Semiosis: A novel of first contact

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.

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.”