Sue Burke > Quotes

“I am glad I grew the humor root. I can endure unpleasant situations better.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Equality is not a fact, like the length of days... Equality is an idea, a belief, like beauty.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Each of us needs to be what we are, perhaps even be more of what we are.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“You must control bugs,” I say. “Bugs no eat fruit,” it answers. In other words, how can you control an animal except with fruit? “Change sap for bugs. Like this.” I show a chemical. “Sap will control animals.” “Bugs no eat fruit.” “Bugs drink sap.” “Yes,” it says. “Bugs no eat fruit.” “Change sap for bugs because bugs drink sap, no eat fruit.” “Bugs no eat fruit.” I realize that we are related plants, both bamboos, in fact, and our shared physiology is the only reason I can have a conversation of any complexity. The hedge along the river is too small to have many sentient roots. The presence of other snow vines triggers an aggressive growth, but this hedge has lived alone and is content to lead a manicured little life parasitizing its aspens and putting down more guard roots than it needs, thus serving the humans without realizing it. It has no need for intelligence, none at all. “Change sap for bugs,” I repeat, hoping that repetition will of itself prove persuasive. “Big animals eat bugs.” “Bugs no eat fruit.” “Big animals eat bugs.” “Big animals eat bugs,” the snow vine repeats. I have made progress. “Yes,” I say. “Change sap for bugs.” “Big animals eat bugs.” “Yes. Change sap for bugs. Like this.” “Bugs eat sap,” it says. “Bugs are pests.” “Bugs are good. Big animals eat bugs like fruit.” The snow vine stammers some meaningless chemical compounds and finally says, “Bugs are like fruit.” This is very significant progress. “Bugs are like fruit,” I agree. “Bugs eat sap. Change sap. Sap will control two animals.” “Sap will control bugs. Big animals eat bugs.” “Yes. You must change sap for bugs and animals.” “I will change sap for bugs and animals.” At last! “Yes. Change sap like this.” I deliver some prototype chemicals.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“I am the biggest and most powerful creature on Pax, and the most dangerous, and I have made mistakes I cannot rectify. But I meant well. I meant greater happiness for all. I meant to create a new and different and better life. I thought I would not repeat the past. I failed.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“We must reward appropriate behavior until it becomes natural behavior.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“I isolate a grove from my root network for a moment and enjoy the night as a human might, small in size but intense in outlook, entirely and pleasurably alert to nothing beyond my immediate surroundings, a luxury I can take only for a moment, but it is amazing how being small is a qualitative rather than a quantitative difference.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“I’m not naturally kind, I’m intentionally kind. I have to figure out what to do, I don’t do it automatically.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Let’s remember to be supportive and listen, not debate. We’re here to solve a problem, not to win.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Among these miseries was pollution, which caused disease. The Heavens saved us from war by means of disease, which blessed not one generation but hundreds. Where there was overcrowding, now there is space. Where there was competition, now there is cooperation. Where there was pollution, now there is a clean world. Where there was poverty, now there is wealth.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Plants cannot escape problems,” I answer, “so we must solve them.”
― Sue Burke, Usurpation

“they could use their sadness to build memories of love to treasure, and their treasures would comfort them. They could make pictures or write songs and poems and stories.”
― Sue Burke, Immunity Index

“Oh, it was shameful how the poor got so little help for problems they never created.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“We had said we expected hardship, no paradise, but we really wanted both. We thought we could come in peace and find a happy niche in another ecology. Instead we found a battlefield. The east vine turned us into servile mercenaries, nothing more than big, clever fippokats helping it win another battle. We had wanted to begin the world afresh, far from Earth and all its mistakes. That had not happened, but only I realised it, and I kept my disappointment to myself.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“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 only had 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 fill.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“... what bothered them more were the pink slugs twenty centimeters long they found eating old carcasses. The slugs would attack anything and dissolved living flesh on contact.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“And that was why I never came to Committee meetings. No matter what anyone talked about, it turned into a bicker, and good ideas got tortured and left to die as slowly as possible.”
― Sue Burke, Interference

“We were supposed to be happy to be just like the parents, and working together in harmony mattered more than thinking as individuals.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Because of the foreign animals, I am more than yesterday, bigger, smarter, stronger. Strong as I once was. In the city, I reign. Outside, groves and sentinels protect and feed me. I turn light into substance. Everywhere, I control the sunshine. Intelligence wastes itself on animals and their trammelled, repetitive lives.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Only disease can prevent war, a fate worse than pestilence, for the coming war will kill us all. I chose to save humanity through kinder”
― Sue Burke, Interference

“They displace their fear and anger at the Glassmakers by growing angry with each other.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“People trust what they see. They trust the system that sends them these visions even though it is as fragile as the paper in ancient books—because they have never read those books. They know nothing about their own environment. They trust it the way people once trusted the food they ate.”
― Sue Burke, Interference

“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.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“I have a significant and inescapable communication to enter into with them. Animals never grow smarter, but I do. Ours will be a rewarding relationship.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“Springtime. I am free of the seasons, yet I feel the splendor of longer days and clement weather.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“The war had begun long before we arrived because war was their way of life. It took its first victims among us before we understood what was happening, on an evening that seemed quiet.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“We had already realized from the disaster on Mars that transplanting Earth ecology wouldn't work. Crops would not grow without specific symbiotic fungi on their roots to extract nutrients, and the exact fungi would not grow without the proper soil composition, which did not exist without certain saprophytic bacteria that had proven resistant to transplantation, each life-form demanding its own billion-year-old niche. But Mars fossils and organic chemicals in interstellar comets showed that the building blocks of life were not unique to Earth. Proteins, amino acids, and carbohydrates existed everywhere. The theory of panspermia was true to a degree.

I had found a grass resembling wheat on our first day on Pax, and with a little plant tissue, a dash of hormone from buds, and some chitin, we soon had artificial seeds to plant. But would it grow? Theory was one thing and farming was another.

Then a few days before the women had died from poisoned fruit, Ramona and Carrie had seen the first shoots, ...”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“The plants here aren't like anything on Earth," I tried to explain one night. "They have cells I can't explain. On Earth, all seeds have one or two embryonic leaves, but here they have three or five or eight."

"And RNA," Grun said, "not DNA. Nothing has DNA except us.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“I had so much to learn. We knew that Pax was a billion years older than Earth. On Earth, plants had separated from animals less than a billion years ago. Probably Pax plants had more time to evolve.

The greenery around me held secrets I would never learn.”
― Sue Burke, Semiosis

“I had checked that fruit carefully. It had caffeine in it. Great breakfast fruit. Delicious”
― Sue Burke, Interference