by Sue Burke
“We must talk a lot more,” I said.
“You are not the first alien species we have encountered,” he said with a small smile like an apology. “We have been talking to one by radio, but it takes generations, and we will never see them. But we have you, face-to-face. You cannot imagine what it—you—tells us about the universe and about how life works.” He had reached out and was idly touching the fronds of a miniature model of Stevland.
What if he knew about Stevland? Why not just tell him?
“On Earth,” he said, but not looking at us, “when we have met other cultures, we have often killed them, and they were our own species, not to mention what we did to animals. But Humans have adopted you into our species. What is it about you that makes it possible?… I have trouble saying what I want in English. We must talk someday, you and me, with Zivon or another anthropologist, and I can say better what a surprise you are.”
Adopted? Dakota, perhaps unconsciously, had taken a half step back from him. I scented bitter laughter, and she looked at me with a twisted smile, then shook her head to say no.
Humans had not adopted us. Stevland had adopted us all.
I had never thought about it quite so clearly.
The rain was still falling, but not as hard, and I had a delivery to make. I thrust out my hands to him. “I must go now and attend to duties.”
“Think about it,” he said as he clasped them with a little bow that was unexpectedly charming.
“I can do nothing else.”
Dakota took my hands and squeezed them, her little wet eyes sharing a secret as expressively as anything that could be said or scented. I released the sexual scent Stevland had taught, and I wished her happiness.
I galloped to the greenhouse to shorten my time in the rain, entered, locked the door, and looked at the fronds falling all around me. I waited for him to speak. His attention was not always everywhere, but he would notice me soon.
Welcome, he scented.
“He desires to take Rattle to Earth.”
“Not necessarily her, but a Glassmaker mother for certain,” he said in Glassmade. “And seeds. I will make sure Earthlings take some of my seeds, but seeds for me are not like a child for you, especially a future queen. Or he could take yourself. I cannot tell you what to choose, but I know it will be a difficult choice.”
Perhaps a joyful choice. “Cawzee is sick.”
“Yes, and I wish I knew what his illness is. At the clinic, they are still trying to stabilize him. They are also working on another medicine for Humans based on its earlier failures. We may have good news soon.”
“Did you hear what Zivon said to me?”
“He is always saying things like that. Do you think it is true?”
“Things are never perfect between Humans and Glassmakers. And us and you,” I dared to say. “Or members of a family. That is truth. Our family is a normal family, the family of Pax.” The wind gusted outside. I reached into a pocket. “I have the neurotransmitter.” The plastic box was sealed. “Shall I open it?”
“Please.”
I struggled with the snap lid a bit, then struggled to understand what I saw inside. Protected by a cover of clear plastic, nestled into a protective berth, lay a tiny flat piece of gold, its surface elaborately worked, and with a long tail-like wire on one end, looping around the berth. I held it up to show him. “It looks small.”
“It fits outside the skull, and only the wire goes into the brain.”
I thought about what it would mean to have a tiny radio in my head. Could I turn it off? A constant noise, a constant connection. “Does this connect everyone with everyone?”
“They seem to be able to choose whom to speak with. Often some individuals have periods of silence, so I believe they can control it. I will have a lot to learn. My roots are the equivalent to a brain, and one of them can accept the wires.”
I had a frightening thought. “You will become more like the Earthlings.”
“I will become more attuned to them. That does not mean I will like them more.”
“Do you really desire to go to Earth? Send your seeds? Earth could be horrible.” Or as Cheery said, it could be wonderful. What did he think?
“I desire to send my seeds everywhere, to places good and bad. It is my nature. Many plants send their seeds to float on the wind, to travel without any plan at all. Your nature is to travel. You are nomadic.”
“Perhaps migratory. We leave home, but we come back. And we do not leave our babies to luck.” But perhaps I would!
“You do not bear a hundred thousand babies in a season. I will not live forever, but I can try to live everywhere.”
That made me laugh. And laughing surprised me. “I must attend to my work and my family.”
“Please leave the neurotransmitter in the box on the table. Queen Chut will come to install it soon.”
“I hope it works well. Water and sunshine.”
“Warmth and food.”
I left into rain and wind, and galloped home. Inside, Rattle and Chirp were playing with dolls, both Glassmaker and Human dolls. I imagined a home without her, after she was grown—or sent to Earth!—and how relaxed I would feel. I walked over and petted her. It felt reasonable, like what a loving mother would do.
“We must think about the Spring Festival,” I said. “What shall we make to burn?” It would symbolize what each one of us wished to change.
“I do not desire change in anything,” Chirp said, “but changes happen.”
“Earthlings?”
“I think a ball for me. It can be a planet, not this one. Earthlings will not understand.”
“You dislike them so much?”
“They eat a lot of food but do not help us get it. They make more tiring work. They are going to eat a lot at the festival. Our Humans are too sick to prepare it, so we will work work work.”
“Is it only the work that bothers you?” If we became ill, who would do that work?
“And what Scratcher said, what they think of us. And their illnesses. But I say this only to you, Mother. I do not speak to Earthlings at all.”
“You are the most headstrong of my children.”
“No, that would be the little mother. As it should be.”
And what would I make to burn, a symbol of my willingness to change? Chirp was right. I had desired no changes, but changes had happened. More would come, great and small, and perhaps good. Perhaps.
5
JACQUES MIRLO—6 DAYS LATER
No one was following me. Good. I walked out of the west gate late in the day, when most colonists were finishing dinner, to a path through a newly planted field. Around me, animals chirped and chimed and barked, and every noise spooked me, but I was more terrified that someone might see me.
I knew where I was headed. I’d investigated earlier. The path continued uphill to a grove of rainbow bamboo shielded from sight from passersby. When I got there, I stood still and looked around. Bamboo branches arched over me like a vaulted roof. I listened. Creepy little animals, no colonists. Good.
I pulled a knife from my pocket. I needed a stalk of bamboo. A small one would do, small enough to hide, but mature. That one? No, too young. There? Yes, but I’d have to trim off the leaves.… I knelt and cut. Sawed, really. A tough stem. This was going to take too long. But I reminded myself that I was in a field in a forest, not in a building with alarms, and not on a planet with the technology to alarm its plant life. As far as I knew.
Done. I had my stalk. I needed only a half meter of it. I began trimming the top and leaves, and they were tough, too. Why didn’t I bring a saw? I was stupid, unprepared.
I could hide the stalk under my coat, but I’d need to cut it into pieces. I knelt to brace it on the ground to begin cutting. Something rustled. I jumped. Probably just an animal. Why did I even think it was a good idea? But I needed to know more about the rainbow bamboo, the plant the colonists seemed to worship. No, not worshiped, respected. Maybe feared. The anthropologists
had figured out that they’d even given it a name: Stevland. They’d seen it written at the museum. Why that name? Why any name?
The anthropologists wanted to know, but no one wanted to talk or even admit to it, and we were all worried about being too pushy after we’d seen them kill all those Glassmakers at the funeral. The colonists didn’t appreciate our killer flu, either, even after the cure four days ago. No one can kill their way to friendship. Om had said to tread softly, and for once I agreed.
I was the task force botanist. The natives were farmers, most of them, so even when I wasn’t trying to figure out the bamboo, everything I did was treading in their territory. I was an outsider.
But I had too many questions to ignore, and until that moment I’d had enough courage to want to find out any way I could. Well, no turning back now. I’d cut a third of the stem off. Another cut and the three pieces would be small enough to hide and I could leave.… There. Done. The knife in a pocket, the stalks under my shirt up against my suit, held in place by the waistband of my slacks.
And back to the city. No running downhill, just walk, out for an evening stroll, enjoying the beauty of the sparkly caterpillars and the music of the barks and chimes and squawks and a far-off terrifying roar, a bat swooping down at me and hooting—I didn’t want to be there at all. I had to continue down the path, through the gate, down the streets. Walk normal. Maybe smile a bit as if I were listening to some entertaining feed. I passed some colonists. Some ignored me, a few nodded more politely than pleasantly.
And finally, the lab. I ducked in under the door and barred it shut. Safe. I’d analyze that bamboo with every piece of equipment I had. I wouldn’t dare to gather more samples anytime soon.
* * *
There, in the MR scanner, those cells again, easy to spot because there were lots of them. Long, thin—ten times too fine to be tracheid tubes to carry water. They carried electric charges. Nerve cells: I’d figured that out a week ago with samples from other species. Nerve cells in plants. I’d seen them in every sample—all the plants on this planet had a nervous system!—and this time I was looking at Bambusa iridis.
As slowly as I could, I rotated the stalk in the scanner, searching for a clue about what the nerves were for, what a plant needed them for. I decided to check the nodes, the joints between stalk sections, as logical a place as any to look for some purpose.… Yes, there. Neurons were entering … something, a little organ of some sort. I took a cross section of it. Another in a different direction, horizontal now because the organ was thin and long, about four micrometers long.
I took a series of images and put them on-screen to study.… Fairly complex for being only a dozen or so cells, with a clear top, long sides, and nerves at the end. Not like anything I’d ever seen in a plant on Earth. So far life here hadn’t seemed as weird as we’d hoped. Earthlike, far too Earthlike for major surprises, both the animals and plants. But now, this.… Animals.… I tried to remember some zoology.… This could be an eye. A cornea, lens, and nerves to sense light—that’s what it might be. I called up some reference materials and searched through them.
An ommatidium—it looked almost exactly like an ommatidium, a unit of a compound eye of an insect. A little eye complete with attached optic nerves. I had to be sure. If it could see, it would react to light. My samples were still alive, since I’d picked them just an hour ago. I could slide in a microhair-sized wire from a sensor to measure electrical charges. The equipment lay on another table in the lab.
Something rattled outside and I jumped. Then I recognized the sound, the string of rattles that the city guards carried, a pair making rounds. Would they stop in front of my lab? I was working in the middle of the night, and the central skylight would be glowing, so they’d know I was there. I had the door blocked so colleagues and Pacifists couldn’t come in and see what I was doing. No colleagues because I wasn’t ready to share what I knew, if I ever would be. No Pacifists because they would have stopped me.
Or maybe they’d do something worse. They had a lot of opinions about all the plants. You could pick some plants or fruit and not others, or just certain parts or at certain times. Above all, you could hardly even touch the rainbow bamboo, never ever burn it, even though it was huge and grew everywhere. And I was dissecting samples of it.
The rattle faded as the guards walked on, leaving me alone in the chilly, dark, glass-domed stone-walled lab with this plant that might have eyes.
I finished placing the sensors into the sample, set it gently … gently in front of the MR, and draped my coat over the machine so the stalk would be in the dark. I brought a lamp over and carefully pulled off the coat. The sensor jumped. The eye had noted the light.
I tried again. Again. Then I brought over a lamp that shone with ultraviolet light. Another reaction. One more time just to be sure. Then with another ommatidium.
Eyes. Tiny eyes. It had a lot of them. I put a stalk under a microscope and started counting the eye cells in a node chosen at random, the first one I grabbed. Thirty-four on that node, and three nodes in that half-meter-long culm, and it was a small culm compared to the monster trunks I’d seen elsewhere, and the plant grew everywhere. A total number of eyes in this valley would require scientific notation to write because we hadn’t brought that many zeros from Earth.
Seriously, it would take a lot of brain-processing power to handle all that data from all those eyes. I’d already seen brains—that is, bundles of neurons—in some of the roots I’d collected from other plants and examined with microscopes, scans, comparisons to known animals on Earth and Pax—thanks, colleagues, for your notes. I found what I was looking for, long cords of ganglia in the roots along with vascular bundles of xylem and phloem and all the other things a root might have. It had secondary growth, too, with new cords and ganglia. Interesting.
The bamboo must have roots like that—a brain. And it could grow more brains. Every plant on this planet had nerve tissue and many had brains. None as big as the rainbow bamboo, though. None of the plants were anywhere near as big as the bamboo. It could do a lot with a brain that big and information from, effectively, every part of its habitat.
Could it hear? That is, detect vibration? And smell, too? Probably. On Earth, plants sensed chemicals in the air, and noted movements and gravity. There were enough nerve cells in the stem for lots of kinds of sensory reception. I needed to investigate more.
And oh, how I wanted to! I wanted a plant, any plant, to sense me, to interact, to communicate, to think in a way I would understand.
There had to be a way to communicate with an intelligent plant alert to its surroundings. On Earth, I could interact with, say, a goldfish, teach it to solve a very simple maze, but not an oak tree, and an oak could live for centuries, maybe growing wiser than me. I’d never believed plants were mere automatons, living self-operating machines going through the motions. Plants made fruit to be eaten. That demonstrated their awareness of us as frugivores, dim awareness, perhaps, but real. How much more did they know?
If only we could … measure a response, watch it make a decision, something. For all that plants could do, for all that I stared at them frustrated, imagining their secret lives, nothing. Now I had a way to find that something.
The Pacifists knew, and they wouldn’t tell us.
But it was late, and I was tired and needed to get to bed, and I still had to clean up very carefully. Where to hide the bamboo samples? As I turned off equipment and put it away, I worried about that. Then I had a flash of genius: I’d drop it in the latrine—gift center, they called it. Gifts? For whom? The bamboo, which occupied the city. A plant that big needed lots of nitrogen.
And so I left with a bag of samples, dumped them while I used the latrine—something for you, Stevland!—and went to bed in the little house I shared with other scientists, the Mu Rees. I thought I’d be too tense to sleep, but I dropped off fast to exciting thoughts. From the moment I’d seen the bamboo, I knew it could make me some good money if I could get it hom
e. What garden plant could be prettier? Big, beautiful bamboo.
But now I wouldn’t just be rich, I’d be famous, at least in the scientific world. And even if Earth was still a fascist lunacy when we got back home, money and fame would protect me—but only if I could find out more about the bamboo, about the enormous plant that could see and think. Bambusa sapiens. The Pacifists knew a lot. How could I get them to tell me?
Oh, and its fruit, such possibilities.…
* * *
The next morning the Mu Ree triplets dragged me out of bed, three identical clones, and if they turned off their ID display, which they did a lot, you couldn’t tell them apart, not in looks, not in personality, not in knowledge. Mediocre zoologists who liked being three parts of one thing.
I didn’t want them to be suspicious, so I got up, tugged on a suit and clothes, and left for breakfast with them. The sky looked clear, the air felt a little chilly. The zoologists were chortling about some giant spider they’d finally documented.
“They’re everywhere,” the Mu Ree next to me told me. “But camouflaged.”
“Here?” I played along, gesturing at the big rainbow bamboo we were passing.
“No, not in the city. They don’t come here. The colony has trained them not to. But the minute we leave the city, they’re everywhere.”
That big rainbow bamboo we passed, was it watching us? It had to be. Those eyes had no lids. What was it thinking? About me? It had to be thinking about something with all those brains. Animals had brains to control their bodies’ processes, to move, to find food, to do things. Plants on Earth, even sequoias, got along just fine without them, as far as I knew. Why here?
“How much do you think the colonists have changed the environment?” I asked.
“Globally, insignificantly. It’s all still wide-open. You’ve seen the global surveys we’re getting from the ship. Amazing stuff. In the immediate area, besides a couple of domestications and some conditioned responses, not too much. It’s a small colony.”
