Semiosis Page 4

  “We can go,” I said. “We can go.”

  The people who caused the Corn War—both sides of that war—were greedy and cruel. But the vines were just vines.

  He pointed the machete at me. “The east vine is already our ally, correct? It will serve us.”

  “Only if we are great big fippokats and do what it wants.”

  Uri hopped like a kat. “The fippokats will win, then.”

  “Only if our vine wins.”

  * * *

  At my insistence, we dug up the graves of Carrie, Ninia, and Zee. We found a mass of roots at war tangled through their flesh. The seeds from the west vine had sprouted, stems and roots bursting through their abdomens. But roots from the east thicket had countered, strangling the seedlings. The east vine had won. I confessed to attacking the west vine’s seedlings.

  Uri put an arm around my shoulder. “You helped kill Ninia’s killer—and Carrie’s and Zee’s. You did us a service.”

  More than that, I had made a decision about the sanctity of a grave, something beyond the struggle to survive. I had brought a mind and a heart to Pax.

  * * *

  At the conclusion of a meager dinner in the village plaza—snow vine fruit but no yams, no bread, and not much of the dehydrated mycoprotein we had brought from Earth—we held a Commonwealth meeting about the snow vines. I described how individual vines battled each other, poisoning other plants and using animals to provide fertilizer, to spread seeds, and perhaps more. “We could probably transplant the east vine to guard our fields, but—”

  Half-Foot Wendy interrupted me. “Perfect.” Other people nodded.

  “But we need to be its fippokats,” I said. “We will work for it, not the other way around. It will help us only because it is helping itself. We give it food and water—our latrines and irrigation and cemetery—and we help it advance, just as if we were a colony of fippokats.”

  “That’s fine,” Wendy said, grinning. “We wanted to fit into the ecology. We won’t be aliens anymore, and after only a couple of months. Oh, this is better than I thought.”

  But immediate success would be unlikely. We had to be overlooking something.

  “Merl,” Paula said, “tell us about fippokats. What are they like, and what do we need to do?”

  He stood up and stroked his beard for a moment. “They’re herbivores, for starters. Camouflaged, and not at the top of the food chain. And I’ve discovered lately that they can slide as well as hop.”

  He continued talking. I wondered what we had not noticed. Ecologies adjust, but two months was fast, especially for plants. Intelligence made humans extremely adaptable as a species. We could probably learn within days to fully imitate fippokats, if we had to make many changes. We already fulfilled many of their behaviors from the snow vines’ point of view.

  Merl was saying: “I believe I’ve seen them teaching each other things. They learn mighty fast.”

  The snow vines had learned fast, too. They had realized that we were like fippokats and used us like them, giving us healthy or poisonous fruit. But the west vine had attacked our fields. It had noticed how we differed from fippokats, that we were farmers, and it had developed a plan that required conspicuous effort on its part. Creative, original ideas and perseverance were signs of intelligence—real intelligence, insightful. It had weighed possible courses of action, then chosen one.

  Snow vines could think and plan ahead, and the west vine had made a very aggressive decision. It had decided to kill us every way it could and had invented tactics to do it. We were civilians in a warlord’s territory. We were in a genuine battleground.

  We were in terrible danger.

  I interrupted Merl. “Do fippokats grow crops?”

  He looked at me like I was crazy, then shrugged. “Why, no, they don’t. Not that I’ve seen. Not even burying seeds like squirrels, though they might, come fall.”

  “The snow vine attacked our crops. It knows we are not fippokats. It is like the Corn War back on Earth. Controlling the food supply is one way to win a war.”

  “Aw, come on,” Bryan said. “It attacked the field because it was a good place for it to grow.”

  “It had to go too far, more than a half kilometer, and it passed better places to grow, like the spring. It analyzed us and made a decision, a complex decision. Then the other snow vine decided to become our ally. They are smart enough to do that. They can think.”

  “You never said this before,” Vera said.

  “I only realized it now.”

  “Plants can’t think!”

  Paula rapped on the table. “Let’s remember to be supportive and listen, not debate. We’re here to solve a problem, not to win.”

  I gave her a look of gratitude, but she was looking at someone else with warning. I took a deep breath. “They have cells I cannot identify. On Earth, plants can count. They can see, they can move, they can produce insecticides when the wrong insect comes in contact with them.”

  “It could be an instinctual response,” Merl said. “Any animal decides what to do about its territory.”

  “Plants struggle against each other for survival. They fight,” I said. “This is a war, an organized fight.”

  “Aw, come on,” Bryan said, then caught Paula’s eye. “I mean, this is a lot to accept at once.”

  “I know,” I said, working hard to be patient. “I want us to be sure we understand that we are picking sides in a war that is bigger than we are, and we are making one side a more determined enemy.”

  “Enemy. A plant enemy,” he muttered. Everyone sat quietly for a minute. A couple of crabs started buzzing near Snowman.

  “Humans go to war because they’re depraved.” Vera glanced at Paula, then continued more gently. “This is an ecosystem, so it all works together as a whole.” She was an astronomer, so of course she saw the universe as stars and planets with neat and predictable orbits, everything worked out by math: the rest of nature would be the same.

  “The plants are fierce,” Uri said. “Octavo is right about that. We must try to survive equally hard.”

  Grun nodded. “He’s found out how to fit into nature, harsh as it is here. It’s a risky plan and it’s good of him to make sure we know the risks, but it’s a reasonable plan, and I like it.”

  I looked around. We all wore the same sturdy clothes, spoke the same language, and shared the same hopes. We had debated this back on Earth and reached an agreement. We would live in harmony with nature, and nature was always in harmony, like the gears of an old-fashioned clock. I knew that the vines had killed us deliberately, with malice and forethought, but that was too hard for anyone else to believe.

  “If plants are so smart,” Bryan said, “where are their cities?”

  “Now, it’s an old planet, but it’s new to us,” Merl replied. “We’ve not been here but a couple of months, and there’s a lot to learn. We might be standing smack in the middle of a city and not be able to see it. Still, we can’t take too long before we decide what to do because we don’t have that much time. The fippokats have managed to live with the vines, and they’re mighty smart for animals. We can do it, too.”

  “This is the first place where I’ve felt genuinely at home,” Wendy said. “We found what we wanted. We left Earth behind, didn’t we? Pax will be at peace as long as we’re at peace.”

  “That’s right,” Vera repeated. “We left behind the failed paradigms like war.”

  Perhaps I was using the wrong paradigm. “You are right, it is an evolutionary struggle, and we need to fit in. But I do not know what the snow vine, either snow vine, is going to do next. We will have to keep on doing whatever they want. They might outthink us, or use us and discard us. The east vine might not even fight for us.”

  “Plants don’t control animals,” Merl said. “Influence, maybe, so it’s right to keep a weather eye, but they can’t outthink us.”

  I thought about agriculture back on Earth. Food meant money and power, and on Earth it was easy to spot th
e enemy. It had its hand in your pocket or its gun pointed at your chest.

  Paula said, “I think we all recognize that our decision might have unforeseen consequences. It will be all our decision, though, knowing that nothing’s guaranteed.”

  “If it doesn’t work,” Ramona echoed, “it’s not your fault, Octavo. I think we ought to try being a friend of the east vine for a while.”

  “It’s that or move the whole colony,” Vera said, “and we’d starve for certain, and there may be snow vines all over Pax anyway. Let’s be practical.”

  They had no idea what they were agreeing to, but if they wanted to think they were living in harmony with nature, maybe they could sleep more peacefully. War was a human thing, but not just a human thing, and we had not added anything new to this planet. We were at war and only I knew what that meant. But one person knowing what to do might be enough.

  Uri still argued for destroying the west thicket, but he was voted down, twenty-four to seven. I voted no because I feared that without the west thicket as an enemy, the east thicket might not need us.

  * * *

  I did what I could. I transplanted snow vines and aspen trees from the east thicket to the western edge of our fields as a shield. They thrived and attacked. We replanted our crops, and they grew unmolested.

  Every day, I walked with a machete on the far side of our shield of vines and hacked off any west vines reaching toward it. Sometimes I found combating vines wrapped around each other in struggle, pushing and tearing. With one chop, I rescued our white knight. Underground, I knew, the battle raged even more fiercely.

  One afternoon, Uri came with me, shirtless in the heat. A bandanna tied across his forehead caught his sweat. “Who would think farming would be so violent?” He chopped off a vine and hurled it toward a woodpile for burning. He walked on, poking with a stick in the brush for vines hiding like snakes. This was simply weeding a garden to him.

  Around us, little lizards hooted under the blue sky and the small bright Sun. Soon we would have our first harvest, and we were planning a feast.

  We had said we expected hardship, not paradise, but we really wanted both. We thought we could come in peace and find a happy niche in another ecology. Instead we found a battlefield. The east vine turned us into servile mercenaries, nothing more than big, clever fippokats helping it win another battle. We had wanted to begin the world afresh, far from Earth and all its mistakes. That had not happened, but only I realized it, and I kept my disappointment to myself. Someday I might explain to our children how we had to compromise to survive.

  Uri chopped merrily away. We faced more fighting ahead, and I hoped I would be ready.

  SYLVIA

  YEAR 34–GENERATION 2

  Nothing herein shall be deemed to infringe on the individual freedom of belief, right to speech and justice, liberty, and the peaceful pursuit of individual aims in harmony with the welfare and interests of the Commonwealth as a whole.

  —from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax

  Before the roof blew away, I had to check it, I had to, and it didn’t matter who said I shouldn’t or if it really wasn’t safe to go upstairs. Summer meant hurricanes and I’d dreamed of designing a beautiful building as strong as a hurricane but I didn’t get beauty or strength because they wouldn’t let me. And this hurricane! It was the first storm of the summer and the meteorologists said it would probably be the worst ever. Rain was plowing against the lodge when Julian and I went up to the third floor. We opened the trapdoor to the attic and I climbed up on his shoulders to look at the roof from the underside.

  It rocked like a boat on water. The shingles were ripped off in some places, rain slashed in and filled the attic with the smell of drenched wood, and the wind tugged on the beams and gables and strained every joint. What if I’d woven the studs and rafters as if they were reeds? Then some wood cracked in the corner like an exploding hydrogen cactus.

  “Torch!” I shouted at Julian, then motioned since he couldn’t hear me over the wind. The flame flickered in the wind as he handed it up and the air smelled of burning resin, then a hard wind swatted the roof and it rocked again.

  There was the problem: the improvised tie-down had broken at the northwest corner. I’d designed the roof to be set into the walls with slotted joints and crossties the way the architecture text recommended, but no one had time for the complicated work. No one wanted to give time to a child’s dream. They’d used poles and logs not even sawed into real beams. They got what they wanted.

  Would the building survive the storm at all? I wanted doubled-up beams, corner braces, and extra ties. Extravagances, they said, and the building turned out weak, cramped, and clumsy.

  “Sylvia!” Julian shouted, and added something I couldn’t catch. His red hair shone like flame in the torchlight and his eyes suffered for me, for how I felt about the roof, my poor roof.

  I began to climb down and there was Vera standing at the head of the stairs. She must have struggled all the way up to check on us, but why? She was the new moderator of Pax so she ought to be concerned about the building but we could have told her all about it. Torchlight lit her face, wrinkled like tree bark, white hair receding like a man’s, false teeth bared.

  “Julian!” She sounded like an underoiled machine. “Why did you bring Sylvia here?”

  “My idea,” I yelled so she could hear me over the storm. Julian had followed me, trying to be helpful. But Vera ignored me and motioned for us to follow her.

  We trudged down the steps. The wind tore at the building the way a fippolion’s claws hunt for roots, and the plaster was cracking as the walls shuddered. Vera descended step by step, leaning on a cane. It would have been disrespectful to get ahead of her, and children must honor the parents! We’d heard that since we were born, and how could we disobey?

  She yelled at him all the way down, and when we arrived in the crowded, dark cellar, I put out the torch and tried again.

  “I needed to inspect the roof.” I kept even a hint of disrespect out of my voice.

  “Julian could have gone alone and told you about it.” She grunted as she lowered herself onto a bench.

  “But he didn’t design it. He wouldn’t know what to look for.”

  She waved her cane. “It was too dangerous.”

  “Don’t worry,” he murmured. He was still a teenager like me, but his beard had come in red like his hair. He got that from his mother, Paula, and a squarish face from his father, Octavo, and had a smile so wide that it made his eyes crinkle up. He patted me on the arm. She glared at his hand.

  Even so, I swear I wanted to like her and I thought maybe she acted angry because she was frightened by the storm. She’d been moderator for only a month, elected after Paula’s death, and I hoped that Vera would be as good as her. Paula had been too sick in her last year to be a real moderator and I hoped that Pax would become calm and organized again. I wanted to keep building, to design strong and beautiful homes and barns and bridges. Survival was year to year and survival came first, but beauty was good for the soul. Several Earth texts said that and Earth couldn’t have been all bad.

  My mother, Half-Foot Wendy, was sitting with Octavo. His white hair and beard looked bright in the dim light of oil lamps. I headed toward them, zigzagging because all twenty-eight residents of the lodge and their possessions crowded the room, all their clothes, beds, tools, medical equipment, and robots. There were three other older lodges, also probably having trouble in a storm so fierce, with cellars full of people, but the cellars were sturdy. Everyone understood the importance of that.

  Mama smiled at me as if I’d gone for a stroll to pick friendly fruit, with a wide smile like Julian’s, but the corners of her mouth disappeared into her jowls. Her face had once been smooth and full like mine, I’d seen the pictures, but she wasn’t made for this gravity. It had pulled her face down, and her breasts, knees, arms, all her flesh drooped. On Earth, according to the parents, I’d be light as a leaf.

  “I
t was a good design,” Mama said.

  “It was my first real building.”

  “Not your fault,” Octavo said, but he wasn’t looking at me.

  Mama wanted to go to the gift center and I helped her stand and walk. The top of my head only reached her shoulder because Pax gravity had made us children short and strong and fast like native animals. The parents were crippled after a lifetime of falls and struggling, no matter how many times the medics rebuilt their bones and joints.

  “Not bad in here yet,” she called from the gift center, which was just big buckets, not a real outhouse, and it didn’t stink yet, but we’d be stuck in the cellar for two days with no chance to make a gift to a friendly plant, and they’d get full. She limped out and took my shoulder again.

  “Do you know why Vera yells at Julian?” she whispered, and put her arm around my shoulders. “Octavo told me. Julian’s sterile.”

  Sterile? I was so surprised I didn’t say anything. Mama shook her head and patted my cheek because she knew I liked Julian.

  Sterility was the Pax curse, that’s what the parents muttered, and population was the Pax problem. Half the parents were dead now and they’d had only twenty-four surviving children, and half the cache of sperm and ova from Earth had been lost in a refrigeration failure in a storm. We children had produced only thirteen grandchildren so far, none from me, and I was now eighteen Earth years old, fourteen Pax years, and fertile, and a lot of parents thought I had a duty to fulfill. “You have time,” Mama always said, but other parents were impatient. I saw how mothers loved their children and I couldn’t stand to love anything that much yet because sometimes babies died even before they were born. What if my baby died?

  We made the usual hurricane meal that evening, fancy fippokat stew, fragrant with onions and potatoes, but I didn’t eat much. I minded Nicoletta’s toddler while she fed her father. Later Ramona wanted to play Go and how can you say no to a parent, especially a bossy one like her? So we played and I won, probably because I could see better. Eventually, the roof blew off. The wood tore horribly until there was a thud and shake of released pressure, then rain blasted louder than ever against the attic floor. No one said anything. Without the tug from the roof, the building seemed to creak less. I was sitting on my cot with a piece of paper, designing a temporary roof, when Julian sat down next to me and put his arm around me. I closed my eyes and leaned against him, hoping Vera was watching. I wished I were on Earth.