Semiosis: A novel of first contact. Sue Burke
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said. “He just fell asleep. Paralysis. He didn’t suffer. That was good, at least.”
“What was the poison?”
“We’re looking,” Ramona said.
“You tested the skin, too?” I said. “Not just the juice. You have to look at pulp, skin, everything.”
“We just blended the whole fruit,” Grun said. “Even the tiny seeds.”
“I can prepare the one from Snowman. Take a rest.”
Instead Grun examined the dead fippokat. I kept my eyes on the fruit, and by the time I had the sample ready, Ramona had news.
“Here’s a new alkaloid. The fruit you tested two weeks ago hadn’t got it, Octavo. I’ve got lists of both.” Her voice, with its thick London accent, began to recover some of its typical energy. “There’s some little differences, but this is a big one.”
We all knew that alkaloids were often pharmacological, if not toxic. I gave her the sample and went out to the east thicket to pick more fruit, lit by dawn twilight and surrounded by the morning’s chirps and buzzes. I thought about the ways that fruit can vary.
“Snowman hasn’t got the alkaloid,” she said when I got back. She switched to another screen. “Take a look at the structure. It’s like strychnine a little, don’t you think?”
“We should check sugar levels and organelles, too.” I reached for a microscope.
Within an hour, as the Sun rose and lit the room, working as fast as we could, we had learned what had happened. I realized it was all my fault, and I had to stop working for fear I would drop a piece of equipment and break it. Paula arrived as I tried to explain.
“Fruit does not simply get ripe,” I said. “It can get ripe and then change again as the season changes. It might become better suited for a certain species of animals that can disperse the seeds more effectively, and it becomes poisonous for other animals. Or maybe the west vine and east vine are different species. Maybe the soil is different.”
“Maybe,” Grun said. “We’ve still got a lot to learn.”
Ramona nodded. They were exhausted and did not understand.
“I was wrong when I said it was safe, and that is what killed them,” I insisted. “Maybe a change in nitrogen metabolism created excess alkaloids. Or perhaps it was a response to pests or pathogens. Or photoinhibition. Maybe it is unusually dry. The trees it parasitizes could have changed in some way.”
Paula took my hand. “Come outside and let’s talk.”
In the warm sunlight, she looked at me gently. “It’s always a shock, but we knew things would go wrong.”
“I killed them.”
“We all ate the west fruit before, and it was fine. It isn’t your fault.”
“We planted the fields on my recommendation. They could go wrong, too. A lot more people could get killed.”
“We’ll just avoid the west fruit until we figure it out.”
“But what will we eat?”
“We’ll find something. I know you’re doing your best.” She took me by both hands and kissed me.
My job, besides searching for edible plants, was to describe and classify Pax’s vegetation.
At first glance, it looked Earthlike: trees, vines, grasses, and bushes. But the bushes that had leaves like bluish butterfly wings were a sort of land coral, a three-part symbiont involving photosynthesizing algae and tiny animals with stony skeletons that held locked-in-place winged lizards. Other kinds of land corals captured and ate small animals, and at some point bush coral had discovered that keeping prisoners had advantages over hunting.
A second glance at the sky, although it was blue, also proved that we were not on Earth. Green ribbons knobbed with bubbles of hydrogen floated in the air and got tangled in treetops, or perhaps they anchored themselves there. Other floating plants resembled cactus-spined balloons.
Some trees had bark of cellulose acetate plastic that peeled off in sheets with razor-sharp edges. Maybe someday we could process it into rayon cloth or lacquer. One by one, I was finding fruits, seeds, roots, stems, and flowers that might prove useful or edible, which was the pressing issue. Moreover, as the colony’s botanist, I had to devise a taxonomy. Every scrap of information would help as we looked for a niche in this ecology for ourselves.
A little before we left Earth, we rehearsed our arrival. Supposedly we did not know where we were, but within minutes after the trucks had left us on a dirt road in a forest, we had guessed.
I noted majestic white pines with long bluish-green needles, coniferous tamaracks, and quaking aspens, their flat leaves rattling in the hot breeze. “This is northern United States, east of the Mississippi,” I said. “If we were in Canada, the trees would still be healthier.”
Merl listened to birds squawk and sing. “Sure enough. Grackles and Carolina chickadees.” He shrugged his wide shoulders. “That doesn’t mean we’re in the Carolinas. They’ve been moving around a lot on account of the heat.”
Paula looked at the clouds. “Thunderheads. Let’s think about shelter.”
Eventually, we got more precise, identifying it as Wisconsin even before we ran into a pair of Menominee women gathering vines to make baskets. The tribal council supported our project and was allowing us to spend two months trying to survive in their reservation’s forest, and the women were sorry to spoil our isolation. But before they left, they suggested coating our skin with wood ash and grease to repel the clouds of mosquitoes, advice we badly needed.
Other than that, survival held no major challenges because we already knew a lot about the environment. Deer were edible, for example. Instead, the rehearsal deepened our commitment as we witnessed the disaster of the forest despite the Menominees’ careful stewardship. Global warming was turning the forest into a prairie. All around us the trees were dying of heat and thirst and disease, bringing down the ecology with them. But the flora and fauna weren’t simply moving north. The disaster was at once too fast and too slow. In southwest Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold’s treasured Sand Counties were becoming sand dunes, and their prairie species were going extinct. The forests in northeast Wisconsin hadn’t yet become prairies to welcome them, so when the forests finally became grasslands, there would be no surviving prairie species to welcome.
I got to know Uri in the Menominees’ forest. His English was even worse then. For both of us, English was a second language, but the colony was strictly monolingual. We would avoid the disputes over language that were poisoning so much of Earth.
“Of course I volunteer for army,” he said. “I work for food. Like now, but not so nice food.” We were knee-deep in a swamp collecting cattail pollen, which could be used like flour to make pancakes. Actually, every eighteen-year-old in Russia had to serve. He had been a marksman.
He pulled a cattail head horizontal and batted it while I held a clay bowl underneath to catch the falling yellow pollen.
“Rifle is not antique. Is fallback, what we use if high tech would be jammed. And very entertaining. My unit gave shows like circus, even with horses, and was when I decided to join this project after my duty is finish. I saw too much of Mother Russia during travel and give shows. They are raping her. I not can endure stay and see it.”
That was true everywhere on Earth, environmental devastation that we wished we could fix, but the best we could do was try again elsewhere.
“I wonder if there will still be humans on Earth when we get to Pax,” Vera said one evening after dinner as we worked on the many tasks that survival required. It had been harder than we thought but also more rewarding.
“The people on this planet don’t deserve to survive,” Bryan said as he made fishhooks out of wire.
“The thing is, we can learn,” Merl said.