Semiosis: A novel of first contact

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. “We’ll just have to do better. And how hard will that be?”

We were all in our twenties, selected for our skills and personalities. Merl, a sandy-haired Texan, had scored low on anxiety and high on agreeableness. I was responsible and self-disciplined. We were all glad to have something to hope for.

We awakened, cold and dizzy, with our muscles, hearts, and digestive systems atrophied from the 158-year hibernation on a tiny spaceship. The computer had brought us into orbit, sent a message to Earth, then administered intravenous drugs.

Two hours later I was in the cramped cabin trying to sip an electrolyte drink when Vera, our astronomer, came flying in from the control module, her tightly curled hair trailing like a black cloud.

“We’re at the wrong star!”

I felt a wave of nausea and despair.

Paula was spoon-feeding Bryan, who was too weak to eat, and she seemed calm, but her hand trembled. “The computer could pick another one if it was better,” she said.

“It did!” Vera said. “It is. Lots of oxygen and water. And lots of life. It’s alive and waiting for us. We’re home!”

We were at star HIP 30815f instead of HIP 30756, at a planet with a well-evolved ecology and, I noted, abundant chlorophyll. The carbon dioxide level was slightly higher than Earth’s but not dangerous. Seen from Earth, both stars were pinpricks in the Gemini constellation near Castor’s left shin. As planned, we named the planet Pax, since we had come to live in peace.

Stevland Barr never awoke, dead years before from a failure in his hibernation system. Krishna Narashima developed pneumonia and died on board. Hedike’s kidneys had failed, although he was recovering with regrown medulla cells.

Waking up was just the start. Two of the six landing pods crashed. One crash broke Terrell’s collarbone and crushed Rosemarie Waukau’s chest, killing her. The other, a disaster, killed all twelve people on board and destroyed irreplaceable equipment, including the food synthesizer, too heavy and bulky for backup units.

The gravity, one-fifth stronger than Earth’s, caused misjudgments. When I left our landing module, I became dizzy and fell, twisting my ankle but nothing worse, although our bones had lost calcium and grown brittle during hibernation. Breasts and scrotums weighed more and ached, and our hearts labored.

We suffered rashes from Pax-style poison ivies, welts from bug-lizard bites, and diarrhea until we artificially stimulated new digestive enzymes and our intestinal flora adapted. A Pax fungus caused hyaline membrane disease, collapsed lungs. It had killed Luigi Dini, the other botanist, before Ramona found a fungicide. Wendy mangled her foot fixing a tractor, the wound got infected, and the medics had to amputate up to the tarsus bone. Always sturdy, she renamed herself “Half-Foot” Wendy.

Then Carrie, Ninia, and Zee died from poison fruit. We still had enough people to populate a planet, since we had a cache of frozen ova and sperm to fall back on. We did not need genetic material as much as we needed hands to work.

Now, a month after we had arrived, I had to figure out what the snow vines were doing. I paced along the east thicket behind the homes of our village. Between the aspens, thorny vines wider than my thumb looped like barbed wire made of bone. I searched for a way in: a tree-fall clearing or an animal path. I told myself I was not afraid of a vine, not me, not a botanist. I walked past one of our outhouses and startled a fippokat. It raced into the thicket. I found its narrow path, dropped to my knees, and, with a shove, shouldered my way in. It was like a cage inside.

Knobby white vine roots and gray tree roots covered the ground, hard as stones beneath my hands and knees. Vines arched across the tunnel and grazed my head. The air in the thicket hung motionless and smelled of exhausted soil. I crawled slowly, bowed to avoid a thorn, and shifted my weight onto a knee already throbbing against a nodule on a root. The thorn slipped across my hair—and stabbed into my scalp. It yanked backward, pulling me up onto aching knees. I groped for the thorn and found it, and its razor edge slit my fingers. The thorn in my scalp jerked again. I fumbled until I could grab it by its sides and tried to back it out. Barbs tore my scalp, and my fingers slipped, wet with blood. Finally, I gritted my teeth and pulled.

I whirled back to see what had bit so deep: a fishhook-sized white thorn, now smeared red. It hung from a tendril that curled like a spring. A sharp little thorn, that was all, just like thorns on Earth, attached to the same kind of tendril that had hoisted bean plants in my mother’s garden. These were natural tools for a climbing vine. Their movements were normal on Earth and Pax. Nothing personal, and nothing to be frightened of. Plants don’t attack botanists. I tugged on the tendril to test its strength. It could have supported my machete.

Around me stretched vines and parasitized trees but nothing else, silent and empty, with no moss, no ferns, no grass, no competing plants of any type. The vines had eliminated them.

I wasn’t sure I could do this job anymore. On Earth, my botany degree had won me work on an industrialized farm to monitor engineered corn. For four years I had watched the near-infrared satellite images of the fields for dark patches that might signal the root blister blight that had caused corn crops to wilt from the top down and had started a war when I was a boy. Sometimes the war had been all I could see, my family running, trying to hide from the spy planes, drones disguised as birds or insects that would call in bigger, armed robot airplanes. If they didn’t kill us, we might die of hunger anyway. We were just farmers, no one’s enemy, but if we lived, we might join the enemy’s forces, so we had to die.

Now I had a planet to explore and people to keep alive, and I was afraid again. Maybe the other planet, the one we had aimed for, would have been better. Here, I was kneeling inside a thicket of a plant wholly unlike docile domesticated corn.

But I was our colony’s sole botanist. I had a big job, and I had to do it properly regardless of my fear.

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I spotted some moss, a patch of green in the bole of a root. It moved again. It was a fippokat. I looked at more boles. They made perfect fippokat homes. Fippokat feces littered the ground, black raisins melting into the sandy soil. Perhaps this was symbiosis—two life-forms helping each other—with the snow vines providing housing and the fippokats providing fertilizer, like bromeliads and ants on Earth. That didn’t explain why the west vines had suddenly made fruit that could kill a fippokat.

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.