‘What has the dog to do with it?’ I asked.
‘Consider,’ they said. ‘If the humans of your Earth had devoted all
their energies, through all their history, to the training of the dog, what
might have been achieved?’
‘Why, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps, by now, we’d have a dog that
might be our equal in intelligence. Perhaps not intelligent in the same
manner that we’re intelligent, but…’
‘There once was another race,’ the Flowers told me, ‘that did that very
thing with us. It all began more than a billion years ago.’
‘This other race deliberately made a plant intelligent?’
‘There was a reason for it. They were a different kind of life than
you. They developed us for one specific purpose. They needed a system of
some sort that would keep the data they had collected continually correlated
and classified and ready for their use.’
‘They could have kept their records. They could have written it all
down.’
‘There were certain physical restrictions and, perhaps more important,
certain mental blocks.’
‘You mean they couldn’t write.’
‘They never thought of writing. It was an idea that did not occur to
them. Not even speech, the way you speak. And even if they had had speech or
writing, it would not have done the job they wanted.’
‘The classification and the correlation?’
‘That is part of it, of course. But how much ancient human knowledge,
written down and committed to what seemed at that time to be safe keeping,
is still alive today?’
‘Not much of it. It has been lost or destroyed. Time has washed it
out.’
‘We still hold the knowledge of that other race,’ they said. ‘We proved
better than the written record – although this other race, of course, did
not consider written records.’
‘This other race,’ I said. ‘The knowledge of this other race and how
many other races?’
They did not answer me. ‘If we had the time,’ they said, ‘we’d explain
it all to you. There are many factors and considerations you’d find
incomprehensible. Believe us when we say that the decision of this other
race, to develop us into a data storage system, was the most reasonable and
workable of the many alternatives they had under study’
‘But the time it took,’ I said, dismayed ‘My God, how much time would
it take to make a plant intelligent! And how could they even start? What do
you do to make a plant intelligent?’
‘Time,’ they said, ‘was no great consideration. It wasn’t any problem.
They knew how to deal with time. They could handle time as you can handle
matter. And that was a part of it. They compressed many centuries of our
lives into seconds of their own. They had all the time they needed. They
made the time they needed.’
‘They made time?’
‘Certainly. Is that so hard to understand?’
‘For me, it is,’ I told them. ‘Time is a river. It flows on and on.
There is nothing you can do about it.’
‘It is nothing like a river,’ said the Flowers, ‘and it doesn’t flow,
and there’s much that can be done with it. And, furthermore, we ignore the
insult that you offer us.’
‘The insult?’
‘Your feeling that it would be so difficult for a plant to acquire
intelligence.’
‘No insult was intended. I was thinking of the plants of Earth. I can’t
imagine a dandelion…’
‘A dandelion?’
‘A very common plant.’
‘You may be right,’ they said. ‘We may have been different, originally,
than the plants of Earth.’
‘You remember nothing of it all, of course.’
‘You mean ancestral memory?’
‘I suppose that’s what I mean.’
‘It was so long ago,’ they said. ‘We have the record of it. Not a myth,
you understand, not a legend. But the actual record of how we became
intelligent.’
‘Which,’ I said, ‘is far more than the human race has got.’
‘And now,’ said the Flowers, ‘we must say goodbye. Our enunciator is
becoming quite fatigued and we must not abuse his strength, for he has
served us long and faithfully and we have affection for him. We will talk
with you again.’
‘Whew!’ said Tupper.
He wiped the slobber off his chin.
‘That’s the longest,’ he said, ‘I have ever talked for them. What did
you talk about?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘Of course I don’t,’ snapped Tupper. ‘I never listen in.’
He was human once again. His eyes had returned to normal and his face
had become unstuck.
‘But the readers,’ I said. ‘They read longer than we talked.’
‘I don’t have nothing to do with the reading that is done,’ said
Tupper. ‘That ain’t two-way talk. That’s all mental contact stuff.’
‘But the phones,’ I said.
‘The phones are just to tell them the things they should read.’
‘Don’t they read into the phones?’
‘Sure they do,’ said Tupper. ‘I hat’s so they’ll read aloud. It’s
easier for the Flowers to pick it up if they read aloud. It’s sharper in the
reader’s brain or something.’
He got up slowly.
‘Going to take a nap,’ he said.
He headed for the hut.
Halfway there, he stopped and turned back to face me. ‘I forgot,’ he
said. ‘Thanks for the pants and shirt.’
12
My hunch had been correct. Tupper was a key, or at least one of the
keys, to what was happening. And the place to look for clues, crazy as it
had sounded, had been the patch of flowers in the garden down below the
greenhouse.
For the flower patch had led, not alone to Tupper, but to all the rest
of it – to that second self that had helped out Gerald Sherwood, to the
phone set-up and the reader service, to the ones who employed Stiffy Grant
and probably to the backers of that weird project down in Mississippi. And
to how many other projects and endeavours I had no idea.
It was not only now, I knew, that this was happening, but it had been
happening for years. For many years, they’d told me, the Flowers had been in
contact with many minds of Earth, had been stealing the ideas and the
attitudes and knowledge which had existed in those minds, and even in those
instances in which the minds were unaware of the prowlers in them, had
persisted in the nudging of those minds, as they had nudged the mind of
Sherwood.
For many years, they’d said, and I had not thought to ask them for a
better estimate. For several centuries, perhaps, and that seemed entirely
likely, for when they spoke of the lifetime of their intelligence they spoke
of a billion years.
For several hundred years, perhaps, and could those centuries, I
wondered, have dated from the Renaissance? Was it possible, I asked myself,
that the credit for the flowering of man’s culture, that the reason for his
advancement might be due, at least in part, to the nudging of the Flowers?
Not, of course, that they themselves would have placed their imprint upon
the ways of man, but theirs could have been the nagging force which had
driven man to much of his achievement.
In the case of Gerald Sherwood, the busybody nudging had resulted in
constructive action. Was it too much to think, I wondered, that in many
other instances the result had been the same – although perhaps not as
pronounced as it had been in Sherwood’s case? For Sherwood had recognized
the otherness that had come to live with him and had learned that it was to
his benefit to co-operate. In many other cases there would not have been
awareness, but even with no awareness, the drive and urge were there and, in
part, there would have been response.
In those hundreds of years, the Flowers must have learned a great deal
of humanity and have squirrelled away much human knowledge. For that had
been their original purpose, to serve as knowledge storage units. During the
last several years man’s knowledge had flowed to them in a steady stream,
with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of readers busily engaged in pouring down
their mental gullets the accumulated literary efforts of all of humankind.
I got off the ground where I was sitting and found that I was stiff and
cramped. I stretched and slowly turned and there, on every side, reaching to
the near horizons of the ridges that paralleled the river, swept the purple
tide.
It could not be right, I told myself. I could not have talked with
flowers. For of all the things on Earth, plants were the one thing that
could never talk.
And yet this was not the Earth. This was another Earth – only one,
they’d said, of many billion earths.
Could one measure, I asked myself, one earth by another? And the answer
seemed to be one couldn’t. The terrain appeared to be almost identical with
the terrain I had known back on my own Earth, and the terrain itself might