Ethertravel report #1993, received December 17, 2539.

We’d sent quite a few ethertravelers out. We had a good catalog of known worlds, and a lot of people, usually older ones who could afford to spend several years’ wages of a high-paying job, were opting for a new life in whatever kind of world screamed “paradise” to them. But there were lots more worlds we had spotted as ethertravel targets but had no reports from. Some were discovered too recently, while others just hadn’t responded. The rest of us looking to leave Earth were limited to these worlds, but they had compressed the training down to a six-week course since they now had the capacity to send lots of people, and no lack of volunteers for either option: go to a new world, or try your hand at a no-contact world.

I, John Mullins, was an adventurous type, so I chose a no-contact world. There were many reasons we might not have gotten a response before. It might mean they were low-tech worlds where it wasn’t feasible to build an ether device. It might mean some other problem, some legal, environmental, or other reasons why nobody had ever called back. It might be a world with high infant mortality and none of the ethertravelers we sent there had lived to adulthood. It might be one so rich and amazing that the ethertravelers chose not to report home to avoid the planet being completely overrun with ethertravelers... though the way we were pouring explorers into no-contact worlds now pointed out the flaw in that last argument.

And despite all of the different things I thought I might find, none of them were near the truth. This is my report.

Awakening

It seemed like for a long time I saw, felt, and heard nothing, but I was awake in some sense. Was it months? Years? I couldn’t tell. Eventually, I had a gradually clearing vision of being in a grassy field. I could see the grass and distant trees and other plants. Also some hills in one direction, and what I took to be a stream on another side. But I couldn’t tell what I was. I didn’t appear to be able to move, but I could still see in all directions. A conundrum. This went on for days.

On what I think was the fifth day that I had sight, I saw a green-skinned girl enter the field. That’s what she looked like: A prepubescent girl with green skin and no hair, and seemingly naked. She came pretty close, maybe examining me, whatever I was. She walked about 100 feet away, dug a small hole with her hands, and squatted down over it. Maybe she pooped there? She covered it up with the dirt and grass she dug from the hole, then left.

The next day, a group of girls similar to the first one came by. I couldn’t tell if the original one was part of the group. They came right up and touched me. I could feel the touches even though I couldn’t tell what it was they were touching. One of them said something I thought sounded like “Soon, soon.” Sort of, anyway; I don’t think I actually heard the words, but I definitely understood it even though I’d just arrived here and had no idea what language they might speak. Some of them went to other spots in the field and pooped in holes like the first girl did.

It was two days later when it happened. I felt a shudder and then my vision shifted. Finally, I could look down at myself and see what I was. I was one of the green girls like the ones who visited me, but I was inside a white pod. No, a huge flower. It had opened up, and I was sitting on one of the stalks that came up in the middle of the flower. Attached to it, I realized. I could move my arms and legs and turn my head in ways that were familiar to me. By standing tall and pushing myself up from the base of the flower, I got free from the stalk, which was quite firm. It was hollow, with some parts I couldn’t discern down inside it a bit. Was this flower my mother?

I carefully stepped down off the surface of the flower and turned to look at it. It immediately closed up, and I could see it was white on the outside as well, with a slightly speckled appearance. But then I had confusion with my vision again. After a moment, I realized it was that I had the vision of the whole field around me again like I had when I was inside the flower, and I could see my green girl body as part of that vision. But I could also see, from the vantage point of the girl, the large white flower I had been inside. So I was both the girl and the flower? Weird.

I wasn’t sure what I was really supposed to do now that I was free of the flower, but I let instinct guide me. I went to one of the closest trees, which was covered in red berries. As I got closer, what I saw looked exactly like a cherry tree. I pulled down dozens of the little fruits and ate them, spitting the pits out on the ground. As far as I could tell, they were exactly like cherries in every way.

There were hundreds more cherries just on this one tree, just counting those I could reach, and if I went climbing into it, thousands, but my appetite seemed filled after eating about 40 of them. Next I went over to the stream I had seen back when I was inside the flower. It really was a stream. I cupped up water in my two hands and drank it, what I could drink by dipping my hands in six times.

There were several other trees here, without fruit. I explored up to about a mile away from my flower, spending a few hours getting a feel for the trees, bushes, and other features of the landscape. I didn’t see the other girls, but I noted the places where they had dug. After that I had a feeling that I needed to get back to my flower, and I made a beeline for it, instinctively knowing where it was without actually, at first, seeing it, As it came into view, once again I had the double vision. I realized at this point that I had actually been seeing from the flower’s viewpoint all along, but nothing was happening near it once I walked away, and I had been able to ignore it. Now I could see myself again and noticed the flower’s vision. As I got closer, the flower opened for me, and I was back to only seeing from the viewpoint of the girl.

I stepped onto the flower. Instinct made me sit on top of the stalk, and I felt it slip inside me. In my pussy? My ass? I felt of my body down there, and whatever hole or holes were down there were completely occupied by the stalk. I assumed this meant just one large hole, since there had been a single stalk that was round at the top.

At that time I remembered. I’ve ethertraveled and this is another world. The people here look sort of like hairless, prepubescent girls, but they aren’t. The fruits look and taste like cherries, but they aren’t really. The water was probably really water, because it’s common on planets with life. And this flower I’m in is nothing like anything on Earth.

As I was thinking these thoughts, the flower closed up around me, and once again, it being completely dark inside, I could see only the flower’s less detailed but 360-degree view. Just after that, I felt movement beneath me, then inside me. Some parts inside the stalk had moved up inside me, connecting with me. I could, somehow, also feel these parts from the flower’s perspective. The flower was pulling both nutrients and wastes from my meal into itself. The wastes went straight through the stalk and down into the ground, while the nutrients provided a sort of meal for the flower. Somehow, I instinctively knew this was happening.

Soon it was dark outside my flower, and I slept, the flower still drawing nutrients slowly from me, and if I was not mistaken, also providing some for me.

Finding the Others

I awoke early in the morning, and my flower opened immediately for my girl body to go exploring. I pulled myself off the stalk the same way I did the first day, and out of curiosity checked between my legs. There was an opening with two flaps covering it like a woman’s vulva, but inside there was nothing but a single big hole large enough for me to easily fit a fist inside. If there was more structure to it, it was farther inside.

I ate from the cherry tree and drank from the stream again, but this time I did not stay in my field. I went beyond the ridge which had up to now blocked my vision, and found other fields with more flowers like mine, and other girls too. At first they didn’t notice me, and I hesitated a moment, conscious of the fact I was naked in front of these strangers. But they were all naked, too. It seemed to be the way around here.

As I headed in their direction, one of them did notice and ran excitedly to meet me, her open palms raised at head height. She looked happy, not threatening. Thinking the open hands were a greeting, or a way of signaling she was peaceful, I mimicked the gesture, maintaining it until we met about halfway between the corner of the ridge and the nearest flower in this field.

She put her palms against mine and brought them down to her sides, and I let mine go down with hers. And she spoke, sort of? It was in the same way one girl had spoken to me before I first left the flower, not in the way people speak. It was more like she sent the words into my mind. And it wasn’t truly spoken in words. More like concepts. After a moment, I understood the concepts she was communicating and had rendered them in my mind into these words:

“Welcome, sister. From where do you come?”

I pointed to the corner of the ridge and then around to indicate the field beyond.

To me, in the same way, she said, “Ah, the lonely one.”

She turned to the other girls and then, in a way which felt like shouting compared to the other communication, she sent, clearly to everyone present, “Sisters, the lonely one is awake!”

The other girls came running toward us with hands raised in the same gesture and my welcomer turned toward them, beckoning me to follow. Soon we were all together, and each girl in turn touched hands with me briefly before the last one repeated the sideways movement to draw the hands down. They then led me on a tour of the flowers, with each girl standing in front of and briefly caressing the surface of what I assumed was her own flower, and introducing herself while she stood there. They all had flower names: Lily, Rose, Begonia, Petunia, and finally my welcomer was Pansy. Or, at least, flowers which reminded me of each of those. The giant flowers looked like none of those, though the lily was closest. Imagine a fat white lily with no stalk, growing directly on the ground, but instead of being an inch or so in diameter and 4 inches tall when closed, it’s 4 feet in diameter and 6 feet tall, or at least, I assumed that size based on our bodies looking like 9 or 10 year old girls and presumably being about four and a half feet tall. When open, it covers the space of a small room, but these were all closed now.

“So what’s your name?”

By now I had figured out, again based on some kind of instinctive knowledge, how to respond in the same way they spoke. I thought for a moment, and based on my old Earth name being John, came up with the name “Jonquil.” Instantly, the image of this flower came up in my mind, and I sent that image to the girls to say, “Jonquil.”

“Ooh, Jonquil.” “Nice name.” “Haven’t encountered a Jonquil in ages.” “Haven’t encountered a Jonquil ever.” “Pretty name,” the girls said, many of them at the same time so it was hard to confirm which girl had made each comment.

Then Pansy asked, “Where did you come from before? Or is this your first life?”

I paused for a moment. “First life?” I thought, without think-speaking it. Surely I didn’t land among a bunch of ethertravelers, and they did none of the checks one was supposed to do. Maybe the flower-girls reincarnated somehow. Died in the winter and came back in the spring? Maybe, but all those ripe cherries told me this had to be summer already. And besides, they lived one field over from where I was born here. Since they didn’t know me, clearly I was new. Maybe it was a trick question or a rhetorical one.

“First life,” I answered.

“Ooh, where’d you hear a pretty name like Jonquil?” Rose asked, suggesting she was the one who’d made the “Pretty name” comment before.

“I don’t know,” I responded. “It just came to me. Maybe I heard it somewhere.” I was sending these messages instinctively now. It had taken very little effort to reply.

“It was probably the people across the creek,” Petunia offered.

“Yeah, they’re always snooping around,” Lily commented.

“One of them is probably Jonquil’s mother,” Begonia added. “None of us planted over there before Jonquil’s flower showed up, right?”

There was a chorus of “Not me” from the other girls.

“Do you know your mothers?” I asked them.

“No,” most of them said.

“My mother was Tulip from Snake Mountain, but that was three lives ago for me,” Lily said.

“Tell me about these lives,” I asked. “How are you reborn?”

“Oh, of course. She’s new. She doesn’t know,” Pansy responded.

Begonia answered my question, “When your flower can no longer support you, you’ll feel instinctively it’s time to start over, and you’ll do so by eating your flower. When it comes time, you’ll instinctively know what to eat, but you mainly eat the petals and a fist-sized organ at the base. It’ll take hours just to eat it, but it’ll give you the energy to travel for up to 6 or 7 days without sleep to where you want to plant yourself. Some people travel long distances and others only a short way. When you sit down, roots will sprout from between your legs and you will transform into a new flower, which will grow a new body over a few months.”

Rose added, “But a new person like you comes about when you sit on the anther of another person’s flower. A seed will then grow in you and you can plant it the next day.”

Well, she didn’t say “anther.” But the image she sent reminded me of the pollen-producing organ of a flower, and somehow I remembered that it is called the anther. Thinking a bit more, I remembered that just the bit at the end is the anther. It sits on top of a stalk, and the whole thing including the stalk is called a stamen. My flower indeed has a second stalk which I hadn’t touched yet, and it must be the stamen. It stayed well back out of my way when I was climbing on and off the nutrition-related one. What is that called? If the seed grows inside me, then maybe the stalk I’ve been sitting on is the female one. After racking my brain for a bit, I remembered the chamber where the seed grows is called an ovary or ovule, the stalk is the style, the organ at the top that catches pollen is the stigma, and the whole thing is called a pistil. I don’t know how I remembered all that, but I did. I could call the thing I’ve been sitting on a style, but from Rose’s description of the process, all of those parts are inside me.

There is only the one hole between my legs, though, so they must use the same one, and maybe there is a pistil inside me where it goes, separate from whatever all the organs that exchange nutrients are called. But based on what they said, I was right about these being girl bodies. We are the females and the flowers are the males. Maybe, but I had been born from inside the flower. But it’s some other world. They are neither actual humans nor actual Earth flowers, just beings that resemble them. I was trying to take this flower analogy too far.

Petunia commented, “I found you all alone over there when I was looking for a place to plant. So naturally I planted there and I got my sisters here to all plant there too. Next year you’ll have your own tribe of sisters!”

“How long does the flower last before it can no longer support you and you have to be reborn?”

“It typically happens in the winter, but it depends on how old you are and how harsh the winter. If it’s really bad, everybody will have to be reborn, and that’s also the main time people die, when they can’t eat the flower before it goes bad or if the ground is too hard to put roots into. Six winters ago, about half the people in this area died. Usually people live through two to four winters before needing to replant themselves, though.”

“And, apart from the kind of death you describe, how many rebirths might a person live through?”

Petunia shrugged. An actual shrug like a human would do. She thought-spoke, “I’m not sure there’s any real limit. There are people in the city, where they have tools to warm the ground, who have been reborn 10 or more times, but the air and soil is not as good there and they usually last no more than two years between rebirths. They own their land there, and use artificial means to revitalize it, alternating between two plots that are usually immediately adjacent.”

I found it interesting that there are cities here. This pastoral life is not the only one available.

Petunia continued, “But since you mention it, there’s one other common way to die. If your body gets destroyed or too badly injured to make it back to your flower, or if your flower gets destroyed, perhaps in fire, before you can eat it, then you can only survive by merging, and usually there’s no candidate available.”

“Merging?”

“If your flower dies, and another flower’s girl body has died, you can sit on it the way you would your own flower to sleep, and you and the person whose flower it was will merge, mind and body. You’ll have both memories; perhaps most scarily, you’ll have the memories of your dead halves dying. But you’ll be able to go on. It’s so rare for those needing a merge to find one that those who do find one accept without a second thought. If you see a flower which is wide open without its body near, that usually means the body has died and it’s looking to merge.”

“What if you are seriously injured but you do make it back to your flower?”

“As long as the flower has enough life, you can go inside and let the flower consume your body. Just as when it happens the other way, this provides enough energy to keep the flower alive long enough to regenerate a new body. If the flower’s too weak, you can eat the flower, but you wouldn’t be able to travel far with a weak body and a weak flower. You’d have to immediately replant yourself somewhere nearby and hope you have enough energy and enough nutrition in the soil for the regeneration to work.”

“That’s gotta be weird, becoming a combination of yourself and somebody else,” I commented. “Guess it’s why you only do it as a last resort; better to stay part-alive than dead. So what do you do besides eat, drink, sleep, and plant seeds?”

Begonia answered, “We take care of the plants. Not just the flowers, but the ones that give us food and the other plants that make life nice here. We walk our field looking for any signs of problems, any visitors, or anything else unusual. And when we have time left over, we play fun games together!”

“Hmm, I did, after emerging from my flower yesterday, go survey the other field by my flower, along with eating a good supply of cherries. Just acting on instinct. But I remember your visit, and I came over here today looking for you all, and I found you!”

“Yay!” “Hooray!” “Welcome.” “Glad you came!” “The more the better.”

The Fields

I toured their field with them. I mostly just looked at things, and ate several types of berries, but there were some weeds growing in a patch of berry bushes which Lily and Petunia removed, just plunging their bare hands into the soil and pulling them up, roots and all, while leaving almost all of the soil in place. Then, to my surprise, they ate the roots and flower buds off each plant.

“You eat those? They didn’t look appetizing at all!”

“They aren’t good food, but that’s why we are removing them now to let the good ones grow more. We can eat anything that grows from the ground. Well, almost anything. Eating the roots and flowers is the easiest way to ensure they don’t make more. The rest of this we’ll bury to fertilize other plants.”

“Almost? Sounds like something I should know.”

I then got educated in the five known plants so poisonous that I shouldn’t eat them, as well as how they deal with them if they catch any growing nearby. The main solution was burn them in a location where the smoke will blow away from our flowers, but one of them was good fertilizer for any of the fruit trees, and they just burned the roots and flowers of that one.

Toward the end of the day our group walked along the stream, each of us drinking several handfuls of the water, and we moved over into my field.

“You have a lot to do over here. Nobody has been tending to this field in a couple years,” Begonia commented.

We pulled dozens of weeds, and I got to try out their style of doing so. I hadn’t noticed it, but these petite little hands have some impressively sharp, tough, pointed nails on the ends, and our arms are extremely strong. We can use them as spades with the whole hand together, or as pruners using thumb and forefinger. For each weed pulled, they showed me what parts needed to be eaten to prevent the plant from reproducing or regrowing when the rest of the plant was put back into the ground to fertilize other plants. We made a pile half as tall as one of one of our flowers out of all the other bits, mainly leaves and stems.

Pansy yawned, and I realized I felt tired too. The sun was still up but it was getting over toward the horizon.

Rose said, “Yes, we should all be getting back to our flowers. But Jonquil, you stay here tomorrow and we’ll come over to continue the work here.”

They all agreed, so I went to my flower, stopping to grab a few more cherries along the way, and they marched the other way. But Petunia hung back behind the others, and I felt a subtly different communication from her.

“Jonquil, when you speak, instead of always directing your thoughts so that everybody can hear them, you can also direct them to a specific person or people. Focus on that person at the start of your thought. She will hear your thought and understand that it was sent privately.”

“Petunia, like this?”

“Jonquil, yes. You’ve got it.”

The sun was just as low on the other side of the sky when they came back over the next day, and this time the focus was on planting rather than removing weeds. We dug a long, narrow trench a foot deep, and filled it halfway with the leaves and stems from yesterday, put a little soil on top of that, and then we all went over to my cherry tree and Rose climbed to the top, surprisingly effortlessly. She picked about 40 of the cherries growing on the highest branches she could reach and threw them down to the ground. We each ate several of these cherries, planting the pits carefully along the length of the trench, saving some for Rose to eat when she got back down.

“The most fertile cherries grow at the top of the tree where they get the most sun,” Pansy explained. “Just for eating, any cherries will do, but when we want to plant, we go get those.

“And not all these will grow,” Petunia added. “But there are lots of them, so we plant a bunch. Many of these won’t grow at all and some won’t survive the first winter, but the ones that do we can replant if they are too close together, giving each good space.”

They dug two more trenches which they filled with weed leaves from other parts of the field, planting blueberries in one - they dropped in whole berries, as the seeds within these were small and usually got eaten - and apples in the other. Apples had not come ripe yet, but they showed me where they had a cave where they saved dry seeds elevated on flat stones to plant later. Somebody had painted pictures of each fruit above the stored seeds.

“Who painted the fruit pictures?”

“I did,” Rose replied.

“Where did you get the paint?”

“More knowledge we should pass on to you. There’s a flowering plant, milkweed. It makes a sticky white juice which can be used as paint, and you can mix in ground up fruit to color it. The paint doesn’t last, though, so you have to use it quickly after you harvest the plant. The plant dies in the late fall, so it’s use it or lose it then. A couple years ago, the milkweed was growing quite rampant along the stream, and in the fall I used it to paint all these pictures.”

Later they showed me the milkweed plants, not yet flowering. There were about a dozen along the portion of the stream that passed along their field, and five in the section by my field. Over the course of the day we explored all of their field and mine and made note of a few areas that needed work. As the sun descended we returned to our flowers.

I felt conscious of the tube I was inserting in my rear end as I docked with the flower. The old me would have considered this to be sex or something even more obscene, but now I knew inserting a different organ there represented sex for my new species, and this thing I was doing now was a necessity for life.

Not only my girl body but also my flower body felt it. The more I did this, the more I came to understand the flower’s sensations while we were docked. There wasn’t any sensation from that side at all sexual. The feeling was more one of relief, the wholeness of being back with the rest of my body, and of relieving my hunger. What the flower got from the sun and the ground was not enough to feed this flower; it also depended on nutrients from my food that my girl body did not use. But the flower also picked up nutrients from those other sources it could not use but my girl body could.

Biologists would have called the relationship symbiotic, save for odd way that we were part of the same being. Either one could die and regenerate the other, and my mind occupied both bodies. That made it something else entirely, far beyond symbiosis.

We took care of those other chores the next day, and after that, with fewer chores needing to be done, my new friends taught me other things. I learned how to climb trees so I could be the one to get the high cherries, and other fruits as they came in. I started learning their games.