Semiosis Read online

  In my earliest memories I thought Pax was somewhere on Earth because the names of so many things were the same here as in the educational programs. But there were big differences too, so later I thought there was some elaborate Earth-Pax distinction about animals and plants and food. I worried that Earth and all its tall fragile people with their multipart names might be just on the other side of the lake and might cross it, because they’d made Earth a living hell. The parents always said so.

  But then I understood that Earth was far away, just a computer library of texts, music, and pictures about complicated histories and places I’d never visit and eventually saw less of as the computers broke down. Besides us, there was no intelligent life on Pax, just the snow vines and some sneaky carnivores. That disappointed the parents and me, too, when I realized that the only new people I’d ever meet were new babies. I wished for aliens.

  The architecture texts, when I could access them, showed beautiful and inspiring buildings, completely impossible because we didn’t have pre-stressed concrete or structural steel, in fact hardly any iron because the satellite hadn’t found any ore deposits. We had only bricks and lumber but I’d tried to learn what was practical and apply it and now my first building was falling apart on top of me because people who hadn’t studied architecture were sure they knew better.

  Vera stayed anxious during the whole storm, organizing teams to mop up leaks and cook meals. Nights were the worst. It was early lights out because the parents wanted to sleep, but they never slept well, waking at any noise, every clap of thunder, shuffling again and again to the gift center, and snoring louder than the roaring wind, then early lights on when they were done with what passed for sleep. They kept me awake and I began to act like them, inattentive, irritable, and forgetful, chronically sleep-deprived because the days and nights were too short for the parents, who’d been born on Earth. I wished I were somewhere else.

  As soon as the storm calmed, two days after the roof was torn off, I slipped out of the damp and stinking cellar, finally, with some other children. I went to the lake with Julian and tall, skinny Aloysha, who were both hunters, and Daniel, who fished and was almost thirty years old. We wanted to see how the boats had fared and what had washed up on shore. It was still raining hard and the clouds were low and dark. We were wrapped in downy acetate ponchos like cocoons but our feet were drenched. Puddles and streamlets were everywhere. Everything we walked past was damaged, buildings and irrigation canals and farm fields, and the disaster would look even worse when the Sun came out. Even some of the aspen trees in the snow vine thicket had fallen, although the thicket itself remained sturdy in a way that I envied.

  The river through the friendly thicket was flooded. The lake was flooded too, with only a narrow strip of sand between the water and the tree line. The other rivers were probably flooded but we couldn’t see them through the rain. The whitecapped waves were dirty brown from all the soil washed into the water. Rain rattled on the surface of the water and made it dull as the clouds. The boats had been hauled up beyond the tree line and lashed tightly.

  Daniel, who always worried, checked the boats. “They look good,” he said, relieved. I checked the wicker fish traps stored under them. They looked good, too.

  Wicker was the reason I’d come to the beach. I made baskets. After storms, fresh reeds and vines would wash up on the beach, brought to the lake by the flooding rivers, and there were usually dead natans from the lake, the swimming plants that dried into silky-soft fibers. I also hoped that a roof beam might be floating around, because we could salvage the nails, at least. Julian and Aloysha found an injured fippolion. I didn’t look as they pulled out their knives and ended its whimpers. It would be a lot of meat, tough and not nearly as good as deer crab, but we’d have enough to eat.

  I saw strange flashes of color in a mat of branches that had washed on shore. I got closer and saw rainbow-striped pieces of stems and twigs. But a hungry lizard or worse might be riding in the mat so I teased out some pieces with a stick. Finger-wide rainbows alternated with black bands on the twigs, worn and scratched but still beautiful, and I could weave extraordinary things with it. I took all I could and stuffed it into my bag. I hoped I’d find more down the beach.

  On the way I saw something pink in the sand, maybe a chunk of rose quartz, so I checked. A pretty stone could be beautiful, too. Closer, I saw shiny yellow metal with it. Maybe it was a bit from one of the landing pods that had crashed thirty-four years ago. I dug it out of the wet sand and let the rain wash it clean. It was a glass ball, solid and heavy, the size of a baby’s fist and faceted, worn on the surface but clear where it was chipped, wrapped in a spiral band of gold.

  The gold was battered but I could still see writing engraved in a kind of alphabet I’d never seen in history texts, just lines and triangles. I turned it around and around in my hands and tried to imagine what it was. A machine part? I knew what most machine parts looked like even if I wasn’t a technician, and a few lenses sort of looked like this, but lenses were small. A decoration? We didn’t have many decorations and nothing like this because gold was too useful to be wasted. A piece of ore? Not even possible. Maybe something natural? Even more impossible. It wasn’t like anything I knew.

  Finally I began to realize that the only things I knew were either natural or human-made. Maybe I couldn’t recognize the ball because it wasn’t either. Maybe it had been made by another kind of sentient being. Maybe someone else lived on Pax. Someone who could make things. Someone who could write and handle metal and glass and make something beautiful with it. This ball had sat in the bottom of the lake or washed in from a river or some traveler had left it behind. Someone else lived on Pax. Maybe we could find them.

  Julian and Aloysha had tied the dead fippolion to a fallen branch and were hoisting it up, a male big enough to tear apart snow vines, with front claws like machetes. They wobbled with its weight. The rain was falling harder. I ran up and held out the ball. My hand trembled.

  “I don’t think this is ours,” I said, “look, I think this is something alien, I mean Pax, really, we’re aliens, it has writing, I found it, really different writing, it’s beautiful, isn’t it, and it was in the sand over there, and it’s not human.” I realized I wasn’t making sense.

  Julian set the branch on his shoulder and put his hands around mine to steady it. He looked at the ball for what seemed like a long time, then he smiled wider than he ever had. Daniel ran over to see what we were excited about and we all started talking at once.

  “This is gold, look, and glass.”

  “We don’t make things like this.”

  “What is it? Let me hold it.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  Aloysha howled like a lion.

  “Something—someone made this,” I said. “We’re not alone. Not here, not on Pax, not in the universe.”

  We stared at it for a moment.

  “There’s intelligent life here besides us,” I said, “somewhere nearby.”

  “Nearby,” Aloysha echoed, squinting. He didn’t always catch on fast.

  “How old is this?” Julian said.

  “The wear should tell us something,” Daniel said. He took it and turned it around in his hand slowly. “It can’t be that old. I mean, not thousands of years.”

  “So they’re still alive,” I said. Daniel handed it back to me, and for a moment I was surprised to feel it was wet because I’d forgotten we were standing in the middle of a rainstorm. I was drenched and rain was pelting on the ball in my hand and all our faces were dripping but I didn’t care. We weren’t alone on Pax.

  “What’s it for?” Aloysha asked.

  “Maybe,” I said, “it’s an invitation. We need to find them.”

  Julian smiled. “Soon.”

  When we got to the village, he and Aloysha had to take the lion to be dressed out and Daniel went to report to the fishing team while I headed straight for the lodge, where Vera would probably be. The reek from the basement hit
me as soon as I opened the door. I knew I shouldn’t go into the basement and drip over everything so I had someone ask her to come up.

  She huffed up the steps, looking anxious. “Is there a problem? Did we lose the boats?”

  “No, they’re fine, but—”

  “The fields?”

  “Well, they’re flooded and there’s damage, and buildings too, but—”

  She shook her head and closed her eyes and sighed. “This is hard, so hard.”

  “I found this.” I held out the ball. Maybe it would cheer her up. She opened her eyes and stared at it blankly. “I think it was made by some other intelligent life,” I said. “It was at the lake.”

  Terrell had come up behind her. He was a parent and metallurgist, so I said, “That’s gold around it. We should look for whoever made it.”

  He was tall and as thin as a parasitized aspen, so when he nudged Vera, she had to look up to see his face as they exchanged a look. They were interested so I pulled out some rainbow twigs.

  “I found these, too.”

  They stiffened with surprise, but Vera said, “We don’t have time for that, not now. There’s too much to do.” She took the ball from my hand. “I’ll put it on the agenda for the next meeting.”

  But the next Commonwealth meeting was in four days. Four days!

  Still, people heard about the ball and wanted to see it that night in the dark cellar as we ate dinner.

  Ramona said, “It looks like a Christmas ornament,” and she began to sing a Christmas song, but Bryan, another parent, complained that Christmas was a nightmare.

  “Arguing over the past,” said Rosemarie, a child a little older than me, and Bryan overheard and scolded her for disrespecting the parents. I’d read about Christmas and “frivolity” was the word I remembered, and frivolity seemed interesting. And unlikely on Pax.

  Survival first. There was a lot to repair and replant but there always was. “Is this really better than Earth?” Nicoletta had whispered once when we were young and no parents were around. Now, she worked as my mother’s replacement, scavenging parts from the failed radio system to repair the medical tomography equipment, and if there were parts left over, to keep the weeding machines running. Machines did mindless tasks so we had time to care for sick parents or prepare for the next storm or preserve what food we had for winter.

  Nicoletta had borne three babies already and two lived. When we were young, we used to coil her curly black hair into ringlets. These days, she had no time for fussing with her hair. And sometimes she cried for no reason.

  Daniel fished but the lake became anaerobic during the bad droughts and all the fish died. My brother tried to enrich the soil in the fields and complained that the snow vines took the nutrients as fast as he could fertilize, but snow vine fruit kept everyone fed when crops failed or were destroyed by storms.

  Sometimes, Octavo would stare at nothing and grumble: “Parameters. Fippokats here. Uri, let’s go weeding.” Uri had died ten years ago. Octavo was sick and would die soon too, and I’d miss him because he was always patient with me.

  I was in the plaza weaving a thatch frame for a temporary roof for the lodge when Octavo limped up to ask for a sample of the rainbow bamboo, as he called it.

  “Something for the meeting,” he said, and coughed with a wheezing bark. “Something that needs an explanation.” He knew plants better than anyone and I wondered what there was to explain.

  But thunderstorms arrived on the meeting night and no building could hold all residents at once, although we were only sixty-two people. The roof thatched with plastic bark on my lodge held with hardly a leak and some people congratulated me, but not Vera. She was still proving she was moderator and reorganizing our rooms because a lot of them had been damaged in the big hurricane, even though we’d already rearranged ourselves without her help and no one was complaining.

  I went to the closet that was my new room, with nothing but a cot and one box that held everything I owned, so angry I almost cried. I should have known then what I realized later, that we wouldn’t have voted to investigate the glass makers anyway. The parents would’ve voted no, the children would’ve voted the way their parents did, and even the grandchildren would follow their parents’ parents. Children didn’t think for themselves. We did what we were told because we’d been convinced that we didn’t really understand things well enough to make our own decisions. That’s what we were told all the time and how could we argue with that? We were supposed to be happy to be just like the parents, and working together in harmony mattered more than thinking as individuals. We were still children even though most of us were twenty or thirty years old.

  What would happen when all the parents died?

  Octavo came to talk to me the next day while I was working in a corner of the plaza next to Snowman, the big old snow vine. I was making a basket for collecting pond grubs, a wide hoop basket with loosely attached ribs so it would be soft and flexible because the grubs burst so easily. I was thinking about the meeting we should have held. Why wasn’t Vera interested in something as big as another intelligent species nearby when something as small as who slept on the sunrise side of a lodge fascinated her?

  I could hear her laughing as I worked. She was sitting with some other parents at the far corner of the plaza cleaning trilobites, stinky work, so they were as far from the lodges and the meal area as they could get and I couldn’t hear the words, just occasional laughter. She always worked hard and the parents and some children liked her leadership and I still wanted to like her but all I had were questions.

  Octavo lowered himself onto a bench, panting. I pulled out some cois twine and anchored the ribs first on one side of the hoop and then on the other. He couldn’t tolerate certain fungus spores and his lungs had been regrown three times but they worked less efficiently each time. The same thing had been killing my father, Merl, when a pack of ground eagles got him first. Our hunters tracked down the pack, the last one to bother us, and we put a bouquet of spiny eagle feathers on Papa’s grave.

  “A Coke would be nice right now,” Octavo finally said. Coke was some sort of Earth drink. “You know, snow vine fruit looks a lot like that glass ball, those same surface facets when they’re immature.”

  I glanced up. “Is that important?”

  He pulled out the rainbow bamboo twig I’d given him. “Pax is a billion years older than Earth. It has had time for more evolution.”

  I finished a weaver and reached for another, thought again, and picked a coil of greener cois so I could make a striped basket. “We should find the people who made the ball.”

  “It might not be that easy, girl. There are two intelligences. The ball is obvious, but the bamboo … It belongs to the snow vine family. We set fippolions to graze on the west vine and the east vine rejoiced. Our loyal master…”

  He paused again to catch his breath and gazed across the plaza. I kept weaving, wondering why he was complaining about the snow vines again.

  “This bamboo,” he said, “displays a representation of a rainbow, not a refraction like the surface of a bubble. This is made with chromoplasts. Plants can see. They grow toward light and observe its angle to know the season. They recognize colors. This one made colors on its bark to show something. It is a signal … that this plant is intelligent. It can interpret the visual spectrum and control its responses.”

  “So it wants to attract us? Attract intelligent beings, I mean?”

  “No. A signal to beware. Like thorns. Who knows what a plant might be thinking? I … doubt they have a natural tenderness for animals. We are … conveniences.”

  “But the glass ball is beautiful. It’s a fruit, you said, so it must have come from a plant that was friendly or the glass makers wouldn’t have made such a nice copy of it. Maybe it came from the rainbow bamboo, since it’s like snow vine fruit. We should find it.”

  Octavo was staring across the plaza. Vera was getting up. He turned to me. “Snow vines are not especially intellige
nt, less than a wolf. Well, you have never seen wolves or even dogs.… But this rainbow bamboo … You can predict animals but not plants. They never think like we do. It might not be friendly.”

  “If the snow vines can decide to give us fruit, then the rainbow bamboo might give us fruit, too. We always need food and a more intelligent plant would know how much we can do for it in exchange for food.”

  “Exactly, plants always want something.” He glanced at Vera, who was walking toward us. “But this cois twine … Tell me, have you noticed a difference in fibers in the different colors?”

  I frowned. Why was he asking that? But I wanted to be polite so I picked up samples of each color and flexed them. “No. I think the greener is just picked younger.”

  Vera came up to us and stopped.

  Octavo looked at her. “We have been discussing cois. It could have many uses, perhaps like flax.… We have been too focused on food sources, I think.”

  “We always need food,” she said.

  They were silent for a while and since I wouldn’t be interrupting, I said, “I’ve been thinking about the glass and rainbow bamboo. When can we discuss it at a meeting?”

  “Not soon,” she said. “We still haven’t recovered from the hurricane.”

  I tried to hide my disappointment, but she was staring at my basket instead of me anyway. The stripe looked good.

  “That’s the natural variation of the cois fiber,” I murmured.

  “Efficient,” she said, and hobbled away.

  “We’ll never discuss it!” I said. “Paula wasn’t like that.” Octavo never scolded when we children complained.