Semiosis: A novel of first contact

I needed samples. With a pocketknife and plastic sample bags that I had been carefully cleaning and reusing since we had arrived, I took bits of vine, aspen, fruit, soil, fippokat feces, dead leaves, and bark, then very carefully I crawled out to uncramped sunshine.

I took samples from Snowman and from the west thicket—which stabbed me just as the east vine had. I tested the samples, and the results explained some things, but not the most important thing. The east thicket and Snowman were genetically the same individual. Snowman must have been a daughter plant from a shoot or underground stem. The west plant was the same species but a different individual. I could not explain why it had become poisonous. I could not predict whether the east fruit would remain safe. I had accomplished nothing.

That afternoon, we buried Ninia, Carrie, and Zee where we had buried the others, just south of the village in a little patch of ground next to the east thicket, where a mat of flowering turf covered the soil like a garden. Weeping, we rolled up the fragrant yellow blooms like sod, dug three holes, and lowered in the bodies. Everyone dropped in a handful of soil before we filled the graves and replanted the turf. Hedike led a song. Jill poured water onto the graves and recited a poem about rivers and oceans in a quaking voice. We each recalled our best memory of the women.

Zee had carved the other markers with names and the number of days since landing. This time Merl set plain stones at each grave.

“No names or dates,” he said, brushing soil from his hands.

“We need a Pax calendar,” Vera said. “And a Pax clock.” She pointed to Lux in the western sky. “That sets three hours before the Sun, and it rises three hours before the Sun. That’s one way to measure time.”

She pointed at another starlike light, an asteroid-sized moon called Chandra.

“That orbit’s almost the same as Pax’s rotation. It’s no good for telling time, except for seasons. But Galileo,” she said, pointing to a light in the northeast, “is perfect. It goes backwards, west to east, so anyone can spot it. It orbits two and a half times a day.”

Paula squinted at the sky. “Thank you. This—”

“Now we have it,” Vera said. “We have our own way. Our own clock, our own sky, our own time. It’s what we came here for.”

With that reminder of our hopes, we returned to our daily tasks for survival. A Pax day and night lasted about twenty Earth hours, and a Pax year about 490 Earth days. A year seemed like such a long time.

A week passed, busy for both the zoologists and me. A flock of tiny moth-winged lizards arrived, flying as gracefully as a school of fish, and we watched with wonder until suddenly, as a group, they swooped down and began to bite us. Ashes and grease worked again, then suddenly the moths disappeared.

Hunting teams found half-eaten birds and fippokats and thought they saw giant birds running away, but what bothered them more were the pink slugs twenty centimeters long they found eating old carcasses. The slugs would attack anything and dissolved living flesh on contact. Grun dissected one.

“Nothing but slime. No differentiated tissue. If you chop it into twenty bits, you have twenty slugs.”

Merl discovered the source of the three-note roaring songs. “I believe I’ve found us the big-time cousin of our friends the fippokats.” He had arrived just before the evening meal and sat at a table talking calmly enough, but sweat soaked his shirt as he petted a fippokat on his lap as if to assure himself that it was docile. Everyone knew he was not an anxious man, so we listened closely.

“If I had to use one word, I’d say kangaroo, but that’s not quite it either. Giant kangaroo to use two words, a good sight taller than me, and judging from the nests they had, they can knock over trees. I believe they’re vegetarians like our friend here, root-eaters very possibly, and I’d like to believe that the claws are for digging, but they’re the size of machetes. I saw a pack of around ten of them, but I didn’t get too close. And I wouldn’t recommend getting close.”

Most colonists tended to focus their attention on animals. Merl got many more questions about his day’s finds than I did, which I tried not to let bother me, but I knew that plants with their poisons and chemicals were as dangerous as animals, and because there were so many more plants than animals, they were more important.

“The plants here aren’t like anything on Earth,” I tried to explain one night. “They have cells I can’t explain. On Earth, all seeds have one or two embryonic leaves, but here they have three or five or eight.”

“And RNA,” Grun said, “not DNA. Nothing has DNA except us.”

“But it looks the same,” Vera said.

“No,” Half-Foot Wendy said, “I mean, floating cactuses? Blue ones? But they have thorns like Earth.”

“Yes,” I said, “thorns. They need to protect themselves like Earth cacti, so they grow thorns. Plants that need to get water from soil develop roots.”

“Not like Earth,” Uri said. “No earthworms. We have sponges instead.”

“But they do the same thing,” Vera said.

“We don’t really know what they do,” I said.

“But we know what plants do,” she said. “They grow. They’re useful or they’re not. And that’s all we need to know.”

I knew we needed to know much more, and I wished Luigi Dini had survived so I would have someone to work with and to talk to.

We had already realized from the disaster on Mars that transplanting Earth ecology wouldn’t work. Crops would not grow without specific symbiotic fungi on their roots to extract nutrients, and the exact fungi would not grow without the proper soil composition, which did not exist without certain saprophytic bacteria that had proven resistant to transplantation, each life-form demanding its own billion-year-old niche. But Mars fossils and organic chemicals in interstellar comets showed that the building blocks of life were not unique to Earth. Proteins, amino acids, and carbohydrates existed everywhere. The theory of panspermia was true to a degree.

I had found a grass resembling wheat on our first day on Pax, and with a little plant tissue, a dash of hormone from buds, and some chitin, we soon had artificial seeds to plant. But would it grow? Theory was one thing and farming was another.

Then a few days before the women had died from poisoned fruit, Ramona and Carrie had seen the first shoots, and whooped and squealed until we all came to look. They were twirling around the edges of the field, hair and skirts flying, and grabbed more of us by the hands until everyone in the colony, all thirty-four of us, danced with low, slow steps at the first evidence that we might survive.

The east fruit remained plentiful—alarmingly, it became more nutritious, another mystery I should have been able to explain but could not. The west fruit rotted on the vines. Uri toiled in the fields as if he could work out his grief through his hands and his tears through irrigation water from a spring between our fields and the west vines. We had planted a second crop, a yamlike tuber, and I prayed it would remain safe to eat.

“Someday we will have to clear that west thicket for more fields,” Uri told Paula after breakfast one morning. We both heard stress tightening his voice.

“I don’t think we’ll need to clear the thicket anytime soon,” Paula said in a deliberately offhand way. We were watching the fippokats play tug-of-war with a length of bark twine in their pen. “We don’t want to do anything unnecessary until we understand the effect on the ecology. We’re the aliens here.”

“But this is necessary. The vine is a danger to us.”

“Are you still angry over Ninia’s death?” she asked, leaning back and gazing at his face.

Uri looked away. “I want peace. We all want peace.”

I kept quiet, but even if he was right, which I doubted, we could hardly eliminate such a huge thicket if we tried.

Paula leaned over the fippokat pen and dangled a stem from a leaf of Pax lettuce. The lettuce was my latest find. The leaves contained folic acid and riboflavin, among other nutrients, but the stems were too tough to eat. We had eaten a slim breakfast of lettuce, nuts, snow vine fruit, and a bit of roasted fippokat.

A fippokat hopped closer to beg for the stem. Paula shook it and the animal turned a somersault in midair. Merl had found them remarkably easy to train. She dropped the stem at its feet. “Octavo,” she said, “can you make seeds for more lettuce?”

“Of course.”

“Uri,” she said, “can you find a field for it? Have we got enough water?”

“I will fill your plate with peaceful lettuce,” he said with a toothy smile. Paula offered a sweeter smile in return, but I knew she sometimes had little patience with his antics.

Uri turned to me. “First, come look at the weeds in the wheat. One in particular has needles like nettle, so even if it is good for something, I do not want you to tell me. The thorns stick to the robot weeders and then stick to me when I clean them, and I do not have enough skin for this procedure.”

Uri pointed out a nettle growing near us. I pulled on gloves to examine the plant. Its leaves were covered with thorns like glass tubes.

“Well, thorns like this might actually have a use,” I said. I looked up. He wasn’t paying attention.

“That field!” he said, pointing toward the top of the hill. “The wheat is flat.”

He dashed up the path. I followed. From one edge almost to the other, the wheat lay flat, every little shoot, and it had stood more than halfway to my knees the day before. My wheat. Flat.

Uri reached the field before I did. He knelt to look, then pawed through the dirt. “Root rot!”

I sprinted. Root rot kills. I dropped beside Uri and brushed apart the wheat to look. Dark rot crept up the stems. I pawed through the moist soil. The roots had decayed into brown slime.

“This is our bread,” Uri howled. “Why?”

I closed my eyes and recited a textbook answer to avoid howling like him. “Disease, too much water, a nutrient shortage. A lot of things can cause it.” I stood up to look for a pattern, moving too fast and getting dizzy, but as soon as my vision cleared, I saw one. “My first guess is disease traveling via water. You can see the rot spreading downhill.”

“Can I stop it? If I stop the water?”

I could only shrug.

He radioed Wendy at the irrigation pumps. I dug out some plants with my hands and ran to the lab, remembering the Corn War, the wilting fields of my family’s farm. But that was blight. This was root rot. The blight was an engineered disease. This was natural. Both as deadly.

By the time I had results, Uri and Half-Foot Wendy had directed robots to dig a trench straight through the middle of the field to stop the downhill seep of irrigation water. Poison in the soil had killed the plants. It ate through their cell walls, making the cells burst like balloons. Ramona and I searched for something to neutralize the poison or to keep rootlets from absorbing it.

Jill came back from a tour of the fields, her dark eyes shadowed with worry. She had taken a sensor with a probe calibrated to test for the poison to see if it was spreading. It was in only one field, but if we irrigated or if it rained, it would spread.

We worked until long past sunset. We debated whether tilling and watering the field unbalanced something in the soil. We worried that we might have brought a disease from Earth despite our decontamination efforts.

For once I went to bed after Paula. I lay not quite touching her, close enough to feel the warmth of her body as she breathed steadily. The bittersweet scent of the air and hoots of the lizards did not quite feel like home, but Earth had long ago stopped feeling like home, too.

I first met Paula when I went to see a play by her father, Dr. Gregory Shanley, about how misplaced priorities had caused the asthma disaster in 2023, a work many people called apostate for its criticism of Greens as well as governments. I went because it was a fund-raiser for Next Earth, as it was called then, a privately funded project to send a colony to a distant planet. She was staffing a table in the theater lobby, and of course I knew who the small young woman was. Her father had been preparing her since childhood to lead it, which some people criticized as much as the project itself.

On video, she had always seemed serious, maybe even a little quiet, but when I approached the table, she was laughing and talking with other people, and when she saw me, she put out her hand. “I’m glad you could come tonight. I’m Paula Shanley.”

“Octavo Pastor.”

She gestured at the others. “We were saying—I was saying—that we could fail, I know, and we could die, but that’s how much it’s worth doing.”

“Tell that to Goltz’s family,” someone said. Erno Goltz was a would-be volunteer whose family had obtained preventive detention so he couldn’t leave Earth. In fact, Gregory and Paula were not welcome in several countries.

“It’s hard for some people to understand,” she said. “We’re the future of humanity, and we have a duty.”

“Can I volunteer?” I said. She looked me in the eyes to see if I was serious. Then she nodded and reached for some papers. I thought perhaps I could help with a scientific committee, but the more I learned about the project, the more I was willing to give everything.

At first I was attracted to Paula’s concern for others, then to her iron determination and the way she sacrificed and struggled for the project.

“What human beings and other sentient species bring to the universe,” she said, “is the ability to make choices, to step beyond the struggle to survive and be the eyes and ears and minds and hearts of the universe. Survival is just the first step.”

I loved her, but I did not dare express my feelings. She approached me. I did not know what she saw in me because I was so unlike her, and I always felt a little awed by her, but I had never been happier. I hoped that happiness would become our legacy on another world.

Our new civilization would be based on the best of Earth. We would respect the dignity of all life, practice justice and compassion, and seek joy and beauty. We brought educational programs in our computers for our children that left out Earthly irrationalities like money, religion, and war. Some thought we would contaminate an exoecology, but we meant to fit in, to add to it, and most of all to ensure that humanity’s fate would not depend on a single imperiled planet.

Not all those who had volunteered could go. They had to support the Pax Constitution, which we had written, debated, and rewritten before we left. They needed good genes, strong bodies without artificial parts, healthy minds, and useful skills, including arts, so Hedike and Stevland Barr, musical prodigies, joined us. Eventually, fifty volunteers left Earth, some in tears, some with smiles.

We landed at a lakeshore near a river, delirious with joy to see trees and hear birdlike whistles. The other five landing pods would arrive—or try to—the next day. As part of the exploration team, I waded upriver, past the wide eerie thicket we would later call the east snow vine, past what I thought were slow green fish camouflaged as plants but soon realized were free-swimming plants. Already dazzled by this new world, we arrived at a vast meadow that seemed ideal. The thickets on the east and west would protect us. The forests on the north and south stood ready for exploration. We had found our home.

The hot, dry weather stole more from us. Leaves that would mark edible roots withered and fell from dormant plants. Seeds on wild grains loosened and blew away. Barking flightless birds gathered nuts before we could find them, and giant birds started to menace the hunters, but Uri frightened them off, at least for a while, with well-aimed rifle shots. Red hydrogen-filled seedpods floated in the wind, ready to ignite with the smallest spark, and the dry forest would burn fast. I had failed to predict the fruit, I could not save the wheat, and I was not finding food, but no one blamed me. Except myself. We all knew we would face unexpected dangers and failures, but no one, not even Paula, knew how much I wanted to advance our survival.

My stomach was empty as I left the village at dawn. I carried a geopositioning receiver tuned to a satellite overhead, all that was left of the spaceship that had brought us here.

I paused at the little cemetery, surprised to see that the yellow blooms above the three women’s graves had become balls of dried petals, dead without going to seed. I knelt to examine the plants and dug into the soil. The sod fell to pieces in my hands. Perhaps we had been less careful replacing it than we had thought.

My fingers, brushing through the sod, felt something firm, springy with life. A white shoot, like bamboo and wide as my thumb, rose from the soil. I found another, another, and more. Snow vines sprouted from the three women’s graves. The vines had sent out roots to feed on dead humans instead of aspen trees, to tap flesh for food and blood for water. One vine had killed them and the other was feeding on them, as if this were an Earth war where corpses were left to be scavenged by crows and wild dogs. I whipped out my machete and hacked apart the colorless shoots without thinking, kicked open the soil to find every last one, and chopped them all to bits.

Finished, panting in the thick atmosphere, I gazed at the east thicket rising unperturbed and realized I was a fool. This was no Earth war, just Darwinian struggle. The cycle of life always reuses the dead, and I had succeeded only in despoiling the graves. I gazed at clods of soil, dead flowers, and white vines bleeding sap. I smoothed the ground as neatly as I could over the graves, and left.

The Sun had risen above the treetops. I explored the forest until the muscles and joints in my legs ached, but I found precious little for our colony.

I had so much to learn. We knew that Pax was a billion years older than Earth. On Earth, plants had separated from animals less than a billion years ago. Probably Pax plants had had more time to evolve.

The greenery around me held secrets I would never learn.

We ate a small dinner in near silence that night. Uri said that some of the yams had been poisoned, apparently from seepage from the wheat fields, despite the drought.

Later, in bed, Paula awoke suddenly.

“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 bubbling from her chest and mouth. We had to leave her with the rest of the dead, and I had to be brave.

Uri had been in an army, but I had been in a war. Soldiers win victories, but civilians merely survive, if they are lucky and clever. 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.