Semiosis: A novel of first contact. Sue Burke
Читать онлайн книгу.
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