Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  Centuries passed and long-buried seeds poked their ways through cracking lava. Among them was a single great Floran, now known as One. Before One, Florans had no awareness of separate existence. All contemporary Florans trace their origin from One. Through a process instigated by the destruction caused by the invading astronomical body, perhaps, or more likely by the radiation that showered the planet from the passing cosmic missile or was released with magma from Flora’s long-sheltered interior, One developed the ability to pull its roots from the soil, an ability it passed along to its descendants. With maneuverable roots, this great Floran no longer had to trust the uncertain breeze to distribute its seeds to suitable soils; it, and its descendants, moved meter by meter and year by year to sheltered valleys where Florans could deposit their seeds in soil prepared to receive them, with more than a hope that chance would allow them to grow and flower.

  Each generation took as its designation an ascending number. I am the forty-one hundred and seventh generation since the great One. All the preceding generations have changed, generation by generation, to gain movement, intelligence, and understanding of the world that nurtured and then tried to destroy them, and the uncaring universe that destroys as blindly as it nurtures.

  How can I describe the impact of intelligence? Every species represented here has experienced it, but none remembers. Florans remember. The history of our species is recorded in the seeds of their consciousness. At first it was only the memory of process, the irresistible bursting from the seed pod, the passionate thrusting upward toward the sun and downward toward moisture and food, the satisfying flow of nutrients through capillaries and their cellular transformation into substance, the delightful flowering, the ecstatic fertilizing, and the determined growth of seeds into which all past and future was poured, and the fading sere time that ends in death. But then awareness of environment entered, and from that all else flowed.

  We learned that the universe was more than the sun, the soil, and water. The universe held many suns, the Earth held many soils, and the rivers, the lakes, and the seas held many waters, and some of these were nurturing and some were not. We learned that we could manipulate our environment, controlling the fertility of the soil and the rain that fell upon it, and then that we could manipulate ourselves, controlling the patterns of biological inheritance we passed along to our seeds. And we learned to limit our reproduction so as not to exhaust our resources and thus, having postponed our flowering and our going to seed, learned that we could postpone the dying that went with it.

  Longevity beyond the season meant an acceleration of the learning process. We learned to develop special breeds, some for greater intelligence to provide more understanding of the universe, some for a new ability you call vision to perceive the world and the universe in new ways, some for manipulative skills to make us independent of our environment, and some for memory to store the wisdom gathered by the others. And finally we learned the terrible truth—that the passing cosmic body that had expelled us from paradise was not some chance interstellar visitor, not some cosmic joke by the cosmic jokester, but a relativistic missile flung across our path by uncaring aliens, envious of our world and eager to reap the benefits of a heavy planet and the mineral wealth that it might vomit from its depths.

  We learned all this when the Alpha Centaurans landed in their sterile metal ships.

  * * *

  The shining vessels from a world far from Flora descended upon our world, glowing from their passage through an atmosphere thicker than any Centaurans had known but thinner for the passage of the invading missile many thousands of cycles before. They glowed with heat, these vessels, and slowly cooled before the Centaurans emerged like meat asserting its natural dominance over the vegetable world. They wasted no thought or pity on the Florans they had crushed or the paradise they had destroyed. Why should they? They were the gods of the universe.

  So we also felt, at first. They had come from the sky like gods, and they came in machines unlike anything ever to touch the soil of Flora, or even imagined among those of us who dreamed of life beyond our Flora-bound reality. The vessels destroyed billions in their descents, and billions more as they sent machines to clear the plains, scything us down, trampling us beneath their treads, plowing us under, mindless of our screams and efforts to communicate, to worship their magnificence in our vegetable way. They put alien seeds in our sacred soil, dull, unresponsive cousins from other worlds. We tried to talk to them but they had nothing but primitive reactions to soil and sun; all awareness had been bred from them, if it ever existed. The Centaurans thought of us, if they thought of us at all, as alien vegetation to be adapted to their purposes or, if that was unsuccessful, eliminated. Finally we despaired and recalled old biological processes. Our herbicides almost succeeded in eliminating the alien vegetation, but the Centaurans responded with even greater destruction, clearing even the few Floran stragglers from their territories, protecting their seedlings with energy walls and developing herbicides of their own.

  Finally we realized the terrible truth: they were not gods; they were invaders, and they would destroy the People if we did not find an effective way to resist. At first we developed sharp leaves stiffened with lignite to kill them when they came among us. You have seen them in action. They are dangerous even to ourselves in a gusty wind. But the Centaurans seldom came into the territories that yet were ours; they preferred to send their machines, against whose metallic hides our weapons slid harmlessly aside. So we developed missiles, poisoned darts that could be expelled by an explosion of stored gas. The Floran that launched such a missile died in the act, but went willingly, for we are all part of the whole. And yet that too failed when our enemies kept us at a distance. We could not use the poison that our ancestors developed to kill the herbivores, because the Centaurans did not eat us, being properly wary of alien evolution. We grew machines like theirs, only with rigid skins of vegetable matter, but they crumpled against the metal of our enemies.

  Finally we realized that we could not defeat an enemy using the enemy’s weapons, and we moved the battle to our field, the soil and the vegetation that grew from it. If their alien vegetation was moronic, we would elevate it; if it was alien, we would naturalize it. We put our specialized agronomists to work, and within a few generations they infected Centauran seeds with Floran genes subtly inserted to express themselves over the centuries. We took advantage of storms and high winds to scatter the seeds among the Centauran fields and waited while the Centaurans continued their campaign of genocide until only a few remote pockets of Floran civilization remained and our hidden depositories of seeds. Would our tactic succeed before we were destroyed beyond revival?

  The memories of Florans are eternal; we can remember the sprouting of the first Floran upon a steaming planet. And the thoughts of Florans are long, long thoughts, suited to the pace of our existence from season to season. But even we began to despair until finally our stunted spies heard the first whispers of intelligence from the Centauran fields. Within a century the whispers grew into a clamor and the Centaurans began to sicken as their sentient food slowly assumed the character of our indigestible Floran genes. More centuries passed before the Centaurans realized that their diminishing vigor and increased disease could be traced to their diet. They wiped out their fields and brought in fresh seed from Centaurus, but it was too late. They could not eliminate all the altered vegetation, and their seeds, bred for dominance and power, soon transformed the new, infecting them with Floran pathogens and Floran intelligence. More Centaurans died.

  At last they recognized the inescapable truth: against an entire planet invaders have no chance. They left in their big ships, shining like dwindling spears into the Floran sky, leaving their ruins and their alien vegetation behind.

  * * *

  We had Flora to ourselves once more, sharing it now with the uplifted Centauran vegetation. We treated it with the compassion we never received from the Centaurans; we raised it to full sentience and gave i
t full membership in our community, and it responded by bringing new hybrid vigor to our lives and new memories to share. Those memories, now accessible to rational inspection, included an understanding of Centauran existence that previously we were never able to reach, and an experience with Centauran technology that we had found alien. For the first time we realized why the Centaurans could not recognize our sentience, and why they had departed, still bewildered by Flora’s lethal resistance to their presence.

  We also perceived that the galaxy was filled with alien species and that we could never be safe in our splendid isolation, that we had to leave our beloved Flora in order to save it. We took the information on Centauran spaceships, buried, unsuspected, in the Centauran seeds of memory and applied it to our own expertise in growing things. We grew our spaceships. At first they were mere decorative shells, but over the centuries they developed internal mechanisms from differentiating vegetable membranes and then movable parts. We grew organic computers operated at the cellular level by selected bacteria. And, finally, we evolved plants capable of producing, storing, and releasing fuel, and the materials able to sustain their fiery expulsion.

  Over many generations we tested them and saw them fail, disastrously, one after the other: the hulls failed, the fuel ran out, the liners burned. But we persisted. We knew that the Centaurans, or some other rapacious meat creatures, would return, but we had the vegetable tradition of patience, and we knew that we would persist until at some distant moment we would succeed. And then one of our Centauran sisters produced the answer—the ability to extract metal from the soil and to shape it, molecule by molecule, into support beams and rocket liners. Another, remembering a Centauran model, developed the ability to process internal carbon into a beanstalk extending, atom by atom, into the sky.

  Finally we were ready physically if not psychologically. A crew was assembled. Since we share the same heritage and memories, though some were specialized in different ways, the selection was easy even if the process was hard. As a species, our dreams were rooted to the soil; our nightmares were filled with the dread of being separated from it. But our will was stronger than our fears, and we launched ourselves into the aching void in which Flora and her sister planets existed, we discovered, as anomalies. The experience was terrifying. Most of us died of shock, a few from madness that our species had never before experienced. But a few survived to return and contribute their seed memories to our gene pool, and from them grew sturdier voyagers. In the long progress of our kind, we persevered, we grew, we became what we needed to become. We explored our solar system.

  Our benevolent sun had seeded seven planets and an uncountable number of undeveloped seedlings beyond the farthest aggregation, before they were blasted by the Centauran relativistic missile. The nearest planet was an insignificant rock sterilized by solar radiation; the next had been a gas giant before the missile had stolen much of its atmosphere; the third was a fair world, somewhat smaller than Flora, that had been destroyed by its animal inhabitants; on its overheated soil and evaporated sea bottoms we found evidence of meat-creature buildings like those of the Centaurans and a carbon dioxide–laden atmosphere that had apparently been a runaway reaction to industrial excess. It would have made a desirable home for Florans but the searing temperature and the absence of water made it a wasteland.

  Flora was the fourth planet. Beyond Flora were two more gas giants and a frozen rock. We were the masters of our solar system, though an impoverished one—and poorer for the Centauran violence. Our attackers came from beyond our system. We had to go farther into the unknown, farther then we could imagine.

  We found ways to use our sun’s energy that surpassed the natural system of converting its rays into stem and leaf and flower. We developed vegetable means of storing these energies. We grew stronger ships, and elevated them up our beanstalks into orbit. We evolved better, more spaceworthy Florans. And finally we set out for the stars, not knowing where we were going or what we were going to find or what we would do when we got there.

  Generations later, as our primitive ships were still only a small way into the vast emptiness that is most of the universe, we were discovered by a galactic ship that had just emerged from a nexus point. If the Florans aboard our ships had been capable of astonishment, they would have wilted into death; if they had understood the chance of being discovered in this fashion, they would not have believed it.

  Fortunately, the ship was Dorian, not Centauran, and even though the Dorians are grazers, they are enlightened grazers. They were as astonished by the Floran crews as the crews should have been astonished by their discovery, and for some cycles the Dorians looked for the meat creatures who must have been the real space voyagers. Finally, because they were enlightened, they came to the realization that we were intelligent, and, through inspiration and dedication, began to decipher our frond-moving communication, just as we began to understand their guttural explosions of air.

  The Dorians installed their nexus devices in our Floran ships and took us to the Galactic Council. There they sponsored us, and because we were the first sentient vegetable creatures to be discovered in the galaxy and had displayed so much determination in setting out in primitive ships and persisting through unbelievable difficulties, we were admitted into the council of civilized species.

  We had achieved our goal. We now were under the protection of the Galactic Council and all its members.

  * * *

  As soon as we understood council procedures—they are limited in scope but precise in their application—and began to acquire minimal insights into animal sentience and motivation (we comprehend concepts outside our own experience only with great difficulty), we filed a genocide complaint against the Centaurans. Council representatives listened with almost vegetable patience, but they ruled against us. We were not sentient, they said, when the Centaurans raped our system with their relativistic missile and the Centaurans, after their later invasion, could not be expected to understand our evolved sentience. Our complaint was dismissed. Indeed, some members of the council, perhaps with political ties to the Centaurans, suggested that we should be grateful to the Centaurans for the actions that produced our sentience. Florans do not understand gratitude, but they never forget injury.

  Admission to the council brought many benefits and some restrictions. From beneficent members of the council we got knowledge of metalworking and machines, charts of the nexus points of the galaxy and the ability to launch our ships through the no-space between them, access to the vast library of information accumulated by a hundred species over the long-cycles, and the ability to reshape our world and our system’s other worlds. We were forbidden, however, to emigrate to worlds beyond our system or to communicate, intellectually or genetically, with vegetable species on council worlds. This, we were told, would be a capital crime punishable by species extinction. That seemed extreme, but we recognized that we were new and different, and we had the other planets of our system to develop with our new skills, and, when that was complete, other worlds outside the council jurisdiction.

  We called upon our vegetable patience, knowing that, before the end of time, we would succeed. What we did not understand was that other species, under the leadership of the Centaurans, would be launching scientific projects to block our genetic program, that all meat creatures, no matter how seemingly benign, will defend their kind against a threat from our kind. What they did not understand was that animal species have the advantage of speed and quickness but they burn out quickly and decay, while vegetation is slow but persistent. In the end we will win before entropy finally defeats us all.

  And yet—all our voyaging beyond the limits of Floran psychology, all our acceptance by the galactic community, all our new knowledge and confidence in survival, if not as certain of final dominance, was not enough. In order to do these things, we had changed. Vegetable existence distrusts and dislikes change, and accepts it only under duress and through the long, slow swing of the cosmos. We had become great, a
nd we hated it.

  And then the humans erupted from Earth—meat inspired by hubris—and, soon after, war began, and all that we had thought and planned was put aside. We did our part in the war, but mostly in the peace. Animals fight wars; flowers practice peace. We delighted in the peace and the stasis that followed the war; we might even have become content with our lot, difficult as it was to reconcile with our essential being. And then word came about the Prophet and the Transcendental Machine. More change. More threat to stasis. More damage to our sense of self. And so, once more, against every instinct, we had to change. Out of this crisis I was grown, against every Floran instinct, to assume the reviled role of individual, to act alone and through my sacrifice find salvation for my sisters. I cannot describe my desolation, my grief, my anguished separation from my fellow Florans as I joined this voyage. I cannot describe, even, what it means to refer to myself as “I.”

  But I will persevere, because my people demand what only I can provide: a return to paradise. Through me the Transcendental Machine will remove the curse of sapience.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The last movements of 4107’s fronds had ceased, and the echoes of Tordor’s translation had died away before Riley said, “The Floran hasn’t told us why it killed the Centauran.”

  The flower’s fronds moved again, stirring the air in movements that might have had meaning. Maybe they did have meaning, but his pedia was silent. Maybe Floran frond movement was too difficult even for a biological computer that knows everything.

  “The Floran says that the action was not revenge, as some might believe,” Tordor said. “It was self-protection and protection of the mission.” The Dorian listened again. “It overheard the Centauran attempting to organize a takeover of the ship and the elimination of all competitors as soon as the ship reaches the farther spiral arm. Meat creatures talk more freely around flowers, it says, particularly Centaurans.” Tordor listened and nodded. “But the Centauran noticed the Floran nearby and, perhaps fearing what its tradition led it to doubt, attacked during the confusion of the Jump.”