Semiosis Page 31

  “Perhaps you define us,” Bartholomew wrote.

  “Us mean-us family.”

  “How many?” Cedar asked. I was about to ask the same thing, but without her anxiety, and Bartholomew was already writing it with no visible anxiety at all.

  “Three majors, four workers, two children. They not fight you.”

  “Why?” Cedar shouted.

  “She be-she perhaps what,” See-You wrote, twitching her head at Cedar. Translation: Who does she think she is?

  “You know what I am,” Cedar said. “Why won’t they attack? What’s going on with you? Here, give me a brush.” Cedar grabbed at the one in Bartholomew’s hand. He didn’t let go. See-You looked at her brush, raised the row of curls on her back, then she dipped the felt tip in ink and began writing again. She gave off a flowery scent that I knew but I couldn’t name.

  “Those without mothers attack. Mothers control each’s family, orphans outnumber families and control with fear all. Orphans order attack you, take-us city. Orphans burn beauty-bush Stevland to give-you fear. Now I escape orphans perhaps to safe place, house, food, clothes, dry, warm, rest, peace, happy.” She wrote slowly.

  We read silently, and finally Bartholomew said, “That explains a lot.”

  “If you believe it,” Cedar said.

  See-You stared at Stevland, muttered, and wrote, “Many die when we nomad. Many mothers. We come-us back or all die. City make healthy life. Perhaps.” That was a question.

  “We welcome you,” Nye said in a shaky voice, and I turned and saw that he was reading the message in Glassmade on Stevland’s stem. Nye put an arm around the worker’s shoulders and hugged it. He looked like he was going to laugh or cry.

  “If families are that small, that leaves us a lot of hostile orphans,” Cedar said, not laughing.

  “Ask her, why did they cook Roland?” Nye said, really close to tears. “Ask that, please.” Bartholomew did.

  She bowed her head to him before writing. “Orphans say you eat dead like eagles. I say no, and if no, you live. I try music stick but be-it stolen. I like music. I like food. I like you live.”

  She put down the pen and scratched a sore at the edge of her eye. I wanted to grab her hand and make her stop. I wanted to grab her and dance around the room with her. I wanted to grab Stevland and hug him, because I knew he felt the way I did, or hug Nye or Bartholomew, but I didn’t want to scare her. Instead, I took the pen from Bartholomew’s hand and wrote, “Friends.”

  That had been my slogan: Next time, friends! Lucille, the perfect fippokat, happy, helpful, playful, gentle. Helpful—“Hey,” I said, “everyone inside who’s our friend.”

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy. Cedar fretted that the queens’ houses would have to be guarded because we shouldn’t trust them, true enough. She fretted over which houses and where, and in the end we needed only three because the fourth queen didn’t want to come inside.

  “Bellona says it’s a trick,” Bartholomew said—shouted, really, because the rain had become a storm with gusty winds that blew rain inside the open tent. Bellona and her child huddled in the most protected spot. “She says she’ll be a prisoner.”

  Water blew into my raincoat. “Tell her she’s a prisoner now. If she comes inside, she’ll be a friend. She’ll get her clothes back. Oh, hell, I’ll get blankets for her and the kid anyway.” I noticed that across the river, Kung’s thatched roofs were holding up under the rain just fine.

  I expected the evening’s Committee meeting to turn into a minor celebration. We finally had good news.

  “The family workers and majors are out of the corrals. Less fighting,” Kung said.

  “Right, but there’s almost sixty orphan Glassmakers out there who hate us,” Cedar said. “And maybe thirty other Glassmakers inside the walls that do, and we can’t put on hobbles in the rain. We shouldn’t relax.”

  “Caution is well advised,” Stevland said, “and yet we have made major progress in domestication. If the orphans had won, barbarism would have engulfed the city.”

  “They thought we were barbarians,” Bartholomew said. “Diplomacy paid off.” He nodded at Marie, who’d been smiling since I woke her up that afternoon and told her the news.

  “We should mark this day,” Daisy exclaimed. “This is the day when the Glassmakers finally returned home. We can have music to commemorate the success of the mission, astronomy studies to recall our first homes—”

  “Archery contests,” Cedar said, not smiling. “The archers saved us.”

  “No, no weapons,” Daisy said. “We want to celebrate friendship, don’t we, Lucille?”

  “Right,” I said. “And we can celebrate now. Operation Domesticate is working!”

  “The archers are working right now out in the rain,” Cedar said.

  “Perhaps a feast,” Stevland said, “an especially nutritious meal on this date next year. There is still much to do. Food will be key to domestication. The orange trees report that they have reconsidered their objections to fortifying their catkins. My outposts report that the river is rising upstream. Our supervision of the orphans will be complicated by a spring flood.”

  “Just what we need,” Cedar said.

  So much for a happy meeting. I stopped at See-You’s house on my way home. The guard opened the door and I peeked in. The queen sat on a mattress on the floor near the fire, her blanket draped over her and her family snuggled up around her. A table held the remains of a big, tasty, nutritious meal. The room smelled odd, not quite sweet, something I couldn’t name, but happy. A happy smell. She swiveled her head toward me.

  “Chek-ooo!” I said. “Sorry to disturb you. Just wanted to say good night.” I waved. She waved back, and her family joined her, ten hands waving sinuously at me, warm and fed and dry and housed and safe and resting peacefully under soft blankets, happy—I hoped they were happy.

  I was happy as I turned to leave. The guard closed the door, and he looked at me grinning, and we hugged and laughed in the cold rainy night, celebrating.

  STEVLAND

  Water is life. So say plants, at least. I have not discussed spiritual beliefs with the humans, but they celebrate equinoxes and solstices and make minute observations of the stars, and each star is a sun. I suspect that humans have an unarticulated reverence for the Sun. Sunshine is predictable, so a sun is a suitable object of reverence for cyclical beings like animals. Water is worshipped by plants not because of its necessity but because of its unpredictability: floods and droughts. We grow and change over time, and we venerate water.

  As the Sun sets, I prepare for worship not unlike the human spring equinox festival. We plants will celebrate. The spring rains came, leaving the soil deeply moist, a cause for great joy, for we channel the water upward into buds, and new leaves and stems unfold as water fills our cells. We grow. The sensation is pleasurable, in fact jubilant.

  Humans regained control, and two days ago, the Glassmakers started communicating with the humans—only some of them, but limited communication will lead to extensive mutual understanding. Progress occurred, the weather became beneficent, and disaster has given way to optimism and glorious springtime. Spring is the most impatient, exciting, exultant season. We celebrate life.

  As darkness falls, we plants busy ourselves with catabolism and growth, but we have energy to spare for rejoicing and gift-giving. I send calcium carbide to my neighbors, who have water galore to break the molecules down to acetylene, which then oxidizes with a delightful flash of energy, entertaining and nutritious. The fight with the Glassmakers left me tired and dispirited, but I am recovering and am joyful to share, because the victory came with the help of my neighbors. I cannot fully express my happiness and indebtedness to them. We have rain, we have peace, we have life. We grow.

  “I am pruned! I am pruned!” lentils sing.

  “Good,” tulips chant. “Good.” “Good.” “Good.” “Good.” “Good.” “Good.”

  Pineapples send me isoprenes. “You said humans would like ter
penes,” they say. “Here. Make them happy.”

  Isoprenes can be made into any number of useful terpenes, such as flavorings, vitamins, or scents. I have been learning the meaning of some of the scents of the Glassmakers, and the chemicals are entirely familiar to us plants, such as certain terpenes and alcohols, for example. Any plant can produce dozens, even hundreds, of scents, depending on its intelligence and the complexity of its flowers and other structures, and often scent is how we communicate with lizards and other pollinators. Glassmakers may be able to communicate with other plants besides myself. I do not know if I would like that.

  The locustwood speaker gives me a generous amount of zinc ions. “Nice work, bamboozler. Nice animals, your humans. Don’t forget our agreement.”

  “How far south did you wish to go?” I send enough calcium carbide to blow apart a rootlet.

  “Move me closer to useful animals, farther from you.”

  I realize that I am not the only plant with a humor root. “Name your useful animal.”

  “Fitch.”

  “Extinct.” Due to bamboo.

  “Gecko dragon.”

  “Slow, stupid, and venomous. Perfect for you.”

  “Humans work for fancy, fruity, oversized grass. What do they see in you?”

  “Fruit-eaters like fancy fruit,” I tell him. “I treat them well.”

  He sends me some fructose, fruit sugar. I send some xylose, wood sugar. Even before I grew a humor root, I understood that sugar is a comical substance because its chemical structure is exceedingly fussy. Locustwood is rarely in such a good humor. Sugar!

  Willows, palms, wheat, yams, even orange trees, we all rejoice at the promise of a productive season and unfold buds to be ready for tomorrow’s sunshine. The spring floods are routine and merely annoy most riverside plants, but the snow vine suddenly panics.

  “Bugs gone! Bugs gone! Big animals eat bugs! Sap control two animals! Water come, bugs gone!”

  It does not realize that the bugs can be replenished. Yet I share its concern. The snowflake-shaped scale bugs both fed and drugged the workers and majors. In addition, the floods are creating logistic problems. I send some calcium carbide to the snow vine.

  “More!” it says.

  I comply, and say: “Water go, bugs come back. Roots good?”

  “Roots good. Bugs gone! Big animals eat bugs. Sap control two animals. Water come, bugs gone. Bugs gone!”

  “Water go, bugs come back. Happiness tonight, happiness tomorrow.” I repeat this several times, spicing my message with calcium carbide, and finally the snow vine calms down.

  Onions are hardly more verbal than tulips, and they are not festive tonight. I am not sentimental about individual leaves, but onions covet theirs because their growth comes from a single bulb. Pacifists harvest only after the onions develop bulblets for reproduction. The onions suffered untimely predation by the Glassmakers until the “pesticide” I suggested made the Glassmakers stop harvesting them. But now their low-lying fields are flooded, which will delay their growth, if not kill them. I send as much oxygen as I can through my roots. Drowning is a slow, hard way to die. Perhaps the farmers can erect walls to protect them. The rain ended this afternoon, but the river will continue to rise for several days.

  Life among the humans slowly moves toward balance. No one languishes ill or injured in the clinic tonight. The flooding river has made supervision of the orphan Glassmakers more difficult, but it has also isolated them. They are too drugged to swim across the rushing water, and this means the guards can relax a bit. In general, the orphans have been behaving more civilly even without hobbles, and some have even helped gather food, easing the burden of the humans. Bellona, the female allied with the orphans, has softened her hostility a bit.

  But is this true domestication? “We can’t tell,” Cedar is saying at the nightly Committee meeting. “We turn our back, and that could be the chance the orphans are waiting for.”

  “I agree,” I say, and Nye voices the words for me. “Pruning has not been completed yet.”

  “You agree?” she says.

  “Domestication takes time.” I should explain further, but my attention is drawn to the plant festival. The locustwood is using aldose and ketose sugars to construct a joke about water. The punch line is … water is flat! Like snowflakes! Of course, but who would have thought of it that way?

  “We need to keep them afraid of us,” Cedar says.

  I try to find an attentive root. “Fear will prune their actions.”

  “I can’t believe we’re agreeing.”

  “The intelligent actions are few. We are likely to agree,” I say, avoiding deeper concerns. I have not checked Cedar’s health in a long time. I wish I could. She is behaving erratically, and this could foreshadow more serious problems. I have discovered five cases of Jersey’s disease since her diagnosis. The patients reported obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Cedar is obsessed about the Glassmakers. Is there a way to coax her to the clinic?

  I say, “We all seek a peaceful solution.”

  “Sometimes you have to fight,” she counters. She stands and paces to give her words more emphasis. “We can’t keep them drugged forever, and the first chance they get, they’ll attack. If these were eagles, you’d want to wipe them out.”

  “Eagles lack that level of intelligence,” I say, having found a mindful root. “Moreover, there are few Glassmakers. Extinction is uncivilized. Where possible, even eagles should not be eliminated, merely dispatched to hunt elsewhere. They eat deer crabs, which eat plants, including me, so I appreciate their ecological niche.”

  “Eagles are intelligent enough. They use fire. Don’t be a tulip. It’s us versus them, and there’s fifty-two orphans, and we have at most a hundred good fighters, and Glassmakers are fast, so they have the advantage.”

  “Damn,” Lucille says. “So what you’re saying is to kill them now?” She, Cedar, and I can read the frowns, the shaking of heads, the downcast eyes, the little movements that betray the thoughts of the rest of the Committee. No one wants to kill them. Bartholomew translates for See-You, who is attending the meeting. Her reaction is unreadable, although I sense a scent whose meaning I do not know.

  “This is stupid,” Cedar says. “We could get it over with. We don’t have time to sit around and wait. We have to plant. We have to hunt. What do you have to offer? Wait and talk. That’s not a plan. Words will get us all killed.” She sits down hard, a display of displaced anger.

  Pacifists have been hunting and working in the fields. They have replanted ravaged crops and caught up on enough primary tasks to have the time for occasional optional labors. They have picked crocus anthers to make spice and they have set traps for young ribbon plants to cultivate them for their fibers. Hunters have slain deer and birds dislocated by the flood, providing good meals. Foresters have snagged logs floating in the river to dry for winter firewood. Pacifists have accomplished much, as members of the Committee report, and Cedar’s pessimism is disputed. The cooperative females’ majors and workers have begun to join the city’s workforce.

  “Glassmakers are great,” a farmer says. “We can do four days’ work in only three days, even though they’re still learning and we need to watch their health. If we can get the rest to cooperate, think of it. Think of what we can do.”

  People smile. Bartholomew translates, and See-You emits perfume. Nye nods. This morning he asked me to grow flutes with mouthpieces suitable for Glassmakers.

  Glassmaker scent communication will likely remain beyond the humans, but I am developing specific sensory organs and specialized roots to understand them. See-You has given me lessons, and I am beginning to glimpse the underlying grammar.

  For example, ethyl alcohol means welcome or be relaxed, and is the active ingredient in truffle, which humans sense as faintly sweet and pleasant. Come is methyl alcohol. By contrast, each Glassmaker family has its own identifying smell, a heavy lingering oil produced only by the female that requires a greater degree of proxi
mity for detection. Welcome or come are easy for any caste member to fabricate and diffuse quickly over a wide area, and their uses are many. Identification is specific, controlled, and lasting. Anyone can say Be relaxed. Few Glassmakers can say You are mine. See-You has anointed Lucille, Marie, and Bartholomew, who understand and appreciate the message.

  “There are many more smells. This is baby talk,” See-You told me after today’s lesson, which involved eugenol, a sweet-spicy phenol that means What do you see? “You speak and smell baby talk,” she said, which I decided to interpret as praise. I have learned some basics. There is much mutualism to celebrate.

  The Committee meeting ends. Humans and Glassmakers go home and sleep. The plants’ rain festival ends with the mass release of thiamine to benefit the mycorrhiza fungus at our roots, which absorb water and other nutrients from the soil and pass them on to us. I look forward to an evening of peace and growth.

  Pollen has blown in on swirling storm winds from one of my starved alpine groves. Eagles are on the move, heading over the west mountains toward the river valley. It is logical. Storms have arrived in the valley, and eagles understand the consequences. Rising water in rivers displaces prey. They have come to hunt. Will they come this far north? Unlikely, because they have learned to fear humans, and as Cedar pointed out, they are somewhat intelligent. But I will watch for them. The pollen is not fresh, and eagles can run quickly.

  Relatively little other pollen rides on the wind, even though it is spring, due to the damp weather, but wind-pollinated species cannot afford to wait for ideal conditions, and now the wind blows steadily from the east. Each species can be identified by the sculpting of the polymer of the outer wall as well as the oils that protect it. I recognize pollen from an orange tree by its external spikes, scalelike shape, and aromatic coat of oils. Have they complied with their bargain and improved their nutritional qualities? They say they did, and they know the penalty for refusing, but I begin an analysis of the oil and cytoplasm anyway.

  Bats fly and sing. Spring lizards peep as they look for mates. Birds bark. In damp vales, slugs hiss and hum. Belowground, sponges throb as they filter silt. I think about music and condense buds for Nye’s flutes. Plants are silent. Do we have to be?