"Your silence tells us," said the Flowers, "that you find it hard to digest what we are telling you."
"I choke on it," I told them.
"Let's try to say it another way. Earth is a basic structure but it progresses along the time path by a process of discontinuity."
"Thanks," I said, "for trying, but it doesn't help too much."
"We have known it for a long time," said the Flowers. "We discovered it many years ago. To us it is a natural law, but to you it's not. It'll take you a little time. You cannot swallow at a single gulp what it took us centuries to know."
"But I walked through time," I said. "That's what's hard to take. How could I walk through time?"
"You walked through a very thin spot."
"Thin spot?"
"A place where time was not so thick."
"And you made this thin spot?"
"Let's say that we exploited it."
"To try to reach our Earth?"
"Please, sir," said the Flowers, "not that tone of horror. For some years now, you people have been going into space."
"We've been trying to," I said.
"You're thinking of invasion. In that we are alike. You are trying to invade space; we're trying to invade time."
"Let's just go back a ways," I pleaded. "There are boundaries between these many Earths?"
"That is right."
"Boundaries in time? The worlds are separated by time phases?"
"That is indeed correct. You catch on very neatly."
"And you are trying to break through this time barrier so you can reach my Earth?"
"To reach your Earth," they told me.
"But why?"
"To co-operate with you. To form a partnership. We need living space and if you give us living space, we'll give our knowledge; we need technology, for we have no hands, and with our knowledge you can shape new technologies and those technologies can be used for the benefit of each of us. We can go together into other worlds. Eventually a long chain of many Earths will be linked together and the races in them linked, as well, in a common aim and purpose." A cold lump of lead blossomed in my guts, and despite the lump of lead I felt that I was empty and there was a vile metallic taste that coated tongue and mouth. A partnership, and who would be in charge? Living space, and how much would they leave for us? Other worlds, and what would happen in those other worlds?
"You have a lot of knowledge?"
"Very much," they said. "It is a thing we pay much attention to — the absorption of all knowledge."
"And you're very busy collecting it from us. You are the people who are hiring all the readers?"
"It is so much more efficient," they explained, "than the way we used to do it, with results indifferent at best. This way is more certain and a great deal more selective."
"Ever since the time," I said, "that you got Gerald Sherwood to make the telephones."
"The telephones," they told me, "provide direct communication. All we had before was the tapping of the mind."
"You mean you had mental contact with people of our Earth? Perhaps for a good long time?"
"Oh, yes," they said, most cheerfully. "With very many people, for many, many years. But the sad part of it was that it was a one-way business. We had contact with them, but by and large, they had none with us. Most of them were not aware of us at all and others, who were more sensitive, were aware of us only in a vague and fumbling way."
"But you picked those minds."
"Of course we did," they said. "But we had to content ourselves with what was in the minds. We could not manage to direct them to specific areas of interest."
"You tried nudging them, of course."
"There were some we nudged with fair success. There were others we could nudge, but they moved in wrong directions. And there were many, most of them perhaps, who stubbornly remained unaware of us, no matter what we did. It was discouraging."
"You contact these minds through certain thin spots, I suppose. You could not have done it through the normal boundaries."
"No, we had to make maximum usage of the thin spots that we found."
"It was, I gather, somewhat unsatisfactory."
"You are perceptive, sir. We were getting nowhere."
"Then you made a breakthrough."
"We are not quite sure we understand."
"You tried a new approach. You concentrated on actually sending something physical through the boundary. A handful of seeds, perhaps."
"You are right, of course. You follow us so closely and you understand so well. But even that would have failed if it had not been for your father. Only a very few of the seeds germinated and the resultant plants would have died out eventually if he'd not found them and taken care of them. You must understand that is why we want you to act as our emissary…"
"Now, just a minute there," I told them. "Before we get into that, there are a few more points I want cleared up. The barrier, for instance, that you've thrown around Millville."
"The barrier," said the Flowers, "is a rather simple thing. It is a time bubble we managed to project outward from the thin spot in the boundary that separates our worlds. That one slight area of space it occupies is out of phase both with Millville and with the rest of your Earth. The smallest imaginable fraction of a second in the past, running that fraction of a second of time behind the time of Earth. So slight a fraction of a second, perhaps, that it would be difficult, we should imagine, for the most sophisticated of your instruments to take a measurement. A very little thing and yet, we imagine you'll agree, it is quite effective."
"Yes," I said, "effective." And, of course, it would be — by the very nature of it, it would be strong beyond imagination. For it would represent the past, a filmy soap bubble of the past encapsulating Millville, so slight a thing that it did not interfere with either sight or sound, and yet was something no human could hope to penetrate.
"But sticks and stones," I said. "And raindrops…"
"Only life," they said. "Life at a certain level of sentience, of awareness of its surroundings, of feeling — how do you say it?"
"You've said it well enough," I told them. "And the inanimate…"
"There are many rules of time," they told me, "of the natural phenomenon which you call time. That is a part, a small part, of the knowledge we would share with you."
"Anything at all," I said, "in that direction would be new knowledge for us. We have not studied time. We haven't even thought of it as a force that we could study. We haven't made a start. A lot of metaphysical mutterings, of course, but no real study of it. We have never found a place where we could start a study of it."
"We know all that," they said.
And was there a note of triumph in the way they said it? I could not be entirely sure.
A new sort of weapon, I thought. A devilish sort of weapon. It wouldn't kill you and it wouldn't hurt you! It would shove you along, herding you along, out of the way, crowding you together, and there wouldn't be a thing you could do about it.
What, Nancy had asked, if it swept all life from Earth, leaving only Millville? And that, perhaps, was possible, although it need not go that far. If it was living space alone that the Flowers were looking for, then they already had the instrument to get that living space. They could expand the bubble, gaining all the space they needed, holding the human race at bay while they settled down in that living space. The weapon was at once a weapon to be used against the people of the Earth and a protection for the Flowers against such reprisals as mankind might attempt.
The way was open to them if they wanted Earth. For Tupper had travelled the way that they must go and so had I and there was nothing now to stop them. They could simply move into the Earth, shielded by that wall of time.
"So," I asked, "what are you waiting for?"
"You are, on certain points, so slow to reach an understanding of what we intend," they said. "We do not plan invasion. We want co-operation. We want to come as friends in perfect understanding
."
"Well, that's fine," I said. "You are asking to be friends. First we must know our friends. What sort of things are you?"
"You are being rude," they said.
"I am not being rude. I want to know about you. You speak of yourselves as plural, or perhaps collective."
"Collective," they said. "You probably would describe us as an organism. Our root system is planet-wide and interconnected and you might want to think of it as our nervous system. At regular intervals there are great masses of our root material and these masses serve — we suppose you'd call them brains. Many, many brains and all of them connected by a common nervous system."
"But it's all wrong," I protested. "It goes against all reason. Plants can't be intelligent. No plant could experience the survival pressure or the motivation to achieve intelligence."
"Your reasoning," they told me calmly, "is beyond reproach."
"So it is beyond reproach," I said. "Yet I am talking with you."
"You have an animal on your Earth that you call a dog."
"That is right. An animal of great intelligence."
"Adopted by you humans as a pet and a companion. An animal that has associated with you people since before the dawning of your history. And, perhaps, the more intelligent because of that association. An animal that is capable of a great degree of training."
"What has the dog to do with it?" I asked.
"Consider," they said. "If the humans of your Earth had devoted all their energies, through all their history, to the training of the dog, what might have been achieved?"
"Why, I don't know," I said. "Perhaps, by now, we'd have a dog that might be our equal in intelligence. Perhaps not intelligent in the same manner that we're intelligent, but…"
"There once was another race," the Flowers told me, "that did that very thing with us. It all began more than a billion years ago."
"This other race deliberately made a plant intelligent?"
"There was a reason for it. They were a different kind of life than you. They developed us for one specific purpose. They needed a system of some sort that would keep the data they had collected continually correlated and classified and ready for their use."
"They could have kept their records. They could have written it all down."
"There were certain physical restrictions and, perhaps more important, certain mental blocks."
"You mean they couldn't write."
"They never thought of writing. It was an idea that did not occur to them. Not even speech, the way you speak. And even if they had had speech or writing, it would not have done the job they wanted."
"The classification and the correlation?"
"That is part of it, of course. But how much ancient human knowledge, written down and committed to what seemed at that time to be safe keeping, is still alive today?"
"Not much of it. It has been lost or destroyed. Time has washed it out."
"We still hold the knowledge of that other race," they said. "We proved better than the written record — although this other race, of course, did not consider written records."
"This other race," I said. "The knowledge of this other race and how many other races?"
They did not answer me. "If we had the time," they said, "we'd explain it all to you. There are many factors and considerations you'd find incomprehensible. Believe us when we say that the decision of this other race, to develop us into a data storage system, was the most reasonable and workable of the many alternatives they had under study."
"But the time it took," I said, dismayed "My God, how much time would it take to make a plant intelligent! And how could they even start? What do you do to make a plant intelligent?"
"Time," they said, "was no great consideration. It wasn't any problem. They knew how to deal with time. They could handle time as you can handle matter. And that was a part of it. They compressed many centuries of our lives into seconds of their own. They had all the time they needed. They made the time they needed."
"They made time?"
"Certainly. Is that so hard to understand?"
"For me, it is," I told them. "Time is a river. It flows on and on. There is nothing you can do about it."
"It is nothing like a river," said the Flowers, "and it doesn't flow, and there's much that can be done with it. And, furthermore, we ignore the insult that you offer us."
"The insult?"
"Your feeling that it would be so difficult for a plant to acquire intelligence."
"No insult was intended. I was thinking of the plants of Earth. I can't imagine a dandelion…"
"A dandelion?"
"A very common plant."
"You may be right," they said. "We may have been different, originally, than the plants of Earth."
"You remember nothing of it all, of course."
"You mean ancestral memory?"
"I suppose that's what I mean."
"It was so long ago," they said. "We have the record of it. Not a myth, you understand, not a legend. But the actual record of how we became intelligent."
"Which," I said, "is far more than the human race has got."
"And now," said the Flowers, "we must say goodbye. Our enunciator is becoming quite fatigued and we must not abuse his strength, for he has served us long and faithfully and we have affection for him. We will talk with you again."
"Whew!" said Tupper.
He wiped the slobber off his chin.
"That's the longest," he said, "I have ever talked for them. What did you talk about?"
"You mean you don't know?"
"Of course I don't," snapped Tupper. "I never listen in." He was human once again. His eyes had returned to normal and his face had become unstuck.
"But the readers," I said. "They read longer than we talked."
"I don't have nothing to do with the reading that is done," said Tupper. "That ain't two-way talk. That's all mental contact stuff."
"But the phones," I said.
"The phones are just to tell them the things they should read."
"Don't they read into the phones?"
"Sure they do," said Tupper. "That's so they'll read aloud. It's easier for the Flowers to pick it up if they read aloud. It's sharper in the reader's brain or something." He got up slowly.
"Going to take a nap," he said.
He headed for the hut.
Halfway there, he stopped and turned back to face me. "I forgot," he said. "Thanks for the pants and shirt."
12
My hunch had been correct. Tupper was a key, or at least one of the keys, to what was happening. And the place to look for clues, crazy as it had sounded, had been the patch of flowers in the garden down below the greenhouse.
For the flower patch had led, not alone to Tupper, but to all the rest of it — to that second self that had helped out Gerald Sherwood, to the phone set-up and the reader service, to the ones who employed Stiffy Grant and probably to the backers of that weird project down in Mississippi. And to how many other projects and endeavours I had no idea.
It was not only now, I knew, that this was happening, but it had been happening for years. For many years, they'd told me, the Flowers had been in contact with many minds of Earth, had been stealing the ideas and the attitudes and knowledge which had existed in those minds, and even in those instances in which the minds were unaware of the prowlers in them, had persisted in the nudging of those minds, as they had nudged the mind of Sherwood.
For many years, they'd said, and I had not thought to ask them for a better estimate. For several centuries, perhaps, and that seemed entirely likely, for when they spoke of the lifetime of their intelligence they spoke of a billion years.
For several hundred years, perhaps, and could those centuries, I wondered, have dated from the Renaissance? Was it possible, I asked myself, that the credit for the flowering of man's culture, that the reason for his advancement might be due, at least in part, to the nudging of the Flowers?
Not, of course, that they thems
elves would have placed their imprint upon the ways of man, but theirs could have been the nagging force which had driven man to much of his achievement.
In the case of Gerald Sherwood, the busybody nudging had resulted in constructive action. Was it too much to think, I wondered, that in many other instances the result had been the same — although perhaps not as pronounced as it had been in Sherwood's case? For Sherwood had recognized the otherness that had come to live with him and had learned that it was to his benefit to co-operate. In many other cases there would not have been awareness, but even with no awareness, the drive and urge were there and, in part, there would have been response.
In those hundreds of years, the Flowers must have learned a great deal of humanity and have squirrelled away much human knowledge. For that had been their original purpose, to serve as knowledge storage units. During the last several years man's knowledge had flowed to them in a steady stream, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of readers busily engaged in pouring down their mental gullets the accumulated literary efforts of all of humankind.
I got off the ground where I was sitting and found that I was stiff and cramped. I stretched and slowly turned and there, on every side, reaching to the near horizons of the ridges that paralleled the river, swept the purple tide.
It could not be right, I told myself. I could not have talked with flowers. For of all the things on Earth, plants were the one thing that could never talk.
And yet this was not the Earth. This was another Earth — only one, they'd said, of many billion earths.
Could one measure, I asked myself, one earth by another? And the answer seemed to be one couldn't. The terrain appeared to be almost identical with the terrain I had known back on my own Earth, and the terrain itself might remain the same for all those multi-billion earths. For what was it they had said — that earth was a basic structure?
But when one considered life and evolution, then all the bets were off.
For even if the life of my own Earth and this other Earth on which I stood had started out identically (and they might well have started out identically) there still would be, along the way, millions of little deviations, no one of which perhaps, by itself, would be significant, but the cumulative effects of all these deviations eventually would result in a life and culture that would bear no resemblance to any other Earth.
All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 12