Semiosis: A novel of first contact. Sue Burke
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“It might rain,” she said.
“Soon?”
“It might rain a lot. The planet has seasonal storm patterns. It makes hurricanes, but they’re big and low and move slow compared to Earth.”
“Can we prepare for them?”
“Not much, not much at all.”
After a long while, we both fell back asleep. I dreamed of my childhood and hunger. I awoke at dawn expecting gunfire—and remembered that I was far away from warfare and safe from soldiers, if not hunger.
Before I went on my daily search for food, Uri and I inspected the fields as the early morning Sun cast long shadows. We checked the trench and the wheat below it. Less than one-third of the crop had been saved, and it was wilting for lack of water. We kept walking. I stared down at the dusty poisoned soil beneath our feet. “Maybe if we water lightly—”
Uri grabbed my arm so suddenly I tripped. “Look.”
At the west end of the fields, at the top of the hill, like white spears, snow vine shoots rose ten centimeters high. Sandy soil still clung to the sprouts. The field had been bare the night before, I had seen it myself. With one look, I understood the poison.
“It’s the vines,” I said. Uri stared wide-eyed at the shoots. “The snow vines poisoned the field. It’s allelopathy. The plant gets rivals out of the way to clear space for itself. If we test them, we’ll find them full of poison.”
They were. The snow vines had sent down roots more than a meter deep, found our irrigated field, exuded a poison, and taken the land for its own use. They were in the yam fields, too.
“Plants try to expand. It’s a natural thing,” I explained in the lab to Uri and Paula. But I felt troubled. The snow vines had sent their roots more than a half kilometer to attack the field, passing other fine fertile ground.
“I say destroy it,” Uri said with clenched teeth. “It killed Ninia. It will kill all our crops.”
Paula looked at him sternly. I stated an obvious fact.
“It will not be easy to destroy. The thicket covers hectares, with who knows what defenses.”
“We stopped Napoleon, we stopped Hitler, we can stop a killer houseplant. We will not fall to siege.” Then Uri caught Paula’s look and smiled, as if he had told a joke.
“We’re not at war,” Paula said slowly, smiling back. “It’s only vines and trees.”
Uri saluted. “I am a lumberjack of a soldier.”
Paula’s smile faded a bit.
If we were ever going to grow anything, we would need to control the vines, but we needed something in harmony with the environment. An idea occurred to me that I should have had much earlier.
“Nature balances,” I said. “Something has to be the natural biological control for the snow vines. We can find it and let the environment take care of itself. Uri, let’s go.”
Paula gave me a look of thanks.
Our two thickets, east and west, were set apart by the wide meadow we lived in, and bounded by forest at either end. With machetes, guided by the geopositioning system, Uri and I crashed through the forest to the north, sweating under gloves and heavy shirts to protect us from thorns and bug-lizards and spiny flightless birds and coral tentacles. Every slash brought a different scent of sap to the air.
Uri swung hard at a poison ivy fern. “We must find something as good as a missile,” he said.
“We will need something even more powerful, but not a weapon. Something natural.”
He paused. “You think we will find such a thing?”
“Have faith in nature. Whatever balances the snow vine has to be at least as powerful as it is.”
The first snow vine thicket that we located stood in the forest like an island two meters across, a cloud of white vines around a crest of aspen. They arched over our heads like tentacles reaching into the woods. One had wrapped around a palm tree, pulling it over, and another tentacle had clamped over the growth bud at the top. The palm was dying.
“Here is a job for a lumberjack soldier,” I said.
With a flourish, he saluted the thicket. “We will meet in battle.”
The satellite scan of the forest had located another thicket, big and split in the middle like a lizard eye. In miniature, it resembled the thickets bordering our meadow.
At one end, a gap in the thicket opened like a doorway into the little meadow inside it. Above the doorway, vines arched toward each other and grappled. Thorns cut into other vines, and sap dripped onto the ground. One branch held a tattered piece of another vine clamped in a spiral grip.
Uri stared at it. “The plant grows very strange.”
I understood it at a glance. “Two plants, east and west.”
“Two soldiers,” he corrected, and laughed, entertained by his own idea. I could not manage to laugh.
Inside we found tufts of grass falling over and rotten like the wheat in our fields. With my boot, I cleared away slimy remains to reveal a rotting aspen sapling that had belonged to one side or another. “This might be the real target of the root rot.”
He studied it, looked around at the thickets on either side of us, and slowly smiled. “Life again makes sense. We are in a battlefield, a fight between two houseplants.”
He was right up to a point. Plants always struggled against each other on Earth. They often fought to the death.
“A fight, yes,” I said, “but for survival. They’re not mere soldiers. And think how big our meadow is, how big the struggle to survive.” I looked around for any hint of a counterbalancing force to snow vines and did not see one.
A stink drew us to a lump of green turf, actually a bloated fippokat corpse. Ripe fruit hung on the vines on one side of the meadow. “I bet those are poisonous,” I said.
“Why kill a little kat? You said they fertilize the ground in the thickets.”
“Dead bodies might yield more fertilizer. Or you could cut off your opponent’s manure supply.”
“Plants are not that smart.”
“They adapt,” I said. “They evolve.” At the university, we had joked about the ways plants abused insects to make them carry pollen or seeds, but insects were small. On Pax, the snow vines were enormous. Next to them, humans and fippokats were insects, objects to abuse. I pushed at the dead fippokat with the toe of my boot. It was anchored to the ground somehow. I prodded the corpse with my machete, holding my breath against the smell. A thick root emerged from its belly and buried itself in the soil beneath it. Something poked up under the fur.
I sliced the poor thing open. Inside, a snow vine seed had germinated. I thought of the three women’s graves. The west vine had employed them just like this fippokat to carry away its seeds and used the dead bodies as fertilizer. I hacked off the shoot springing out of the fippokat. I had learned everything I needed to know. I knew what we were.
I looked for Uri. Holding his machete like a sword, he had approached one of the thickets walls and was walking slowly down its length. He kicked at the leaf litter and rotting grass on the ground. Leaves and twigs flew, and maybe bones. Beneath the litter, vine roots lay like slithering snakes, reaching out and winding around each other. “Madness,” he shouted. “Madness. We are being killed by fighting houseplants.”
In the flying leaves I saw our house in Veracruz explode in the Corn War, thatch blasting through the air. My family fled through dying fields to the swampy forest, spy planes buzzing all around us. My mother tried to shield my eyes and told me to be brave, but I saw human bones in the woods, their stinking flesh falling away, and I screamed. Then my mother fell, blood