Semiosis: A novel of first contact. Sue Burke
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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 intelligent, 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.
“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