CHAPTER SIX

THE FERTILE IMAGINATION

I haven’t been in the group quite as long as Amelia and Walter and I thought at first that I didn’t really belong here. If I’ve ever been properly abducted, before or after the events I’m about to describe—which happened way back in the seventies—I don’t remember it at all. Walter very kindly told me, though, that AlAbAn meetings are open to anyone, and more than willing to offer support to people who’ve had any kind of alien encounter whatsoever. The members have always been good to me, and I hope that’s not just because of the boxes of organic vegetables I bring along in the season and the jars of chutney I give out as Christmas presents.

As those of you who haven’t heard my story before will have guessed from what I just said, I’m a keen gardener. Now that I’m retired, of course, it’s my sole occupation, but for twenty years before I turned sixty-five it was a convenient way of not getting under Mildred’s feet too much. Mildred is my late wife. She liked to keep the house nice, and didn’t approve of clutter in her territory, so it suited us both for me to spend Sundays and summer evenings in the garden. She used to joke that if we ever got divorced she’d get custody of the house and I’d get custody of the garden shed, but of course we never did. Forty years without a single argument, and then the silly old girl goes and gets cancer. What can you do?

Anyway, I found the tuber—the tuber that the story’s about, that is—in a bag of tulip bulbs I bought at the local Garden Centre. I could see immediately that it didn’t belong, and my first thought was simply to throw it away, but I didn’t like to do that without knowing what it was. I tried to look it up, obviously, but it’s actually very difficult to identify the species of a tuber unless you’ve got a dissecting kit, a set of stains and a high-powered microscope. If, on the other hand, you plant it and let it grow, you can usually tell what it is as soon as it begins to produce leaves—or, at the very latest, once it produces a flower.

Flowers are, of course, the structures that provide the fundamental plan of the Linnaean classification system. The move was very controversial at the time, I understand, because flowers are a plant’s sex organs and most amateur botanists back in those days were clergymen, some of whom thought that Erasmus Darwin’s poetic account of The Loves of the Plants was an exceedingly racy text.

Anyhow, I decided that the simplest thing would be to plant the anomalous tuber and see if it would grow. I had no idea what kind of soil would suit it, or how much water it might need, or how much shade it could tolerate, but I wasn’t that worried. I just bedded it down it in a five-pint pot in early March and shoved the pot into a quiet corner that I wasn’t using for anything else, in a little covert between the edge of the patio and the back wall of the garage. I left it to its own devices, fully prepared not to give it another thought if nothing actually materialized.

I suppose I must have glanced at the pot occasionally during the next three weeks, but it wasn’t until a shoot began to appear that I actually took any notice of what was happening. The shoot was mostly white at first, as shoots often are, but the first time I saw it I noticed that its sprouting tip was tinted purple rather than green.

That’s not entirely unknown, of course; these days, you see that crunchy purple rubbish in all the bags of mixed salad the supermarket sells. Not that I’d ever buy such a thing, mind. You don’t grow fancy lettuce from tubers, but I already had the suspicion that the thing might be an exotic kind of potato, and I had the vague idea that some potatoes with purple skins also had purple tints in their foliage.

In South America, where potatoes come from, there are thousands of different kinds, although Europeans only imported the ones that were best to eat. Globalization hadn’t really got off the ground in the seventies, but there was a certain amount of new interest in exotic vegetables even so, and it seemed perfectly plausible to me that the Garden Center’s suppliers might have been investigating neglected potato species, and that one such sample might have gone astray and accidentally fallen in with the tulip bulbs.

There’s nothing very exciting about potatoes—even exotic ones—so I didn’t pay any special attention to the purple plant during April, even though I was mildly surprised by just how purple it was. It wasn’t until May Day—I always spend the whole of Bank Holiday Mondays in the garden—that it became obvious that the thing had become far too bulky for the five-pint pot and that I’d have to plant it out. When I did that, I took the opportunity to take a good look at the root system, to see how the new potatoes were getting on.

That was when I realized that I’d made a mistake. There weren’t any new potatoes forming amid the roots. The original tuber was still in one piece at the centre of the tangle, and it had grown considerably. The roots themselves looked like any other roots—white, thin, expanding in every direction—but the thing that now sat at the bottom of the stem was like nothing I’d ever seen before: round, plump and very solid. It was a lighter shade of purple than the stem and leaves—Mildred would probably have called it mauve—but that still seemed odd. It brought it home to me for the first time how strange it was that all of the plant’s upper body was colored deep imperial purple. Obviously, it wasn’t using chlorophyll for the purpose of photosynthesis but had substituted some other compound of similar efficiency.

When I planted it out, its growth rate accelerated. On May Day the stem had attained a height of about two-and-a-half feet, and the leaves had expanded in a spray that was maybe two feet wide. Three weeks later, the thing was nearly as tall as I am, and it was pushing out branches that were four and five feet long—not woody branches, mind, but branches whose texture was more like plastic. In fact, the whole thing looked suspiciously artificial. If it hadn’t been growing so enthusiastically, it could easily have been mistaken for a giant version of one of those plastic plants they put on restaurant tables, which had been mistakenly cast in the wrong color of polystyrene.

It was late flowering, but that didn’t surprise me, and the buds it eventually produced grew to be as big as my head before they began to open, but that didn’t surprise me either. By then, I thought nothing would surprise me. If the thing had unfolded flowers like a Venus fly-trap’s, with a gape like a crocodile, and started catching cats and urban foxes while building up to a career as a man-eater, I’d have been alarmed but not surprised. I knew, you see, that I had to be dealing with something alien—the product of some Arrhenius spore carried across the interstellar void by the wind of some ancient supernoval explosion, which had fallen to Earth in a meteor shower.

I thought I was ready for anything. I even bought a new camera so that I could record its further progress—we were still in the pre-digital era, alas, so I suppose I paid over the odds for something that would soon be obsolete. However, as even those of you who haven’t heard the story before will probably have anticipated, I wasn’t ready for anything at all. When the buds opened, they weren’t like hungry mouths ready to devour anything they could get their teeth into, although they did eventually develop mouths of a sort.

At first, when the flowers opened, they looked like huge carnations, with multitudinous petals. There was no scent at first. By most surprising thing about them by far was their color. The sepals folded around the buds had been purple, of course, and the tips of the corolla protruding from the bundle had seemed to be grey, but when the flowers expanded, it turned out that they were more silver than grey, if they were any color at all. I say if they were any color at all, although it doesn’t quite make sense, because the whole ensemble was strangely reminiscent of a mirror. I say strangely reminiscent because the petals didn’t form a smooth and shiny surface at all; they bore no more resemblance to a bathroom mirror than they did to a dandelion-clock. There was still a sense, though, in which the flower was reflective: capable of capturing and reproducing an image.

The images took time to form, but it was only a matter of days. They weren’t consistent or stable—if you looked at the plant from a distance they looked like little cumulus clouds or bundles of cotton wool—but when they had some nearby presence to reflect they became much more clearly-defined. When I was there, they immediately began to look like me. The only other Earthly face I ever saw in them was next door’s cat. I never asked Mildred to come out of the house and take a look, because it wasn’t her sort of thing. I did take a lot of pictures with my new camera, though, so I do have proof, of a sort.

I’ve got pictures of flowers reflecting the cat as well as pictures of flowers reflecting my own face. Pictures don’t lie. Unfortunately, they don’t always tell the whole truth either, and they came out rather fuzzy. I did my best, but I never could get the images in the flowers properly in focus. When I showed them around here, the first time I told this story, most of the members could see what I meant, but when I showed them to Mildred, she couldn’t see anything at all.

Cameras don’t record sound, either. You couldn’t get camcorders back in the seventies—not at the sort of price I could afford, anyway—and I didn’t have a Dictaphone, so the second aspect of the flowers’ marvelous properties went unrecorded. The reflections weren’t just surface appearances, you see. The flowers had depth, and those plastic stems obviously had versatile xylem at the core. As to what was going on underground, where the central tuber must have been much bigger than a football by then, I could only speculate. At any rate, the flowers soon began to reflect more than the appearance of my face. By the second week of July, the plant was able to talk.

I’ve always talked to my plants. That’s not the sort of thing I confess readily, even in a safe environment like this, because I remember the reception poor Prince Charles got when he said that it was a good thing to do—but it is a good thing to do, even if you never expect them to reply. It helps them to flourish, to make the most of themselves. I talk to my tulips and my geraniums, my rosemary and my fennel, my rose-bushes and my pear tree. I always have and I always will. So I’d been talking to the purple plant ever since I first transplanted it from its pot and started taking a greater interest in it.

I suppose I talked to the purple plant—which I had begun to call “my purple emperor”, although a purple emperor is really a kind of butterfly—more than any of the other plants in the garden, especially when it got to be about my height. I had no idea that it was actually listening, but it must have been. It must have been smart, too, to learn English simply by listening. It didn’t say a word until it had mastered the language; it wasn’t the sort of creature to go in for baby talk.

I don’t know how many times I’d put questions to it before I finally got a reply, but it must have been far more than a dozen. They were all intended rhetorically, of course. The answer, when it eventually came, had obviously been carefully considered. It was right at the end of July, on the thirty-first, when I asked it for the umpteenth time what the hell it was, and it told me.

“Essentially,” it said, “I’m a dreamer. Unfortunately, the soil in which you’ve planted me isn’t doing a great deal to fertilize my imagination. It needs assistance.”

As you can imagine, I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation, but I won’t embarrass myself by trying to repeat exactly what I said during the next half hour, while I belatedly convinced myself of the obvious. Eventually, we got back to the nub of the matter.

“What kind of assistance?” I said. “There’s a young man at work who’s always bragging about tripping on LSD. I expect he’ll know where I can buy some.”

“I’m not talking about human-active psychotropics,” the plant said. “Do I look as if I have the kind of brain chemistry that could be stimulated or inhibited by the same things that play havoc with your neurotransmitters?”

“You do when I’m staring one of your flowers in its temporary face,” I said. “But that’s not the point, I suppose. You don’t even look as if you have the same kind of carbon-fixing chemistry as your neighbors, so I’ll presume that we’re in a whole different ball-park, if you’ll forgive the Americanism. So what do you need?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” the plant confessed. “This isn’t a milieu I know anything about, and I haven’t a clue how I wound up here. I’ve sent out roots as far as I presently can, in order to sample the local resources, and the most promising location seems to be roughly north by northwest, on or above the surface.”

It took me a few seconds to work out which way that was, but I eventually figured out that I needed to look towards the far corner of the garden, at the shady covert sandwiched between the back end of the shed and the fence, diplomatically shielded by the bole of the pear tree.

“Oh,” I said. “The compost heap. You want composting.”

“There appears to be something in the soil in that region that has a stimulating effect,” the plant informed me. “I can access it by means of my exploratory roots, but it would be more convenient if you could transport the active compound to the immediate vicinity—and more convenient by far if you could identify it and procure more.”

“That might not be easy,” I said. “I compost all sorts of things—not just cuttings from the lawn and the usual sorts of garden waste but potato-peelings and apple cores, and leftover food when Mildred gets a rush of blood to the head and makes a bit too much for our feeble appetites to cope with. She means well, bless her, but I wish she wouldn’t try to feed me up. I’m a solicitor’s clerk, not a Sumo wrestler. I also buy fertilizer at the Garden Centre and mix it in with the stuff in the heap—not that vile chemical fertilizer, of course, but natural fertilizer: horse manure and the like.” In those days, of course, green politics was just getting off the ground, and there were only a few prophets of doom anticipating ecocatastrophe, but as a keen amateur gardener I already had many habits that would nowadays be thought progressive.

“That’s good,” the plant said. “It will make it easier to experiment. Just pack a few forkfuls of compost around the base of my stem, for now. Starting tomorrow, though, we’ll test out the elements of the mixture one at a time. We’ll do the household leftovers first, and then we’ll move on to the things you can buy at the Garden Centre.”

“I don’t have a lot of control over the kind of leftovers we generate from day to day,” I said. “Menu-planning is Mildred’s department, and she’s very keen on my respecting her boundaries. That’s only fair, mind, because she’s just as keen on respecting mine—which is why you haven’t met her, and probably won’t. She’s not a garden person. She hates bugs and gets allergies.”

“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 thy 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 superintelligent, 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.