The alien creature that broke the fibrous outer surface of its shell and began its struggle to the surface of the heavy planet called Flora was part of a multitude, but as it pushed through the top soil into the warmth of a yellow sun it became aware of the disturbing reality of its existence. That it was individual and aware were the consequences of a series of crimes inflicted on a guiltless species. All this emerged from a slow connection of neurons scattered through its stem and unfolding fronds and, finally, into the yellow flower that gradually blossomed and sought the sun. The first reality the flower creature was forced to accept was the designation that distanced itself from all the others in the same field and across the vast world that they inhabited. It was 4107, and as it pieced together the information and instructions imbedded in the seed from which it had sprouted, it was profoundly unhappy.
The world on which it grew was thought of as “Earth,” or the home planet, as all home worlds are, but outsiders called it “Flora” because of its people. And its dominant species was called “the People,” as all species consider themselves. Whatever language intelligent creatures use—the movement of air through passages that restrict its flow in various distinguishable ways, the rubbing of mandibles, the gestures of tentacles, the release of pheromones, or, in the case of the People, the disturbance of air by the movement of fronds—the translation is always the same. They are the People.
For uncounted generations the People had lived the simple lives of seedlings springing from the soil, growing into maturity and blossoming, enjoying fertilization, dropping their petals and then their seeds upon the soil, and depositing their decaying bodies to nourish the next generation. The generations were uncounted because every day was the same, and every long cycle: the people of this world were born, lived, reproduced, and died. Their world was a big world, drawn by its massive gravity into great plains and placid seas, and the people thrived in peace and plenty amid mindless warmth and fertile soil. That is the time the People looked back upon as paradise before they developed awareness and were expelled.
Even paradise had its problems. Flora had grazers, herbivores who lived among the People and nourished themselves with the People’s vegetable plenty, and predators who prevented the herbivores from destroying themselves by overgrazing and overpopulation, but the People responded with one of the great breakthroughs of their evolution: they made themselves unpleasant fodder, and when the grazers evolved in response, the People developed poisons. The grazers died off, and then the predators, and the only competitors that remained were weeds. The People developed herbicides, and then they were truly supreme and supremely content in their mindless vegetable way. The process took many long cycles, but finally Flora was the People and the People were Flora.
At this moment of mindless bliss, a passing astronomical body came into their existence like divine punishment for the People’s hubris, showering their world with devastating radiation that nearly destroyed all life on Flora including the People, stirring their world’s inner fires and releasing continents from the loving embrace of its massive gravity. The paradise that the People’s world had been became the hell that it became: volcanic eruptions poisoned the air and lava burned its way across the plains; the continents crashed together and pushed upward great mountain ranges. The People perished.
Long cycle after long cycle passed until long-buried seeds finally poked their sprouts through cracking lava. Among them was a single great flower, known to later generations as One. Before One, the People had no awareness of separate existence. After One the People traced their origin from this single source, who is regarded as both savior and destroyer. Through 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 released with magma from Flora’s long-sheltered interior, One developed the ability to pull its roots from the soil and move to a sunnier or more fertile place, 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; One and its descendants moved meter by meter and cycle by cycle to sheltered valleys where the People could deposit their seeds in soil prepared to receive them, with more than a hope that chance would allow them to grow and flower and seed.
Each generation took as its designation an ascending number: 4107 was the forty-one hundredth generation since the great One, and the seventh in his generation. All its ancestors had changed, generation by generation, to gain movement, intelligence, and understanding of the world that first nurtured and then tried to destroy them, and the uncaring universe that kills as blindly as it nurtures.
As all of this information flowed from 4107’s shattered birth seed through the roots of its development, it became aware of itself and the agony of separation. The profound unhappiness that it felt could not endure.
Every thinking and self-aware species has experienced the impact of intelligence, but none remembers. Florans remember. The history of their species is recorded in the seeds of their consciousness. Before, they had 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 transformation into cellular substance, the delightful flowering, the ecstatic fertilizing, 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.
Through senses that received information from the infrared, Florans learned that the universe was more than the sun, the soil, the air, and water. The universe held many suns, other Earths held many soils and many kinds of air, and the rivers, the lakes, and the seas held many waters, and some of these were nurturing and some were not. Florans learned that they need not allow themselves to be dependent upon nature’s fickle moods but could manipulate their environment, controlling the fertility of the soil and the rain that fell upon it, and then that they could manipulate themselves, controlling the patterns of biological inheritance they passed along to their seeds. And they learned to limit their reproduction so as not to exhaust their resources and thus, having postponed their flowering and their going to seed, learned that they could postpone the dying that went with it. With longevity came the accumulation of information and experience that other species equate with wisdom and its encapsulation in their seeds.
Longevity beyond the season meant an acceleration of the learning process. Florans learned to develop special breeds, some for greater intelligence to provide more understanding of the universe, some for a new ability comparable to what other species call vision that allowed Florans to perceive the world and the universe in new ways, some for manipulative skills to make Florans independent of their environment, and some for memory to store the wisdom gathered by the others. And finally, through an accumulation of observations and a linking of observations into a scenario of events far from the earthy reality they inhabited, they came upon the terrible truth—that the passing cosmic body that had expelled them from paradise was not some chance interstellar visitor, not some cosmic joke by the cosmic jokester, but a relativistic missile flung across their path by greedy aliens, envious of their world and eager to reap the benefits of a heavy planet and the mineral wealth that it might vomit from its depths.
They learned all this when the Alpha Centaurans landed in their sterile metal ships. The shining vessels from a world far from Flora descended upon the Florans’ world, glowing from their passage through an atmosphere thicker than any Alpha Centauran had known but thinner for the passage of the invading missile many thousands of long cycles before. They glowed with heat, these vessels, and slowly cooled before the Alpha Centaurans emerged like meat asserting its natural dominance over the vegetable world. They were descended from birds who ate insects and seeds, and they wasted no thought or pity on the Florans they had crushed or the paradise their ancestors had destroyed. Why should they? They were the gods of the universe.
So the Florans also felt, at first. The Alpha Centaurans 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 Florans who dreamed beyond their Flora-bound reality. The vessels destroyed billions in their descents, and billions more as they sent machines to clear the plains, scything Florans down, trampling them beneath their treads, plowing them under, mindless of their voiceless screams and desperate efforts to communicate, to worship their magnificence in Florans’ vegetable way. The Alpha Centaurans put alien seeds in Flora’s sacred soil, dull, unresponsive cousins from other worlds. Florans tried to talk to these fellow vegetable creatures but they had nothing but primitive reactions to soil and sun; all awareness had been bred from them, if it ever existed. The Alpha Centaurans thought of Florans, if they thought of Florans at all, as alien vegetation to be adapted to their purposes or, if that was unsuccessful, eliminated. Finally the Florans despaired and recalled old biological processes. Their herbicides almost succeeded in eliminating the alien vegetation, but the Alpha Centaurans responded with greater destruction, clearing even the few Floran stragglers from their territories, protecting their seedlings with energy walls and developing targeted herbicides of their own.
Finally Florans realized the terrible truth: the Alpha Centaurans were not gods; they were invaders, and they would destroy the People if they did not find an effective way to resist. At first the Florans developed sharp leaves stiffened with lignite to kill Alpha Centaurans when they came among the Florans. These leaves were dangerous even to Florans in a gusty wind. But the Alpha Centaurans seldom came into the territories that they had not yet cleared; they preferred to send their machines, against whose metallic hides Floran weapons slid harmlessly aside. So the Florans 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 Florans are all part of the whole. And yet that too failed when their enemies kept them at a distance. Florans could not use the poison that their ancestors developed to kill the herbivores, because the Alpha Centaurans did not eat Florans, being properly wary of alien evolution. The People grew machines like those the Alpha Centaurans made, only with rigid skins of vegetable matter, but they crumpled against the metal of their enemies.
Finally the Florans realized that they could not defeat an enemy using the enemy’s weapons, and they moved the battle to their field, the soil and the vegetation that grew from it. If their alien vegetation was moronic, the Florans would elevate it; if it was alien, the Florans would naturalize it. The Florans put their specialized agronomists to work, and within a few generations they infected Alpha Centauran seeds with Floran genes subtly inserted to express themselves over the centuries. They took advantage of storms and high winds to scatter the seeds among the Alpha Centauran fields and waited while the Alpha Centaurans continued their campaign of genocide until only a few remote pockets of Floran civilization remained as well as Florans’ hidden depositories of seeds. Would their tactic succeed before they were destroyed beyond resurrection?
The memories of Florans are eternal; they 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 their existence from season to season. But even they began to despair until finally their stunted spies heard the first whispers of intelligence from the Alpha Centauran fields. Within a hundred long cycles the whispers grew into a clamor and the Alpha Centaurans began to sicken as their sentient food slowly assumed the character of the indigestible Floran seeds. More centuries passed before the Alpha 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 the Floran-altered seeds, bred for dominance and power, soon transformed the new, infecting them with Floran pathogens and Floran intelligence. More Alpha Centaurans died.
At last the Alpha Centaurans 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.
The People had Flora to themselves once more, sharing it now with the uplifted Alpha Centauran vegetation. Florans treated it with the compassion they never received from the Alpha Centaurans; they raised it to full sentience and gave it full membership in the Floran community, and it responded by bringing new hybrid vigor to Floran lives and new memories to share. Those memories, now accessible to rational inspection, included an understanding of Alpha Centauran existence that Florans had never been able to reach, and an experience with Alpha Centauran technology that they had found beyond comprehension. For the first time Florans realized why the Alpha Centaurans could not recognize Floran sentience, and why they had departed, still bewildered by Flora’s lethal resistance to their presence.
Florans also perceived that the galaxy was filled with alien species and that the People could never be safe in their splendid isolation, that they had to leave their beloved Flora in order to save it. They took the information on Alpha Centauran space ships buried, unsuspected, in the Alpha Centauran seeds of memory and applied it to their own expertise in growing things. They grew their spaceships. At first they were mere decorative shells, but over the centuries their progeny developed internal mechanisms from differentiating vegetable membranes and then movable parts. The Florans grew organic computers operated at the cellular level by selected bacteria. And, finally, the Florans evolved plants capable of producing, storing, and releasing fuel, and the materials able to sustain their fiery expulsion.
Over many generations Florans tested these products of vegetable versatility and persistence and saw them fail, disastrously, one after the other: the hulls failed, the fuel ran out, the liners burned. But the Florans persisted. They knew that the Alpha Centaurans, or some other rapacious meat creatures, would return, but Florans had the vegetable tradition of patience, and they knew that they would persist until at some distant moment they would succeed. And then one of their Alpha Centauran brethren 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 an Alpha Centauran model, developed the ability to process internal carbon into a beanstalk extending, molecule by molecule, into the sky.
Finally the Florans were ready, physically if not psychologically. A crew was assembled. Since Florans share the same heritage and memories, though some are specialized in different ways, the selection was easy even if the process was hard. As a species, Floran dreams were rooted to the soil; their nightmares were filled with the dread of being separated from it. But their will was stronger than their fears, and they launched themselves into the aching void in which Flora and her sister planets existed, they discovered, as anomalies. The experience was terrifying. Most of them died of shock, a few from madness that their species had never before experienced. But a few survived to return and contribute their seed memories to the Floran gene pool, and from them grew sturdier voyagers. In the long progress of the Floran kind, they persevered, they grew, they became what they needed to be. They explored their solar system.
The Florans’ benevolent sun had seeded its near-space with seven planets and an uncountable number of undeveloped seedlings beyond the farthest aggregation, before they were blasted by the Alpha 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 the exploring Florans found evidence of meat-creature buildings like those of the Alpha Centaurans and a carbon-dioxide-laden atmosphere that had apparently been a run-away 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. Florans were the masters of their solar system, though an impoverished one—and poorer for the Alpha Centauran violence. Their attackers came from beyond the Floran system. They had to go farther into the unknown, farther then they could imagine.
The Florans found ways to use their sun’s energy that surpassed the natural system of converting its rays into stem and leaf and flower. They developed vegetable means of storing these energies. They grew stronger ships, and elevated them up their beanstalks into orbit. They evolved better, more spaceworthy Florans. And finally they set out for the stars, not knowing where they were going or what they were going to find or what they would do when they got there.
Generations later, as their primitive ships were still only a small way into the vast emptiness that is most of the universe, they were discovered by a Federation ship that had just emerged from a nexus point. If the Florans aboard their 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 considered it fantasy.
Fortunately, the ship was Dorian, not Alpha Centauran, and even though the Dorians are grazers, they were 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, they thought, must be the real space voyagers. Finally, because they were enlightened, they came to the realization that the Florans were intelligent, and, through inspiration and dedication, began to decipher the Florans’ frond-moving communication, just as the Florans began to understand the Dorians’ guttural explosions of air.
The Dorians installed their nexus devices in the Floran ships and took the Florans to the Federation Council. There they sponsored the Florans, and, because they 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, they were admitted into the Council of civilized species.
They had achieved their goal. They now were under the protection of the Galactic Council and all its members.
As soon as the Florans understood Council procedures—they are limited in scope but precise in their application—and began to acquire minimal insights into animal sentience and motivation (they comprehend concepts outside their own experience only with great difficulty), they filed a genocide complaint against the Alpha Centaurans. Council representatives listened with almost vegetable patience, but they ruled against Flora. Florans were not sentient, they said, when the Alpha Centaurans seared their system with their relativistic missile and the Alpha Centaurans, after their later invasion, could not be expected to understand Florans’ evolved sentience. The Florans’ complaint was dismissed. Indeed, some members of the Council, perhaps with political ties to the Alpha Centaurans, suggested that Florans should be grateful to the Alpha Centaurans for the actions that produced their 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 Flora got knowledge of metal working and machines, charts of the nexus points of the galaxy and the ability to launch Floran ships through the no-space between them, access to the vast library of information accumulated by a hundred species over the long long-cycles, and the ability to reshape the Floran world and its system’s other worlds. Florans were forbidden, however, to emigrate to worlds beyond their system or to communicate, intellectually or genetically, with vegetable species on Federation worlds. This, Florans were told, would be a capital crime punishable by species extinction. That seemed extreme, but Florans recognized that they were new and different, and they had the other planets of their system to develop with their new skills, and, when that was complete, other worlds outside Federation jurisdiction.
They called upon their vegetable patience, knowing that, before the end of time, they would prevail. What they did not understand was that other species, under the leadership of the Alpha Centaurans, would be launching scientific projects to block the Floran genetic program, that all meat creatures, no matter how seemingly benign, will defend their kind against a threat from the Floran 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 vegetation would win before entropy finally defeated them all.
And yet—all the Floran voyaging beyond the limits of their psychology, all their acceptance by the Galactic community, all their new knowledge and confidence in survival and, if not as certain, of final dominance was not enough. In order to do these things, Florans had changed. Vegetable existence distrusted and disliked change, and accepted it only under duress and through the long, slow swing of the cosmos. Florans had become great, and they hated it.
And then the humans erupted from Earth—meat inspired by hubris—and, soon after, war began, and all that Florans had thought and planned was put aside. Florans did their part in the war, but mostly in the peace. Animals fought wars; flowers practiced peace. Florans delighted in the peace and the stasis that followed the war; they might even have become content with their lot, difficult as it was to reconcile with their essential being. And then word came about the Prophet and the Transcendental Machine. More change. More threat to stasis. More damage to the Floran sense of self. And so, once more, against every instinct, they had to change. Out of this crisis 4107 was grown, against every Floran instinct, to assume the reviled role of individual, to act alone and through its sacrifice find salvation for its fellow Florans. It was assigned the task of joining the pilgrimage to find the Transcendental Machine, in spite of the desolation, the grief, the anguished separation from its fellow Florans, the need to refer to itself as “I.” 4107 could not describe, even, what it meant to refer to itself as “I.”
But 4107 had the vegetable ability to persevere, and the more-than-vegetable desire to succeed: Florans present and future raise their silent screams for what only 4107 could provide: a return to paradise. Through 4107 the Transcendental Machine could remove the curse of sapience.
Federation Central is an insignificant planet of an insignificant sun, but the administrative hub of the vast Federation of member worlds is a marvel of the transformation of nature by the machine. It grew from a few buildings into a vast, world-encompassing structure not by design but by accretion. Its administrative structure developed in the same unplanned way. What it had never encountered before, at least at the bureaucratic level, was a mobile flower apparently applying for transportation.
The functionary, a Xiforan, messaged his superior, a Sirian, “I’ve got this creature—it seems to be kind of a mobile flower with roots sort of like tentacles with toes—and it seems to be applying for interstellar transportation. But it doesn’t speak. In fact, I don’t think it has any means of speech. It just keeps waving its—what do you call them?—leaves around. But it doesn’t say anything. How do I handle this?”
In a few moments the answer came back, “That’s a Floran, a vegetable creature, and—hard as it is to believe—it’s a member species. It communicates by swishing its fronds. Only a Dorian can understand it, and if you can’t get one you’ll have to call on the Pedia.”
The Xiforan looked up at the yellow flower on top of a sturdy green stalk and back down at its desk where it messaged the Pedia for help. In a brief moment, hardly more than a blink, the answer came back. “The Floran is a representative of a member species and has been authorized, as a representative, for passage on the first available transport to its destination.”
After the Floran had picked up its bucket of dirt in a surprisingly strong frond and departed on plodding roots, the Xiforan messaged his superior once more. “Just sent off that flower thing—the Floran—to a planet at the far end of nowhere, a world called Terminal.”