CHAPTER TEN

ERRAND OF MERCY

This happened a fair while ago but I never tried to talk about it before. I’ve lived most of my life over the other side of the plain, in Warminster, so I grew up with UFO talk. When I was a kid, I reckon I was just about the only one in my class who’d never seen one and didn’t have an idea about them. I wasn’t even one of those smartarse skeptics who lectured people about optical illusions; I just didn’t take part.

I went through my twenties the same way, never giving much of a thought to the fact that I was living in the world’s number one UFO hotspot. I suppose you might think it ironic that almost as soon as I took a step up in the business—I’m a plumber by trade—and moved to Salisbury, I was taken. Not that I remembered it at the time, mind; I’m one of those people who got the memory back much later, in a series of disjointed flashbacks that had to be pieced together like a jigsaw before I got a grip on the whole thing.

It might be have been more sensible, I suppose, just to accept that my mind had made most of it up in an attempt to make sense of a couple of meaningless dream-images. I thought so for a long time, but lately…well, let’s just say that it’s been on my mind quite a bit while I’ve been fixing taps and installing boilers, and I figured that maybe the time had come to get it out in the open. It’s not that I want to be rid of it, even if I could, but…well, I know that most of you are veterans at this lark, so you probably understand what I mean better than I do.

At any rate, it happened, one dark and moonless night. I woke up for no reason I could figure, went to the window and opened it wide. It was a senseless thing to do, given than it was mid-January. The blast of cold air set me shivering madly, but the tractor beam grabbed me almost immediately. Rumor has it that most people see lights, but I couldn’t see anything. It was pitch dark, and I just moved into the heart of the darkness, as if I were being swallowed by a black hole. I must have blacked out myself—for a matter of minutes, I thought, when I first began to remember, or maybe days, although I’ve now concluded that it might well have been years, or even centuries.

That might seem ridiculous, I guess, but having heard what some of you have said about being put back into your beds after a matter of minutes even though you’d lived through weeks while you were gone, I’ve given the matter much deeper consideration. If you can spend a week on an alien starship and then get returned a few seconds after you were taken, there can’t be any reason, in principle, why you couldn’t be away for much longer and still get back in good time. I didn’t age much while I was away—not to any extent I could detect—but I reckon the aliens might be able to fix that too, with their advanced medical techniques. They certainly fixed me up well and properly in other ways.

When I woke up, I was in a space-suit. I call it a space-suit, even though I was never actually required to wear it in outer space, because calling it a diving-suit would be even more absurd. It might be better to call it a cold-suit, but that wouldn’t give you much of a visual image, whereas calling it a space-suit will put the right sort of picture into your heads. In any case, although I can’t actually be sure that the surface where they put me to work was completely airless, any air it had must have been very thin indeed, and I’m pretty sure that it was extremely cold.

I don’t know much about the way the suit was kitted out internally, but it must have had mechanisms for supplying food and water, presumably intravenously, as well as air, and some provision for soaking up various bodily wastes. At the end of every shift the aliens would change all the various canisters strapped to my back and sides, but I never got out of the suit, even when I got into my hammock to sleep.

There was nothing much else to do apart from work and sleep. There was nothing to stop the workers talking to one another, although we had to touch helmets to make ourselves heard, but I never found another one who could speak English. Although our visors allowed us to see out easily enough, it wasn’t so easy to look through two of them to see into the interior of another helmet, but I figured out soon enough that my co-workers weren’t even human. They were all built on the same model—two legs, two arms, six feet tall, give or take a couple of feet—but when it came to faces it was like a crowd scene in some TV sci-fi series. The alien slave-drivers wore suits too, and we could see as much of their faces as we could of one another’s. They didn’t look particular nasty—no fangs or anything of that sort—but they weren’t handsome and they certainly weren’t friendly. They didn’t fraternize with the unhired help.

Some of you have had experiences in which the aliens took the trouble to explain to you what they were doing, but they probably only do that if they need to. The ones that kidnapped me didn’t go in for explanations, although they could synthesize English well enough to give out orders via some kind of microphone in the suit’s helmet. From the moment I went to bed that first night to the moment I got up the next morning, maybe ten or a hundred years later, I never had a genuine conversation with another living soul. I certainly tried to engage my suit, or whoever was transmitting to its speaker, in meaningful dialogue, but it was hopeless. I asked a million questions but none was ever answered.

“Where am I?” I’d say.

MOVE FORWARD, the suit would say.

“What is it that you want me to do?” I’d asked, when I wanted to create the illusion that we were communicating like normal people—but I knew that when it replied, telling me where to go or what sort of action I had to perform, it was just issuing a command. If I didn’t do as I was told, it would repeat the order once, and then it would use the whip.

I always thought of it as the whip, although I guess it must have been some kind of electrical device to stimulate the pain centre in my brain. Whatever it was, I learned very quickly to do as I was told without any undue delay.

When I say that I was gone maybe ten or a hundred years, I don’t mean that I was conscious of working thousands or tens of thousands of shifts. My best guess is that I worked a couple of hundred, maybe ten hours apiece. Allowing for sleep time, that probably means that I was actually on-site for about half a year—but I had to be taken there, you see, and brought back. My guess is that the journeys took a long time. I don’t have any idea where we were, but it certainly didn’t look like the Earth we know and love. My theory is that when I was taken I was put into some kind of suspended animation chamber, maybe frozen down to within a couple of degrees of absolute zero, so that I could be shipped to another system, maybe ten or twenty light-years away—but that’s just a guess. The suit never told me where I was, or why we were doing what we were doing, or why the people who needed to get it done had to raid a dozen or a hundred different worlds to get their slave labor when they could have got the whole crew from just one.

That’s all it was: just slave labor, sheer drudgery. Most of you might have been taken because the aliens wanted to study you, or extract something precious from your biochemistry, or whatever, but they only wanted me for the strength of my arms. They didn’t even want me to do any plumbing. Maybe they also wanted my patience, and picked me because I was the kind of person who could be patient, laboring in poor light, all alone.

Not many people could have gone through what I went through, I suspect, without going completely crazy from the isolation. I’m not claiming to be absolutely sane myself, but I’m not claiming, either, that any difficulty I might have in forming relationships of late is due to having being sentenced to six months to a year of hard labor on another world, without ever being able to exchange two meaningful words with another living soul. All I’m saying is that I came through it in better shape than some people would have. I did my time. I survived.

Sorry, I’m rambling a bit. What you want to know is what the place was like and what I had to do there.

Well, it wasn’t what you might call a picturesque environment, but it could have been worse. The planetary surface was very uneven—a mess of crags and ditches—but there weren’t many sharp edges. It was mostly rock, in various shades of grey, with a liberal topping of white ice, but there were streaks and splashes of rust-red color. In addition to that, there were the plants, which were almost all silver while they were closed, although the colored edges of their folded-up petals often showed through in streaks and whorls. There didn’t seem to be any liquids on the surface, but it was obvious that it hadn’t always been that way. All the ice must once have been liquid, and there must have been wind and rain to erode the rocks and hollow out rivers—but that must have been a long time before. Now, everything was still and fixed and seemingly dead—except for the plants and a few very tiny things that could scuttle or wriggle around in the hollows and crannies.

The plants weren’t numerous enough to form clumps, let alone forests. Sometimes I had to walk fifteen or twenty miles in the course of a shift to collect enough to fill a hamper. They weren’t so rare, though, that I ever failed to get my quota, even when the elevator took me to one of the less promising outlets and the directions the suit gave me took me into barren territory.

By day, the plants opened up, unfolding their leaves to catch the sunlight. For that reason, we worked mainly at night, when they closed themselves up into ovoids or warped cubes. They weren’t easy to gather even then, because their stems were hard to break, but they were brittle enough to snap if you chopped them hard enough in exactly the right spot. There was a knack to it, which was one of the few things the suits couldn’t communicate directly. Whoever was controlling the whip had to be lenient for a week or two while I got the hang of it. Eventually, though, it got so I could crack the stems first time, without causing any supplementary damage.

Mostly, I used a tool that was like a cross between a sickle and a crowbar. Occasionally, I was given something different for another job, but most of us—the slaves, that is—were schooled in the use of a single implement. The ones who worked down below had a variety of different ones, including some that looked far more suited to a plumber’s specialist skills, but those of us trained for surface work didn’t do much else but gather plants.

Most of the plants were structured like angular lettuces, with lots of layers of leaves, but the leaves were more like metal than flesh—flexible, the way a spring is flexible, but not soft. Whatever color they wore on the surfaces that caught the light, the undersides of the leaves were always paler and shinier, which is why they looked silvery when they were furled up. The light-gathering surfaces had a mat finish; some were so dark as to be literally black, but most were dark red or dark green. Blues and purples were uncommon, but not unknown. Sometimes you’d find a mixture of colors in a single specimen, just as you’d occasionally find a more complex shape, but most of them were all one color, variegated in slightly differing shades, and fairly symmetrical in shape. When we worked by day, while the petals were fully opened, the suit would usually instruct me to look for specimens of a particular shape or color, which would have been harder to spot by night, but it didn’t seem to me that the aliens counted any of them more precious than the rest. I think they were just trying to make sure that they got a more-or-less balanced selection down below.

Down below is where we sent or took our harvests when we’d filled our hampers. That was what the whole operation was about: taking plants from the surface into caverns deep beneath the surface, through artificial shafts. There were shafts designed to carry elevators and trains as well as pedestrian traffic, and shafts packed with all manner of machines deeper down. Down below, most of the work was done by machines, although the aliens still needed slaves with hands and legs to undertake trickier tasks and trickier journeys.

I didn’t spend much time down below—three shifts out of four I didn’t spend any time at all there except for the journeys from and to the dormitory—so I’m sure that I only got to see a tiny fraction of the aliens’ below-surface operations, but I saw enough to be sure that they were re-settling the plants in crop-fields a long way beneath the surface, near enough to the core of the planet for me to be able to sense a difference in gravity. The caverns were artificially lit, but they seemed to require hundreds of glaring electric bulbs to provide the kind of energy that was provided on the surface by the sun.

Why were the aliens doing it? Well, they certainly didn’t see fit to tell me, but I eventually figured it out, with the aid of the plants.

The plants didn’t talk back when I talked to them any more than the aliens did, and I can’t even say for sure whether they had thoughts as well as feelings, but I’m perfectly sure about the feelings. I didn’t imagine them.

It wouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, if I had started having delusions born of isolation, but I didn’t invent the plants’ feelings, or my growing sensitivity to them. It didn’t happen immediately, but I hadn’t been laboring all that long when I first began to realize that I could sense the plants’ pain when their stems were broken, just as surely as I could sense the lighter gravity when I was down in the caverns. Once I was convinced that it was their pain that I was feeling—which felt quite different from the pain of the whip, even though I knew that it was the same to them—I began to sense their other feelings too. I never sensed a thought—not, at any rate, any thought that I could translate into words—but that only helped to convince me that my sensitivity was real. If it had been a delusion conjured up in answer to loneliness, I’d surely have imagined that they could talk to me as well as communicate their feelings.

There wasn’t any significant difference, so far as I could tell, between the way the plants felt pain and the way I felt it, even though their pain didn’t feel the same to me as my own pain did. I guess pain doesn’t vary much from one species to another—not, at least, the kind of pain that’s associated with a sharp break. The other feelings did differ, though, not just from my feelings but between plants of different shapes and different colors. I can’t say that I could identify all the feelings, but I could feel the differences between them.

I translated those differences into shades of human feeling, although I’m pretty sure that plant feelings must be different from human feelings. Pain must be pain, whoever and whatever you are, but all the other emotions entities can feel must surely be different. Not that I’m saying that plants don’t love one another, you understand, or don’t feel fear and anxiety and regret—but I figure that plant love is likely to be markedly different in kind and texture from human love, and plant anxiety from human anxiety. I figure, too, that there must be some plant emotions that are utterly alien to human sensation, and vice versa. I translated their feelings into human love, anxiety and so on, because that was the only vocabulary of emotion I had, but I’m pretty sure that there were differences and distinctions that I couldn’t catch, which didn’t apply to pain in anything like the same degree.

If the familiar plants that surround us—Wiltshire plants, I mean—were able to feel, they’d probably feel just as differently from those alien plants as they would from us. Most of the plants we know disperse their pollen on atmospheric winds, or employ insect vectors, which rely on that same atmosphere to sustain their flight. Their fertilized seeds likewise tend to rely on the movement of wind, water or animals to discover and reach new places in which to grow. All their sensuality must be bound up in those processes, reflective of their particular uncertainties. On that alien world there was no wind to speak of and very little in the way of animal life, none of which could fly; that world’s plants had to use different methods to introduce their pollen to one another and dispatch their seeds to colonize new ground.

On the inhospitable surface of that terrible world, the plants had to be far more ingenious than the flora of Wiltshire to secure their own fortunes. The only vectors they could employ were creatures that walked or wriggled, and the essential unreliability of the native animal life was reflected in the fact that many native plants produced pollen and seeds that were capable of doing their own wriggling and walking. The entities themselves were mostly too small to be seen with the naked eye—let alone eyes that were trapped inside a space-suit’s helmet, peering through a thick visor—but the feelings associated with those entities were different. Once I was empathically tuned in, I could sense that whole aspect of their experience.

The empathy in question wasn’t my talent, of course—try as I might, now that I’m back on home ground, I can’t get more than the faintest emanation of plant sensibility—but the alien plants must have been powerful empathic transmitters. Obviously, they needed that ability for some existential reason of their own that our plants haven’t yet discovered. Maybe some day, in the distant future, when Earthly plants become sentient and intelligent, they’ll be powerful empaths too—but as yet, they aren’t.

I really needed that empathy, while I was so far away from home, working as a slave, even though the extent to which I had it was so pathetically limited. I suppose that I was no more than an eavesdropper on the plants’ emotional intercourse, but I needed that murmur of emotional gossip. It wouldn’t be correct to call it music, but what it did to me inside was something akin to what music can do. Music, you see, is the nearest thing to a method of empathic broadcasting that humans have yet devised, and there’s a sense in which the sum of all the empathic broadcasts on the surface of that weird world added up to a kind of orchestral harmony. Maybe that’s what people are trying to signify when they talk about the harmony of the spheres, although I don’t know how they’d know about it, because there isn’t any harmony in any sphere near here, at present.

I don’t actually need that kind of empathy now, of course—not here—but I miss it anyway. Maybe, if I had it still, I’d be a slightly better and happier person than I actually am. I listen to music all the time, but it’s not the same—just an echo, too blurred even to be thought of as distant. I guess the empathic broadcasts of alien worlds don’t reach as far as Earth—or haven’t yet. If they only travel at the speed of light, maybe they will, eventually.

If I could only sense the feelings of Earthly plants…but if Earthly plants have feelings, they don’t have the same ability to transmit those feelings that the plants of that other world have…or had.…

Sorry, I’m getting confused again. I must try to keep things in better order. What you want to know next, I suppose, is what the empathic sensations eventually added up to. What was it that I learned to feel as I went about my work on the surface and made occasional trips into the depths? What translation did I make of the plants’ sensibility and sensuality?

For a start, they were sad. Sadness was the backcloth, or the subsoil, of the plants’ emotional experience; it touched everything else they felt, including their joy and their ecstasy—and they did, occasionally, have moments of joy and ecstasy, although my presence as a not-so-grim reaper inevitably inhibited them in that respect.

I thought at first that it might be my reaping work that was generating the sadness—that what was making them feel sad was the fact that some huge clodhopping alien in a rubber suit was coming to chop them off at the stem and carry them off into the bowels of the planet—but I realized soon enough that I was wrong. Once the fear of anticipation and the pain of the actual severance had come and gone, they weren’t unduly disturbed to be stuck in the hamper or dispatched into the core of the planet. They didn’t seem to dislike the beds to which they were transplanted, set down so that they could generate new roots. Indeed, once they began to put down their new roots, they began to feel what I translated as gratitude as well as contentment…but all permanently tinged with sadness.

My second thought was that maybe they were sad on my behalf—that they were receiving and reflecting, perhaps in amplified fashion, my own feelings as a slave laborer light-years away from home—but that was just narcissism on my part. They probably could sense my feelings, more easily and more accurately that I could sense theirs, but they were no mere echo-chambers. The sadness was theirs, and theirs alone, even though I could sense it too. It was a regretful and fatalistic kind of sadness—the kind of sadness that relates to a long life-history rather than ephemeral events.

They weren’t short-lived, those plants—I think they probably lived for tens of thousands of years—but there was something in their sadness that went beyond mere individualism, even on that sort of time-scale. Theirs was the mournfulness of something vast and enduring; their equivalent of Earth’s Gaia was much more coherent than Earth’s, and much more stable. Theirs was the sadness of something close to eternity, something that felt with a depth that I could hardly begin to contemplate.

Eventually, I figured out that they were sad because their world was dying. I don’t just mean that their Gaia-equivalent was fading away, because the mass of everything living was gradually and inexorably diminishing following the drastic thinning of its atmosphere and the drastic cooling of its surface. I mean that it was approaching some kind of apocalyptic event—something that would finish off what remained of life on the surface at a single brutal stroke, once and for all.

That was the purpose of the whole operation, you see. We slaves had been pressed into service because time was of the essence. What we were doing was transplanting living things from the surface into deep artificial caverns, in the hope that they might be able to survive the coming catastrophe. What we were doing was assisting in the construction of some kind of ultimate storm-shelter or nuclear bunker. The alien slave-masters weren’t native to the world, of course, any more than we were: they were on an errand of mercy, trying to save that world’s Gaia-equivalent from extinction, to win it a few thousand million further years of existence, and of feeling, if not of thought.

That’s why the sadness on which I eavesdropped was such a special kind of sadness, alleviated but never wholly displaced by so many other strains of emotional music. I don’t know why the aliens didn’t explain that to us, rather than just working us as slaves; maybe they’d tried asking for volunteers and got nowhere, and had decided in desperation that the end justified the means. At least they didn’t work us to death. They must have driven a lot of us crazy, but they sent us home again when we’d done our bit, not much older or worn-out than when they’d first picked us up.

I don’t know for sure, because I could only sense feelings, not thoughts, but I think the planet’s sun was due to explode, or at least undergo some dramatic metamorphosis, into a white dwarf or a red giant. What the plants were sad about was the impending end of life on the surface—life that had been around for billions of years. Set against that background of sadness, though, they had an awareness that there was still a good chance that life would go on, deep inside the world, insulated from all outer effects by miles and miles of solid rock, for hundreds of millions of years more. It wouldn’t be the same—how could it be?—and it would only postpone the inevitable ultimate end, but it was something.

The plants couldn’t have survived on their own. There were no native life-forms capable of hollowing out caverns miles beneath the surface, and lighting them with the aid of thermal energy radiating from the molten core. Maybe there never had been, or maybe they’d died out, or maybe they’d simply gone away. Maybe—just maybe—it was the remote descendants of earlier natives that had come back on their errand of mercy, bringing their legions of slaves to do the drudge-work that they weren’t prepared to do themselves.

I knew full well that I’d never have gone if they’d asked me. I knew full well that I’d have been terrified of the prospect, and that I’d have hated the work, even though I’m just a plumber here. I can’t even say, with my hand on my heart, that I’m glad that I went. I certainly didn’t enjoy it while I was there. It was hard, thankless, and unutterably boring…and yet, I don’t think the time was wasted. I wouldn’t do it again, but I’m not sorry that I did it once. I learned a new kind of sadness, with all manner of subtle qualifications, and I think I’m a little richer for that, and maybe a little less sad myself than I otherwise might have been.

I haven’t made a great success of my life, I suppose, but that’s not because of anything the aliens did to me, and I’m certainly no worse off than I would have been if I’d never been taken. I know now, though, that any sadness I might have felt—might still feel—about not having made a great success of my life, isn’t a big deal, compared with the kind of sadness that the consciousness of a whole world might feel, confronted by a sun about to explode, even while knowing that it’s not alone, and that it might have a little time yet, thanks to the kindness and courtesy of strangers.

It wasn’t just the sadness, though, and I don’t want to leave you with the impression that it was. I don’t know what to call the other thing, or how to give an impression of it, but there was something else that was almost ever-present in the emotions of the plants: a kind of desire. I don’t mean the kind of desire that’s associated with everyday propagation and reproduction—the longing to pollinate and be pollinated, the yearning that every adult organism has to produce fruitful seed, and the yearning that every fruitful seed has to grow into an adult. They had all that, of course, with all its petty delights and disappointments, all its petty jealousies and triumphs, all its petty fantasies and releases…but they had something else, something more.

They had, I think, a sense of their own becoming, not in the individual sense that we have, but in a grander sense that applied to their whole community, if not to their whole Gaia-equivalent. I suppose that some such hyperconsciousness must be a natural corollary of empathic communication. At any rate, they had some sense of where they were bound…or, at least, where they were aiming for. It would be wrong to say that it was what they wanted, or even that it was a condition they would settle for, if only it were practicable, but it was something of which they dreamed, something that attracted them.

They dreamed of being stone. They dreamed of being a kind of matter that they were not—a kind of matter invulnerable to the fate that awaited them. They dreamed of being free from the threat of death.

They knew, if they knew anything at all, that it was impossible. They knew, if they knew anything at all, that they couldn’t undergo that kind of metamorphosis, even to escape the destruction or transmogrification of their sun. They were more metallic by far than the kinds of plants we know, but they were still organic in their innermost being, and couldn’t turn to stone by means of any other process than petrifaction, which is itself a kind of death.

Even if they weren’t the kinds of creatures who could think and know, they felt the impossibility of their dream—that I know, because I felt it too, and I am the kind of creature who can think and feel, even though I’m only a plumber and haven’t made a great success of my life. I felt the impossibility of their dream, but I also felt its attraction, its seduction, its tantalization. Maybe, at the end of the day, it was just another shade or facet of their sadness, or maybe a shade or facet of their anxiety, but I don’t think so, I think it was something different, something better.

I couldn’t bring it back, of course, any more than I could bring back their particular kind of sadness. I do remember it, though, as more than just the knowledge that something once happened to me, more than just a mere matter of fact. I don’t think about it much while I’m at work—which, God knows, isn’t slave labor, no matter how tedious it sometimes seems—but when I’m at home, on my own, thinking and feeling that it really might be nice to have someone to talk to, I put some music on, and I listen…and, in the nicest possible way, I dream about turning to stone.

You might think that if you were to dream that, it would seem like a nightmare, and maybe you’re right. I can’t speak for you—but I can speak for those alien plants, on that alien world, somewhere in the lonely depths of space. I can assure you, on their behalf and on mine, that it isn’t a nightmare at all the way we dream it. Maybe it’s more than a little sad, but it’s a good kind of sadness. It’s comforting—more comfortable in their way of feeling, and mine, than any idea of heavenly bliss could ever be.

When the lights finally go out in their underworld, because the core of their planet has cooled, and the outer surface has been sterilized by the explosion of their sun, they’ll still be dreaming, impracticably and impossibly, of somehow turning into stone without ceasing to be themselves in the process, or losing the ability to feel their own inwardly-generated and uncannily communicated emotions.

For that reason, if for no other, they still have something to live and die for, and always will.