“We’ll take things as they come,” my purple emperor assured me.
And that’s what we did. I forked some general compost into the soil around the plant’s roots, and then I started adding more specific things day by day: potato peelings, cold spaghetti Bolognese, eggshells, used lard from the chip pan...you know the sort of thing.
The general composting perked the plant up a bit. The purple in its leaves became a little more luxuriant, although it didn’t grow any taller and didn’t extend its branches any further. The flowers also acquired a scent for the first time—pleasant enough, I suppose, but certainly nothing that could compete with my roses. The real difference, however, was in the way it talked.
“That’s better,” it told me, in a much plummier accent and a much more satisfied tone. “I’m beginning to dream a little more effectively now.”
“What do you mean by that, exactly?” I asked.
The plant explained to me, little by little, that there are significant differences between plant consciousness and animal consciousness, and hence in the kinds of intelligence associated with them.
Animal consciousness, it said, is the evolutionary product of relentless movement, and of the continual need to evaluate new situations by comparing them to others, in order to figure out how they might develop and thus make rational choices. To some extent, that’s a matter of locating food and avoiding dangers, but, according to the purple emperor, the primary evolutionary motive of all consciousness is sexual. In that respect, animal consciousness is very much orientated to the matter of finding and pursuing mates. Animal consciousness is busy and alert, always wakeful even when an animal goes to sleep. Animal dreams are busy too, always manufacturing bizarre situations for comparison with experienced ones, further exploring the potential and testing the limits of choice.
Because plants are mostly rooted, and very limited in their capacity for movement, the consciousness they develop—in evolutionary circumstances where they do develop it—is much less concerned with the needs of meeting new situations and making choices. It’s far more meditative. The sensoria of plants—even plants like the alien in my garden, which could develop organs of sight and hearing by reflection—are markedly different from those of animals, far more sensitive to the interplay of chemical substances and fundamental physical forces. The same applies to the sexual aspects of plant consciousness, which are closely akin if only in a symbolic sense—to those of flowers. There’s no discovery and pursuit involved; it’s all a matter of reception and sensation. Plant consciousness is very luxurious and very voluptuous; plants, my purple emperor assured me, are the true connoisseurs of sensuality.
The plants with which we’re familiar are extremely primitive by comparison with the intelligent plants that are the dominant species in whatever world my purple emperor had strayed from, but they possess the rudiments on which true plant intelligence is based. That’s why it helps if you talk to them—not because they can experience sound as animal ears experience it, let alone decode human speech, but because they can experience it as a form of nuanced physical vibration, a subtle component of the great universal symphony of matter in motion, and something essentially erotic. There’s not a lot that humans can do for plants in terms of erotic enhancement, but a soft tone of voice is apparently quite nice.
It would give the wrong impression to say that intelligent plants are telepathic, or even intuitive, but when they dream—which they do while fully conscious, because they never sleep, even while their photosynthetic activity ceases at night—they possess a particular kind of perception, of which humans can only obtain the merest glimpses at the extremes of psychotropic experience. The younger members of the group have probably sampled magic mushrooms and ecstasy as well as LSD, and maybe more exotic things too, but, if what my purple emperor told me can be trusted, the best trip ever experienced by any animal in the history of the universe can offer no more than a thousandth of the enlightenment that’s routine in the course of a sophisticated plant’s dreaming.
“With the right chemical stimulus,” my purple emperor assured me, in a voice that was getting more rhapsodically elevated by the day, “a plant like me really can tap into the cosmic consciousness of the universe entire, sensing its spatial breadth and its temporal depth, from the moment of the Big Bang to the Omega Point. It can tap into the essential sexuality of the universe—the perpetual echo of the infinite orgasm. If I guess rightly, that’s probably what my people were doing when I got lost: searching the great erotic symphony for new nuances, experimenting with the long-lost organic produce of the Dark Eras. Do you happen to know, by the way, exactly how old the Earth is just now?”
“No,” I said. “I think current estimates vary from six thousand years to four billion.”
“That young?” it said—although I don’t think it was talking about the six thousand years. “Well, no matter, I won’t need to find anything particularly exotic to dream what I need to dream, in order to figure out exactly when I am, to restore empathy with my species and obtain a measure of relief from dreadful frustration. I’ll die here, obviously—almost certainly unpollinated, in a crudely literal sense—but I needn’t die alone, if only I can find a moderately powerful stimulant. We just have to keep trying.”
So that’s what we did. In the latter part of August we moved on from leftovers to the opportunities offered by the Garden Centre— and that’s how we discovered the miraculous efficacy of horse-manure.
* * * *
The moment I started spreading the manure, the plant got very excited. “That’s good,” it said. “That’s very, very good. Do you know how it feels when you’ve been looking for something your entire life, without even knowing what it is, and then you find it?”
“Actually, no,” I said.
“Well,” my purple emperor assured me, “it’s good. In fact, it’s wonderful. Yours is a direly ineffectual language, you know—it can’t even begin to express the merest fundamentals of vegetal dreaming, let alone the greater rewards.”
“That’s not something that English has a lot of call for,” I admitted. I hoped that the plant might go on talking anyway, in spite of the inadequacies of the language, in order that I could get a slightly better grasp of what it was talking about, but it didn’t. I did, however, manage to catch a glimpse—a literal glimpse—of the substance of its dream. Mostly, its fancy flowers only reflected entities outside of itself, but they were also capable of other modes of reflection. They could change their apparent color and apparent shape in all sorts of ways, as if they were little three-dimensional windows into other worlds. They could change their scent, too, and when I breathed in their finest perfumes I became better able to make out the images within the flowers
I didn’t recognize any of the shapes, of course; if any of them were faces I couldn’t tell. To me, they were all just different kinds of flowers—but I’ve grown a lot of flowers in my time, and I can assure you that these were flowers like none on Earth. I took a lot of pictures, but they didn’t come out any better than the pictures of my face and the cat’s; there was some kind of light-trickery involved that was too subtle for the camera. I was able to stand in front of my lovely bush, breathing in its exhalations and watching its flowers change, though—and sometimes, while watching them change, I managed to fall into a kind of trance, to experience what modern jargon calls an “altered state of consciousness”.
I’m not going to tell you that I actually gained a full appreciation of the great universal symphony of matter in motion, or that I made any kind of empathetic compact with the infinite orgasm extending from the Big Bang to the Omega Point. I didn’t feel infinity in the palm of my hand and eternity in an hour, let alone get a grip on the essential secret of existence—but I did sense the incredible multiplicity of possibility, the vastness of space, the sheer stubbornness of Earthly life in the face of perennial adversity, and the essential voluptuousness of vegetal identity. Even in my poor suburban human brain, there was some
slight potential—which I’d never learned to tap before—to think somewhat after the fashion that a su-perintelligent, supersensitive, and supersensual plant might think, and to dream in a strange way distantly akin to the way that such an organism might dream. I must have nodded off the first time, because I woke up with quite a start.
“More,” was all that my purple emperor said, like a drunken Old Etonian. “Much, much more.”
* * * *
I shoveled on all the muck I’d bought, and then went to wash my hands before dinner, but when I went out into the garden the following evening, the plant demanded more. It also demanded to know everything I knew about the fabulous substance that had given it the ability to dream with such awesome and unexpected power.
When I’d explained, my purple emperor immediately decided to investigate the properties of every other kind of manure I could lay my hands on—which seemed to me to pose all kinds of practical difficulties, as well as being a trifle unsavory. I won’t go into the details; suffice it to say that I did my best.
The summer was drawing to a close, and there was already a hint of Autumn in the air. By the end of September, the plant had experimented with forty different kinds of animal manure, if you count the various kinds of bird and bat guano. I’d had a horrible suspicion, at first, that it might turn out to like human waste best, but it didn’t. In fact, it reckoned human manure to be distinctly inferior as dream-nourishment, even by comparison with horses.
What my purple emperor like best of all, it turned out, was elephant-dung—which was rather inconvenient, given that the nearest zoo was in Bristol. I made what heroic efforts I could—which didn’t do the boot of the Escort any good at all—but I was desperately anxious that I wouldn’t be able to meet the plant’s increasingly desperate demands. Not that it was exercising any terrible power of command over me—mine was just a gardener’s passion for the products of his art.
As it was, things came to a head more rapidly than I’d ever imagined. Almost as soon as I began to transfer my precious final cargo of elephant-dung from the boot of the car to the place where the bulbous structure at the foot of the purple emperor’s stem now protruded a couple of feet above the surface of the soil, I could tell that the plant was in dire distress. It wasn’t a matter of withdrawal symptoms—quite the reverse. The poor thing was overdosing on the stuff of vegetal dreams.
I wanted to stop, but it wouldn’t hear of it. It insisted that I keep shoveling, until the boot and the wheelbarrow were both empty. Perhaps I should have insisted, but I didn’t have the heart—and I couldn’t imagine, at that point, that the poor thing was actually going to die.
Its purple leaves turned black, and then began to get brittle. Its roots began to emerge from the ground, not just in the vicinity of the overgrown tuber but all over the lawn, writhing like tormented snakes. As for the flowers...well, as soon as I stopped shoveling I was entranced, just as I had been entranced before. I experienced the merest, slightest hint of that final vegetal dream, and it overwhelmed me. It was a dream of sex and death—of individual sex and individual death as well as cosmic sex and cosmic death—and it was magnificent.
Human consciousness, the existentialists tell us, is blighted and crippled by an awareness of the inevitability of its own extinction; the fundamental mood of human existence is angst. You might think all consciousness would be similar, and I suspect that all animal consciousness is. Animal consciousness, you see, is fundamentally a matter of action and exploration, of being busy and making rational choices, of pursuing and finding potential mates—or trying to. Plant consciousness isn’t like that. It’s fundamentally quiet, sedentary, meditative, sensual and self-indulgent. That’s not to say that it welcomes eventual death, or even that it’s fatalistic about the necessity, but the fundamental mood of plant existence is neither blighted nor crippled by angst. Even humans, so it’s said, can sometimes find compensation for the awareness of death in erotic experience; flowering plants have no difficulty at all.
In human beings and most other animals, sex and death are only loosely connected, both existentially and symbolically, but flowers retain a far more intimate connection in the process and ideology of seed-production. My purple emperor never got to make any literal seeds, because whatever pollination mechanism it had in its own world was lacking in ours. That might qualify, from our point of view, as a lucky escape, because I’m not sure that the human race is quite ready to share its world with a race of superintelligent plants, but from the purple emperor’s point of view it was a tragedy of sorts. It was, however, a tragedy considerably ameliorated by dreaming—and my purple emperor was a dreamer before it was anything else. Its manure-nourished dreams reflected the great ballet of gametes in motion, the purpose and existence of every flower that had ever lived and ever would: the great and mighty thrust of an orgasmic evolution that will lead, inevitably and inexorably, to the floral Omega Point that will become the glorious seed of a whole new universe.
That, at least, is what it dreamed, and what it believed; it probably had no special insight into the actual fate of the universe.
The plant didn’t have to die so soon. It didn’t have to overdose on ecstasy—but I think it chose to go that way. It chose to go out on a high. There’s a sense in which it was poisoned, but there’s also a sense in which it found its own destiny, and met it gladly.
Somehow, I don’t think there are any elephants in the world from which it came, and probably no horses or humans either. It never said so, because it didn’t know—how could it, growing up, as it did, as an orphan, probably countless light-years away from its point of origin. That, if you think about it, must be the fate of almost all the infinitesimally tiny minority of Arrhenius spores that ever make planetfall; the vast majority must, of course, drift eternally and dreamlessly through the interstellar void, without any such hope.
In the end, the massive globe at the foot of the stem collapsed like a punctured football and shriveled up, exhaling the most appalling stench. I had to throw my clothes away. Luckily, they were old ones reserved for gardening, and my current set of work shirts were already reaching the end of their allotted span, so Mildred didn’t get upset.
I put my purple emperor’s remains on the compost heap. I think that’s what it would have wanted.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER SEVEN
Taking the Wrong Direction
When the meeting was over, Steve expected to drop Milly off at her flat and then make his way straight home. He was mildly surprised when Milly raised the possibility of getting something to eat, although he remembered that she’d said on prior occasions that she’d had time to eat before the meeting, which she obviously hadn’t been able to do on this occasion.
“Sure,” he said. “Janine and I usually get a takeaway from the Chinese at the end of her street, but that’s a bit out of our way. We can get a burger, if you like, or we could stop off at the Pizza Hut in the town centre—it won’t be crowded on a Thursday—if you’d prefer that.”
“I don’t eat burgers,” Milly said, flatly, hastening to add: “They may not actually be made of elephant-dung, but they always look a bit iffy to me.”
Steve suspected that Milly was worried about what Janine might have told him about her past problems with food, so he was quick to say: “I’d prefer a pizza myself. We can split a large one, if you like—your choice of toppings.”
“That’s fine,” she said.
When they got to the centre of Salisbury, Steve had to double-check with Milly that it was okay for him to park in the side-street near the restaurant, despite the single yellow line, given that it was after six o’clock and that he was on the right-hand side of the thoroughfare.
“You’re a driver,” she told him, after consulting the relevant notice and confirming that it would be okay. “You really need to be able to understand restriction notices, even when they’re a little complicated and badly-expressed. Look at it as a matter of simpl
e economics, if not moral duty.”
“I do,” Steve assured her, as he opened the restaurant door and ushered her through. “Luckily, I’m still a parking-ticket virgin, although I once got caught by a speed camera.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Milly said, ominously. “Everybody gets a ticket eventually—everyone who drives, that is.”
“Have you ever been tempted to learn to drive?” Steve asked, while they waited for the food to arrive. Milly had ordered a strong cider, but Steve thought it best to stick to diet Pepsi, given that he was dining with an officer of the law.
“Not since I became a traffic warden,” Milly told him. “I’m not that much of a movement-freak, to be honest. I’m more the sedentary type—although I’m very grateful to you for driving me to East Grimstead once a fortnight. Catching the bus is a pain, especially if it’s raining.
“You’ve never been tempted to leave the old home town, then?” Steve said. “You don’t dream of the gold-paved streets of London, where they have red routes and a congestion charge as well as double yellows?”
“If I were to be tempted,” Milly assured him, “that wouldn’t be the kind of bait I’d go for. What about you? Do you dream of getting a plum job in some public school? Winchester, if not Eton or Harrow?”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 13