Semiosis Page 9

  She turned to pick up a shovel alongside the grave, not even considering that someone would speak, especially not me.

  “Octavo was a liar like the rest of the parents,” I said.

  She turned. “How dare you!”

  “You all know the city exists, you’ve known it all along.”

  She raised the shovel like a weapon, teeth bared. She stood several meters away. I ran toward her, pulling the knife with a poisoned blade from a sheath inside my shirt.

  The wrinkles on her cheeks lined up in waves as she shouted, “Step back!”

  She didn’t deserve to be obeyed. I batted away the shovel. It fell to the ground.

  “Stop her!” she screamed. “She can’t do this!”

  But all I could see was everything that had happened and everything I could stop. I raised the knife and brought it down. The blade bounced along her ribs horribly and she wailed like a swooping bat until I twisted the knife and forced it in with both hands and then pushed her into the grave. I took a deep breath. There was still more to do.

  I turned to see Aloysha and Blas wrestling with Vera’s son, Ross. Bryan already lay on the ground yelling, and Nicoletta stood over him, holding his cane like a club. The parents squalled that I’d violated this or that, and Nicoletta and Cynthia shouted back that I was right. The little grandchildren were shrieking and Higgins stood in front of them, fists raised at the parents.

  Vera whimpered and was quiet. Was that how Julian died? I couldn’t look into the grave. The new Pax was beginning the wrong way and I had to do something. I raised my hands, one of them with Vera’s blood on it. Children’s voices called for quiet.

  “They all knew the city was there,” I said, “and they were afraid. Something happened to the glass makers and they blamed the rainbow bamboo.”

  Bryan began to say something. “Quiet!” Nicoletta told him.

  I continued. “But that’s not why the parents lied. They had a dream. They wanted a new society, a better version of Earth. They thought they could make it with hardship, and the more hardship, the more they thought they had a new Earth here.”

  “That’s right,” Bryan called out.

  “But it’s not working,” Nicoletta said. “It’s not better.”

  “They have their new society,” I said. “It is us. We can make our own choices. Us, the children. Octavo asked me if I wanted a life worth living. I do. There’s a better place to live than here. It’s time for a new moderator.”

  I looked around. Everyone was still, watching me.

  “Who wants Pax to be more than endless hardship?” I said. “Who isn’t afraid to change? Vote for me. I’ll be the moderator, and we’ll do more than survive. The parents wanted a new Earth. What we want is Pax. The time of the parents is over. Vote.”

  Hands went up for me: Aloysha, Rosemarie, Daniel, Leon, Nicoletta, Cynthia, Enea, Mellona, Victor, Epi, Blas, Ravi, Carmia, and Hroc. And Higgins and many of the grandchildren. And one parent, Ramona. I didn’t call for the hands of those who were against me.

  So that was the revolt. I became the moderator by a minority vote and in spite of the fact that at eighteen, I was seven years too young according to the Constitution. But by the time we’d moved everything to Rainbow City, I was actually old enough and Aloysha and I had had two healthy babies. Vera’s son, Ross, was probably one of the men who attacked me but once he saw Rainbow City, he wanted to stay there and he worked harder than anyone to get it ready. By the time we left the village for good, only four parents were still alive.

  I didn’t want to abandon them, although their half-blind eyes looked at me as if I were a murderer in those final days. We even offered to carry them! When I left the village the last time, the Sun was rising bright red. When it set, we were camped in the valley above the waterfall. The bats began to swoop and wail, and I heard Vera dying again. It was the end of Earth.

  HIGGINS AND THE BAMBOO

  YEAR 63–GENERATION 3

  We understand that we must endlessly make choices, and that our choices have consequences, and that we are not guaranteed health, happiness, or even life.

  —from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax

  HIGGINS

  Beck did right to invite me to the birth of his third child, since I’ve helped at two dozen other births, including a fippolioness once, almost my last mistake. Beck and I are best friends and besides, I was the real father and would’ve made a far better father and husband than him.

  There’s a stage in childbirth just before the real pushing starts when women often panic, and they don’t mean the things they do and yell, although if it were me going through all that, I might turn homicidal. Women are more solid than men that way. Indira—beautiful brown-eyed Indira, with hair that swirls and curls like water in a brook—Indira had endured hormones, heartburn, headaches, and hemorrhoids for 325 days and then a half day of labor. She was curled up like a baby herself, teary and trembling in her always tidy house, where a crib waited for the wonderful moment. Beck hovered near the door for a fast escape if necessary; not the best husband, as I said, though a square-shouldered man, very fit for repairing brickwork and turning over soil. (I’m much handsomer, ask anyone, and, better still, perfectly symmetrical from head to toe, which indicates very fine genes.)

  Indira commanded Beck to open the door to the sleety weather because she was hot. She shrieked that her back had never hurt that way before so something must be wrong.

  “Here?” I asked, caressing her backbone. She wailed something I decided was yes, and I glanced at the old medic, Blas.

  “Probably just the baby’s head pushing against the spine, nothing dangerous,” he said. “Everything’s normal.” To his relief, too.

  I began to rub just above those beautiful round hips, hands sliding on the sweat. “Here?”

  “Don’t stop!” she said.

  “Soon, the baby will come soon, soon, soon,” I crooned. “You’ll hold it in your arms, soon, soon, soon.”

  Just relax, just relax. Indira wasn’t the relaxing type.…

  But fippolionesses usually are, so a few months earlier when I heard Clay mewling deep-down tired and hopeless, I’d have run because I’d guessed her problem, but I didn’t want to spook her. We kept a herd of a dozen adult lions and their young a bit upstream to fell pines for firewood and to clear new fields, and I was coming for my evening check, being the animal-responsible guy. People worry most about a lion’s front claws, and they should, agile scythes that they are, but they do mere detail work when the lions dig up roots. The back claws are only as long as your fingers but they inhabit the end of those muscular hopping legs. A lion can rip out your intestines and toss them over the dome of a house with one kick. Or, with a bit more effort, it can knock over a tree.

  Clay lay on her side, curled up and twitching in a nest of logs and leaves. Lions don’t have the brains to need a big head, so births shouldn’t be hard—and generally, the big fipps and I kept a respectful distance from each other. The rest of the herd was keeping a respectful distance from her that night, too. Idiot that I am, I approached, mimicking the coos of their chatter: “What’s wrong, Clay? What’s your problem, honey? Things aren’t working right? Let me take a look, I won’t hurt you, just relax, just relax.”

  I touched her claws the way they do for greetings and cooed and petted her long fur and let her sniff my face. Her prehensile lips curled in pain with a contraction, her eyes blinked exhausted and drooping, and she mewled again, terrible breath, which isn’t at all characteristic of a healthy lion. She held her back legs tight to her chest, and her fur dripped with blood and birth fluids.

  “Don’t worry, Clay, we’re fine here, let me look, let me look.” I pushed on the legs, and she opened up a bit. “Just relax, just relax.” A little arm covered with slicked blond fur stuck out of the slit just below her sternum, three precious fingers tipped with pearls ready to grow into claws. Lions should be born headfirst, like humans. This was bad. I touched the hand.
The fingers flexed. Maybe there was a chance. I stroked the abdomen to get a feel for how the cub was located. Mama’s claws began to stroke my back, very gentle, just returning the gesture. The cub wasn’t fully transverse, near as I could tell, unless I was mistaking a tense stomach wall muscle for its head, very possibly so, but she was dilated and maybe, maybe I could ease the baby out.

  The lead male, Pitman, at the edge of the clearing, growled and rasped his claws on the ground, watching me.

  I massaged a little harder, and her claws caught the collar of my coat and began to tear it. “Just relax, just relax, if that makes you feel better, tear all you need.” I was kneeling beside her, a very easy reach for a back foot. “Just stay relaxed, honey.” I pulled a bit on the arm and kneaded on the outside to try to move the head past a hump, but I couldn’t. It was close, and she had a contraction, but we accomplished nothing except probably to make things harder on the baby. Clay whimpered to break my heart.

  Without much thought, I pulled up my sleeve and reached inside, hot and slippery and rippled with muscles, the head so close, and she ran her claws through my collar and coat and ripped fringe. My fingers closed around the cub’s head, around the snout, guiding it up next to its extended arm, and she suddenly pushed and I pulled, pulled on the arm, on the snout in the canal, her claws reached into my hair, the snout out now, pink, her claws like razors on my scalp and my hair falling onto my shoulders, the whole cub’s head out with another push, and I cleaned the little nose and mouth as she pushed again, more claws tearing my coat, and the cub’s body was out and it took a breath and yelped and I showed it to her, a boy, and set him down and the claws flew from my hair and she was licking him and he was licking her, both weak but excited, and I backed away slowly, cooing. A cute, happy baby, a good day’s work for a fine mama.

  Pitman came toward me on all fours, growling. I stood up. He rose on his hind legs. My eye level was his chest level, so I was at an undisguised disadvantage. He could hop faster than I could run, so running wouldn’t get me anywhere. But I had always had a feel about lions the way I did about kats. The Glassmakers or someone had domesticated both of them. Pitman probably knew how to be number two if I knew how to tell him I was number one, or so I thought.

  I took a step forward. He raised his claws, and my disadvantage became all the more clear. I growled and raised my hands as menacingly as I could, puny fleshy fingers, and wondered if lions could laugh. What I needed was a big stick, but if I bent down to pick one up, I might get sliced to string. But he only wanted to assert authority, so he reached back with a foot and kicked a tub-sized mess of dirt and rocks at me. I saw it coming and caught it in an intact part of my coat. I grabbed out a rock and threw it hard right below his sternum, aiming for his manhood, and I got lucky one more time. He howled and doubled over but stood right back up and flexed to lunge. I threw another rock at his pointy nose, which I hoped would be even more tender than his manhood, hit it luck-on, and he was down. To make my point, I heaved the dirt in my coat on him. He stayed down, bloody-snouted, the new number two.

  I walked around the clearing, holding out a hand to the other lions, but I had to force it to stay steady. A few young males sniffed, and I held my breath waiting to see if they would decide to make their own challenge. The entire pack kept its eyes on me. No challenges. I petted Clay and the cub and left with all the swagger I could still manage.

  And so, at nightfall, I arrived back at the city, torn and sheared and bloody, and in a cold sweat and breathless realizing that I had used up a full year’s worth of luck. In fact, I could have been killed right there, domesticated or not—even kats can kill, let alone lions, and what kind of idiot was I? The idiot who won, but was the prize worth it?

  Indira came running down the street—“Higg! Higg!”—and when she saw I was all right and it was just Clay’s blood, she went back to her loom, always a hard worker. Women are solid, but not always about what I wish they would be solid at. She was already pregnant.…

  And now, Indira was in childbirth and had decided walking might make her back hurt less, and it did, and soon she was on her hands and knees, pushing. Beck, a purely decorative addition to the room, still hung by the door. I knelt in front of her, wiping sweat from a face that I sometimes see before I wake up in an empty bed, and she chattered now, breathing normally without having to be reminded to do so. Blas sat on a chair behind her, holding a mirror so she could see herself work. Another medic waited among towels and warm water and blankets and diapers, ready to spring up with whatever was needed, meanwhile tending the fire to keep everyone warm. Beck leaned out under the doorway from time to time for a few words with someone outside, as far away as he could get without a total cowardly retreat.

  The head crowned and emerged, then one shoulder—two shoulders, wet and wonderful—and then the whole baby. Blas and I cleaned the child a bit, checked it quick, and Indira dropped into a cot to take the baby, a fine girl with good lungs. Indira and I marveled at her, then the medics did, and Beck finally got the grit to come over to look, all of us awestruck and congratulating each other. That kept us busy until the afterbirth.

  A new baby girl. I didn’t know what Indira and Beck were going to name her, but I was ready to sing her songs and shear a lion for wool for fuzzy slippers so those delicate little feet would stay warm day and night.

  Indira’s mother peeked in to say she would get their other children. I helped tidy up for visitors. “She’s cute,” the baby’s sister, Moon, declared shortly after arrival as she marveled over tiny fingers and ears. Moon was my daughter, too, four years old, and her brother, Lightning, almost ten, was my son. I have a fair number of children (the Pax curse of infertility still being a problem, but not for me), and since I have such fine genes, spreading them around a bit won’t cause special problems in downstream generations.

  I wiped up the floor and carried some equipment back to the clinic, growing more joyless with every step. The excitement of birth had ended, leaving me with my particular form of postpartum depression as I pondered the philosophical contradiction of a baby that was both mine and not mine.

  I could solve the conundrum with well-aged truffle. Lions won’t eat fresh truffle roots, cloying and common though they are, I suppose because they smell like rotting trilobites, but the flavor mellows with fermentation. I collect what they dig up, boil it in water, and add a butter root (which the lions will eat, so I have to dig them up myself), then after a few days when it’s done fizzing, I strain the stock into another jar, seal it with pine wax, and wait a month or more. The result is my big weakness (next to women) and my reliable consolation.

  I’m an expert at truffle. Good truffle smells like thistle flowers, like roasting almonds, like the river at sunset on a warm evening when you’ve had a good day and expect a good night. I grabbed two large jars from a stack in a bay in my house, not the biggest or best house in the city, but good enough for me. The dome had been repaired passably well, but four of the six side bays were beyond hope and the walls were rebuilt plain and straight. Still, I had all the room I needed for a bed, a chair, a table, some tools, musical instruments, of course, and a whole lot of truffle.

  I carried the jars in my arms and my guitar slung across my back under my coat, and headed for the Meeting House, the biggest building in all of Pax, a place where we guessed the Glassmakers themselves had held meetings, with built-in benches all around and a roof so wide it needed columns. The winter sleet had turned to a frigid downpour, my clogs splashed in the streets, and the fringe on my coat was going to be dripping by the time I arrived. Fringe doesn’t keep me warm, but it looks good on me, so I’ve fringed up all my clothes.

  And I enjoyed the walk anyway, or I tried to. The city has a special charm in the rain at night. The glass roofs on the houses glowed from the lamps and fireplaces inside, and the little candle in the lamp I carried lit a circle of raindrops and hinted at the gardens and bamboo growing around the buildings, the foliage skeletal in the winter and
sparkling from the rain—a hint of the city rather than the solid reality of the city in bright daylight. You could hear more than you could see, though, if you listened. The splashes of the raindrops showed what was in the shadows: the curve of walls, the tangle of leaves, the flatness of pavement. It takes a good ear to appreciate the beauty of a cold, wet night. By the time I arrived, I had decided that I didn’t have the ear to truly, deep-down appreciate a nighttime walk in the freezing rain.

  Carilla, wearing a bonfire’s worth of bamboo jewelry, kissed me on my cheek when I walked in. I knew those wide soft lips—warm lips—but she kissed me chastely, as if she had never moaned with ecstasy in my bed, and she was glowing with pregnancy now, my doing. Her husband, Orson, talked trivia with me about farm chores for fippokats. Paloma, plump and squeezable, kissed me just as chastely, holding little Sierra in her arms. That was my little Sierra, with a smile just exactly like mine. Sierra kissed me too, and Sierra had her doll kiss me, a doll I had carved for her from ivory wood with joints that moved and eyes inlaid with agate. Other women kissed me on the cheek and asked about Indira and the baby, but only my parents asked me how my new baby was. No one has as many grandchildren as they do, but private is one thing, and public is another.

  Spoil the party with resentment? Not me. All my children were there. Jefferson and Lief had just lost a front tooth. Lief had my brown eyes, but mine couldn’t look that sad, could they? Tatiana had learned more multiplication tables. She was only six but very serious about everything and quite tall for her age, neither of which she could have inherited from me. I had given Hathor some lion wool, which she spun and knitted into a hat, and her twin brother, Forrest, wanted some wool, too. Orion wanted to know if what Tiffany said was true, that fippokats understood everything we said, because Tiffany had a fippokat that would stamp a paw the right number of times when you said a number, provided it wasn’t too big. I said that kats were smarter than we all thought.