Semiosis Page 6

  “Paula had … training.” He looked at the twig. “Not our planet, not our niche.”

  “Intelligent creatures have no niche.” I’d read that somewhere.

  Octavo shook his head. He never really liked plants even though he was a botanist, and it was no good arguing with him. He had me help him get up and he went to the lab.

  I kept working on the basket and I tried to imagine plants as smart as we were. How would they relate to us? Probably not the way regular plants acted toward bug-lizards or fippokats. And I could make beautiful things with rainbow bamboo. Why wait? I got some twigs from storage, soaked them, and when the grub basket was done, I took a twig, made two loops, and then braided the end through the loops. A colorful bracelet, a whole minute wasted on a decoration. I made seven and set them to dry in the Sun with the basket.

  I gave the soaking water to Snowman, put my things away, helped erect a bower to shade some lettuce seedlings, and delivered the basket to Rosemarie and Daniel. I returned to the bracelets, put one on, and gave others to Julian, Aloysha, Mama, Nicoletta, Cynthia, and Enea.

  Vera saw them during the evening meal out in the plaza, boxer bird soup and tulip salad. We didn’t have much because of the storm, but we sat down happy enough on the benches on either side of the line of tables. It was a comfortable evening, although the parents were bundled up, always cold when we were hot. The bats were swooping and singing, and cactus balloon plants on strings kept them from stealing food. The grandchildren, the pregnant women, and the sick ate well. I got plenty of salad and a bowl of soup with a scrap of meat. Julian got only broth from the birds he’d hunted. The grandchildren were in a giggly mood.

  Then Vera frowned at the bracelets. “Those have no place here,” she said. “We don’t have time to waste.”

  “Oh, I suppose you’ll want me to erase the carving on my walking stick,” Mama said. “Everything doesn’t have to be useful, does it?”

  That provoked more of the endless debate about a flower garden, parents’ opinions only, children should listen and learn. Terrell thought we should look for metal, not pretty flowers.

  Bryan made a show of standing to speak in spite of his stiff joints, as if we owed him something for chronic bursitis and his drooping skin with scars where skin cancer had been removed. He wanted to require childbearing “in harmony with the welfare and interests of the Commonwealth as a whole,” as the Constitution said. Parents liked to quote the Constitution and worried that if we didn’t follow it, we’d face disaster, but the Constitution talked about beauty too, and about equality. Parents quoted only what they wanted to.

  “I think we’ve discussed this enough,” Vera said. “We should get rid of the bracelets. This is no time for divisiveness.”

  “Oh, it’s only a bracelet,” Mama said.

  “The problem is with what it represents. This is Pax. A community with peace, mutual trust, and support,” Vera said, quoting the Constitution. “The bracelet is a violation of trust. Let’s be practical. Symbols are important. The bracelets symbolize a decision we aren’t ready to make now. We have too much to do just to recover from the hurricane.”

  I should have resisted, I should have spoken up, but too many people were looking at me, childless, designer of a failed roof, and a disrespectful citizen, or so they probably thought, and we children were always being suspected of being lazy and greedy. I took off my bracelet. So did the rest. Aloysha and Nicoletta made a face when they did and Julian stamped on his and broke it. Terrell burned them.

  That night I was crying in my bed when Julian came to my room and he didn’t say a thing, he just hugged me until I stopped crying and we made love for the first time. I’d done that before with other boys so the parents would think I was trying to get pregnant but it was just to satisfy other people, not to make me happy.

  Julian wanted to make me happy and I wanted to be happy with him, and afterward I held him and realized I wanted him to be happy forever, too. The parents would have thought the whole thing was a waste of time because he was sterile, but that night was love, real love. It was uselessly beautiful just like the bracelets. And it was the beginning of the revolt.

  I looked for the rainbow bamboo in the storage shed the next day and it was gone. There might have been more at the beach but I didn’t have time to go to the lake. Julian looked for it when he hunted and finally found a twig, prettier than I remembered.

  “It’s from Thunder River, at the waterfall,” he said. No one had gone upriver beyond the waterfall but the maps based on the meteorologists’ satellite pictures showed a long canyon up through some mountains that led to a wide plateau. “And I found this.” He smiled and held out some pieces of red, green, and yellow glass. “It might be obsidian or agate, but I don’t think so. What do we do?”

  I thought hard before I answered. We could continue as usual, working from Luxrise to sunset, planting, weeding, building, harvesting, hunting, gathering, cooking, cleaning, weaving, sewing, caring for animals, monitoring equipment, repairing machines, watching the computers sputter and the robots stop, disassembling dead machines for their parts, helping the parents to and from the clinic, and reengineering the electrical system to run on wind and hand cranks.

  We could watch the seasons go by, spring with floods and lizards hatching everywhere, summer with its storms knocking down roofs and trees and fields of grain, autumn with droughts and fires, and winter with frost and fog. Our holidays were harvests, births, funerals, and the solar solstices and equinoxes, and a holiday only meant a bit more to eat. On Earth people went to battles, carnivals, museums, and universities, and on a lucky day I got to go to the lake. On Earth there was protest, revolution, genocide, piracy, and war, and I was punished for weaving bracelets.

  “I know what I don’t want to do,” I said so sadly that he hugged me.

  But we kept on doing it. What was our choice? Search for the glass makers on our own? That would be a violation of mutual support.

  Besides, Mama was sick with cancer from radiation exposure during the space trip and she got worse until she was bedridden. The same cancer had killed many parents already. I spent as much time as I could with her in her little room in the lodge, wondering if I’d miss her as much as Papa, and one day I asked the question that I’d always wondered about.

  “What was Earth really like? Really and honestly?” Books said things, usually bad, but I could tell they didn’t say everything.

  Mama’s bones hurt, her belly hurt, and she was glad for any distraction, that’s what she always said. She pursed her gray lips and thought for a while. “Stressful. And complicated. Actually, not that bad for us because we were rich, at least compared to the rest of the world. Other people died of hunger and we could get together enough money to go to the stars.”

  Rich? She was rich? No one had told me that. “What if you hadn’t gone, Mama?”

  “We’d have all led easier lives. You too, probably. Oh, they like to tell tales, don’t they, about pollution and diseases, the beginning of the end of humanity, but the rich got by. It was only the poor who were killing each other. Or trying not to die of one thing or another. It was so tragic.”

  “But, then why did you leave? Didn’t you have to?”

  “No, we didn’t, we volunteered, and we wanted to try to do better. People had made horrible mistakes on Earth, fatal mistakes for whole countries, millions and millions of people. Oh, it was shameful how the poor got so little help for problems they never created. You wouldn’t understand, but we wanted to try again. To make a fresh start of Earth. To do it right this time, without the unfairness that made some people rich and some people poor. Things you couldn’t imagine. I think we made a good new start. And I’m glad we did. Oh, there’s hardship, but we expected that. It was like coming home to Eden.”

  I’d heard of Eden, a mythical paradise, but the book that told all about it wasn’t in the libraries. I wouldn’t understand anyway according to the parents, but hardship wasn’t paradise, I kne
w that. What would it be like to be so rich you could get any book you wanted and then have time to read it?

  “For all its troubles, Earth could get boring.” Mama smiled. “Pax was exciting.”

  I thought about that while I was crying during her funeral. I’d have led an easier life on Earth. We buried her near the friendly snow vines along the western fields, next to Paula, and we buried Mama in rags because we couldn’t afford to bury good clothes. Octavo stared slumped and tired at the vines. “Birth to death,” he muttered, “they have us.”

  Octavo didn’t like snow vines so he might misjudge the rainbow bamboo and the glass makers. I said that to Julian one morning. He was making poisoned arrows for hunting. We were far away from everyone so that a grandchild couldn’t accidentally wander over, and we could say what we thought.

  “We need to go up Thunder River and see what’s there,” I said.

  “Up Thunder River,” he repeated, watching his work. He wore gloves and goggles as he dipped arrowheads in ergot and set them to dry in a rack in the Sun. “I’m a trained explorer. I can do it.”

  “Both of us. We both have to look.”

  He hesitated. Vera would never approve.

  “I’ll go without you,” I said.

  After a while he said, “You should never travel alone,” in the same voice as if he were saying Honor the parents. We started planning while he wrapped the arrows in mullein leaves. Would the glass makers and the bamboo welcome us? Why hadn’t the glass makers come to us?

  Survival last, curiosity first. Better no life than this life.

  So when Vera’s weather report said there were no hurricanes in formation, we sneaked off, carrying food, a blanket, a hammock, rope, a lighter, hunting knives, and clothes. All the clothes I owned fit into a single backpack, and people on Earth, rich people like I’d have been, had closets full of clothes.

  We left with questions and we came back with answers to questions we hadn’t even thought to ask, with thoughts we weren’t supposed to think. I almost didn’t want to come back but I knew we had to, and so we did, nearly sixty days later, with rainbow-striped hiking staffs, rainbow bracelets, and rainbow diadems. We were skinny, our clothes in rags, our backpacks filled with tokens of another civilization and morsels of bamboo fruit that were dried and shriveled but still delicious. We entered the village, a huddle of mismatched hovels, and the lodge I had designed looked utterly clumsy, still with the improvised bark thatch roof. The fields rose on hills, thirsty, the snow vine thickets hulked like prison walls, and storm clouds churned overhead.

  Cynthia saw us and shouted. We were surrounded immediately, smothered with hugs and tears and welcomes, everyone asking questions all at once.

  Then Vera hobbled up. “You left us when we needed you,” she squeaked.

  “We found a city,” I said.

  “You were incredibly irresponsible. You most of all, Sylvia. We searched for you for days.”

  “But they’re back safe,” Ramona said. “That’s what matters.”

  Vera kept scolding. Enea’s little boy toddled up, yelling, “Juu!” with arms raised, ready for Julian to pick him up. I picked up Higgins, Nicoletta’s boy, and he squirmed with excitement. Octavo was limping toward us, looking at Julian.

  Aloysha repeated until we heard, “What city? What city?”

  “Another hurricane will arrive tonight,” Vera said, “and the buildings aren’t ready, and there are animals to be gathered in!”

  “A beautiful city,” I said, “with sparkling glass roofs and gardens of rainbow bamboo.”

  Octavo arrived, the wind tossing his long beard. “A city?” He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look happy to see his own son.

  “Up on Thunder River, Dad.”

  “That’s not important,” Vera said.

  “The glass makers?” Octavo said.

  “They’re not there,” Julian said. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

  “I brought some fruit,” I said. I patted Higgins and hoped Julian would stick to our plan.

  “And we brought soil samples,” Julian added. “They look rich.”

  “A hurricane is coming!” Vera said.

  Not a big hurricane, though, and finally we were assembled in the cellar. All the people who could had crowded into the lodge with us as thunder rumbled and Vera tried to convince them to start preparing the stew but we respectfully ignored her.

  Is it a lie not to tell everything? Julian and I wanted to save certain details for the Commonwealth meeting and there were things I didn’t want to tell at all.

  “We walked for twenty days,” I said.

  “It had to be farther than that,” Bryan said.

  It had seemed farther.

  * * *

  On the day that we left, we circled to one side of Thunder River’s waterfall and hurried over the scree and up the ledges on the cliff, then got lost finding our way around a snow vine thicket. The first night, we slept cuddled in a hammock draped with a bug net, and the barks from the digging owls kept me awake for hours because they sounded so human that I was sure they were the voices of people chasing us, and the fireflies whizzed around us until I felt dizzy. When I woke, a slug had crawled into a fold of the net and divided, so slimy little pink things were crawling all around trying to touch us and dissolve a nip of flesh for a meal.

  When we got close to the river that morning, we were in foggy, swampy woods, and slithery things moved on the ground, giant slugs, some bright pink and purple, some just clumps of clear slime, and a few disguised like logs or vines, and we had to put spearheads on our walking staffs to protect ourselves but they were sometimes too fast and stung us. Moths swirled around us in patterns like giant thumbprints, each trying for a bite. We were wrapped in raincoats and double pairs of socks and had smeared mud on our faces and still lost bits of flesh.

  Beyond the waterfall and its mists and slugs, travel got easier.

  * * *

  “Up above the waterfall,” I told the people in the cellar, “the canyon is like the ruins of a giant Greek temple.” Everyone had seen a picture of the Acropolis in the history text, the birthplace of democracy. The canyon actually was high and narrow, with the trees arching overhead, more like a cathedral, but only the architecture texts showed churches.

  “There are rocks like columns,” I said, “and aspens grow free and tall alongside them. No snow vines. There are meadows full of flowers on the riverbanks.”

  * * *

  I didn’t mention all the rocks to climb over and around, uphill all the way, and some of the flowers were little biting corals with dewdrops of digestive enzymes on tiny teeth. The only food we could easily find were wild onions and palm-sized trilobites netted from the river. Onions and trilobites for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Once, we were trapped between the riverbank and a cliff by three ground eagles, drumming their air sacs and dancing and snapping their big beaks at us, human-sized and smelly, with spiny feathers that looked so much like bark and dried weeds they’d had no trouble sneaking up on us. We lit a line of fires to hold them off but they were waiting until we ran out of fuel so we caught trilobites and threw them to the eagles until they’d eaten their fill and left.

  We left the valley and climbed hand in hand through the misty forest around the final waterfall, up through vines and mosses and clumps of pulsing slime and finally over some rocks and into a forest. That’s when we saw our first rainbow bamboo. A stand of it grew right along the edge of the cliff, taller than some of the trees, with trunks as wide as a human thigh. The bamboo stood straight and proud, not at all like the snaking snow vines. Living rainbows. A few pieces of fruit, pink and translucent and bright in the sunshine, hung face-high.

  Julian and I looked at each other. You should never eat something untested.

  “It looks exactly like the glass maker ornament, except bigger,” I said.

  “Snow vines can kill when they decide to.”

  “But the bamboo hasn’t met us yet, so it shouldn�
��t have an opinion.” A piece of fruit pulled off easily from the stem. Three seeds were shadowed inside. It smelled like fresh wheat and cinnamon. I took a little bite and the juice was sweet and oily against my tongue. Julian watched.

  “If it kills me,” I said, “I’ll die happy.” But that was all I ate for the moment. I stroked the bamboo’s smooth and waxy trunk and I imagined it as door frames or roof beams, or split and woven into wall coverings. A small trunk cut into rings would make beautiful bracelets.

  We admired it awhile, then walked along the top of the cliff toward the waterfall, hoping to see the aliens behind every rock. We looked down on the canyon, green and long and dropping sharply between the stone cliffs. The view became better as we got close to the waterfall and at the most beautiful spot we found a bench carved into the stone and encrusted with lichen. At first we thought it was natural but there were words carved into the back of the seat, the same script writing that was on the glass ball. The glass makers had been there! We shouted and hugged each other.

  We sat on the bench, trying to guess what glass makers could be like. The seat was low and wide. The glass makers were somewhere upstream, so we began hiking. The land became flat and the river got wider and slower. There was a path along it made of flagstones, heaved up by roots. We were going in the right direction, and we walked faster. There were more bits of glass in the river, all the colors of the rainbow. Around the next bend, soon, soon, we’d find them.

  That afternoon we spotted a cluster of four buildings with domed glass roofs sparkling in the middle of a grove of bamboo. I ran toward the nearest one. The roofs were rings of colored glass blocks arranged in rainbows, the walls were made of brownish bricks, and the foundations were stone with bands of sparkling gray and white. Julian was right behind me. But as soon as I started running, I saw that the buildings were ruins, the walls cracked and tumbled in, the roofs collapsed.

  The glass makers weren’t there. They hadn’t been there for a long time.