Gateways (29 page)

We learned all this when the Alpha Centaurans landed in their sterile metal ships.

The shining vessels from a world far from Flora descended upon our world, glowing from their passage through an atmosphere thicker than any Centaurans had known but thinner for the passage of the invading missile many thousands of cycles before. They glowed with heat, these vessels, and slowly cooled before the Centaurans emerged like meat asserting its natural dominance over the vegetable world. They wasted no thought or pity
on the Florans they had crushed or the paradise they had destroyed. Why should they? They were the gods of the universe.

So we also felt, at first. They 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 our poets. They destroyed billions in their descents, and billions more as they sent machines to clear the plains, scything us down, trampling us beneath their treads, plowing us under, mindless of our screams and efforts to communicate, to worship their magnificence in our vegetable way. They put alien seeds in our sacred soil, dull, unresponsive cousins from other worlds. We tried to talk to them, but they had nothing but primitive reactions to soil and sun; all awareness had been bred from them, if it ever existed. The Centaurans thought of us, if they thought of us at all, as alien vegetation to be adapted to their purposes or, if that was unsuccessful, eliminated. Finally we despaired and recalled old biological processes. Our herbicides almost succeeded in eliminating the alien vegetation, but the Centaurans responded with even greater destruction, clearing even the few Floran stragglers from their territories, protecting their seedlings with energy walls and developing herbicides of their own.

Finally we realized the terrible truth: they were not gods; they were invaders, and they would destroy the People if we did not find a way to resist. At first we developed sharp leaves stiffened with lignite to kill them when they came among us. You have seen them in action. They are dangerous even to ourselves in a gusty wind. But the Centaurans seldom came into the territories that yet were ours; they preferred to send their machines, against whose metallic hides our weapons slid harmlessly aside. So we 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 we are all part of the whole. And yet that too failed when our enemies kept us at a distance. We could not use the poison that our ancestors developed to kill the herbivores, because the Centaurans did not eat us, being properly wary of alien evolution. We grew machines like theirs, only with rigid skins of vegetable matter, but they crumpled against the metal of our enemies.

Finally we realized that we could not defeat an enemy using the enemy’s weapons, and we moved the battle to our field, the soil and the vegetation that grew from it. If their alien vegetation was moronic, we would elevate it; if it was alien, we would naturalize it. We put our specialized agronomists to work, and within a few generations they infected Centauran seeds with Floran genes subtly inserted to express themselves over the centuries. We took advantage of storms and high winds to scatter the seeds
among the Centauran fields and waited while the Centaurans continued their campaign of genocide until only a few remote pockets of Floran civilization remained and our hidden depositories of seeds. Would our tactic succeed before we were destroyed beyond revival?

The memories of Florans are eternal; we 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 our existence from season to season. But even we began to despair until finally our stunted spies heard the first whispers of intelligence from the Centauran fields. Within a century the whispers grew into a clamor and the Centaurans began to sicken as their sentient food slowly assumed the character of our indigestible Floran genes. More centuries passed before the 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 their seeds, bred for dominance and power, soon transformed the new, infecting them with Floran pathogens and Floran intelligence. More Centaurans died.

At last they 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.

We had Flora to ourselves once more, sharing it now with the uplifted Centauran vegetation. We treated it with the compassion we never received from the Centaurans; we raised it to full sentience and gave it full membership in our community, and it responded by bringing new hybrid vigor to our lives and new memories to share. Those memories, now accessible to rational inspection, included an understanding of Centauran existence that we were never able to reach, and an experience with Centauran technology that we had found alien. For the first time we realized why the Centaurans could not recognize our sentience, and why they had departed, still bewildered by Flora’s lethal resistance to their presence.

We also perceived that the galaxy was filled with alien species and that we could never be safe in our splendid isolation, that we had to leave our beloved Flora in order to save it. We took the information on Centauran spaceships buried, unsuspected, in the Centauran seeds of memory and applied it to our own expertise in growing things. We grew our spaceships. At first they were mere decorative shells, but over the centuries they developed internal mechanisms from differentiating vegetable membranes and then movable parts. We grew organic computers operated at the cellular
level by selected bacteria. And, finally, we evolved plants capable of producing, storing, and releasing fuel, and the materials able to sustain their fiery expulsion.

Over many generations we tested them and saw them fail, disastrously, one after the other: the hulls failed, the fuel ran out, the liners burned. But we persisted. We knew that the Centaurans, or some other rapacious meat creatures, would return, but we had the vegetable tradition of patience, and we knew that we would persist until at some distant moment we would succeed. And then one of our Centauran sisters 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 a Centauran model, developed the ability to process internal carbon into a beanstalk extending, atom by atom, into the sky.

Finally we were ready physically if not psychologically. A crew was assembled. Since we share the same heritage and the same memories, though some were specialized in different ways, the selection was easy even if the process was hard. As a species, our dreams were rooted to the soil; our nightmares were filled with the dread of being separated from it. But our will was stronger than our fears, and we launched ourselves into the aching void in which Flora and her sister planets existed, we discovered, as anomalies. The experience was terrifying. Most of us died of shock, a few from madness that our species had never before experienced. But a few survived to return and contribute their seed memories to our gene pool, and from them grew sturdier voyagers. In the long progress of our kind, we persevered, we grew, we became what we needed to become. We explored our solar system.

Our benevolent sun had seeded seven planets and an uncountable number of undeveloped seedlings beyond the farthest aggregation, before they were blasted by the 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 we found evidence of meat-creature buildings like those of the Centaurans and a carbon-dioxide–laden atmosphere that had apparently been a runaway 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. We were the masters of our solar system, though an impoverished
one—and poorer for the Centauran violence. Our attackers came from beyond our system. We had to go farther into the unknown, farther then we could imagine.

We found ways to use our sun’s energy that surpassed the natural system of converting its rays into stem and leaf and flower. We developed vegetable means of storing these energies. We grew stronger ships, and elevated them up our beanstalks into orbit. We evolved better spaceworthy Florans. And finally we set out for the stars, not knowing where we were going or what we were going to find or what we would do when we got there.

Generations later, as our primitive ships were still only a small way into the vast emptiness that is most of the universe, we were discovered by a Galactic ship that had just emerged from a nexus point. If the Florans aboard our 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 believed it.

Fortunately, the ship was Dorian, not Centauran, and even though the Dorians are grazers, they are 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 must have been the real space voyagers. Finally, because they were enlightened, they came to the realization that we were intelligent, and, through inspiration and dedication, began to decipher our frond-moving communication, just as we began to understand their guttural explosions of air.

The Dorians installed their nexus devices in our Floran ships and took us to the Galactic Council. There they sponsored us, and because we were the first sentient vegetable creatures to be discovered in the galaxy and because we had displayed so much determination in setting out in primitive ships and persisting through unbelievable difficulties, we are admitted into the Council of civilized species.

We had achieved our goal. We now were under the protection of the Galactic Council and all its members.

As soon as we understood Council procedures—they are limited in scope but precise in their application—and as soon as we began to acquire minimal insights into animal sentience and motivation (we comprehend concepts outside our own experience only with great difficulty), we filed a genocide complaint against the Centaurans. Council representatives listened with almost vegetable patience, but they ruled against us. We were not sentient, they said, when the Centaurans raped our system with their relativistic missile and the Centaurans, after their later invasion, could not be expected to
understand our evolved sentience. Our complaint was dismissed. Indeed, some members of the Council, perhaps with political ties to the Centaurans, suggested that we should be grateful to the Centaurans for the actions that produced our sentience. Florans do not understand gratitude, but they never forget injury.