Semiosis Read online

I was crying by the time I entered the closest building. Dirt and dead leaves covered the floor. The walls inside had been faced with glazed tile in a pattern of interlaced red and green lines. I’d seen glazed tiles in computer texts. I tried to wipe away the tears and look carefully. The room was about five meters across. Glass blocks from the roof lay on the floor, half-buried and sparkling.

  “Spectacular,” Julian whispered.

  The building had several low bays, each crowned by a half dome, and one of them was intact. The glass roof was dirty and corals were crusted on the outside.

  Someone had stood below this ceiling once, had stared up at the sunlight filtering through it, someone with eyes like mine that enjoyed colors, someone who built buildings like me, someone who thought like me, someone who could do things that I’d dreamed of. Someone had built a bench, low and wide, along the wall. I sat on it and sobbed. Julian sat with me.

  The glass makers must have abandoned the buildings before the parents had come to Pax. We’d traveled far to find only ruins, but there had to be more glass makers somewhere. I wiped my face and stood up. I walked over and around fallen brick and stone and glass, trying to see how it had been built. The bricks were slightly offset at about head level, sloping in for a half meter, then changing to glass, and the curve of the domes was parabolic, not circular. One apse seemed to be the entrance to the building and I’d have had to duck a bit if it had been intact. I was taller than the glass makers.

  “Come here!” Julian said. I heard rustling. He was already in the next building. He’d kicked some of the dirt and leaves off the floor. It was covered with a mosaic of flowers and plants, including a stand of rainbow bamboo. We cleared away more dirt. The bamboo had flowers and fruit, and what looked like a skinny yellow arm and hand was reaching for a fruit. We cleared more as fast as we could but the rest of the tiles were broken and scattered.

  The buildings were surrounded by bamboo and weeds. I picked another piece of fruit and it tasted better than ever. Fippokats peeked out from a burrow between the bamboo roots. The path kept going, straight into a patch of woods. More ruins? Or would the next building be inhabited? We began walking.

  Two hours later, just before Luxset, mothbitten, we saw the city on a bluff above the river, a huge city. Sparkling roofs and bamboo rose behind a glazed brick city wall taller than we were. But we knew from the cracked wall and shattered roofs that once we got through the gate, we’d find nothing but fippokats, bats, and lizards. I was already out of tears.

  That night, we lashed the hammock between two bamboo trunks and slept beneath a dome that was partially intact. The moths finally left us alone. The wind sighed in the streets, the bamboo stood tall, and its flowers breathed a scent like spices I never wanted to be away from.

  But twenty days later we did leave the city.

  * * *

  On the night we arrived back in the village, down in a cellar as a hurricane blew outside, Julian told the people listening, “When we got to the city, it was unbelievable. Nothing on Earth could be as good.”

  Bryan snorted. He had elbowed in close.

  I pulled out a rainbow of glass tiles from my backpack. “The roofs of the buildings are domes of glass bricks. They sparkle like jewels, and the city could hold a thousand people.”

  “What about the glass makers?” Enea said.

  I was watching Vera from the corner of my eye. She sat at the far wall with Terrell.

  “They’ve been gone for a long time,” Julian said, “and some of the buildings need repairs, but they left behind a lot of things, useful things.”

  He took out a heavy steel cup inscribed with the line-and-triangle writing we saw all over the city. We’d found the remains of furniture and bits of fabric in a few houses. Some things were obviously technological, like metal boxes filled with corroded wires or brass housings around lenses, and there was lots of furniture that had rotted over the years, but some of the ceramic dishes in a kitchen building were still stacked up neatly.

  Vera and Terrell whispered to each other, and she was twisting a piece of cloth so hard it ripped.

  “Most of the buildings are habitable,” I said. “We could move in tomorrow with a little cleaning up.”

  Only a slight exaggeration. Some buildings had fallen down and a central tower had almost completely collapsed because its wooden beams had rotted away. Outside of the city we found round stone-and-brick kilns as tall as me for making glass or working metal.

  I added, “There aren’t any snow vines.” I couldn’t tell if Octavo was listening. “Lots of rainbow bamboo. Delicious fruit, more than we could eat. Here are some.”

  Octavo leaned in to look as I laid out dried samples, little wrinkled purplish lumps, still smelling sweet and cinnamony, thrilling, and I felt desperate to eat one but if I was going to have more I couldn’t show how much I wanted one.

  Bryan grabbed a piece. “I’ll analyze this later.” Octavo looked at him, then at the rest of the fruit, but didn’t move.

  * * *

  In truth, the bamboo had looked so sickly that it scared me. Eventually Julian discovered a big water pipe that led from the hills to the city but it had broken in several places, so the bamboo was probably thirsty and the only gifts it got were from fippokats. Little corals were growing everywhere.

  Julian and I agreed that the walls were probably meant to keep out deer crabs and slugs, although ground eagles could jump over them. I looked and looked but couldn’t find anything that showed an attack or a fire, and we couldn’t figure what had made the glass makers leave. Everything seemed to say they hadn’t left in a hurry. Maybe they’d even meant to come back.

  Just outside the walls I found an old grove of bamboo growing around stones with painted ceramic portrait tiles, a cemetery. Digging beneath a stone, I found bones as brown as the soil. They cracked and crumbled as I tried to pull them out but I got several good pieces. I put the soil back and pried the portrait tile from the stone. I’d bring a glass maker back to the village.

  We’d learned a lot, including one more thing. The bamboo was very friendly. Fruit appeared right away near the house where we stayed. Then one of the trunks where we’d tied our hammocks grew a shoot. Each of the new leaves had stripes of a different color, a little rainbow built out of leaves instead of bark to show that it had observed us and recognized us as an intelligent species like itself. It had delivered a message, a welcome home, because it wanted us to stay.

  * * *

  But I didn’t say that back in the village. Octavo wouldn’t want to know that this bamboo was as smart as he’d thought it was.

  “This is a glass maker,” I said in the dim cellar back in the village as the storm rumbled and splashed outside. I pulled the cemetery tile from my bag.

  It showed someone with four spindly legs that supported a body with an overhanging rump. Oddly bent twiggy arms and a clublike head with yellow-brown skin rose from the shoulders. The head had large gray eyes on its sides and a vertical mouth. I’d seen plenty of other pictures and figured out the anatomy. The tile was the best small picture of a glass maker I’d found. There was writing at the feet, five linear marks and three triangles, maybe the person’s name.

  “It’s wearing clothes,” I added. A red lace sleeveless tunic fell to just below its body. I’d seen lace in computer texts.

  The portrait went from hand to hand. “Almost a praying mantis,” Octavo said. Male or female? We didn’t know.

  “There’s good hunting,” Julian said. “The glass makers had farms, and tulips and potatoes are still growing wild.” He was sticking to the plan. And Vera did what I’d expected.

  “You ran away, and no matter what you discovered, you have to answer for that.” She was on her feet, waving droopy-skinned arms, the torn cloth in one hand. “You acted without concern for the welfare and interests of the Commonwealth as a whole. In four days, we’ll hold a meeting for judicial proceedings. Now it’s time to go to bed.”

  The grandchildren whined.


  “I’ll tell you more tomorrow,” I murmured to them.

  * * *

  Of course, there was a lot more to be told. Some of what we left out wasn’t much at all, like how truly miserable the hike back was. The moths bothered us less but the pulsing slime was worse. It had rained, and the water was higher in the river so the easy-walking sandbars had disappeared. We looked at the flotsam stuck in the tree branches above our heads and worried that a sudden storm might cause a flood. Our shoes had worn out, the packs were heavy with artifacts, and the stinking ground eagles remembered us as a source of trilobites and extorted meals.

  The most miserable of all was the end of the bamboo fruit. We stretched it out as best we could but having only a little was as bad as having none at all. I was tired, I had headaches, I was hungry, and Julian felt just as bad.

  “The only way to get more is to go back to the city,” I said one night in the hammock. “Not now, though. We couldn’t survive there alone, not forever. We need to move the village there, everyone. We need to live there.”

  “The parents can’t make this hike.”

  “Would they even want to come? I don’t think so.” I was quiet for a while, trying to conceive of life without them. Could they imagine the city, shining in the forest alongside the river? The city was big, really big … too big.

  They knew about it. They had always known about it. They had been lying all our lives.

  I lay silently, too shocked to think, while he stroked me under the blanket. “I wish they could see the city,” he said. “Then they’d come.”

  “They’ve seen it in the satellite pictures,” I finally said. The satellite had surveyed the area carefully for resources. During our hike up the valley, Julian had told me all about a fault line that made the waterfall on Thunder River near the village and about the granite mountains that surrounded the plateau where the glass maker city was. He had a map with enough details to show the major cataracts in the valley and the river snaking through the forest in the plateau. The city’s roofs should have flashed out at any observer, but we used the meteorologists’ maps and had never seen the survey pictures themselves.

  Julian figured it out fast. “They knew. Mom, Vera…”

  “They saw it every day on the weather scans.”

  “They knew. They covered it up. Why not tell us? Why?”

  “We should ask them. But we should do it in a way to make people want to move to the city.”

  I convinced him not to confront Vera right away although we wanted to when we got back to the village. We’d discuss her un-community-minded behavior at a Commonwealth meeting. I knew there’d be one and I was right.

  * * *

  Back in the village, the day after the little hurricane, we were answering questions even before we left the cellar. Julian went to hunt and I went to the plaza to make a couple of baskets to sift wheat, and a lot of people seemed to have tasks to do in the plaza.

  “Are there fippokats?” asked little Higgins.

  “Yes, and they play and slide just like here.”

  “Is the soil good?” a farmer asked.

  “Well, the trees are bigger.”

  “How was the climate?”

  “You’d have to ask Vera, she has the weather data, but it seemed cooler and damper. The fields wouldn’t need irrigation. And we know hurricanes break up on the mountains, so we wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore.”

  “Were there ground eagles?”

  “Probably, but the town has a wall around it.”

  “What happened to the glass makers?”

  “Maybe an epidemic, or maybe they moved and live somewhere else.”

  “How much bamboo fruit was there?”

  “Plenty.”

  I learned that while we were gone, the tomography machine had failed for good, Nicoletta’s father had died of space travel cancer, and a new kind of lizard had been discovered, tiny and iridescent yellow, that fertilized tulip flowers.

  I folded in the spokes to finish the first basket and I measured and cut reeds for the second one. “The rainbow bamboo probably wants what the snow vine does,” I said, “gifts and a little help.”

  “Was it beautiful?”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  Ramona limped up to us, leaning on a pair of canes and draped in a shawl. It was odd to see her out of the clinic where she worked and at first I thought she’d come to hear about the city, but she looked too sad. Maybe another parent had died and she’d come to tell someone. But she came over to me.

  “Sylvia, I’m so sorry,” she said. She leaned against my worktable and took my hand. Hers was cold and twitched with Parkinson’s disease. My parents were dead, so what could she be so sorry about?

  “Julian is dead. He made a mistake with a poisoned arrow.” She went on to explain but I hardly heard her. Julian was dead. Julian.

  That couldn’t be right.

  Ramona hugged me. She was thin and shaking. “I’m sorry. I know you’d gotten close.”

  I tried to talk and realized I had stopped breathing. I deliberately took a deep breath. “What happened?”

  “He died. Julian died when he was hunting.”

  “How?” Even with one small syllable, my voice shook.

  She explained again and I made myself listen. She said it was just a hunting accident in the forest near the lake. He was putting a poisoned arrow on his bowstring and it slipped. But she was lying, I knew it, another lying parent. He’d never have made a mistake like that. He was a fine hunter, as silent as an owl in the woods.

  They lied about Earth, they lied about the city, and now they were lying about how Julian died.

  He was dead. They killed him.

  Everyone told me they were sorry and hugged me and cried. The children’s tears were real. And mine.

  I’d known him all my life and he wasn’t there anymore. I thought about climbing up the valley with him toward that first stand of bamboo on top of the cliff, hand in hand, hoping a glass maker would pop up from behind the next rock. I thought about the long walk home after we’d both learned so much. I slept with him, ate with him, talked with him, expected to be with him my whole life.

  Now life was different, never the same again.

  We held the funeral that night. Octavo wouldn’t talk to anyone and didn’t go to the grave. For his own son! He didn’t go because he knew it was no accident. But he wouldn’t do anything about the people who killed him. Or maybe he couldn’t do anything.

  I followed Julian’s corpse as it was carried to its grave, thinking that I did not, not, not want to die there, did not want to lead a hard, ugly life under the dictates of lying murderous parents and finally be carried in rags through the desolate fields and be left to feed the greedy, stupid snow vine. Vera gave a short bland funeral speech. I didn’t say anything. I probably couldn’t have. Children were only allowed to praise the dead, anyway.

  Late that night, in my room, I ate a dried bamboo fruit, sweet and spicy, and felt worse to know that more waited for me, wanted me to come, gardens decorated with fruit in a city that sparkled in the Sun and that Julian would never see again with me. He was sterile and expendable. He was a warning, the sort of crime they did on Earth, what the parents left Earth to escape, but they were still Earthlings. And I could carry on without Julian. I had to.

  I was quiet the next day and the day after that, sometimes pretending he was still with me, sometimes imagining I was back at the city with him or that I was at the city in the future, we’d all gone there to live, and I was looking at the places where we’d been together. The worst was at night, alone, trying to sleep in the same ugly building as the people who’d killed him. I thought about how to get back to the city, about what I had to do, about why they killed Julian to keep me quiet, but I wouldn’t be quiet. I’d make them talk.

  Bryan told people he’d tested the dried fruit and when they asked him about the results, he sighed. He said he’d explain at the meeting.


  That evening, I arrived at the plaza as the benches were being lined up and Cynthia came up to me and asked about the city.

  “It’s big and colorful,” I said.

  “Why isn’t it on the satellite pictures?” She did a lot of foraging and depended on maps.

  “That’s a good question.”

  She frowned and curled a lock of hair around her finger, thinking, as bats wailed overhead.

  Vera emerged from one of the lodges with a parent being carried to the meeting in a cot. She called everyone to order and we all sat down. “A long meeting would be difficult for some of us, so let’s start. Sylvia’s broken the covenant of the Commonwealth, and we must decide how she will be punished.”

  “What did I do?” I said. She glared at me because I was talking at a meeting in a challenging tone of voice. Aloysha made a fist and winked.

  “You ran away,” Terrell said.

  Octavo said softly, “We ran away from Earth,” but no one paid attention.

  I didn’t have time to waste. “The city is visible from the sky.”

  “That’s not the point of the meeting,” Terrell snapped.

  “Lying is as bad as running away,” I said. “Lying for years is worse than running away once. The satellite can see the city. We were never told.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Someone should review the satellite data code,” I said. “That’s the proof.”

  Nicoletta stood up. “I will.”

  I looked at Octavo. He was staring far away, his lips moving silently.

  “That’s not what this meeting is for,” said Vera. “You—”

  “What else do you know about the city?” I said.

  “There’s no city,” Terrell said.

  “It’s that rainbow fruit,” Bryan said. “I’ve analyzed it. An alkaloid. Do you know what alkaloids do to people? Cocaine, nicotine, strychnine. They’re addictive. They affect your thinking. Mescaline. People took mescaline and thought they saw God.”

  And cocaine and nicotine had ruined Earth, he didn’t need to say that. Rosemarie and Daniel were sitting together, holding hands. Her other hand covered her mouth, and he was looking all around, nervous.