Semiosis: A novel of first contact. Sue Burke
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That can be enough, but the civilians may hate both sides, and I did. I had left Earth to escape them all, every side in every war.
“We can go,” I said. “We can go.”
The people who caused the Corn War—both sides of that war—were greedy and cruel. But the vines were just vines.
He pointed the machete at me. “The east vine is already our ally, correct? It will serve us.”
“Only if we are great big fippokats and do what it wants.”
Uri hopped like a kat. “The fippokats will win, then.”
“Only if our vine wins.”
At my insistence, we dug up the graves of Carrie, Ninia, and Zee. We found a mass of roots at war tangled through their flesh. The seeds from the west vine had sprouted, stems and roots bursting through their abdomens. But roots from the east thicket had countered, strangling the seedlings. The east vine had won. I confessed to attacking the west vine’s seedlings.
Uri put an arm around my shoulder. “You helped kill Ninia’s killer—and Carrie’s and Zee’s. You did us a service.”
More than that, I had made a decision about the sanctity of a grave, something beyond the struggle to survive. I had brought a mind and a heart to Pax.
At the conclusion of a meager dinner in the village plaza—snow vine fruit but no yams, no bread, and not much of the dehydrated mycoprotein we had brought from Earth—we held a Commonwealth meeting about the snow vines. I described how individual vines battled each other, poisoning other plants and using animals to provide fertilizer, to spread seeds, and perhaps more. “We could probably transplant the east vine to guard our fields, but—”
Half-Foot Wendy interrupted me. “Perfect.” Other people nodded.
“But we need to be its fippokats,” I said. “We will work for it, not the other way around. It will help us only because it is helping itself. We give it food and water—our latrines and irrigation and cemetery—and we help it advance, just as if we were a colony of fippokats.”
“That’s fine,” Wendy said, grinning. “We wanted to fit into the ecology. We won’t be aliens anymore, and after only a couple of months. Oh, this is better than I thought.”
But immediate success would be unlikely. We had to be overlooking something.
“Merl,” Paula said, “tell us about fippokats. What are they like, and what do we need to do?”
He stood up and stroked his beard for a moment. “They’re herbivores, for starters. Camouflaged, and not at the top of the food chain. And I’ve discovered lately that they can slide as well as hop.”
He continued talking. I wondered what we had not noticed. Ecologies adjust, but two months was fast, especially for plants. Intelligence made humans extremely adaptable as a species. We could probably learn within days to fully imitate fippokats, if we had to make many changes. We already fulfilled many of their behaviors from the snow vines’ point of view.
Merl was saying: “I believe I’ve seen them teaching each other things. They learn mighty fast.”
The snow vines had learned fast, too. They had realized that we were like fippokats and used us like them, giving us healthy or poisonous fruit. But the west vine had attacked our fields. It had noticed how we differed from fippokats, that we were farmers, and it had developed a plan that required conspicuous effort on its part. Creative, original ideas and perseverance were signs of intelligence—real intelligence, insightful. It had weighed possible courses of action, then chosen one.
Snow vines could think and plan ahead, and the west vine had made a very aggressive decision. It had decided to kill us every way it could and had invented tactics to do it. We were civilians in a warlord’s territory. We were in a genuine battleground.
We were in terrible danger.
I interrupted Merl. “Do fippokats grow crops?”
He looked at me like I was crazy, then shrugged. “Why, no, they don’t. Not that I’ve seen. Not even burying seeds like squirrels, though they might, come fall.”
“The snow vine attacked our crops. It knows we are not fippokats. It is like the Corn War back on Earth. Controlling the food supply is one way to win a war.”
“Aw, come on,” Bryan said. “It attacked the field because it was a good place for it to grow.”
“It had to go too far, more than a half kilometer, and it passed better places to grow, like the spring. It analyzed us and made a decision, a complex decision. Then the other snow vine decided to become our ally. They are smart enough to do that. They can think.”
“You never said this before,” Vera said.
“I only realized it now.”
“Plants can’t think!”
Paula rapped on the table. “Let’s remember to be supportive and listen, not debate. We’re here to solve a problem, not to win.”
I gave her a look of gratitude, but she was looking at someone else with warning. I took a deep breath. “They have cells I cannot identify. On Earth, plants can count. They can see, they can move, they can produce insecticides when the wrong insect comes in contact with them.”
“It could be an instinctual response,” Merl said. “Any animal decides what to do about its territory.”
“Plants struggle against each other for survival. They fight,” I said. “This is a war, an organized fight.”
“Aw, come on,” Bryan said, then caught Paula’s eye. “I mean, this is a lot to accept at once.”
“I know,” I said, working hard to be patient. “I want us to be sure we understand that we are picking sides in a war that is bigger than we are, and we are making one side a more determined enemy.”
“Enemy. A plant enemy,” he muttered. Everyone sat quietly for a minute. A couple of crabs started buzzing near Snowman.
“Humans go to war because they’re depraved.” Vera glanced at Paula, then continued more gently. “This is an ecosystem, so it all works together as a whole.” She was an astronomer, so of course she saw the universe as stars and planets with neat and predictable orbits, everything worked out by math: the rest of nature would be the same.
“The plants are fierce,” Uri said. “Octavo is right about that. We must try to survive equally hard.”
Grun nodded. “He’s found out how to fit into nature, harsh as it is here. It’s a risky plan and it’s good of him to make sure we know the risks, but it’s a reasonable plan, and I like it.”
I looked around. We all wore the same sturdy clothes, spoke the same language, and shared the same hopes. We had debated this back on Earth and reached an agreement. We would live in harmony with nature, and nature was always in harmony, like the gears of an old-fashioned clock. I knew that the vines had killed us deliberately, with malice and forethought, but that was too hard for anyone else to believe.
“If plants are so smart,” Bryan said, “where are their cities?”
“Now, it’s an old planet, but it’s new to us,” Merl replied. “We’ve not been here but a couple of months, and there’s a lot to learn. We might be standing smack in the middle of a city and not be able to see it. Still, we can’t take too long before we decide what to do because we don’t have that much time. The fippokats have managed to live with the vines, and they’re mighty smart for animals. We can do it, too.”
“This is the first place where I’ve felt genuinely at home,” Wendy said. “We found what we wanted. We left Earth behind, didn’t we? Pax will be at peace as long as we’re at peace.”
“That’s right,” Vera repeated. “We left behind the failed paradigms like war.”
Perhaps