Semiosis Page 36

  Fabio’s father swung the axe at another branch. A Glassmaker would have hacked like that, axes and clubs swinging at the end of long, sinuous arms. All around me, axes opened up bright orange raw wood, too much like blood-red flesh. The morning after the battle, they had found Osbert’s body, his head smashed open, thrown into the thistles, on a day with so many dead that we didn’t have enough funeral baskets and buried them in bare soil.

  “Are you okay? Bartholomew, are you okay?” Fabio’s father was talking to me.

  “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “Do you want to chop for a while?”

  “No. Thanks. I’m good down here.”

  But was I where I ought to be?

  The fight was over. We had won, the orphans were gone, and the surviving Glassmakers wouldn’t turn on us. But Cedar could turn on them, and they could lose their last chance to survive. I had more important things to do than kill trees.

  * * *

  I checked the kitchen and several workshops, and found Cedar in the Meeting House. All the doors were propped open.

  “I am pleased to have a chance to speak with you,” Stevland’s stem already said when I ducked in, probably addressing Cedar. She looked up from a law text.

  “Keep the doors open,” she told me. “Stevland isn’t going to put anything in the air to control me. Only the Committee can vote out a moderator, right? But we vote for moderators. Everyone votes for them. Why can’t everyone vote a moderator out? That’s what they did with Vera, right?”

  I sat down across the table from her. Take away her need to fight, that was what Stevland had said. No, take away her ability, that was it. I didn’t know how to begin, but now would be the time, and no time to be tired or let my mind wander.

  “We can all count,” I said. “The Committee supports Stevland and the Glassmakers. Most citizens support them, too. You’d lose in a vote.”

  “Not by much,” she said, then turned to Stevland. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? You win, we all lose. You get to stay in control.”

  “I do not wish to fight you,” he said. “I forgive you for letting Lucille die.”

  She turned red and opened her mouth, teeth bared, ready to explode with denial.

  I didn’t give her the chance. The first rule of argumentation is to appropriate the argument. “No, Stevland, you won’t forgive her.”

  “You cannot tell me what to do.”

  “I can tell you what you ought to do. First, forgiveness isn’t that easy. Second, she doesn’t want it.”

  “I don’t need it!” she said.

  A few people, attracted by our arguing voices, peeked into the Meeting House, unsure if they should listen. I gave them a nod to encourage them to stay. I would need witnesses—if I could figure out what to do.

  “I can forgive,” Stevland said, “because I understand killing. I did not wish to make Sylvia kill Vera, but I did.”

  “Sylvia did that back in the old village,” I said. “You weren’t involved.”

  Two people already sat on benches halfway toward the front. A few more lingered near the back, while another leaned out, gesturing at others to come.

  “What actually happened is a secret passed on by moderators,” Stevland said. “You are not a moderator, thus you do not know.”

  I pointed to the document bureau. “The facts are in the old record book, there for anyone to read.” The book had been written by a record keeper named Nicoletta.

  “I have the knife Sylvia killed Vera with,” Stevland responded. “Lucille told me that Sylvia had killed her, and Lucille forgave me because I had not wished to make her kill, thus I can forgive others.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cedar demanded. The people on the benches—a lot more now—looked perplexed.

  I tried to unravel his logic or his emotions, but I couldn’t. “I’ll get the book. Where’s the knife, Stevland?”

  “It is beneath the paving tile next to Harry’s waltz box. It is steel, and it is from Earth. It has been passed down from moderator to moderator, but as a secret.”

  Cedar rose as fast as she could, limped over, and knelt to pry up the stone. I climbed on a chair and pulled down volume two, bound in worked leather and dusty. I hadn’t looked at it for months. Cedar stood up, holding the knife vertically like a bouquet of flowers: a shiny, silver-gray metal blade.

  Two dozen people sat on the benches now, with more arriving fast.

  I turned to Stevland. “Let’s see if this account agrees with the story passed down to you. There’s a paragraph here among the notations about births and deaths and such, written about five years after the events. It says, The Parents knew about Rainbow City but thought that the rainbow bamboo would be worse than snow vines. Sylvia and Julian—Julian was a young man, Sylvia’s first husband, I think—discovered the city and wanted to move the colony here.”

  A few Glassmakers arrived. Cedar stood near the upturned tile, knife in hand, looking every minute more like her old self. I continued, trying to think and talk at the same time.

  “The record says that to suppress the idea of moving the colony, Vera, who was the moderator, had Julian and Octavo the Rulemaker killed, she had Sylvia attacked and hurt, and she had several people beaten. It concludes, Sylvia killed Vera during Octavo’s funeral and declared herself the moderator. She was actually underage, only a teenager. That was the revolt. There was a vote, but only the votes in favor of Sylvia were taken.”

  The room was quieter than it would have been if it were empty.

  “Stevland,” I said, “is this the story as you know it?”

  “I did not know that Vera had killed other Pacifists. This changes Sylvia’s culpability.”

  “Indeed. Sylvia had to protect herself. However, Cedar had a chance to try to save Lucille and Marie during the orphan attack, but she did not.”

  “That’s not true,” Cedar said, waving the knife, perhaps unconsciously. “We were outnumbered.”

  “Bartholomew’s account is again correct,” Stevland said. “You were hiding beneath one of my groves, so I was able to observe. As Bartholomew suggested at the time, you only needed to create a diversion, and you said you would get killed doing so. At the time, I believed you were afraid.”

  “I was not!”

  “Now,” I said, facing the audience, “to forgive, first we need to understand what happened. Sylvia was in danger and she protected herself. During the orphan attack, Lucille and Marie needed help, and Cedar failed to act. If she wasn’t afraid, then what motivated her?”

  “I—” She stared at the knife in her hand.

  People began to do more than murmur. Violet had arrived, and I looked at her across the room, hoping she would realize she ought to keep order. She marched to the front, faced everyone, and said, “We’re eavesdropping here. Let’s be quiet and listen.” It was a counterfactual order, since I was addressing the audience directly, but it seemed to work.

  “If you weren’t afraid,” I said, “then what? We have two models for behavior. Sylvia acted for the good of Pax. Vera acted to retain power. Allowing Lucille and Marie to die did not help Pax, but you have long felt you should be moderator. Allowing Lucille to die would be a step toward acquiring the moderator position for yourself, rather like Sylvia, but—”

  “No! I didn’t want her to die! I … I was afraid. I was. I was afraid of the Glassmakers. And I was right. Look what they did. Lucille didn’t know how to defend the city. They caught her and killed her. Marie made mistakes from the start of the mission. Stevland—he didn’t know what to do.”

  “I have made many mistakes,” Stevland said.

  I didn’t wait for him to list them. “You were afraid, then. Would we all have done the same? We can forgive acts we could have committed. Many of us were afraid that night, many of us hesitated, and we all made mistakes, some big, some small. Some made no difference. Could we have saved Lucille and Marie? The orphans already had the acetone and planned to use it. Cedar could have tried to res
cue them, but she would have failed.”

  Her eyes snapped up to meet mine. “Lucille would have died anyway?” There was relief in her voice—maybe. That would change everything. That needed to be confirmed.

  “You thought that she died because you had failed to act.”

  “There were so many orphans! I didn’t know what weapons they had. I…” She paused again, looked down at the knife, at the floor. “I didn’t know what to do. I pretended I was brave, that it didn’t matter. I … But you said I couldn’t have saved them. I didn’t like Lucille, but she was the moderator! I wanted to save her, I did, I…” She had run out of words.

  “I understand,” I said. “You hesitated out of fear. An error we all could have made.”

  She nodded, still looking down. My own emotions were slowly shifting, but I hadn’t undertaken this effort for my emotional benefit. People had begun to talk among themselves again, which was a good sign.

  “You were afraid, and you hesitated,” I summarized one more time to make sure everyone understood. “Had the situation been different, Lucille and Marie would have died because of what you failed to do, but in this case, their death was certain regardless.” I turned to Violet, sitting up front. “What shall we do?”

  She blinked a few times. “This isn’t a proper meeting, so we can’t do anything. We’ll need to think about all this.”

  “Let’s get back to work,” Hathor said, disgusted. Could she forgive Cedar? No, she and Forrest never forgave anyone. People stood up to leave.

  Cedar threw the knife down on a table and began to limp out, but she looked back at me, less smug than usual, maybe even ashamed. Not murderous. Not more likable, but that wouldn’t matter anymore. I could forgive fear. She left.

  I sat down at the table and pondered Stevland’s talking stem, now blank. He had said he wanted a voice. He had wanted to remove Cedar’s ability to fight. He had wanted to understand grief. He had wanted to become balanced again.

  A few fellow Greens came up to the table.

  “Thank you,” one of them said.

  “This is going to help a lot,” another said. They did not seem triumphant. Good.

  “It had to be done,” I said.

  “And you didn’t hurt anyone,” yet another added. “That’s the way to do it.”

  I looked at them, old friends, companions in joys and sorrows and whatever the current moment was—hollow satisfaction, perhaps.

  “We’ll be at dinner when Lux sets. See you?”

  I nodded, and one of them patted my shoulder as they left. By then only Violet remained. She walked over to the upturned paving tile and began to set it back in place.

  “Stevland,” I said, “what should we do with this knife?”

  He didn’t answer right away, and for a moment I worried that I had sent him back into silence, but then he said, “I believe it belongs in the museum. You were right not to allow me to forgive. It is more complex than I had believed. I attempted to balance emotions with facts, yet the weight of emotions seems hard for me to estimate.”

  “For us, too,” I said, “even our own emotions. Sometimes they gain or lose weight over time.”

  I suddenly remembered the smell of truffle in the Meeting House, a long night keeping the Glassmakers calm, and no sight of my son, Osbert, none at all, but we all knew without saying what had happened to the guards on the wall and what might happen to us.

  “You ought to get some rest.” Violet had sat down and taken my hand. “You know, you could be moderator.”

  I tried to imagine Sylvia as a girl. As a new, underage moderator. Someone who wanted to do more than survive, but so did the Parents, obviously, by the expectations written into the Constitution: aspirations to joy, love, beauty, and community. They had thought they had to leave Earth to achieve them. Were they right?

  “Stevland wants to sing,” I said. Violet raised her grand eyebrows.

  I tried to imagine Earth, and I couldn’t. I tried to imagine writing a history of Pax, and there was much that I would never know. Too much.

  Yet it needed to be done. I could start with what I knew and what I could learn so our story could survive, so we could discover our true selves. Our future would be another discovery—or, if we understood how we had arrived at where we were, it could be a choice.

  I stood up. It was time to get back to work. Back to the business of living. Back to a life that would slowly seem normal even if it was never the same again.

  Violet stood, too.

  “Look what I found.” She held out a little mesh basket, and a cactus the size of a thumbnail floated inside, sky-blue underneath, brownish-green on top, bristling with long white thorns.

  “It’s an Astrophytum echinocactus caeruleus.” She pronounced the words carefully. “These are common and they get big, a meter across, but they’re camouflaged and high flyers, so we don’t see them much. This seedling sprang a leak, and that’s why it fell. Leaks can be fatal, you know.”

  “The danger from leaks is susceptibility to predation,” Stevland said. “With your protection, it will recover.”

  “Oh, I’ll take good care of it. Like all my cacti.” She took my hand. “Let’s go. Water and sunshine, Stevland!”

  “Warmth and food.”

  Under a Sun close to noon, the city seemed different. Or I was different. Less damaged. The house closest to the Meeting House had remained untouched during the attack and its roof sparkled. I paused to admire it, and Violet stayed with me, her warm hand in mine.

  Glassmakers had built that house, one of the few that had survived entirely intact over the centuries and disasters. They had made those glass bricks with internal air pockets that acted like facets, a technique we had never quite mastered. Thus, deliberately, the roof flashed color. I had seen it every day of my life and enjoyed it often. Had marveled at it from inside and from up on the walls. And now from down on the ground again.

  “Stevland told me beauty is a link among all of us,” I said, “a love of beauty, for us, him, and the Glassmakers. Will that be enough?”

  “It’s one link, but I suppose we’ll need more. What do we have?” She tugged on my hand. “What keeps us?” She led me past a garden that had also escaped untouched, studded with flowers that would become fruit and seeds in time. “We came from somewhere else and we came here. Both of us. We both wanted to be here.”

  She had taken me in the opposite direction from the front gate, where fire still scarred the stones and Stevland. Her path avoided other destruction as well. I soon realized she could do so with ease. We had hurt each other more than our surroundings.

  “Glassmakers farmed, too,” she added.

  “Yes. When Sylvia and Julian came here, they found the remains of fields.”

  “They’ve already been very useful in the fields now, the Glassmakers. They’ll help us a lot. And technology, they had technology. It’s in the museum, isn’t it? They can help with that, too.”

  “They don’t seem to remember much,” I said, “but they have a history, too.”

  They did, and it shouldn’t be forgotten. I could see to that. I had another project. Or rather, I had a single, bigger project that would unite us a bit more.

  We turned a corner and paused as people filed past on their way to or from work, still in old clothing but with the occasional new head scarf or string of beads. A man said something beyond our hearing, and everyone around him laughed.

  Violet held up her caged cactus. “I should take this to put it with the rest of them.”

  “I need to make some tools,” I said—and suddenly realized something. “We’ll need some tools made specially for Glassmaker workers. Shorter handles, and maybe smaller overall. I’ll need to talk to them about it.”

  I released her hand to go to the workshop outside the city, where there was room to stack logs and lumber. I’d need to pass through the main gate. I stopped. No. I didn’t want to do that. A lot of us still hadn’t yet. We’d been leaving through the west gat
e.

  “I’ll go with you to the plaza,” I said. Then I’d head through the west gate and take a long circular walk outside the city walls. But at the end of the day I’d walk back in through the main gate. I would see destruction, but from a different angle and already somewhat repaired. A new view and a new memory.

  Stevland had said that in the roots below the gate, his wish that it had never happened was fighting with reality. I didn’t have that problem.

  Around me rose his bright stalks and graceful leaves, the curves of their boughs echoing the curves of the roofs. I had water and sunshine, and warmth and food. Some shards of broken crockery lay at my feet. I’d have a long chapter to write about the meeting of Pacifists and Glassmakers. Yet it wouldn’t be the last chapter. Or the longest.

  “Do you really think I could be moderator?” I asked Violet. Someone had to do it, and I knew what it would involve. I had seen it done well. And I would leave the knife in the museum, no longer a secret.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SUE BURKE spent many years working as a reporter and editor for a variety of newspapers and magazines. A Clarion workshop alumnus, Burke has published more than thirty short stories in addition to working extensively as a literary translator. She now lives in Chicago.

  @SueBurkeSpain

  Visit her online at mount-oregano.livejournal.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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