Semiosis: A novel of first contact

“But he didn’t design it. He wouldn’t know what to look for.”

She waved her cane. “It was too dangerous.”

“Don’t worry,” he murmured. He was still a teenager like me, but his beard had come in red like his hair. He got that from his mother, Paula, and a squarish face from his father, Octavo, and had a smile so wide that it made his eyes crinkle up. He patted me on the arm. She glared at his hand.

Even so, I swear I wanted to like her and I thought maybe she acted angry because she was frightened by the storm. She’d been moderator for only a month, elected after Paula’s death, and I hoped that Vera would be as good as her. Paula had been too sick in her last year to be a real moderator and I hoped that Pax would become calm and organized again. I wanted to keep building, to design strong and beautiful homes and barns and bridges. Survival was year to year and survival came first, but beauty was good for the soul. Several Earth texts said that and Earth couldn’t have been all bad.

My mother, Half-Foot Wendy, was sitting with Octavo. His white hair and beard looked bright in the dim light of oil lamps. I headed toward them, zigzagging because all twenty-eight residents of the lodge and their possessions crowded the room, all their clothes, beds, tools, medical equipment, and robots. There were three other older lodges, also probably having trouble in a storm so fierce, with cellars full of people, but the cellars were sturdy. Everyone understood the importance of that.

Mama smiled at me as if I’d gone for a stroll to pick friendly fruit, with a wide smile like Julian’s, but the corners of her mouth disappeared into her jowls. Her face had once been smooth and full like mine, I’d seen the pictures, but she wasn’t made for this gravity. It had pulled her face down, and her breasts, knees, arms, all her flesh drooped. On Earth, according to the parents, I’d be light as a leaf.

“It was a good design,” Mama said.

“It was my first real building.”

“Not your fault,” Octavo said, but he wasn’t looking at me.

Mama wanted to go to the gift center and I helped her stand and walk. The top of my head only reached her shoulder because Pax gravity had made us children short and strong and fast like native animals. The parents were crippled after a lifetime of falls and struggling, no matter how many times the medics rebuilt their bones and joints.

“Not bad in here yet,” she called from the gift center, which was just big buckets, not a real outhouse, and it didn’t stink yet, but we’d be stuck in the cellar for two days with no chance to make a gift to a friendly plant, and they’d get full. She limped out and took my shoulder again.

“Do you know why Vera yells at Julian?” she whispered, and put her arm around my shoulders. “Octavo told me. Julian’s sterile.”

Sterile? I was so surprised I didn’t say anything. Mama shook her head and patted my cheek because she knew I liked Julian.

Sterility was the Pax curse, that’s what the parents muttered, and population was the Pax problem. Half the parents were dead now and they’d had only twenty-four surviving children, and half the cache of sperm and ova from Earth had been lost in a refrigeration failure in a storm. We children had produced only thirteen grandchildren so far, none from me, and I was now eighteen Earth years old, fourteen Pax years, and fertile, and a lot of parents thought I had a duty to fulfill. “You have time,” Mama always said, but other parents were impatient. I saw how mothers loved their children and I couldn’t stand to love anything that much yet because sometimes babies died even before they were born. What if my baby died?

We made the usual hurricane meal that evening, fancy fippokat stew, fragrant with onions and potatoes, but I didn’t eat much. I minded Nicoletta’s toddler while she fed her father. Later Ramona wanted to play Go and how can you say no to a parent, especially a bossy one like her? So we played and I won, probably because I could see better. Eventually, the roof blew off. The wood tore horribly until there was a thud and shake of released pressure, then rain blasted louder than ever against the attic floor. No one said anything. Without the tug from the roof, the building seemed to creak less. I was sitting on my cot with a piece of paper, designing a temporary roof, when Julian sat down next to me and put his arm around me. I closed my eyes and leaned against him, hoping Vera was watching. I wished I were on Earth.

In my earliest memories I thought Pax was somewhere on Earth because the names of so many things were the same here as in the educational programs. But there were big differences too, so later I thought there was some elaborate Earth-Pax distinction about animals and plants and food. I worried that Earth and all its tall fragile people with their multipart names might be just on the other side of the lake and might cross it, because they’d made Earth a living hell. The parents always said so.

But then I understood that Earth was far away, just a computer library of texts, music, and pictures about complicated histories and places I’d never visit and eventually saw less of as the computers broke down. Besides us, there was no intelligent life on Pax, just the snow vines and some sneaky carnivores. That disappointed the parents and me, too, when I realized that the only new people I’d ever meet were new babies. I wished for aliens.

The architecture texts, when I could access them, showed beautiful and inspiring buildings, completely impossible because we didn’t have pre-stressed concrete or structural steel, in fact hardly any iron because the satellite hadn’t found any ore deposits. We had only bricks and lumber but I’d tried to learn what was practical and apply it and now my first building was falling apart on top of me because people who hadn’t studied architecture were sure they knew better.

Vera stayed anxious during the whole storm, organizing teams to mop up leaks and cook meals. Nights were the worst. It was early lights out because the parents wanted to sleep, but they never slept well, waking at any noise, every clap of thunder, shuffling again and again to the gift center, and snoring louder than the roaring wind, then early lights on when they were done with what passed for sleep. They kept me awake and I began to act like them, inattentive, irritable, and forgetful, chronically sleep-deprived because the days and nights were too short for the parents, who’d been born on Earth. I wished I were somewhere else.

As soon as the storm calmed, two days after the roof was torn off, I slipped out of the damp and stinking cellar, finally, with some other children. I went to the lake with Julian and tall, skinny Aloysha, who were both hunters, and Daniel, who fished and was almost thirty years old. We wanted to see how the boats had fared and what had washed up on shore. It was still raining hard and the clouds were low and dark. We were wrapped in downy acetate ponchos like cocoons but our feet were drenched. Puddles and streamlets were everywhere. Everything we walked past was damaged, buildings and irrigation canals and farm fields, and the disaster would look even worse when the Sun came out. Even some of the aspen trees in the snow vine thicket had fallen, although the thicket itself remained sturdy in a way that I envied.

The river through the friendly thicket was flooded. The lake was flooded too, with only a narrow strip of sand between the water and the tree line. The other rivers were probably flooded but we couldn’t see them through the rain. The whitecapped waves were dirty brown from all the soil washed into the water. Rain rattled on the surface of the water and made it dull as the clouds. The boats had been hauled up beyond the tree line and lashed tightly.

Daniel, who always worried, checked the boats. “They look good,” he said, relieved. I checked the wicker fish traps stored under them. They looked good, too.

Wicker was the reason I’d come to the beach. I made baskets. After storms, fresh reeds and vines would wash up on the beach, brought to the lake by the flooding rivers, and there were usually dead natans from the lake, the swimming plants that dried into silky-soft fibers. I also hoped that a roof beam might be floating around, because we could salvage the nails, at least. Julian and Aloysha found an injured fippolion. I didn’t look as they pulled out their knives and ended its whimpers. It would be a lot of meat, tough and not nearly as good as deer crab, but we’d have enough to eat.

I saw strange flashes of color in a mat of branches that had washed on shore. I got closer and saw rainbow-striped pieces of stems and twigs. But a hungry lizard or worse might be riding in the mat so I teased out some pieces with a stick. Finger-wide rainbows alternated with black bands on the twigs, worn and scratched but still beautiful, and I could weave extraordinary things with it. I took all I could and stuffed it into my bag. I hoped I’d find more down the beach.

On the way I saw something pink in the sand, maybe a chunk of rose quartz, so I checked. A pretty stone could be beautiful, too. Closer, I saw shiny yellow metal with it. Maybe it was a bit from one of the landing pods that had crashed thirty-four years ago. I dug it out of the wet sand and let the rain wash it clean. It was a glass ball, solid and heavy, the size of a baby’s fist and faceted, worn on the surface but clear where it was chipped, wrapped in a spiral band of gold.

The gold was battered but I could still see writing engraved in a kind of alphabet I’d never seen in history texts, just lines and triangles. I turned it around and around in my hands and tried to imagine what it was. A machine part? I knew what most machine parts looked like even if I wasn’t a technician, and a few lenses sort of looked like this, but lenses were small. A decoration? We didn’t have many decorations and nothing like this because gold was too useful to be wasted. A piece of ore? Not even possible. Maybe something natural? Even more impossible. It wasn’t like anything I knew.

Finally I began to realize that the only things I knew were either natural or human-made. Maybe I couldn’t recognize the ball because it wasn’t either. Maybe it had been made by another kind of sentient being. Maybe someone else lived on Pax. Someone who could make things. Someone who could write and handle metal and glass and make something beautiful with it. This ball had sat in the bottom of the lake or washed in from a river or some traveler had left it behind. Someone else lived on Pax. Maybe we could find them.

Julian and Aloysha had tied the dead fippolion to a fallen branch and were hoisting it up, a male big enough to tear apart snow vines, with front claws like machetes. They wobbled with its weight. The rain was falling harder. I ran up and held out the ball. My hand trembled.

“I don’t think this is ours,” I said, “look, I think this is something alien, I mean Pax, really, we’re aliens, it has writing, I found it, really different writing, it’s beautiful, isn’t it, and it was in the sand over there, and it’s not human.” I realized I wasn’t making sense.

Julian set the branch on his shoulder and put his hands around mine to steady it. He looked at the ball for what seemed like a long time, then he smiled wider than he ever had. Daniel ran over to see what we were excited about and we all started talking at once.

“This is gold, look, and glass.”

“We don’t make things like this.”

“What is it? Let me hold it.”

“It’s beautiful.”

Aloysha howled like a lion.

“Something—someone made this,” I said. “We’re not alone. Not here, not on Pax, not in the universe.”

We stared at it for a moment.

“There’s intelligent life here besides us,” I said, “somewhere nearby.”

“Nearby,” Aloysha echoed, squinting. He didn’t always catch on fast.

“How old is this?” Julian said.

“The wear should tell us something,” Daniel said. He took it and turned it around in his hand slowly. “It can’t be that old. I mean, not thousands of years.”

“So they’re still alive,” I said. Daniel handed it back to me, and for a moment I was surprised to feel it was wet because I’d forgotten we were standing in the middle of a rainstorm. I was drenched and rain was pelting on the ball in my hand and all our faces were dripping but I didn’t care. We weren’t alone on Pax.

“What’s it for?” Aloysha asked.

“Maybe,” I said, “it’s an invitation. We need to find them.”

Julian smiled. “Soon.”

When we got to the village, he and Aloysha had to take the lion to be dressed out and Daniel went to report to the fishing team while I headed straight for the lodge, where Vera would probably be. The reek from the basement hit me as soon as I opened the door. I knew I shouldn’t go into the basement and drip over everything so I had someone ask her to come up.

She huffed up the steps, looking anxious. “Is there a problem? Did we lose the boats?”

“No, they’re fine, but—”

“The fields?”

“Well, they’re flooded and there’s damage, and buildings too, but—”