by Sue Burke
“But here’s something interesting,” another Mu Ree said. “The colonists tell us they didn’t domesticate the fippokats and fippolions. They were domesticated before they got here, and not by the Glassmakers, either, who got here a little before them. The colonists believe that intelligent species preceded them. But they have no proof. They just believe that.”
In unison, they shook their heads in amazement.
“Right,” I said. “They know things and they’re not telling us.”
“How did they domesticate so many crops so fast?” one of them asked.
“Good question,” I said. “If I could get anyone to talk to me honestly, I might learn the answer.”
In fact, that was an obvious question. I’d been asking it and not getting many satisfactory responses. And if all the plants could think, the questions got more complicated. Why would, say, the pineapples cooperate and be domesticated? Was there some sort of deal? How? Did it involve the bamboo? And if the colonists found out I’d filched samples of the bamboo and examined them, would they ever talk to me at all? Or would they just kill me?
We walked into the big, square building next to the kitchen where everyone ate, a lot like a school cafeteria. Food service and buffet at one end, the rest filled with tables and benches, lots of light and lots of windows, and big doors to open in nice weather. I looked around and tried to remember what I’d learned about sociology, because if I could figure out where the weak links were, I could pry some information out of someone.
Colonists tended to sit by generations, each with its marker—like black hats or bald heads—but not all the time. Sometimes they sat by work group or families. Could I spot a work group of farmers? They could tell me something.
If they would talk to me. During the flu outbreak, they’d stayed far away, as if I were poison ivy come to infest their crops, as if I were the source. (I checked, I wasn’t.) After the antiviral was developed that got all but the sickest cases back on their feet in forty-eight hours and everyone else immune, they were still looking at me as I scanned the room as if maybe I were about to mutate into poison nettles.
Om said to be humble. I could fake that. I could go with them, pull weeds with them, and talk with them. And listen. Learn. Sooner or later they’d let something slip. I’d sit at that table over there, with Geraldine, too much of a coward to be rude, but yet a knowledgeable farmer. She’d let me invite myself along to the fields.
First, some food. A table at one end was loaded with bread and nut spread and fruit—rainbow bamboo fruit. I had checked that fruit carefully. It had caffeine in it. Great breakfast fruit. Delicious. Fruit like that would sell big on Earth. I grabbed one and put it and a bread turnover on a clay plate, grabbed a cup of what they called reddog tea, and—
Behind me a man began talking loud enough to distract me.
“Velvet leaves? You could boil them a week and dip them in butterfly oil and they’d still be inedible. What were you thinking?” The translation sent through my connection didn’t match the indignation of the original voice. That was the trouble with translation. That’s why I had learned as much as I could of English and forced myself to get used to the Pax accent.
I turned. Behind me was the little table where cooks put experiments. If you tried something there, you had to give an opinion.
The cook, a plump woman, just shrugged. “I was thinking that Glassmakers might like them. It was brave of you to try.”
“Put a warning sign on it next time.”
“I thought ‘velvet leaves’ would be enough.”
They glared at each other a moment and went back to whatever they were doing. The anthropologists had explained that the culture here was very direct.
Velvet leaves. Something else, yet another thing, that might warrant investigation.
Someone touched my arm. Om.
“Would you mind sitting with me?”
“Of course not.” Well, yes, I would, but I had no choice. So I followed him to his table in the middle of the room. He liked to be the center of attention, the senior person by location. Karola and Honey were there, too, and one of the Mu Rees. Om let me sit down and begin to eat while he asked me polite questions about how I slept and whether I had finally fully adjusted to the food, which had given us diarrhea and worse at first. I assured him I was fine.
“I think you know that we’ve discovered that the corals here have DNA, while most other life-forms use RNA.”
I nodded. “No plants with DNA either, only RNA.”
“And that’s what we want to explore. We want to go to the Coral Plains and take some samples.”
“Good idea.”
“Fine. Mu Ree Fa is organizing the trip tomorrow.” He gestured at the Mu Ree at the table. “He’ll fill you in on the details.”
I swallowed hard to avoid choking. “I’m going?”
“Yes.”
Karola murmured something to Honey. Those two were a pair. Like Jose and Haus.
“You’ll love it there!” Honey said. “I just got back. It’s beautiful and very interesting. I can tell you all about it. Some of the plants are the same, but some are completely different. And of course the corals are fascinating!” I understood some of what she said, and the feed took care of the rest.
“They can hurt you,” I said.
She raised her hand with a stump of a finger. “Wear gloves and don’t take them off. And don’t be stupid like Queen Rust. The corals hunt, and they have a pretty good range. I wrote a full report about our visit. You can read it!”
A long report, probably, in Classical English. I didn’t reply.
After a moment, Karola said, “I’ll read it and send you a summary.”
“Oh,” Honey added, sitting straight up with enthusiasm, “and you want Arthur to be on your team. He’s great there, and he’ll keep you safe. And Cawzee, if he’s well. I hope so!”
“Has Arthur been there?” Mu Ree Fa said.
Honey began a description of their recent visit. A detailed description, and Fa seemed interested. I tried to pay attention, and the rest of the time I tried to convince myself I really wanted to go. A one-day trip, in and out fast, wouldn’t take too much time, but if we found interesting samples, and from what she said we would, they would need analysis. I already had more interesting samples than I could deal with. We should have brought two botanists, but everyone cared about animals more than plants, probably because we humans were animals ourselves. But there would be no animals without plants.
Like Stevland. The most interesting plant of all.
“Is there any rainbow bamboo in the Coral Plains?” I asked.
“We planted some seeds, but s— But we don’t know of any bamboo.”
Stevland … Did she almost say Stevland?
* * *
Later that day I was talking to Zivon, one of the anthropologists, up on the city walls. I had gone there to spy on colonists to see what they did around Stevland and to marvel at the landscape. Every growing thing there had nerves and brains. He saw me up there and joined me. I felt a little disappointed by the interruption. If I could stare hard and long, I hoped I might see something, some pattern, to show me how they thought, how they interacted, what I might do.…
“I have a question for you,” he said. “It’s weird, but I have to ask it. It’s about those trees named Stevland.”
“Ask away.”
He leaned on the wall and looked out, squinting. “Yesterday a four-year-old told me she talked to him—him, she called the tree him, not it. I thought that might be a childhood fantasy, but maybe not, so I kept her talking, and she had details. He talks with a machine, she said, and he talks a lot at the meetings they have almost every night. I said we’ve never heard him speak there, and she said he was turned off. He won’t talk to people from Earth.”
“What’s wrong with us?”
“Yeah. I asked her why and she got incoherent, which probably means she doesn’t know. But my question for you is, could this
be possible?”
“Talking plants?” I weighed my words. “I don’t know. I can’t say yes, I can’t say no. The plants here seem to have a nervous system. I’m still researching. But it bothers me that the colonists are lying to us about it.”
“This tree is central to their culture. So is a belief that we destroyed the Earth, which is why their ancestors had to leave, so we might destroy this planet. If the bamboo is so central to them, they might want to protect it. These are practical people. I disagree with Om about that a lot. He sees superstition or romanticism, and I see a good reason that we haven’t figured out yet.”
“Om. He’s going to write the final report.”
“His final report,” Zivon said. “I’ll have my own.”
“When we get back to Earth. What’s happening there, anyway? We should be getting reports. That was in the project plan, regular radio contact.”
He stared at some people working in a field. “If we weren’t getting messages from Earth, Om would be fretting. He’s silent, so I suppose we’re getting them. Maybe Pollux won’t release them, if he’s back at his job. He’s still, um, unstable. I don’t have the exact diagnosis. And I wish he’d stop complaining and trying to make us agree with him. Anyway, Om is a government tool, too. They don’t want us to know what’s going on.”
“I take that as a good sign. No news is good news.”
Zivon continued to stare. “Yeah, but at some point, we might have to do something to find out what our real situation is.”
“We might.”
* * *
Dawn. Me, Haus, Mu Ree Fa, a visual recorder, a data recorder, and Arthur with Cawzee, both of them loaded with primitive weapons, waiting to climb into the plane as the pilot on board made some checks. Around us fields and forests, aware, watching.
“How’s Cawzee?” I asked Arthur. Cawzee was standing next to him, like a loyal dog. I could guess, but I wanted to be on Arthur’s good side. He knew a lot, according to Honey’s report. He was a hunter, not a farmer, and an explorer, and a leader, and something else. Something the natives wouldn’t say.
Cawzee squawked, and my link provided a translation: “Fine. Not an Earth virus, it was a Pax bacteria, easy medicine. I am strong. I recover quickly.” He took Arthur by the hand, a gesture that bothered me for some reason. He pointed at the environmental suit Haus had insisted every mission member wear. “Good clothing for the Coral Plains. But perhaps not enough. We should call it Hunger Plains, perhaps. You will be careful of everything you see and even more of what you do not see.”
“What are we going to see?”
“Big corals,” Arthur said. “Stay far away from them. They have a long range with their darts, up to three arm’s widths. And animals, all of them dangerous. A lot of the life is underground, so watch where you step. And plants. You’ll see some strange plants. We didn’t look at them closely, but they’re probably dangerous somehow, too.”
Haus had wandered over. He grinned. “We can handle this. We’ve got suits and weapons”—he gestured at their spears—“a hundred times better than yours.”
A technological mismatch. Our suits could change color for camouflage and resist bullets, gases, fire, rays, and radiation. The colonists wore high leather boots, heavy coats, and leather gloves. Haus had a combined projectile-ray gun slung over his shoulder, and pockets and pouches filled with smaller weapons and equipment. Arthur and Cawzee carried glass-tipped spears, a bow and glass-tipped arrows, stonewood knives, and pouches filled with items made from wood, clay, fiber, glass, leather, and stone. Pax had almost no metal, so its inhabitants were stone age.
Haus carried his helmet under his arm. It bore 360-degree sensors for the visual spectrum and beyond, audio amplifiers, communication links, and a link to his weapon for pinpoint far-distance aiming. Arthur had a black hat and alert eyes. Cawzee’s wide compound eyes offered close to 360-degree vision, but the physician said they had a limited visual spectrum.
I smelled strawberry, which meant Cawzee was laughing.
Arthur glanced at his Glassmaker. “The best weapon is caution. It’s hungry there, that’s the truth.”
I said, “Don’t you like the plains? Honey said you think they’re beautiful.”
He nodded, frowning. “Yes, beautiful but deadly. I don’t really want to go back, but I can’t let you go alone, so I had to accept joining this team.”
Haus shook his head, still grinning, and sent: “A man with stone tools thinks we need his help.” At least Arthur and Cawzee didn’t hear the insult.
We got on board. Haus opened a panel and handed Arthur and Cawzee earphones. “We have links in our brains, you know. These are like links but external. You can wear them, and we can communicate.” He looked at Cawzee. “Somehow.”
Arthur took the earphone with big eyes and held it in his palm, gazing at it with surprising reverence and a big grin. It was the first time I’d seen a Pacifist get excited about something technological. He slid the loop over his ear, pushed in the earbud, and listened. Haus reached out and adjusted a slider on the loop. After a moment, Arthur’s eyes got even bigger and he bit his lip to suppress his excitement.
Cawzee watched, checked his slider, muttered something about “two ears,” and tucked his into a scarf tied around the base of his neck. “We can speak with this?” he said.
“Oh, sure. Mics.” Haus returned to the panel as Arthur watched him intently. Haus handed them some microphones on clips for their collars.
Stevland talked by a machine, the girl had said. A radio was a machine. Arthur could see the usefulness of a radio.
We took off. The two colonists were fascinated by the view out of the windows and stood together, pointing things out to each other. I sat at the next window, almost as fascinated. We passed over the end of the forest and the start of the plains, a line so stark it seemed artificial.
“Why does the forest just end that way?” I asked.
“The forest fights against the plains,” Arthur said.
An interesting metaphor. If it was a metaphor. “What do you mean?”
He pursed his lips, then shrugged. “Each one has its own ecology. So they fight to keep separate.”
“How do you know that?”
He thought a moment. “I have eyes.” He wasn’t a good liar.
“Did you know that we think one might be native to Pax and one might be from another planet?”
“Yes, that’s what it looked like when I was there.”
“You see a lot for someone with no technology to speak of.” That was out of my mouth before I realized I had insulted him.
“I keep my eyes open,” he said, aware of my real question and avoiding it. Cawzee made a noise too fast to be translated. Arthur reached out and patted him on what passed for his shoulder. “You learn fast,” he told him.
The plane began to descend.
“No, don’t land there!” Arthur rushed to the pilot and began talking and gesturing, but the noise of the engines kept me from hearing them. The plane moved about a kilometer forward and descended again. I looked at the landscape below, wondering what was wrong, and saw it. The site we had been headed for had a lot of lines of big white and pink ball corals converging on it. We’d have damaged some of them landing. I knew from Honey’s report what that would have meant. I must have been the only one to have read it, at least the summary—and it had been worth my time. She could have earned a Ph.D. with it.
We touched down in a barren area, the top of a rise. Honey had described the terrain well. Uneven ground with lots of rills. Brush on the hilltops in odd shapes and colors: plants, she supposed, but she hadn’t examined them closely. The ground seemed covered with tiny balls and fans and horns in a variety of colors. Corals, she said. I looked for something moving. Nothing. Good.
Arthur came back and talked to Haus about something that seemed very serious. Haus looked into the cockpit, then talked to Arthur again. They both seemed concerned. When the noise of the engines subsided, I hear
d Haus ask, “… if we crushed them?”
“You could. I think they’re easy to break, and they’re deadly. If we crushed the center ones, the rest would attack. I think. I don’t know. But I know to take them seriously. Those are the kind of corals that killed Queen Rust. You”—he gestured to Mu Ree Fa—“if you want to take a sample, take small ones.” He made a circle with his fingers of a couple of centimeters. “Avoid the big ones. But the little ones will attack, too. And I think they’re connected underground, so stay far away from anything big.”
“Noted,” Haus said. He put on his helmet and headed toward the door, the first one off according to plan. The door opened, he jumped out, and we heard a far-off buzz, then something closer, clicking loudly. A breeze blew, damp with more than a hint of methanethiol, the aroma of flatulence and marsh gas. That confirmed something about the ecology. After a minute we got an all clear. But that click had spooked me, so I let Arthur and Cawzee go first, then Fa, and then it was my turn, because to let the recorder techs go first would have been a breach of rank and proof of cowardice.
I checked that my gloves were on tight and wished that everyone had been wearing helmets. That way I could check their feeds and know where I was jumping and not look overly cautious. I could see Haus asking Arthur which way we should go. I prepared myself to leap, still not used to falling faster than on Earth.
I landed hard and the ground gave way under my feet, and for a moment I panicked, but the ground sank maybe only a centimeter. Calm down. Just soft ground. Haus, Fa, and Arthur were talking and pointing, Cawzee faced the other way, his bow in his hands. A light breeze blew. I looked around again.
All those colors on the ground were like a field of low wildflowers in bloom. Lots of red and pink, not much green. And those big white spheres here and there were the oddest thing I’d seen yet. I could spend a lifetime here researching. I could spend a lifetime researching what I already had. I could spend a lifetime researching just one thing, Stevland.
Let’s get this over with, I thought. Get some samples and go.
