Semiosis: A novel of first contact. Sue Burke
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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