by Sue Burke
“So it wouldn’t need so much fertilizer, like that.” I tipped my head toward the cemetery. “It would go wild.”
“No, every niche is only so big. Anyway, we already trashed the climate and nuked a few cities, so how much harm could it do?”
He didn’t seem to think of Stevland as anything more than a plant. He couldn’t see the forest for the trees, literally. No cross-discipline.
“Remember,” I said, “when they revived the theropod dinosaurs?”
He grimaced and nodded.
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it would have been fine with bigger fences. Anyway, nobody really wanted to live in Florida even before that. So all you care about is the money you’d get from this. Stevland? Are you going to call it ‘Stevland bamboo’?”
“Stevland is just what they call it here.”
“But won’t it be cultural appropriation to take it? It’s central to their culture here. And on Earth, all it’s going to be is a crop, something to be tortured with commercial agriculture.”
“It doesn’t matter. This is just daydreaming. We need to fit in here now.”
“Fit in. What can I do? Stand around and talk to people and write reports? That’s my Earth job.”
“We could go work on the crops. That’s the default job here.”
Out toiling for the fields. I’d seen a lot of that. “Yeah, we could.” We both sat there thinking about it for a while. “Aren’t there ants that take care of plants?”
“On Earth, sure, uh, myrmecophytes. Why?”
“That’s what farmwork always looked like to me.”
He almost laughed. “I suppose, farming means taking care of plants. But watch out who you call ants around here.”
“Would it be safe to take the bamboo to Earth? It does so much here.”
He thought a while. “It would just be another crop, or ornamental horticulture, not much difference. Why are you so worried?”
Why was I? Good question. “I guess I’ll go do something useful,” I said. I hadn’t learned a thing about the bamboo, and he was just a botanist, shortsighted as anyone in life sciences, studying their little organisms and that’s all.
And why did I worry? A long time ago, as a student, I thought if I could figure out people, I could do something, change the world, make it better. Save the Earth. It didn’t happen, but I still wanted to do it. Save the Earth. I’d never had the chance, though, until now.
If we ever did get to go home, I had to be sure we didn’t take those seeds. Absolutely not. Something was wrong about Stevland, some secret we shouldn’t let loose on Earth. Ever. Not even in Florida.
On my way through the city, I passed the building holding the network, what was left of it, which wasn’t enough to make it work again. Still, technicians were there, including the five, the traitorous five, now trying to excuse themselves. The network said it was under attack. We had to defend it. Something weird was going on. We didn’t know what. Sure. How stupid were they? We’re sorry. We’re really sorry. We didn’t know. We needed the network. We still do. Yes, we still did, and that was the only reason they were still free, because they promised to make it operational again. They were trying to, at least.
“Give us a hand,” Ernst called from the doorway, sweaty and weary. I looked inside and the hair on my arms stood up. The equipment had been pulled open like some sort of mechanical autopsy, guts strewn all over. This was never going to work. We’d be on Pax forever for sure.
“A lot of components were overloaded and damaged,” he said. “The memory was shut down, and we can’t get to it.”
“I’m not—”
“All we need is a grunt worker. We’re picking parts out of everything we can.”
Inside, Queen Chut stood in the middle of the room. A fire burned in the fireplace, heating sort of a little oven.
I spent the afternoon lugging machinery, holding things open or shut or up or down so other people could rummage around or put things together, or I pumped a little bellows to melt gold in a tiny crucible that Chut used to connect parts. She had the most delicate touch in the room. But she never lifted anything heavier than tongs, of course.
“We will get you home,” she kept saying, or that was one translation. Another might have been, “We will throw you out.”
Close to sunset, I came back from depositing the husk of a scanner in the zoology lab to clear some space out for the Abacus rebuilding project. I was hoping we’d stop for the night and rest. They seemed to be packing things up. Good. I was exhausted, and I hadn’t done the hardest work. Other people had spent the day matching up parts, desperate for a good fit.
I imagined going to sleep back on Earth. I would weigh less, and the bed would feel soft as feathers. No hungry trees looming over me, no giant insects giving orders or dealing out death, no far-off glowing balls trying to take over my brain.
“Zivon,” Velma said, grinning, “stay there. Tell us what you hear. We’re going to test it.”
Inside, Ernst said, “Input on…? Output…? Power…? All right, I’m turning it on.”
I hurried to a bench, sat down, and held my head in my hands. Something might go wrong again, and I’d get sent a mental smack like the corals had dished out. I waited. And waited. Nothing. People were talking in the building. Velma gave a little shriek of joy. Nothing. Nothing. Well, sort of a click. Cheering in the building. A hum, and a faint sensation of yellow-green. I tried sending but felt nothing. I turned my connection on and off. I could do that. But nothing else. No network, properly speaking. And we’d worked so hard.
I stood up to tell them that, to commiserate. We were still stuck here.
“All right, turn on Abacus!” Ernst said.
They hadn’t turned it all on. They were about to do that. I needed to sit down again because now I might really get hurt. I turned back to the bench. I heard a ping.
“Hello.” A bright green hello.
“All right!” Ernst shouted. “No one touch anything.”
I needed to test it. I tried to link to Velma.
“You can go home! You can go home!” she sent. Barely coherent. “You can go!”
The network was up! We could go home!
I ran to the doorway and shouted congratulations, afraid to take a step inside and jostle the table full of mismatched pieces that were now the inner workings of the network.
We’d leave as soon as we could. With Stevland? I’d stop that. Somehow.
But it was time to go to bed. “Test Abacus,” Ernst had said when I left. “Try to do things.” I had a test. What did we know about Stevland? I looked at our data as I walked home, undressed, and lay down. I found a pattern, not what I expected. Something far worse.
Stevland could talk using machines, children had told me. A Glassmaker queen made and ran the machines.
It lived in the city. The Glassmakers had built the city.
It also lived in Laurentia. Glassmakers lived in Laurentia.
So Glassmakers and Stevland were intimately connected.
We’d learned something about Glassmakers during the fight. They could run the city if they felt like it. Stevland was central to the city. If they controlled Stevland, they controlled the city.
I checked about myrmecophytes with the network. It was mutualism. Ants and plants lived together, and they both benefited. Ants could make slaves, too. And they kept some kinds of insects like cattle. Ants could take charge, cruelly.
We’d generated a lot of blather about Stevland, that he was a deity, a personification, a superfarmer, a moderator at meetings. Yes, he was a moderator, he talked with a machine, and who ran the machines? Glassmakers.
I used to think the Glassmakers were exploited by Humans. Then in the fields I saw who did the hard work, the dangerous work, and who did the easy work, the follow-up after the trailblazers. Humans cleared fields, but they didn’t decide what to do with them. Queens didn’t even get their hands dirty unless it was to handle gold.
No wonder the Glassm
akers were so quick to say they weren’t exploited. “We are equal,” Thunderclap always said. They had to insist on equality. They even acted a bit stupid, but look how fast Cawzee, the big hero who saved us all, learned to fly a heli-plane. It was the sham mythology of their society. Queens ran everything. The elite.
And I couldn’t be sure, but I half suspected they had brought the rainbow bamboo with them to the planet. How else could they work so closely with it?
At least, that’s what I thought that long night on Pax, lying in bed, staring at data, thinking, and making notes. I needed to confirm what I knew.
Eventually, I fell asleep but didn’t sleep well. In the morning, I got up to start work.
I found Thunderclap in her carpentry workshop next to the river, which still flowed full of stinking ashes. While her staff, Human and Glassmaker, worked on something big, a shed, I think, she used a lathe to carve decorations into the outside of a bowl made of checkerboard wood. Delicate work, light work, and frankly an object of beauty. It would join the other dishes at the dining hall, ceramic or wood, none of them merely utilitarian. I had already thoroughly documented the Pax commitment to beauty.
Her little baby and its worker-caretaker stacked up scraps like toy blocks. The baby was making an arch, complex engineering for someone not even two months old. Queens started out smart.
I approached Thunderclap and offered my hands humbly. I wanted to behave nicely, and I’d learned that offering hands was the polite thing to do. She stopped pumping the lathe with a foot. She welcomed me and said, “You go home now, I hear. Your mind network functions again, free from corals and their damage.”
“Yes. I can hear you and it translates again, so we can talk.” My words, in Glassmade, came out of a tiny speaker I’d found in one of the labs the day before. Even though I knew a little bit of the language, the sound made me flinch. Was that really what I said?
“Talk is your work.”
I heard and smelled laughter behind me. Earthlings weren’t good for much, according to Pacifists.
“That bowl is beautiful.”
“Beauty unites us here. We have many skills, all are finally beauty. Here,” she said, reaching for something on a table behind her, “my beauty for you. You perhaps take it home. I am sad for your friends. Three days ago was horrible.”
She held out a disk of checkerboard wood carved with sort of a woven pattern accentuating the variations in the wood. A cord was threaded through a hole drilled across one end. I didn’t know if it would be fashionable on Earth, but it would certainly be an object of art.
“Thank you.” I took it and slipped it over my head.
“And now, you will ask me questions.”
“What do you know about Stevland?” I asked Thunderclap.
“Again you ask me. He is bamboo, a symbol of city.”
“You didn’t use to say that.”
“We say something, you make wrong ideas. Better not to talk to you.”
She began to pump the lathe again and picked up the bowl.
“One more question, not about Stevland. Do you want to come to Earth?”
She stopped pumping. “No. Not I. We talk, Om and I. Perhaps Rattle.”
“You would send your own little daughter far away, alone?”
“You will be with her. You love us much. You will care for her.”
Thunderclap would get rid of a potential rival for power that way. “I don’t know anything about Glassmakers,” I said.
She laughed, a strawberry smell. “Finally you say something wise. You will talk with Om.” She set down the bowl and took my hands again, rubbing them with scent. “First you will sit and play with Rattle.” She knelt down to talk to her. “This is Chee-wa. He loves you.”
Rattle looked up, a ball of tan fuzz with a head like a club, four ant legs, and two arms like little ant legs. Babies were cute, kittens were cute, but this child was only slightly less ugly than her mother. “Weeoooo weeoooo!” she said, and reached for me.
Thunderclap put a hand on my shoulder and pushed. Sit down, it meant. So I sat. What choice did I have? She had killed the Mu Rees.
Rattle climbed up me, claws hooking onto my clothes. She smelled like sweet roses. Work had stopped, and everyone was watching us as if we were the funniest thing they’d seen all day. She reached the top of my head and screeched and crackled and rattled and ran her claws through my hair.
Did that fool Om really want to take this insect to Earth? There were ethics. She was a child and would be brought up alone, alone and lonely, and that would twist her mind. Besides, she could reproduce on her own, and these were aggressive, superintelligent creatures, convinced of their own superiority. Was that belief innate? Yeah. And they’d take over Earth, sooner or later. We were a tough species, but not as tough as them.
Ethically, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let it happen.
She climbed down to my shoulders and whistled.
“She says walk,” the baby’s caretaker said.
“You go,” Thunderclap called. “Chirp will help you.”
He led me back to the city, and she called and waved to every workshop we passed, and they called and waved back, Human and Glassmaker. No one was ever that nice to me when I walked past alone. We climbed up the river bluff into the city. She reeked of roses and spices, and she clung tight, claws digging into my scalp. I didn’t dare unhook them.
“Let’s see Om,” I told the worker. I could put a stop to this stupidity. We found him in the Meeting House, talking to the old lady there. “Thunderclap sent me,” I told him.
Rattle shrieked and climbed down me to greet the woman, who had been sewing.
“And she entrusted you with her child,” Om said.
I switched to Earth Creole. “Why did you let her think that!”
“Think what?”
“She said we’re taking her to Earth. Her daughter.”
“No, that’s not right. We’re taking Cheery, her adult daughter. How could we take a child?”
“How can we take either one?”
“You’re upset about the Mu Rees. Plenty went wrong on both sides. We should begin with a clean slate.”
I checked my scalp for blood. Only a drop or two. But—“But what about her health? It’s hard enough to make us dormant for the trip.”
“The physician has serious doubts, our physician, but the native medical staff seems to know an unexpected lot about them.”
“So you’re taking Cheery. You have to talk to Thunderclap. She really thinks it’s this baby.”
“I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”
Maybe I could talk Cheery out of it. I had to try.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Rattle, come here. We’re going.”
She dashed off, crackling.
Chirp called to me, “It is game! You will chase her.”
So I wound up chasing the fuzzy ant all over the Meeting House, which was a big building, hoping we wouldn’t knock over any artwork, while that old woman and Om laughed at me. It was surreal.
After we caught the baby, we went to look for Cheery. She managed the weaving. I knew where that workshop was. Chirp didn’t think I should take the baby in there, so they stayed outside.
The building was filled with looms, all sorts of frames with bright-colored threads strung in them and dangling loose everywhere. The baby would have been a disaster there. It reminded me a little of the guts of the machines we had worked on the day before. It probably wasn’t chaos but it looked like it, and only one other person there besides Cheery, a human, was working. The rest were in the fields. Springtime planting and all that. Cheery was weaving on a long, clunky, narrow loom to make fancy belts or something.
She saw me and rushed over. “I am leaving!” She reached for my hands, then backed off. I realized I smelled like Thunderclap. Queens were fussy about that.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “So you’re coming to Earth.”
“I am happy.” She reeked rosy-happy. “I will
not work, everyone will be interested in me.”
“What about your family?”
“I have no family yet. I will make family on Earth.”
“You really would not be happy there. Do you know what Earth is like?”
“No one works. Time for music and study.”
“Wrong. I had to study. I mean, you think you can decide what team you’ll be on, what you’ll do, right? No. I had no choice. I did what I was told.”
“Teachers always tell students what to do.”
“I had to work as hard as I could or else I couldn’t go to school. When I was done with school, I had to look for work. If I couldn’t find work, I couldn’t eat. We don’t have dining halls. We have to buy our own food, and we need to get money for that. But you wouldn’t know what money is. You’ll find out. We have a saying, Money is the root of all evil, and still we all have to have money, as much as we can.”
“You are not all evil.”
“Think of the Mu Rees. They’re typical.”
“They did what corals told them.”
“Before that. They were lazy.”
“Many are lazy here.”
I stopped. I was rushing. I hadn’t thought this through. What would trouble someone at the pinnacle of power? “I can show you what it’s like.”
“We queens have decided we will send one. We do not need to know more.”
“Thunderclap thinks you’re sending her baby.”
“A mother who has one daughter wants no more.”
“But you or her?”
“We will talk tonight. Queens will meet and talk.”
“I must talk to you, all of you. There are things you need to know.”
“We will talk with Om.”
I knew what Om would tell them. “You’ve already heard what he has to say. But he hasn’t told you everything.”
“You do not like the leader of your team. We know this, everyone knows this.” She turned back to her weaving.
“You’ll be surprised. It won’t be good.” I was too frustrated to keep trying. I turned and left. Chirp and Rattle were playing outside. “Take her back to Thunderclap,” I said. I was in no mood for that ugly baby.