to the Glassmakers. They just don’t see it.”

  A child grabbed the letter from the ground and looked ready to tear it up, a bored little kid looking for something to do. They were really cute, those kids, with soft curly fur and heads a bit oversize just like human kids. Bellona screeched something. The kid put the letter down. A kat hopped over and turned a somersault. They liked the kids, too. The children and kat began playing follow-the-leader.

  “They don’t want to admit we exist,” Bartholomew said. “But this morning two of them got up and marched out of the tent toward the city gate. They wanted to go someplace, obviously, fine, so I escorted them and they went straight to the museum. They didn’t pay attention during the first visit, or so we thought, but that was a false front, because they knew exactly what they wanted to look at this time, and it was the section about the abandonment of the city.”