Semiosis: A novel of first contact

“They’re not there,” Julian said. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

“I brought some fruit,” I said. I patted Higgins and hoped Julian would stick to our plan.

“And we brought soil samples,” Julian added. “They look rich.”

“A hurricane is coming!” Vera said.

Not a big hurricane, though, and finally we were assembled in the cellar. All the people who could had crowded into the lodge with us as thunder rumbled and Vera tried to convince them to start preparing the stew but we respectfully ignored her.

Is it a lie not to tell everything? Julian and I wanted to save certain details for the Commonwealth meeting and there were things I didn’t want to tell at all.

“We walked for twenty days,” I said.

“It had to be farther than that,” Bryan said.

It had seemed farther.

On the day that we left, we circled to one side of Thunder River’s waterfall and hurried over the scree and up the ledges on the cliff, then got lost finding our way around a snow vine thicket. The first night, we slept cuddled in a hammock draped with a bug net, and the barks from the digging owls kept me awake for hours because they sounded so human that I was sure they were the voices of people chasing us, and the fireflies whizzed around us until I felt dizzy. When I woke, a slug had crawled into a fold of the net and divided, so slimy little pink things were crawling all around trying to touch us and dissolve a nip of flesh for a meal.

When we got close to the river that morning, we were in foggy, swampy woods, and slithery things moved on the ground, giant slugs, some bright pink and purple, some just clumps of clear slime, and a few disguised like logs or vines, and we had to put spearheads on our walking staffs to protect ourselves but they were sometimes too fast and stung us. Moths swirled around us in patterns like giant thumbprints, each trying for a bite. We were wrapped in raincoats and double pairs of socks and had smeared mud on our faces and still lost bits of flesh.

Beyond the waterfall and its mists and slugs, travel got easier.

“Up above the waterfall,” I told the people in the cellar, “the canyon is like the ruins of a giant Greek temple.” Everyone had seen a picture of the Acropolis in the history text, the birthplace of democracy. The canyon actually was high and narrow, with the trees arching overhead, more like a cathedral, but only the architecture texts showed churches.

“There are rocks like columns,” I said, “and aspens grow free and tall alongside them. No snow vines. There are meadows full of flowers on the riverbanks.”

I didn’t mention all the rocks to climb over and around, uphill all the way, and some of the flowers were little biting corals with dewdrops of digestive enzymes on tiny teeth. The only food we could easily find were wild onions and palm-sized trilobites netted from the river. Onions and trilobites for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Once, we were trapped between the riverbank and a cliff by three ground eagles, drumming their air sacs and dancing and snapping their big beaks at us, human-sized and smelly, with spiny feathers that looked so much like bark and dried weeds they’d had no trouble sneaking up on us. We lit a line of fires to hold them off but they were waiting until we ran out of fuel so we caught trilobites and threw them to the eagles until they’d eaten their fill and left.

We left the valley and climbed hand in hand through the misty forest around the final waterfall, up through vines and mosses and clumps of pulsing slime and finally over some rocks and into a forest. That’s when we saw our first rainbow bamboo. A stand of it grew right along the edge of the cliff, taller than some of the trees, with trunks as wide as a human thigh. The bamboo stood straight and proud, not at all like the snaking snow vines. Living rainbows. A few pieces of fruit, pink and translucent and bright in the sunshine, hung face-high.

Julian and I looked at each other. You should never eat something untested.

“It looks exactly like the glass maker ornament, except bigger,” I said.

“Snow vines can kill when they decide to.”

“But the bamboo hasn’t met us yet, so it shouldn’t have an opinion.” A piece of fruit pulled off easily from the stem. Three seeds were shadowed inside. It smelled like fresh wheat and cinnamon. I took a little bite and the juice was sweet and oily against my tongue. Julian watched.

“If it kills me,” I said, “I’ll die happy.” But that was all I ate for the moment. I stroked the bamboo’s smooth and waxy trunk and I imagined it as door frames or roof beams, or split and woven into wall coverings. A small trunk cut into rings would make beautiful bracelets.

We admired it awhile, then walked along the top of the cliff toward the waterfall, hoping to see the aliens behind every rock. We looked down on the canyon, green and long and dropping sharply between the stone cliffs. The view became better as we got close to the waterfall and at the most beautiful spot we found a bench carved into the stone and encrusted with lichen. At first we thought it was natural but there were words carved into the back of the seat, the same script writing that was on the glass ball. The glass makers had been there! We shouted and hugged each other.

We sat on the bench, trying to guess what glass makers could be like. The seat was low and wide. The glass makers were somewhere upstream, so we began hiking. The land became flat and the river got wider and slower. There was a path along it made of flagstones, heaved up by roots. We were going in the right direction, and we walked faster. There were more bits of glass in the river, all the colors of the rainbow. Around the next bend, soon, soon, we’d find them.

That afternoon we spotted a cluster of four buildings with domed glass roofs sparkling in the middle of a grove of bamboo. I ran toward the nearest one. The roofs were rings of colored glass blocks arranged in rainbows, the walls were made of brownish bricks, and the foundations were stone with bands of sparkling gray and white. Julian was right behind me. But as soon as I started running, I saw that the buildings were ruins, the walls cracked and tumbled in, the roofs collapsed.

The glass makers weren’t there. They hadn’t been there for a long time.

I was crying by the time I entered the closest building. Dirt and dead leaves covered the floor. The walls inside had been faced with glazed tile in a pattern of interlaced red and green lines. I’d seen glazed tiles in computer texts. I tried to wipe away the tears and look carefully. The room was about five meters across. Glass blocks from the roof lay on the floor, half-buried and sparkling.

“Spectacular,” Julian whispered.

The building had several low bays, each crowned by a half dome, and one of them was intact. The glass roof was dirty and corals were crusted on the outside.

Someone had stood below this ceiling once, had stared up at the sunlight filtering through it, someone with eyes like mine that enjoyed colors, someone who built buildings like me, someone who thought like me, someone who could do things that I’d dreamed of. Someone had built a bench, low and wide, along the wall. I sat on it and sobbed. Julian sat with me.

The glass makers must have abandoned the buildings before the parents had come to Pax. We’d traveled far to find only ruins, but there had to be more glass makers somewhere. I wiped my face and stood up. I walked over and around fallen brick and stone and glass, trying to see how it had been built. The bricks were slightly offset at about head level, sloping in for a half meter, then changing to glass, and the curve of the domes was parabolic, not circular. One apse seemed to be the entrance to the building and I’d have had to duck a bit if it had been intact. I was taller than the glass makers.

“Come here!” Julian said. I heard rustling. He was already in the next building. He’d kicked some of the dirt 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.