Semiosis: A novel of first contact

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.