Читать книгу Semiosis: A novel of first contact - Sue Burke, Sue Burke - Страница 7

Nothing herein shall be deemed to infringe on the individual freedom of belief, right to speech and justice, liberty, and the peaceful pursuit of individual aims in harmony with the welfare and interests of the Commonwealth as a whole.

—from the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax

Before the roof blew away, I had to check it, I had to, and it didn’t matter who said I shouldn’t or if it really wasn’t safe to go upstairs. Summer meant hurricanes and I’d dreamed of designing a beautiful building as strong as a hurricane but I didn’t get beauty or strength because they wouldn’t let me. And this hurricane! It was the first storm of the summer and the meteorologists said it would probably be the worst ever. Rain was plowing against the lodge when Julian and I went up to the third floor. We opened the trapdoor to the attic and I climbed up on his shoulders to look at the roof from the underside.

It rocked like a boat on water. The shingles were ripped off in some places, rain slashed in and filled the attic with the smell of drenched wood, and the wind tugged on the beams and gables and strained every joint. What if I’d woven the studs and rafters as if they were reeds? Then some wood cracked in the corner like an exploding hydrogen cactus.

“Torch!” I shouted at Julian, then motioned since he couldn’t hear me over the wind. The flame flickered in the wind as he handed it up and the air smelled of burning resin, then a hard wind swatted the roof and it rocked again.

There was the problem: the improvised tie-down had broken at the northwest corner. I’d designed the roof to be set into the walls with slotted joints and crossties the way the architecture text recommended, but no one had time for the complicated work. No one wanted to give time to a child’s dream. They’d used poles and logs not even sawed into real beams. They got what they wanted.

Would the building survive the storm at all? I wanted doubled-up beams, corner braces, and extra ties. Extravagances, they said, and the building turned out weak, cramped, and clumsy.

“Sylvia!” Julian shouted, and added something I couldn’t catch. His red hair shone like flame in the torchlight and his eyes suffered for me, for how I felt about the roof, my poor roof.

I began to climb down and there was Vera standing at the head of the stairs. She must have struggled all the way up to check on us, but why? She was the new moderator of Pax so she ought to be concerned about the building but we could have told her all about it. Torchlight lit her face, wrinkled like tree bark, white hair receding like a man’s, false teeth bared.

“Julian!” She sounded like an underoiled machine. “Why did you bring Sylvia here?”

“My idea,” I yelled so she could hear me over the storm. Julian had followed me, trying to be helpful. But Vera ignored me and motioned for us to follow her.

We trudged down the steps. The wind tore at the building the way a fippolion’s claws hunt for roots, and the plaster was cracking as the walls shuddered. Vera descended step by step, leaning on a cane. It would have been disrespectful to get ahead of her, and children must honor the parents! We’d heard that since we were born, and how could we disobey?

She yelled at him all the way down, and when we arrived in the crowded, dark cellar, I put out the torch and tried again.

“I needed to inspect the roof.” I kept even a hint of disrespect out of my voice.

“Julian could have gone alone and told you about it.” She grunted as she lowered herself onto a bench.

“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—”

She shook her head and closed her eyes and sighed. “This is hard, so hard.”

“I found this.” I held out the ball. Maybe it would cheer her up. She opened her eyes and stared at it blankly. “I think it was made by some other intelligent life,” I said. “It was at the lake.”

Terrell had come up behind her. He was a parent and metallurgist, so I said, “That’s gold around it. We should look for whoever made it.”

He was tall and as thin as a parasitized aspen, so when he nudged Vera, she had to look up to see his face as they exchanged a look. They were interested so I pulled out some rainbow twigs.

“I found these, too.”

They stiffened with surprise, but Vera said, “We don’t have time for that, not now. There’s too much to do.” She took the ball from my hand. “I’ll put it on the agenda for the next meeting.”

But the next Commonwealth meeting was in four days. Four days!

Still, people heard about the ball and wanted to see it that night in the dark cellar as we ate dinner.

Ramona said, “It looks like a Christmas ornament,” and she began to sing a Christmas song, but Bryan, another parent, complained that Christmas was a nightmare.

“Arguing over the past,” said Rosemarie, a child a little older than me, and Bryan overheard and scolded her for disrespecting the parents. I’d read about Christmas and “frivolity” was the word I remembered, and frivolity seemed interesting. And unlikely on Pax.

Survival first. There was a lot to repair and replant but there always was. “Is this really better than Earth?” Nicoletta had whispered once when we were young and no parents were around. Now, she worked as my mother’s replacement, scavenging parts from the failed radio system to repair the medical tomography equipment, and if there were parts left over, to keep the weeding machines running. Machines did mindless tasks so we had time to care for sick parents or prepare for the next storm or preserve what food we had for winter.

Nicoletta had borne three babies already and two lived. When we were young, we used to coil her curly black hair into ringlets. These days, she had no time for fussing with her hair. And sometimes she cried for no reason.

Daniel fished but the lake became anaerobic during the bad droughts and all the fish died. My brother tried to enrich the soil in the fields and complained that the snow vines took the nutrients as fast as he could fertilize, but snow vine fruit kept everyone fed when crops failed or were destroyed by storms.

Sometimes, Octavo would stare at nothing and grumble: “Parameters. Fippokats here. Uri, let’s go weeding.” Uri had died ten years ago. Octavo was sick and would die soon too, and I’d miss him because he was always patient with me.

I was in the plaza weaving a thatch frame for a temporary roof for the lodge when Octavo limped up to ask for a sample of the rainbow bamboo, as he called it.

“Something for the meeting,” he said, and coughed with a wheezing bark. “Something that needs an explanation.” He knew plants better than anyone and I wondered what there was to explain.

But thunderstorms arrived on the meeting night and no building could hold all residents at once, although we were only sixty-two people. The roof thatched with plastic bark on my lodge held with hardly a leak and some people congratulated me, but not Vera. She was still proving she was moderator and reorganizing our rooms because a lot of them had been damaged in the big hurricane, even though we’d already rearranged ourselves without her help and no one was complaining.

I went to the closet that was my new room, with nothing but a cot and one box that held everything I owned, so angry I almost cried. I should have known then what I realized later, that we wouldn’t have voted to investigate the glass makers anyway. The parents would’ve voted no, the children would’ve voted the way their parents did, and even the grandchildren would follow their parents’ parents. Children didn’t think for themselves. We did what we were told because we’d been convinced that we didn’t really understand things well enough to make our own decisions. That’s what we were told all the time and how could we argue with that? We were supposed to be happy to be just like the parents, and working together in harmony mattered more than thinking as individuals. We were still children even though most of us were twenty or thirty years old.

What would happen when all the parents died?

Octavo came to talk to me the next day while I was working in a corner of the plaza next to Snowman, the big old snow vine. I was making a basket for collecting pond grubs, a wide hoop basket with loosely attached ribs so it would be soft and flexible because the grubs burst so easily. I was thinking about the meeting we should have held. Why wasn’t Vera interested in something as big as another intelligent species nearby when something as small as who slept on the sunrise side of a lodge fascinated her?

I could hear her laughing as I worked. She was sitting with some other parents at the far corner of the plaza cleaning trilobites, stinky work, so they were as far from the lodges and the meal area as they could get and I couldn’t hear the words, just occasional laughter. She always worked hard and the parents and some children liked her leadership and I still wanted to like her but all I had were questions.

Octavo lowered himself onto a bench, panting. I pulled out some cois twine and anchored the ribs first on one side of the hoop and then on the other. He couldn’t tolerate certain fungus spores and his lungs had been regrown three times but they worked less efficiently each time. The same thing had been killing my father, Merl, when a pack of ground eagles got him first. Our hunters tracked down the pack, the last one to bother us, and we put a bouquet of spiny eagle feathers on Papa’s grave.

“A Coke would be nice right now,” Octavo finally said. Coke was some sort of Earth drink. “You know, snow vine fruit looks a lot like that glass ball, those same surface facets when they’re immature.”

I glanced up. “Is that important?”

He pulled out the rainbow bamboo twig I’d given him. “Pax is a billion years older than Earth. It has had time for more evolution.”

I finished a weaver and reached for another, thought again, and picked a coil of greener cois so I could make a striped basket. “We should find the people who made the ball.”

“It might not be that easy, girl. There are two intelligences. The ball is obvious, but the bamboo … It belongs to the snow vine family. We set fippolions to graze on the west vine and the east vine rejoiced. Our loyal master …”

He paused again to catch his breath and gazed across the plaza. I kept weaving, wondering why he was complaining about the snow vines again.

“This bamboo,” he said, “displays a representation of a rainbow, not a refraction like the surface of a bubble. This is made with chromoplasts. Plants can see. They grow toward light and observe its angle to know the season. They recognize colors. This one made colors on its bark to show something. It is a signal … that this plant is intelligent. It can interpret the visual spectrum and control its responses.”

“So it wants to attract us? Attract intelligent beings, I mean?”

“No. A signal to beware. Like thorns. Who knows what a plant might be thinking? I … doubt they have a natural tenderness for animals. We are … conveniences.”

“But the glass ball is beautiful. It’s a fruit, you said, so it must have come from a plant that was friendly or the glass makers wouldn’t have made such a nice copy of it. Maybe it came from the rainbow bamboo, since it’s like snow vine fruit. We should find it.”

Octavo was staring across the plaza. Vera was getting up. He turned to me. “Snow vines are not especially intelligent, less than a wolf. Well, you have never seen wolves or even dogs … But this rainbow bamboo … You can predict animals but not plants. They never think like we do. It might not be friendly.”

“If the snow vines can decide to give us fruit, then the rainbow bamboo might give us fruit, too. We always need food and a more intelligent plant would know how much we can do for it in exchange for food.”

“Exactly, plants always want something.” He glanced at Vera, who was walking toward us. “But this cois twine … Tell me, have you noticed a difference in fibers in the different colors?”

I frowned. Why was he asking that? But I wanted to be polite so I picked up samples of each color and flexed them. “No. I think the greener is just picked younger.”

Vera came up to us and stopped.

Octavo looked at her. “We have been discussing cois. It could have many uses, perhaps like flax … We have been too focused on food sources, I think.”

“We always need food,” she said.

They were silent for a while and since I wouldn’t be interrupting, I said, “I’ve been thinking about the glass and rainbow bamboo. When can we discuss it at a meeting?”

“Not soon,” she said. “We still haven’t recovered from the hurricane.”

I tried to hide my disappointment, but she was staring at my basket instead of me anyway. The stripe looked good.

“That’s the natural variation of the cois fiber,” I murmured.

“Efficient,” she said, and hobbled away.

“We’ll never discuss it!” I said. “Paula wasn’t like that.” Octavo never scolded when we children complained.

“Paula had … training.” He looked at the twig. “Not our planet, not our niche.”

“Intelligent creatures have no niche.” I’d read that somewhere.

Octavo shook his head. He never really liked plants even though he was a botanist, and it was no good arguing with him. He had me help him get up and he went to the lab.

I kept working on the basket and I tried to imagine plants as smart as we were. How would they relate to us? Probably not the way regular plants acted toward bug-lizards or fippokats. And I could make beautiful things with rainbow bamboo. Why wait? I got some twigs from storage, soaked them, and when the grub basket was done, I took a twig, made two loops, and then braided the end through the loops. A colorful bracelet, a whole minute wasted on a decoration. I made seven and set them to dry in the Sun with the basket.

I gave the soaking water to Snowman, put my things away, helped erect a bower to shade some lettuce seedlings, and delivered the basket to Rosemarie and Daniel. I returned to the bracelets, put one on, and gave others to Julian, Aloysha, Mama, Nicoletta, Cynthia, and Enea.

Vera saw them during the evening meal out in the plaza, boxer bird soup and tulip salad. We didn’t have much because of the storm, but we sat down happy enough on the benches on either side of the line of tables. It was a comfortable evening, although the parents were bundled up, always cold when we were hot. The bats were swooping and singing, and cactus balloon plants on strings kept them from stealing food. The grandchildren, the pregnant women, and the sick ate well. I got plenty of salad and a bowl of soup with a scrap of meat. Julian got only broth from the birds he’d hunted. The grandchildren were in a giggly mood.

Then Vera frowned at the bracelets. “Those have no place here,” she said. “We don’t have time to waste.”

“Oh, I suppose you’ll want me to erase the carving on my walking stick,” Mama said. “Everything doesn’t have to be useful, does it?”

That provoked more of the endless debate about a flower garden, parents’ opinions only, children should listen and learn. Terrell thought we should look for metal, not pretty flowers.

Bryan made a show of standing to speak in spite of his stiff joints, as if we owed him something for chronic bursitis and his drooping skin with scars where skin cancer had been removed. He wanted to require childbearing “in harmony with the welfare and interests of the Commonwealth as a whole,” as the Constitution said. Parents liked to quote the Constitution and worried that if we didn’t follow it, we’d face disaster, but the Constitution talked about beauty too, and about equality. Parents quoted only what they wanted to.

“I think we’ve discussed this enough,” Vera said. “We should get rid of the bracelets. This is no time for divisiveness.”

“Oh, it’s only a bracelet,” Mama said.

“The problem is with what it represents. This is Pax. A community with peace, mutual trust, and support,” Vera said, quoting the Constitution. “The bracelet is a violation of trust. Let’s be practical. Symbols are important. The bracelets symbolize a decision we aren’t ready to make now. We have too much to do just to recover from the hurricane.”

I should have resisted, I should have spoken up, but too many people were looking at me, childless, designer of a failed roof, and a disrespectful citizen, or so they probably thought, and we children were always being suspected of being lazy and greedy. I took off my bracelet. So did the rest. Aloysha and Nicoletta made a face when they did and Julian stamped on his and broke it. Terrell burned them.

That night I was crying in my bed when Julian came to my room and he didn’t say a thing, he just hugged me until I stopped crying and we made love for the first time. I’d done that before with other boys so the parents would think I was trying to get pregnant but it was just to satisfy other people, not to make me happy.

Julian wanted to make me happy and I wanted to be happy with him, and afterward I held him and realized I wanted him to be happy forever, too. The parents would have thought the whole thing was a waste of time because he was sterile, but that night was love, real love. It was uselessly beautiful just like the bracelets. And it was the beginning of the revolt.

I looked for the rainbow bamboo in the storage shed the next day and it was gone. There might have been more at the beach but I didn’t have time to go to the lake. Julian looked for it when he hunted and finally found a twig, prettier than I remembered.

“It’s from Thunder River, at the waterfall,” he said. No one had gone upriver beyond the waterfall but the maps based on the meteorologists’ satellite pictures showed a long canyon up through some mountains that led to a wide plateau. “And I found this.” He smiled and held out some pieces of red, green, and yellow glass. “It might be obsidian or agate, but I don’t think so. What do we do?”

I thought hard before I answered. We could continue as usual, working from Luxrise to sunset, planting, weeding, building, harvesting, hunting, gathering, cooking, cleaning, weaving, sewing, caring for animals, monitoring equipment, repairing machines, watching the computers sputter and the robots stop, disassembling dead machines for their parts, helping the parents to and from the clinic, and reengineering the electrical system to run on wind and hand cranks.

We could watch the seasons go by, spring with floods and lizards hatching everywhere, summer with its storms knocking down roofs and trees and fields of grain, autumn with droughts and fires, and winter with frost and fog. Our holidays were harvests, births, funerals, and the solar solstices and equinoxes, and a holiday only meant a bit more to eat. On Earth people went to battles, carnivals, museums, and universities, and on a lucky day I got to go to the lake. On Earth there was protest, revolution, genocide, piracy, and war, and I was punished for weaving bracelets.

“I know what I don’t want to do,” I said so sadly that he hugged me.

But we kept on doing it. What was our choice? Search for the glass makers on our own? That would be a violation of mutual support.

Besides, Mama was sick with cancer from radiation exposure during the space trip and she got worse until she was bedridden. The same cancer had killed many parents already. I spent as much time as I could with her in her little room in the lodge, wondering if I’d miss her as much as Papa, and one day I asked the question that I’d always wondered about.

“What was Earth really like? Really and honestly?” Books said things, usually bad, but I could tell they didn’t say everything.

Mama’s bones hurt, her belly hurt, and she was glad for any distraction, that’s what she always said. She pursed her gray lips and thought for a while. “Stressful. And complicated. Actually, not that bad for us because we were rich, at least compared to the rest of the world. Other people died of hunger and we could get together enough money to go to the stars.”

Rich? She was rich? No one had told me that. “What if you hadn’t gone, Mama?”

“We’d have all led easier lives. You too, probably. Oh, they like to tell tales, don’t they, about pollution and diseases, the beginning of the end of humanity, but the rich got by. It was only the poor who were killing each other. Or trying not to die of one thing or another. It was so tragic.”

“But, then why did you leave? Didn’t you have to?”

“No, we didn’t, we volunteered, and we wanted to try to do better. People had made horrible mistakes on Earth, fatal mistakes for whole countries, millions and millions of people. Oh, it was shameful how the poor got so little help for problems they never created. You wouldn’t understand, but we wanted to try again. To make a fresh start of Earth. To do it right this time, without the unfairness that made some people rich and some people poor. Things you couldn’t imagine. I think we made a good new start. And I’m glad we did. Oh, there’s hardship, but we expected that. It was like coming home to Eden.”

I’d heard of Eden, a mythical paradise, but the book that told all about it wasn’t in the libraries. I wouldn’t understand anyway according to the parents, but hardship wasn’t paradise, I knew that. What would it be like to be so rich you could get any book you wanted and then have time to read it?

“For all its troubles, Earth could get boring.” Mama smiled. “Pax was exciting.”

I thought about that while I was crying during her funeral. I’d have led an easier life on Earth. We buried her near the friendly snow vines along the western fields, next to Paula, and we buried Mama in rags because we couldn’t afford to bury good clothes. Octavo stared slumped and tired at the vines. “Birth to death,” he muttered, “they have us.”

Octavo didn’t like snow vines so he might misjudge the rainbow bamboo and the glass makers. I said that to Julian one morning. He was making poisoned arrows for hunting. We were far away from everyone so that a grandchild couldn’t accidentally wander over, and we could say what we thought.

“We need to go up Thunder River and see what’s there,” I said.

“Up Thunder River,” he repeated, watching his work. He wore gloves and goggles as he dipped arrowheads in ergot and set them to dry in a rack in the Sun. “I’m a trained explorer. I can do it.”

“Both of us. We both have to look.”

He hesitated. Vera would never approve.

“I’ll go without you,” I said.

After a while he said, “You should never travel alone,” in the same voice as if he were saying Honor the parents. We started planning while he wrapped the arrows in mullein leaves. Would the glass makers and the bamboo welcome us? Why hadn’t the glass makers come to us?

Survival last, curiosity first. Better no life than this life.

So when Vera’s weather report said there were no hurricanes in formation, we sneaked off, carrying food, a blanket, a hammock, rope, a lighter, hunting knives, and clothes. All the clothes I owned fit into a single backpack, and people on Earth, rich people like I’d have been, had closets full of clothes.

We left with questions and we came back with answers to questions we hadn’t even thought to ask, with thoughts we weren’t supposed to think. I almost didn’t want to come back but I knew we had to, and so we did, nearly sixty days later, with rainbow-striped hiking staffs, rainbow bracelets, and rainbow diadems. We were skinny, our clothes in rags, our backpacks filled with tokens of another civilization and morsels of bamboo fruit that were dried and shriveled but still delicious. We entered the village, a huddle of mismatched hovels, and the lodge I had designed looked utterly clumsy, still with the improvised bark thatch roof. The fields rose on hills, thirsty, the snow vine thickets hulked like prison walls, and storm clouds churned overhead.

Cynthia saw us and shouted. We were surrounded immediately, smothered with hugs and tears and welcomes, everyone asking questions all at once.

Then Vera hobbled up. “You left us when we needed you,” she squeaked.

“We found a city,” I said.

“You were incredibly irresponsible. You most of all, Sylvia. We searched for you for days.”

“But they’re back safe,” Ramona said. “That’s what matters.”

Vera kept scolding. Enea’s little boy toddled up, yelling, “Juu!” with arms raised, ready for Julian to pick him up. I picked up Higgins, Nicoletta’s boy, and he squirmed with excitement. Octavo was limping toward us, looking at Julian.

Aloysha repeated until we heard, “What city? What city?”

“Another hurricane will arrive tonight,” Vera said, “and the buildings aren’t ready, and there are animals to be gathered in!”

“A beautiful city,” I said, “with sparkling glass roofs and gardens of rainbow bamboo.”

Octavo arrived, the wind tossing his long beard. “A city?” He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look happy to see his own son.

“Up on Thunder River, Dad.”

“That’s not important,” Vera said.

“The glass makers?” Octavo said.

“They’re not there,” Julian said. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

“I brought some fruit,” I said. I patted Higgins and hoped Julian would stick to our plan.

“And we brought soil samples,” Julian added. “They look rich.”

“A hurricane is coming!” Vera said.

Not a big hurricane, though, and finally we were assembled in the cellar. All the people who could had crowded into the lodge with us as thunder rumbled and Vera tried to convince them to start preparing the stew but we respectfully ignored her.

Is it a lie not to tell everything? Julian and I wanted to save certain details for the Commonwealth meeting and there were things I didn’t want to tell at all.

“We walked for twenty days,” I said.

“It had to be farther than that,” Bryan said.

It had seemed farther.

On the day that we left, we circled to one side of Thunder River’s waterfall and hurried over the scree and up the ledges on the cliff, then got lost finding our way around a snow vine thicket. The first night, we slept cuddled in a hammock draped with a bug net, and the barks from the digging owls kept me awake for hours because they sounded so human that I was sure they were the voices of people chasing us, and the fireflies whizzed around us until I felt dizzy. When I woke, a slug had crawled into a fold of the net and divided, so slimy little pink things were crawling all around trying to touch us and dissolve a nip of flesh for a meal.

When we got close to the river that morning, we were in foggy, swampy woods, and slithery things moved on the ground, giant slugs, some bright pink and purple, some just clumps of clear slime, and a few disguised like logs or vines, and we had to put spearheads on our walking staffs to protect ourselves but they were sometimes too fast and stung us. Moths swirled around us in patterns like giant thumbprints, each trying for a bite. We were wrapped in raincoats and double pairs of socks and had smeared mud on our faces and still lost bits of flesh.

Beyond the waterfall and its mists and slugs, travel got easier.

“Up above the waterfall,” I told the people in the cellar, “the canyon is like the ruins of a giant Greek temple.” Everyone had seen a picture of the Acropolis in the history text, the birthplace of democracy. The canyon actually was high and narrow, with the trees arching overhead, more like a cathedral, but only the architecture texts showed churches.

“There are rocks like columns,” I said, “and aspens grow free and tall alongside them. No snow vines. There are meadows full of flowers on the riverbanks.”

I didn’t mention all the rocks to climb over and around, uphill all the way, and some of the flowers were little biting corals with dewdrops of digestive enzymes on tiny teeth. The only food we could easily find were wild onions and palm-sized trilobites netted from the river. Onions and trilobites for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Once, we were trapped between the riverbank and a cliff by three ground eagles, drumming their air sacs and dancing and snapping their big beaks at us, human-sized and smelly, with spiny feathers that looked so much like bark and dried weeds they’d had no trouble sneaking up on us. We lit a line of fires to hold them off but they were waiting until we ran out of fuel so we caught trilobites and threw them to the eagles until they’d eaten their fill and left.

We left the valley and climbed hand in hand through the misty forest around the final waterfall, up through vines and mosses and clumps of pulsing slime and finally over some rocks and into a forest. That’s when we saw our first rainbow bamboo. A stand of it grew right along the edge of the cliff, taller than some of the trees, with trunks as wide as a human thigh. The bamboo stood straight and proud, not at all like the snaking snow vines. Living rainbows. A few pieces of fruit, pink and translucent and bright in the sunshine, hung face-high.

Julian and I looked at each other. You should never eat something untested.

“It looks exactly like the glass maker ornament, except bigger,” I said.

“Snow vines can kill when they decide to.”

“But the bamboo hasn’t met us yet, so it shouldn’t have an opinion.” A piece of fruit pulled off easily from the stem. Three seeds were shadowed inside. It smelled like fresh wheat and cinnamon. I took a little bite and the juice was sweet and oily against my tongue. Julian watched.

“If it kills me,” I said, “I’ll die happy.” But that was all I ate for the moment. I stroked the bamboo’s smooth and waxy trunk and I imagined it as door frames or roof beams, or split and woven into wall coverings. A small trunk cut into rings would make beautiful bracelets.

We admired it awhile, then walked along the top of the cliff toward the waterfall, hoping to see the aliens behind every rock. We looked down on the canyon, green and long and dropping sharply between the stone cliffs. The view became better as we got close to the waterfall and at the most beautiful spot we found a bench carved into the stone and encrusted with lichen. At first we thought it was natural but there were words carved into the back of the seat, the same script writing that was on the glass ball. The glass makers had been there! We shouted and hugged each other.

We sat on the bench, trying to guess what glass makers could be like. The seat was low and wide. The glass makers were somewhere upstream, so we began hiking. The land became flat and the river got wider and slower. There was a path along it made of flagstones, heaved up by roots. We were going in the right direction, and we walked faster. There were more bits of glass in the river, all the colors of the rainbow. Around the next bend, soon, soon, we’d find them.

That afternoon we spotted a cluster of four buildings with domed glass roofs sparkling in the middle of a grove of bamboo. I ran toward the nearest one. The roofs were rings of colored glass blocks arranged in rainbows, the walls were made of brownish bricks, and the foundations were stone with bands of sparkling gray and white. Julian was right behind me. But as soon as I started running, I saw that the buildings were ruins, the walls cracked and tumbled in, the roofs collapsed.

The glass makers weren’t there. They hadn’t been there for a long time.

I was crying by the time I entered the closest building. Dirt and dead leaves covered the floor. The walls inside had been faced with glazed tile in a pattern of interlaced red and green lines. I’d seen glazed tiles in computer texts. I tried to wipe away the tears and look carefully. The room was about five meters across. Glass blocks from the roof lay on the floor, half-buried and sparkling.

“Spectacular,” Julian whispered.

The building had several low bays, each crowned by a half dome, and one of them was intact. The glass roof was dirty and corals were crusted on the outside.

Someone had stood below this ceiling once, had stared up at the sunlight filtering through it, someone with eyes like mine that enjoyed colors, someone who built buildings like me, someone who thought like me, someone who could do things that I’d dreamed of. Someone had built a bench, low and wide, along the wall. I sat on it and sobbed. Julian sat with me.

The glass makers must have abandoned the buildings before the parents had come to Pax. We’d traveled far to find only ruins, but there had to be more glass makers somewhere. I wiped my face and stood up. I walked over and around fallen brick and stone and glass, trying to see how it had been built. The bricks were slightly offset at about head level, sloping in for a half meter, then changing to glass, and the curve of the domes was parabolic, not circular. One apse seemed to be the entrance to the building and I’d have had to duck a bit if it had been intact. I was taller than the glass makers.

“Come here!” Julian said. I heard rustling. He was already in the next building. He’d kicked some of the dirt and leaves off the floor. It was covered with a mosaic of flowers and plants, including a stand of rainbow bamboo. We cleared away more dirt. The bamboo had flowers and fruit, and what looked like a skinny yellow arm and hand was reaching for a fruit. We cleared more as fast as we could but the rest of the tiles were broken and scattered.

The buildings were surrounded by bamboo and weeds. I picked another piece of fruit and it tasted better than ever. Fippokats peeked out from a burrow between the bamboo roots. The path kept going, straight into a patch of woods. More ruins? Or would the next building be inhabited? We began walking.

Two hours later, just before Luxset, mothbitten, we saw the city on a bluff above the river, a huge city. Sparkling roofs and bamboo rose behind a glazed brick city wall taller than we were. But we knew from the cracked wall and shattered roofs that once we got through the gate, we’d find nothing but fippokats, bats, and lizards. I was already out of tears.

That night, we lashed the hammock between two bamboo trunks and slept beneath a dome that was partially intact. The moths finally left us alone. The wind sighed in the streets, the bamboo stood tall, and its flowers breathed a scent like spices I never wanted to be away from.

But twenty days later we did leave the city.

On the night we arrived back in the village, down in a cellar as a hurricane blew outside, Julian told the people listening, “When we got to the city, it was unbelievable. Nothing on Earth could be as good.”

Bryan snorted. He had elbowed in close.

I pulled out a rainbow of glass tiles from my backpack. “The roofs of the buildings are domes of glass bricks. They sparkle like jewels, and the city could hold a thousand people.”

“What about the glass makers?” Enea said.

I was watching Vera from the corner of my eye. She sat at the far wall with Terrell.

“They’ve been gone for a long time,” Julian said, “and some of the buildings need repairs, but they left behind a lot of things, useful things.”

He took out a heavy steel cup inscribed with the line-and-triangle writing we saw all over the city. We’d found the remains of furniture and bits of fabric in a few houses. Some things were obviously technological, like metal boxes filled with corroded wires or brass housings around lenses, and there was lots of furniture that had rotted over the years, but some of the ceramic dishes in a kitchen building were still stacked up neatly.

Vera and Terrell whispered to each other, and she was twisting a piece of cloth so hard it ripped.

“Most of the buildings are habitable,” I said. “We could move in tomorrow with a little cleaning up.”

Only a slight exaggeration. Some buildings had fallen down and a central tower had almost completely collapsed because its wooden beams had rotted away. Outside of the city we found round stone-and-brick kilns as tall as me for making glass or working metal.

I added, “There aren’t any snow vines.” I couldn’t tell if Octavo was listening. “Lots of rainbow bamboo. Delicious fruit, more than we could eat. Here are some.”

Octavo leaned in to look as I laid out dried samples, little wrinkled purplish lumps, still smelling sweet and cinnamony, thrilling, and I felt desperate to eat one but if I was going to have more I couldn’t show how much I wanted one.

Bryan grabbed a piece. “I’ll analyze this later.” Octavo looked at him, then at the rest of the fruit, but didn’t move.

In truth, the bamboo had looked so sickly that it scared me. Eventually Julian discovered a big water pipe that led from the hills to the city but it had broken in several places, so the bamboo was probably thirsty and the only gifts it got were from fippokats. Little corals were growing everywhere.

Julian and I agreed that the walls were probably meant to keep out deer crabs and slugs, although ground eagles could jump over them. I looked and looked but couldn’t find anything that showed an attack or a fire, and we couldn’t figure what had made the glass makers leave. Everything seemed to say they hadn’t left in a hurry. Maybe they’d even meant to come back.

Just outside the walls I found an old grove of bamboo growing around stones with painted ceramic portrait tiles, a cemetery. Digging beneath a stone, I found bones as brown as the soil. They cracked and crumbled as I tried to pull them out but I got several good pieces. I put the soil back and pried the portrait tile from the stone. I’d bring a glass maker back to the village.

We’d learned a lot, including one more thing. The bamboo was very friendly. Fruit appeared right away near the house where we stayed. Then one of the trunks where we’d tied our hammocks grew a shoot. Each of the new leaves had stripes of a different color, a little rainbow built out of leaves instead of bark to show that it had observed us and recognized us as an intelligent species like itself. It had delivered a message, a welcome home, because it wanted us to stay.

But I didn’t say that back in the village. Octavo wouldn’t want to know that this bamboo was as smart as he’d thought it was.

“This is a glass maker,” I said in the dim cellar back in the village as the storm rumbled and splashed outside. I pulled the cemetery tile from my bag.

It showed someone with four spindly legs that supported a body with an overhanging rump. Oddly bent twiggy arms and a clublike head with yellow-brown skin rose from the shoulders. The head had large gray eyes on its sides and a vertical mouth. I’d seen plenty of other pictures and figured out the anatomy. The tile was the best small picture of a glass maker I’d found. There was writing at the feet, five linear marks and three triangles, maybe the person’s name.

“It’s wearing clothes,” I added. A red lace sleeveless tunic fell to just below its body. I’d seen lace in computer texts.

The portrait went from hand to hand. “Almost a praying mantis,” Octavo said. Male or female? We didn’t know.

“There’s good hunting,” Julian said. “The glass makers had farms, and tulips and potatoes are still growing wild.” He was sticking to the plan. And Vera did what I’d expected.

“You ran away, and no matter what you discovered, you have to answer for that.” She was on her feet, waving droopy-skinned arms, the torn cloth in one hand. “You acted without concern for the welfare and interests of the Commonwealth as a whole. In four days, we’ll hold a meeting for judicial proceedings. Now it’s time to go to bed.”

The grandchildren whined.

“I’ll tell you more tomorrow,” I murmured to them.

Of course, there was a lot more to be told. Some of what we left out wasn’t much at all, like how truly miserable the hike back was. The moths bothered us less but the pulsing slime was worse. It had rained, and the water was higher in the river so the easy-walking sandbars had disappeared. We looked at the flotsam stuck in the tree branches above our heads and worried that a sudden storm might cause a flood. Our shoes had worn out, the packs were heavy with artifacts, and the stinking ground eagles remembered us as a source of trilobites and extorted meals.

The most miserable of all was the end of the bamboo fruit. We stretched it out as best we could but having only a little was as bad as having none at all. I was tired, I had headaches, I was hungry, and Julian felt just as bad.

“The only way to get more is to go back to the city,” I said one night in the hammock. “Not now, though. We couldn’t survive there alone, not forever. We need to move the village there, everyone. We need to live there.”

“The parents can’t make this hike.”

“Would they even want to come? I don’t think so.” I was quiet for a while, trying to conceive of life without them. Could they imagine the city, shining in the forest alongside the river? The city was big, really big … too big.

They knew about it. They had always known about it. They had been lying all our lives.

I lay silently, too shocked to think, while he stroked me under the blanket. “I wish they could see the city,” he said. “Then they’d come.”

“They’ve seen it in the satellite pictures,” I finally said. The satellite had surveyed the area carefully for resources. During our hike up the valley, Julian had told me all about a fault line that made the waterfall on Thunder River near the village and about the granite mountains that surrounded the plateau where the glass maker city was. He had a map with enough details to show the major cataracts in the valley and the river snaking through the forest in the plateau. The city’s roofs should have flashed out at any observer, but we used the meteorologists’ maps and had never seen the survey pictures themselves.

Julian figured it out fast. “They knew. Mom, Vera …”

“They saw it every day on the weather scans.”

“They knew. They covered it up. Why not tell us? Why?”

“We should ask them. But we should do it in a way to make people want to move to the city.”

I convinced him not to confront Vera right away although we wanted to when we got back to the village. We’d discuss her un-community-minded behavior at a Commonwealth meeting. I knew there’d be one and I was right.

Back in the village, the day after the little hurricane, we were answering questions even before we left the cellar. Julian went to hunt and I went to the plaza to make a couple of baskets to sift wheat, and a lot of people seemed to have tasks to do in the plaza.

“Are there fippokats?” asked little Higgins.

“Yes, and they play and slide just like here.”

“Is the soil good?” a farmer asked.

“Well, the trees are bigger.”

“How was the climate?”

“You’d have to ask Vera, she has the weather data, but it seemed cooler and damper. The fields wouldn’t need irrigation. And we know hurricanes break up on the mountains, so we wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore.”

“Were there ground eagles?”

“Probably, but the town has a wall around it.”

“What happened to the glass makers?”

“Maybe an epidemic, or maybe they moved and live somewhere else.”

“How much bamboo fruit was there?”

“Plenty.”

I learned that while we were gone, the tomography machine had failed for good, Nicoletta’s father had died of space travel cancer, and a new kind of lizard had been discovered, tiny and iridescent yellow, that fertilized tulip flowers.

I folded in the spokes to finish the first basket and I measured and cut reeds for the second one. “The rainbow bamboo probably wants what the snow vine does,” I said, “gifts and a little help.”

“Was it beautiful?”

“You can’t imagine.”

Ramona limped up to us, leaning on a pair of canes and draped in a shawl. It was odd to see her out of the clinic where she worked and at first I thought she’d come to hear about the city, but she looked too sad. Maybe another parent had died and she’d come to tell someone. But she came over to me.

“Sylvia, I’m so sorry,” she said. She leaned against my worktable and took my hand. Hers was cold and twitched with Parkinson’s disease. My parents were dead, so what could she be so sorry about?

“Julian is dead. He made a mistake with a poisoned arrow.” She went on to explain but I hardly heard her. Julian was dead. Julian.

That couldn’t be right.

Ramona hugged me. She was thin and shaking. “I’m sorry. I know you’d gotten close.”

I tried to talk and realized I had stopped breathing. I deliberately took a deep breath. “What happened?”

“He died. Julian died when he was hunting.”

“How?” Even with one small syllable, my voice shook.

She explained again and I made myself listen. She said it was just a hunting accident in the forest near the lake. He was putting a poisoned arrow on his bowstring and it slipped. But she was lying, I knew it, another lying parent. He’d never have made a mistake like that. He was a fine hunter, as silent as an owl in the woods.

They lied about Earth, they lied about the city, and now they were lying about how Julian died.

He was dead. They killed him.

Everyone told me they were sorry and hugged me and cried. The children’s tears were real. And mine.

I’d known him all my life and he wasn’t there anymore. I thought about climbing up the valley with him toward that first stand of bamboo on top of the cliff, hand in hand, hoping a glass maker would pop up from behind the next rock. I thought about the long walk home after we’d both learned so much. I slept with him, ate with him, talked with him, expected to be with him my whole life.

Now life was different, never the same again.

We held the funeral that night. Octavo wouldn’t talk to anyone and didn’t go to the grave. For his own son! He didn’t go because he knew it was no accident. But he wouldn’t do anything about the people who killed him. Or maybe he couldn’t do anything.

I followed Julian’s corpse as it was carried to its grave, thinking that I did not, not, not want to die there, did not want to lead a hard, ugly life under the dictates of lying murderous parents and finally be carried in rags through the desolate fields and be left to feed the greedy, stupid snow vine. Vera gave a short bland funeral speech. I didn’t say anything. I probably couldn’t have. Children were only allowed to praise the dead, anyway.

Late that night, in my room, I ate a dried bamboo fruit, sweet and spicy, and felt worse to know that more waited for me, wanted me to come, gardens decorated with fruit in a city that sparkled in the Sun and that Julian would never see again with me. He was sterile and expendable. He was a warning, the sort of crime they did on Earth, what the parents left Earth to escape, but they were still Earthlings. And I could carry on without Julian. I had to.

I was quiet the next day and the day after that, sometimes pretending he was still with me, sometimes imagining I was back at the city with him or that I was at the city in the future, we’d all gone there to live, and I was looking at the places where we’d been together. The worst was at night, alone, trying to sleep in the same ugly building as the people who’d killed him. I thought about how to get back to the city, about what I had to do, about why they killed Julian to keep me quiet, but I wouldn’t be quiet. I’d make them talk.

Bryan told people he’d tested the dried fruit and when they asked him about the results, he sighed. He said he’d explain at the meeting.

That evening, I arrived at the plaza as the benches were being lined up and Cynthia came up to me and asked about the city.

“It’s big and colorful,” I said.

“Why isn’t it on the satellite pictures?” She did a lot of foraging and depended on maps.

“That’s a good question.”

She frowned and curled a lock of hair around her finger, thinking, as bats wailed overhead.

Vera emerged from one of the lodges with a parent being carried to the meeting in a cot. She called everyone to order and we all sat down. “A long meeting would be difficult for some of us, so let’s start. Sylvia’s broken the covenant of the Commonwealth, and we must decide how she will be punished.”

“What did I do?” I said. She glared at me because I was talking at a meeting in a challenging tone of voice. Aloysha made a fist and winked.

“You ran away,” Terrell said.

Octavo said softly, “We ran away from Earth,” but no one paid attention.

I didn’t have time to waste. “The city is visible from the sky.”

“That’s not the point of the meeting,” Terrell snapped.

“Lying is as bad as running away,” I said. “Lying for years is worse than running away once. The satellite can see the city. We were never told.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Someone should review the satellite data code,” I said. “That’s the proof.”

Nicoletta stood up. “I will.”

I looked at Octavo. He was staring far away, his lips moving silently.

“That’s not what this meeting is for,” said Vera. “You—”

“What else do you know about the city?” I said.

“There’s no city,” Terrell said.

“It’s that rainbow fruit,” Bryan said. “I’ve analyzed it. An alkaloid. Do you know what alkaloids do to people? Cocaine, nicotine, strychnine. They’re addictive. They affect your thinking. Mescaline. People took mescaline and thought they saw God.”

And cocaine and nicotine had ruined Earth, he didn’t need to say that. Rosemarie and Daniel were sitting together, holding hands. Her other hand covered her mouth, and he was looking all around, nervous.

“Ephedrine is an alkaloid, too,” said Blas, the medic, another child speaking up, but he was apologetic, staring at the ground. “It’s what keeps some of you breathing.”

“The city is there,” I said. “The bamboo has fruit.”

Vera’s wrinkles deepened into valleys. “This is outrageous. You broke the covenant, and now you bring all sorts of false charges. We need to set things right before we continue. But no more talk about this before the next meeting. It’s divisive, and we need to put our energies into productive work. And I want everything that Sylvia and Julian brought back analyzed.”

“I can do that,” Octavo rasped. Bryan looked disappointed. I felt frustrated but I hid it. I’d never convince the parents but I knew that a few children already agreed with me. As we walked back to the lodges, I got some gentle pats of support.

“I will give these things a real analysis,” Octavo said when he came to my room, huffing and wheezing. I doubted it because he knew they had killed Julian and he hadn’t done anything. I stared at the fruit, dying to nibble it, to feel the dried flesh become alive and sweet and rich in my mouth. “More fruit,” he said. “Good.”

“I have glass maker bones.” I watched to see how he’d react.

“Bones … Very good.” But he wasn’t pleased or surprised.

“You knew about the city.”

He wouldn’t look at me. “I can analyze these,” he said, and shuffled away. Liar. But I didn’t think he liked lying. Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t keep lying.

The methane fermenters in the power units of the weeding robots somehow broke down the next morning, which was cold and rainy, so Nicoletta was too busy fixing them to have time to examine the satellite maps because the crops came first. I was sent to fix the roofs on the gift center and Cynthia met me there.

“We can’t even talk about it,” she said.

“So don’t,” I said. “Don’t talk about anything.”

That evening, seven of us children ate dinner in silence. Some of the grandchildren thought it was a game and joined in. Higgins tried to hush Vera as she talked about the weather and new problems with the medical equipment, which meant more unexpected work for Nicoletta and delays for Octavo’s testing, since there wasn’t enough equipment to investigate our surroundings and care for Ansel’s perforated ulcer, Terrell’s this, someone’s that, and Bryan’s malingering joint trouble. With every sentence, Higgins shook his head, no no no! Other grandchildren joined in. Vera opened her mouth and a half-dozen little heads wagged.

Bryan ran out of patience by the next morning. “You’re addicted to the fruit, right? Answer me!” As a reply, I took off my clothes because parents hated nudity for some Earth reason. He hobbled away as fast as he could.

The protest caught on. Higgins and his little friends got naked and tried to undress people.

That afternoon Vera looked me in the eye, deliberately ignoring my body, when she ordered me to make a cage for hydrogen seeds about to ripen, so I was on my way to the shed for esparto grass when Octavo limped up.

“The fruit is fine,” he said.

“Bryan lied? And you, will you lie?”

“There has been enough lying, but that is not the important part. It is complicated. We can start with the fruit.”

I wanted to start with the lies but he’d get to that eventually or I’d make him.

He walked toward the shed with me. “It has plenty of vitamin E, which might actually help with our fertility problem. We have yet to find a good source of it. And some other oil-soluble vitamins like niacin.”

He stumbled a little and I made him lean on my shoulder because liar or not, I still couldn’t hate him. He didn’t seem to care that I was naked but he kept rambling.

“But vitamins are only natural, just like pyridoxine and their alkaloids. Oh, yes, alkaloids … just like the snow vines. We had to rethink the meaning of alkaloids because of that, you know.” He looked down at my face. “It is an Earth science assumption. We … had always thought they were a leftover from nitrogen metabolism stored in leaves or fruit or flowers to be discarded with them. Useful, of course …”

He was breathing too hard. He needed to rest a moment. I suggested finding a bench but he said he didn’t want to keep me from my work and slowly, slowly, we kept walking and he kept rambling and I kept waiting.

“Alkaloids are part of nature, although not as common here. Which seems only logical, since the plants had more time to evolve. Monocotyledons on Earth do not make them often. Apparently … they have more efficient metabolisms. Although alkaloids discourage predation. Nicotine is a potent insecticide. The plants here create all manner of toxins …”

He stared at the trees and shrubs as if he’d never seen them before. I reminded myself to be patient, at least for a while.

“The problem with potent toxins being that the learning curve is steeper than the lifetime. The predators never live and learn, which they do with alkaloids … The mere taste is the chief discouragement. If something does not taste discouraging, there usually is not a … sufficient concentration to worry about. Addictive in this case, not surprisingly. Alkaloids often are, like caffeine, but harmful is another matter. The plant wants you dependent, not injured. Very wise choice, addiction … You say the fruit is delicious? Bryan is too excitable. And not just about that …” He looked around. “I am too excitable. I taught him, and I suppose I taught him that, my fault, all my fault … again, and I paid for it.”

“Julian,” I said.

He didn’t answer, just looked sad.

We’d arrived at the shed and I opened it and pulled out a bundle of grass.

“What?” he said. “Esparto? No, let me see.” He grabbed the bundle, squinted at the ends of the stems, and took out a hand lens. He studied it, then threw the grass down as if it would bite him. “Wrong … wrong veins. Where did you get this?”

“I picked this a while ago up in the south meadow.” But maybe it wasn’t the same bundle. It looked a little smaller.

“Ricin. This has ricin.” He bent down to rub his fingertips with clay. “Wash your hands, too. This is not esparto, it is Lycopodium ensatus. It looks about the same dried, but … you would never mistake it when you picked it. Exotoxins … it has plenty, a kind called ricin. By the time you wove this all, the skin would fall off your hands.” He picked up the bundle with his walking stick. “We must burn this. The grandchildren, you know. They could get hurt.”

“How did it get there?” But I already knew. I hadn’t gotten the hint with Julian and I needed to get another lesson.

He carried it on the tip of his walking stick and limped toward a hearth near the metallurgy shed. “It does not occur around here. It grows in brackish soils. Bryan …”

“Bryan did this?” That made sense.

“He is afraid of the rainbow bamboo. I taught him … fear of plants, but the fruit was poisonous … the bamboo fruit. After the snow vine, we thought the bamboo would be worse. Understand that. The fruit was poisonous back then. And now …”

“You visited the city?” The lies were bigger than I thought.

“Not me, no. Uri, Bryan, and Jill. We were excited … A city. Bryan thought the people had been wiped out by … rainbow bamboo. It moved in … grabbed their water system … But …” He could hardly breathe and looked bad, worse than usual.

“The city was built to copy the bamboo,” I said. “Anyone could see that. Look, you need to sit down and rest. I’ll take the poison grass. Here, sit on this log.”

I helped him sit, grabbed a stick from the ground, took the grass, and carried it to the hearth. I struck a spark and it burned like a torch. They knew about the city, all the parents did, but they were afraid of the bamboo, so afraid that they killed Julian to make sure we wouldn’t go back. I walked back to the log, and Octavo tried to stand up.

“Oh, we all knew … ,” he said, “the only city the satellite found …”

“The only city? Here, don’t try to stand. I’ll sit with you.” I wondered if I should get a medic but I needed to hear what he had to say, the truth about the lies, all of them, finally.

“Not everyone believes plants are significantly intelligent, but … but we were all afraid of them. The glass makers disappeared for a reason … Snow vines have been domesticated … They are less intelligent. Bamboo … is very intelligent.” I wanted to say something but he looked too frightened, and of what? “Do you want a life worth living? It wants to keep you … You will be slaves in a pretty cage.”

“A life worth living, that’s what I want. You should have told us.”

“I think so now. Lies and lies, and Julian died because we need to keep telling them.” Frightened or sad, I couldn’t tell. “But you will not … believe the truth, child. Poisoned by lies. Us and you. Poison fruit.”

“I know the truth. The bamboo is smart. It thinks and it wants us to live there. It will help us.”

Something about his face looked wrong. “But do not trust it. Plants are not altruistic … Wants you for a purpose.” He could barely talk.

“Aren’t humans altruistic? Why not plants?”

“Not all humans. That is why we left Earth.” His right eyelid drooped. The right side of his mouth had gone slack. I took his right hand and it was limp.

“You need a medic.”

“No. Just rest. I need rest. I am sick, Sylvia. I will not live much longer. It is a waste to prolong it.”

I got up and ran to the clinic as fast as I could. The medics came with a stretcher and at a glance said he was having a stroke. I followed them to the clinic. Vera arrived but she didn’t even look at him before she started yelling at me.

“You attacked Octavo. You’ve gone too far. Much too far.” She waved her cane, but I wasn’t scared. She shouldn’t be running Pax.

“He had a stroke. I didn’t do that. I didn’t attack anyone. You knew about the city all along, and I can prove it.” I walked out. She didn’t deserve respect anymore. Nicoletta could check the satellite scans and whatever she was doing couldn’t be as important as proving that Vera lied.

I found Nicoletta over the hills fixing the electronic fence around the fippolions that were clearing unfriendly snow vines for us, and from far away I saw that she’d put on her clothes.

“No,” she said, “I can’t check the satellite scans.” She wouldn’t look at me.

“It won’t take much,” I said. “Repeating code in a photo file. The parents actually visited the place, Bryan and Jill and Uri. We can prove that they knew.”

“And then what?”

That was all she’d say. The fippolions looked at us dully. Electronic collars kept them on the other side of the fence but they could kill us with a swipe if they had the chance. I left her alone but at the top of the hill I looked back. It was hard to tell from that distance, but she might have been crying. What had they done to Nicoletta?

I went south on the way home through a field of esparto just about to bloom close to western snow vines. I looked at it closely. When esparto dried, the wavy edges of the leaves would become flat and resemble the poison grass.

Something smacked me hard across the shoulders and I flew face-first into the esparto. Maybe it was an eagle. Maybe they’d come back. I tried to get up and escape, not wasting time to look back, but I was hit again across the back and I glimpsed human feet as my face struck the ground again. Someone knelt on my shoulders and held my face in the grass. I yelled but it hurt to breathe and grass and dirt in my face muffled the sound. Who was doing this? It had looked like a man’s feet and I tried to look again, but someone else grabbed my legs and pulled them up and apart and a man’s hips slammed against my thighs as he shoved his penis inside me. I struggled against the knees on my back and tried to get up and I kept trying and trying. I wanted to stop it, stop him, to get away. He was hurting me, pushing in and pulling out, dry and tearing, and my hips ached, pulled too wide. I kicked and grabbed with my hands but couldn’t catch anything. I wanted to hurt them, hurt them more, not thinking, just pain and anger, and I couldn’t do anything.

He pulled all the way out and dropped me. My knees scraped against the grass. They clubbed me across my back again. I gasped, and my ribs throbbed, my shoulders, my crotch, my knees. Their footsteps rasped through the esparto as they ran away. I sat up as fast as I could, but they were already out of sight and I was dizzy and I couldn’t catch them. After a while I saw that a shirt and trousers lay on the grass next to me, a message.

My face hurt. I touched it. Dirt and something wet. I knew it was blood before I looked at my fingers. I knew why I’d been attacked. I was too valuable to kill because I could have babies but they wanted me to stop fighting, stop trying to make parents tell the truth, stop thinking that children had a right to live their own lives, better lives.

Parents. They’d silenced Julian. They’d hurt me as badly as they could. I knew what they wanted and I knew what I wanted and nothing they’d done to me had changed anything. Except for what I was willing to do. Heresy, rebellion, and war, at last.

Lux was approaching the treetops. I put my clothes back on. I stopped at an irrigation ditch on the way back to the village and washed everything twice, three times, and I shivered as I did even though it wasn’t cold, and all I could think about was violence.

Children and grandchildren had put their clothes back on. Or they did when they saw me, bruised and scratched. They whispered to me, a knot of children in the plaza, about what had happened to Epi and Blas, and to Beck, Leon’s little boy and Higgins’s loyal follower, and to Nicoletta, Higgins’s mother, about the threats and beatings. I was dangerous, they were told. Remember what happened to Julian. Don’t listen to me, they were told, but they wouldn’t obey anymore. I told them what had happened to me and that made them ready to fight back, but how? Even I didn’t know.

Aloysha saw me and stammered, tugging apologetically at the fabric of the shirt he wore.

“Uri went to Rainbow City,” I said, not waiting for him to speak. “Your father knew. They all know, all the parents. They don’t want us to go.”

His face puckered in confusion.

“They’re afraid of the rainbow bamboo. And they’re afraid of me,” I said. “Sleep with me tonight.” He stared, mouth open. “With a hunting knife,” I added. He blinked, then nodded. It didn’t matter whether he understood why.

I went to see Octavo. Blas said he was better but he didn’t look better. The side of his face had collapsed and he spoke thickly. Saliva dripped from one side of his mouth.

“Girl, you are hurt.”

“Vera is having people attacked. You know that. Remember Julian. We have to stop her.”

His good hand stroked his face as if he were tracing the edge of the good part and bad part. “We expected paradise. To find paradise. Do you know what you found?”

“A better place to live at the city. You didn’t want to go there, but I do. We do.”

“The bones you found have DNA. Pax uses RNA. That is … why … it was the only city. Astonishing. Not from Pax. Others looking for paradise.”

It took me a moment to understand. “The glass makers were aliens? Like us?” I didn’t know what to think and I didn’t have time. “We have to stop Vera. Can you help us?”

“Paula made herself a leader. Vera never learned, but no one did …”

“Can you help us?”

“Help you what?”

“Go to Rainbow City.” And escape from the parents.

“The bamboo is even smarter … You will do what it wants.”

“The bamboo isn’t that bad. You haven’t even seen it.”

“It is, it is. It will make you stay.”

“It asked me to stay. It needs water, it needs gifts, it needs us. The glass makers liked the rainbow bamboo a lot, you can see that in the city. It can’t be worse than here.”

He seemed to be looking at me but I wasn’t sure.

“Help us,” I said. “Tell the truth. That’s all you need to do.”

“Tell the truth …” He nodded unsteadily. “Yes … the truth.”

“Thank you.”

“Your future, not mine.” He seemed unhappy. I kissed him on his good cheek.

Blas told me he’d recover, the stroke wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He fussed over the cuts on my face and pretended to believe me when I said nothing else was hurting. I was trying not to think about it but I couldn’t stop and wasn’t thinking just about me.

“It’s not right,” he said. “What do we do?”

“You’ll see,” I said. Although I still wasn’t sure what I’d do. How would the parents react when Octavo started talking? Or the children? We children respected Octavo and some of us liked him. But the parents would try to hurt us. Again.

Octavo was dozing when I left the clinic. I walked to my room through the tiny huddle of ugly hovels that was our home. Plants bribed us but they didn’t beat us or attack us. Aloysha was waiting in my room and during the night he held me tight every time I woke up trembling, dreaming I was in an esparto field.

In the morning, we learned that Octavo had died. Vera had been with him. A lot of children doubted her story and when I whispered to them about the city, the fruit, about what Octavo had said and what he was going to say, they understood what had really happened. The parents knew about the city and the aliens and were afraid, afraid enough to kill again. Who’d be next? We had to stop them and I could. I got ready.

Octavo’s funeral was that evening. We marched at the pace of the slowest parents, shuffling with their canes and crutches through fields that sparkled with glowworms. Those fields, those ragged patches of green, were their only hope and accomplishment. We were silent except for sobs, and I cried too, for Octavo, for how bad things had gotten. They had attacked me. They had killed Julian and Octavo. If I didn’t act, it would get even worse.

Octavo was lowered into a grave next to the snow vines that he had hated.

“He more than anyone wanted Pax to succeed,” Vera said. “He searched for food crops, he helped us understand our place in our new home and how to live here in peace. He gave us his mutual trust and support so we could live in a new community and make a new society.” She was quoting the Constitution, words she didn’t believe in. I got ready.

She turned to pick up a shovel alongside the grave, not even considering that someone would speak, especially not me.

“Octavo was a liar like the rest of the parents,” I said.

She turned. “How dare you!”

“You all know the city exists, you’ve known it all along.”

She raised the shovel like a weapon, teeth bared. She stood several meters away. I ran toward her, pulling the knife with a poisoned blade from a sheath inside my shirt.

The wrinkles on her cheeks lined up in waves as she shouted, “Step back!”

She didn’t deserve to be obeyed. I batted away the shovel. It fell to the ground.

“Stop her!” she screamed. “She can’t do this!”

But all I could see was everything that had happened and everything I could stop. I raised the knife and brought it down. The blade bounced along her ribs horribly and she wailed like a swooping bat until I twisted the knife and forced it in with both hands and then pushed her into the grave. I took a deep breath. There was still more to do.

I turned to see Aloysha and Blas wrestling with Vera’s son, Ross. Bryan already lay on the ground yelling, and Nicoletta stood over him, holding his cane like a club. The parents squalled that I’d violated this or that, and Nicoletta and Cynthia shouted back that I was right. The little grandchildren were shrieking and Higgins stood in front of them, fists raised at the parents.

Vera whimpered and was quiet. Was that how Julian died? I couldn’t look into the grave. The new Pax was beginning the wrong way and I had to do something. I raised my hands, one of them with Vera’s blood on it. Children’s voices called for quiet.

“They all knew the city was there,” I said, “and they were afraid. Something happened to the glass makers and they blamed the rainbow bamboo.”

Bryan began to say something. “Quiet!” Nicoletta told him.

I continued. “But that’s not why the parents lied. They had a dream. They wanted a new society, a better version of Earth. They thought they could make it with hardship, and the more hardship, the more they thought they had a new Earth here.”

“That’s right,” Bryan called out.

“But it’s not working,” Nicoletta said. “It’s not better.”

“They have their new society,” I said. “It is us. We can make our own choices. Us, the children. Octavo asked me if I wanted a life worth living. I do. There’s a better place to live than here. It’s time for a new moderator.”

I looked around. Everyone was still, watching me.

“Who wants Pax to be more than endless hardship?” I said. “Who isn’t afraid to change? Vote for me. I’ll be the moderator, and we’ll do more than survive. The parents wanted a new Earth. What we want is Pax. The time of the parents is over. Vote.”

Hands went up for me: Aloysha, Rosemarie, Daniel, Leon, Nicoletta, Cynthia, Enea, Mellona, Victor, Epi, Blas, Ravi, Carmia, and Hroc. And Higgins and many of the grandchildren. And one parent, Ramona. I didn’t call for the hands of those who were against me.

So that was the revolt. I became the moderator by a minority vote and in spite of the fact that at eighteen, I was seven years too young according to the Constitution. But by the time we’d moved everything to Rainbow City, I was actually old enough and Aloysha and I had had two healthy babies. Vera’s son, Ross, was probably one of the men who attacked me but once he saw Rainbow City, he wanted to stay there and he worked harder than anyone to get it ready. By the time we left the village for good, only four parents were still alive.

I didn’t want to abandon them, although their half-blind eyes looked at me as if I were a murderer in those final days. We even offered to carry them! When I left the village the last time, the Sun was rising bright red. When it set, we were camped in the valley above the waterfall. The bats began to swoop and wail, and I heard Vera dying again. It was the end of Earth.