Returning to the City

We had a great time together the following spring and summer, with the group of 11 of us making easy work of caring for all three fields, and having time to engage in the fun games the elder five had promised but which I’d only had a little time to participate in before. Sakura and I gave the others opportunities to show themselves as ethertravelers, and none of them did.

As fall approached, I knew my flower was not going to last. Sakura and I decided we were going to leave, and we told the others our goodbyes. Nobody had any problem at all with it. I suspect the original five had mostly not been born here, but migrated from who knows where, so they understood our desire to go see other places.

I finally got to experience the sex these weird bodies had from the male side, as Sakura and I mated both ways and planted two seeds near where my flower was, a few days before we ate our flowers and left. It was in fact a more powerful experience than it was from the female side. We each took two baskets full of fruit, which was all we could carry easily, and headed back to the city. Our friends gladly let us take those to get started in our new lives. As we ate from the baskets, we refilled them with other fruits we saw in unoccupied lands along the way, so we arrived with four still-full baskets with a mixture of fruit.

When we got there, we discovered Peter had needed replanting after we left but did not survive the metamorphosis, and a new librarian, Marcia (flower name Poppy), an apprentice Peter had taken in after we left, was now in charge.

“I’ll be glad to take you on as my apprentice, Jonquil. Feel free to plant yourself in any open area of the greenhouses.”

I claimed a spot, but didn’t plant yet as I wanted to help Sakura. She wanted to help in whatever I could attempt toward the goal we ethertravelers had been given, but not knowing English, she couldn’t help so much with the papers, and instead proposed to help by being a food provider to me, to give me more time to work on stuff.

We had found an unoccupied house in the outskirts with two greenhouse sides and a lot of land, so Sakura was going to live there. The mile from there to the library was easy for our bodies to cover. So I went there to help her clean things up a bit before we both planted and spent months before we would be able to work again.

Marcia had shown me all the features of the greenhouses while providing a space to me, so I passed this along to Sakura. It wasn’t a long list, but there were some unobvious ones. The two glass doors on each side of the stone house part, even on sides with greenhouses, were obvious. The fireplace was also pretty obvious. The stone base kept it from setting all the grass on fire, and it made a spot where you couldn’t plant, up next to the house. The cooling system was that some of the windows on the flat sides opened. Since we were part plant and even the non-plant part photosynthesized, we were pretty tolerant of heat as long as we had water.

There was an ingenious mechanism built into the greenhouses for managing water. All the water that ran down the slanted side of the greenhouse was caught and stored in an underground reservoir, and there was a hand-crank inside that let you pump that water up through sprinkler heads inside the greenhouse to water your flower and any other plants you had grown inside. In Sakura’s house, the ground inside was dry but the reservoir was full, so we cranked a bit to make the land more suitable.

The other unobvious feature wasn’t actually in the greenhouse, but in the main part of the house. There was a basement the same size as the main room, with a staircase in the middle. This area stayed dry; they had some way of sealing the basement so water didn’t seep in from the ground, and the doors sealed it above ground. They called it a fruit cellar, because they put fruit down there to dry. Apparently all it took was a little salt and placing them apart from one another until they dried. I wasn’t familiar enough with preserving fruit like this on Earth, but I knew people did something like this. Was it really that simple, or were there more reactions that worked differently here which made them easier to keep?

We had traded one whole basket of the fruit for various tools, including the bear-trapping set. I didn’t need those at the library, which was well equipped with all manner of tools, in addition to it being quite unlikely a bear would roam so far into a populated area. We had most of three baskets of fruit left over, and we put them down there for now, and I’d have to see about getting some salt.

The trees outside were not well cared for and some were in poor health, and I helped Sakura plant new ones with seeds from food we had eaten along the way, at least six different kinds.

We stayed up one more night, and the next day, when I took some of the fruit into town to trade for a hatchet, I learned that salt was basically free. Our flowers maintained a salt reserve in an underground nodule which was waterproof and which seals up when the flower dies. So we could dig at old flower sites to look for these. If you couldn’t find such reserves, there were plenty of people who had excess stored in their cellars, and if you asked around, you’d find someone who would sell you some salt for cheap. The standard rate was about the same volume of salt as the volume of fruit you were offering. But we did find two old planting sites within Sakura’s lot and dug up a good deal of salt there, and salted the fruit so we’d have it after our replanting.

After a bunch more cleanup work at Sakura’s house, including cutting down one tree that was completely dead and cutting it up for firewood, we planted ourselves, Sakura there and me in my spot at the library.

In the spring we awoke and ate a bunch of our salted fruit. I made visits to Sakura’s home to help out with cleaning up after the winter there, and also helped Poppy with similar chores around the library, where they weren’t already done. Even though we nominally were devoted to the books, those who lived on library grounds also tended to the plants we grew there, much like anybody would do on their own land. However, the library had many trees like on the land where I was born into this world, while most city people only had room for one or two trees.

I saw Marcia had made the appropriate updates to the visitor log, and I added an entry to my own page mentioning my new position, and when Sakura came into town, I had her update hers as well, showing where she now lived.

Writing

Eventually, I had the time to read through all the other books. Some of my questions were answered, some not. I decided my role here at the library was, for a while, going to be compiling a consolidated text about the life here. That meant learning what I didn’t know, but I started with what I did.

There were plenty of unused three-ring binders and loose-leaf paper stashed in the place in the library where I’d been directed to find it. Because there were many aspects to it and some might need a lot of rewriting, the loose-leaf pages were essential. Even though I would be writing in pencil, there weren’t any usable erasers after over 50 years, and with people mostly not writing anymore, they hadn’t developed an alternative. Minor changes would require crossouts and significant changes would require rewriting pages.

In one binder, I wrote down everything about how the rural people live, at least in the area outside of Cincinnati, including all the lore my friends there had passed down to me. In another, I wrote out my personal experience being born here and traveling to the city. When I started thinking about it, I found I had a remarkable memory for even the smallest details, and these reports ended up being quite long.

In a third, I summarized all the first-hand reports that people wrote down immediately after the change. We had several that had been originally written here, and more that the various connectors had obtained copies of via exchanges with ethertravelers coming from other cities. A lot of this was new to me, or mostly new, having only read about it during my first trip to the city, and it took more time for me to review and compare all the available documents, and a fair bit of rewriting. I ended up breaking it into different sections on several topics.

The Change Itself

A bunch of sources confirmed April 12, 1957 as the date it happened. Some people recalled seeing news reports that day about someone being granted a wish, before everybody was forced to take root, but there were no records of what the wish was, who wished it, or how or where the supposed wish-granting happened. Whatever happened to break electrical systems hadn’t happened yet. But the effect of the wish was to cause everyone to have the irresistible urge to find a spot to plant themselves, and the first metamorphosis took effect. This ran its usual cycle of several months, with all of them emerging from the flowers over the course of about 3 days that fall.

The new people were completely like the ones of today, except they had yet to acquire knowledge of how to live their new lives. They quickly figured a lot of it out, and had a lot more trouble with other bits. They couldn’t speak, but enough of them figured out the mind-speaking to pass it along to the others, and everybody was doing that within a day of the last people emerging from their flowers.

They realized pretty quickly that they were going to have to do without electricity and their technology (such as it was, given that it was 1957). The power plants were offline; they mostly used coal and oil power back then, and while you could certainly burn them, they didn’t generate as much heat as they used to, and the equipment just didn’t work. The combustion engines in cars didn’t work. They either didn’t start, or they didn’t run long enough to actually get the car moving anywhere before stalling. Even battery-powered devices didn’t work; the batteries generated electricity, but not at the voltage that was expected. Some people spliced together extra batteries with wires and were able to make some devices function, but mostly figured it wasn’t worth it. There weren’t going to be any more batteries, anyway, because the equipment that made them stopped working. Nobody seemed to understand exactly how chemistry changed, but it didn’t seem to affect the chemistry of life.

New Bodies

In no aspect of the altered society was there more conflict than over the new bodies. They had instincts which were very much at odds with the way people used to live, and there were both internal conflicts within a person’s own mind and actual physical altercations among people over what was right.

First off, people’s new instincts told them to go out into the sunlight, naked, and return to their flowers at night. But their old habits had them live mainly inside buildings, and to wear clothes. This was the most quickly resolved conflict, as those who refused to return to their flowers died after only a few days. Those who did return to their flowers, but stayed inside buildings a lot or covered themselves with clothes, found themselves weak, or feeling that they needed more food. They died also, but more slowly. The new bodies needed not only the energy from food but also from photosynthesis provided by their green skin.

Most people at first ate the food they already had, improvising fires for cooking when needed, and this was fine. But the food supply was disrupted, too; the farm machinery and the trucks to bring food from the farms into the cities no longer worked. Those who insisted on finding the kind of food they ate before did not survive, and only those who let their instincts guide them the most while eating survived the first winter. Those instincts had them basically eating anything that grew from the ground. Things that people would have eaten before were more appetizing, and often more nutritious food, but people could survive on almost any organic matter as food, just needing more of it.

Naturally, people figured out pretty quickly how to have sex. Many were curious about the stamen in their flowers, and seeing how they only had one hole down there, tried inserting it there. The ones who did quickly understood that this was sex, but felt a strong revulsion against the incest that mating with one’s own flower represented. People who were already paired up as married couples or engaged or dating became the first ones to swap into each others’ flowers for proper sex and produced the first seeds for new people. They were surprised when they felt the urge to push this thing out of their body and got what was unmistakably a large seed. But they had no doubt about what it was, or what to do with it. There was also no obligation to plant those seeds, but some did and became the first new parents. This knowledge quickly spread by word of mouth (a figurative mouth, since they didn’t speak that way anymore), and by one year after the change, though only a quarter of the original people still lived, almost half of those had had sex and planted at least one seed.

There were several different kinds of conflicts that came out of this. Some were upset that “children” were having sex, thinking of the new bodies that way because they looked that way, by pre-change humans’ perspective. This faction persisted for years until it became clear the bodies weren’t going to grow any, and that they emerged from their flowers at their full adult size and form, even though this was about the size of 9 or 10 year old children of the past. Some who were men before the change objected to the fact that they’d been turned effectively into women. Others basically told them “Nobody’s forcing you to have sex, but this is how sex works now.” And still others pointed out that they could invite others to have sex on their stamen and feel the male sexual pleasure they wanted.

The next generation grew up without any of these preconceived notions, and while they did need some education on things, they lived much more on their instincts and were much better off than the average pre-change person as a result. Some were surprised at how quickly these new people fit into society; there was no need to learn to speak or walk or any of the things babies did, as the new bodies had all of that from instinct.

Some people who had been doctors before the change studied bodies of some of the dead, which were widely available the first year. The main things they noticed were in the digestive system. There were multiple stomachs which were involved in not just digestion but also the separation of food the girl bodies could digest from that they could not. Everything not taken into the body eventually went down to the plant, but it was separated into several chambers which exited separately into what they called the cloaca, borrowing a term from certain animals which only have a single opening for everything like we now do. There was also, as I’d already figured out, a passage up from the cloaca which went into the first stomach to send up food from the plant to the girl body.

And as there had to be to produce the seeds, there was a pistil, the female plant reproductive system, and they used all the same terms to describe it: The stigma, the opening of the pistil within the cloaca. The style, the channel beyond it. And the ovary, where the seed was produced. The difference was that unlike most plants which depended on other processes for getting pollen into the ovary, we shoved the anther right down into the ovary to saturate it with pollen.

City Life

A fourth binder was dedicated to how city people lived today. It was the last one written because I spent time learning how city people lived by doing it first-hand. Most of the ways this had changed from what the first generation present during the change experienced had never been written down in any records here before.

I worked closely with Gina Reynolds (Chrysanthemum), the current connector. I went over with her all the subjects I was interested in, what I knew about them, what I didn’t know, and where I wasn’t even sure what I didn’t know. She was pretty knowledgeable, and answered some of it herself, and put me in contact with others in the city, more natives than ethertravelers, to learn what I wanted. In some cases, she didn’t have any source for the info at all, and asked the drifters, those ethertravelers who lived their lives by traveling between cities every few years, sharing information and often making copies of written records to take with them on their travels. Just knowing such people existed gave me a great satisfaction in the fact that they might carry my writings along and share them among people I’d never have the chance to meet myself.

They had saved a remarkable number of skills from before the change, and they knew what did and didn’t work. Since it was a society from 1957, they had only primitive electronics, including early televisions based on vacuum tubes. None of that worked, even if they could run on batteries, because the batteries didn’t work. They had figured out how to make hand-cranked generators, but they put out inconsistent power and couldn’t run any practical electronics, and they mainly used them to power what were essentially cumbersome flashlights. Basic electrical devices would work with the crank systems, but the other uses were mostly tools used in various trades, which usually worked by having one person crank a generator while a second person used the tool.

As I had surmised, they had mostly adopted a system like medieval guilds. Each person only needed to learn one valuable skill, and did that as a service for other people or sold the products of doing it to other people to pay for food and other needs. They took on apprentices, who in many cases helped provide crank power for electrical devices as they also learned the trade.

A major exception to this was the house-building trade. People in the cities usually wanted houses before they had learned enough to provide enough in trade to possibly equal a house. This was true of pre-change society as well, and was why mortgages were invented. Here and now, young people became temporary apprentice house builders or practiced some other profession which provided materials to the house builders and did so free of charge for a time, in exchange for getting a house of their own. There were metal-workers, who scavenged or traded for metal and refined it and shaped it into the pieces used to hold together the greenhouses, glass-workers who had passed along the art of making glass to perhaps one in every 50 city-dwellers, stone-masons, and even stone collectors who gathered both the larger stones used in the walls of houses and the pulverized rocks used in the mortar which put it together. These people went on to learn and practice other professions, perhaps going back to their first jobs temporarily when a neighbor needed help, for instance, replacing a broken window.

Reporting to Earth

One of the interesting things one ethertraveler reported was “Astronomy is wrong.” They meant that the stars were not arranged in the way they should be around Earth. The sun and planets seemed to match, but the stars indicate we’re somewhere else in space. Naturally, the natives didn’t see a problem; they had always known them this way, including a completely different set of constellations. Checking in my own library, I found that even the historical documents reflected these different stars. So we weren’t actually on Earth, but, as impossible as it seems, on a copy of Earth.

So I had Gina recruit some ethertravelers who were interested in astronomy to find the real Earth. I wanted to find a way to call home. Nobody ever had, either thinking we were already on Earth and there was no point, or that without working electronics or batteries there was no way. But clockwork devices worked, and we had people, mostly not ethertravelers, who had the skill to build them.

“We have manual typewriters. Why not a manual ether communicator? You press a key, and it sends the sequence of positive and negative signals corresponding to that letter. They left the timing of the code unspecified on purpose in case we had to do something like this; it always returns to 0 after each bit, so the timing of the bits can be loose.”

“But what about the connection?”

“Someone will have to hand-crank a device, but the records suggest electronics work on that sort of power, just inconsistently because they don’t get a steady voltage. We might have to use vacuum tubes and make a transmitter that fills a room, and figure out some kind of voltage regulator, but there should be a way to make it work.”

We started recruiting a whole team. There were a bunch of ethertravelers who indeed thought calling home was impossible, but were happy to do a specific task to help us. We could have made space inside the library, but nobody wanted to drag all the stuff far enough inside to where we could make space. Instead, we had several people who didn’t feel like they could help us otherwise join the home-building crew, and as their pay, we built a larger greenhouse-house on a part of the library grounds, with the central building twice as long and wide as the normal building and 8 rooms worth of greenhouse around all the sides. This would provide living space for up to 8 of us and a large space for the device to be built, with natural lighting reaching the inside much of the day.

Besides that, there were four teams. One team was working on the quantum device to locate targets and send and receive transmissions. One team was working on a clockwork device to encode letters according to the standard transmission code. One team was working with telescopes to locate our Earth in the sky. And my team was working on collecting all the information for the report.

About 10 years after I kicked off the effort, all the teams were reporting successes.

The ether team had managed to build two communication devices, filling a large portion of their building. They had hooked two people up to them, located one from the other, and sent a signal, which was at first a hardcoded “ABC”. The receiver had a pen plotter which traced the received signal, which could be manually verified. Somebody had found the plotter and cases of tractor-feed paper for it in Chicago, and the whole device worked on crank power, using an ink derived from the milkweed paint but with an ingredient that kept it from drying up in the reservoir.

The clockwork team had managed to convert a manual typewriter into a key-input device for the communicator. The typewriter was attached to a box which served as a table, but which had extra components. It could be plugged into the communicator, and they’d done a more detailed test sending the entire character set and confirmed the results off the plotter. The typewriter part also functioned, again with milkweed-based ink. It was useful for providing a transcription of what we had sent and helping us notice errors.

The astronomy team had located Earth. This was a monumental task, since at first we had no idea where to look. But they did it intelligently, assuming we were somewhere in the galaxy and looking for the supergiant stars which were visible galaxy-wide to help orient ourselves. We couldn’t be too far away, because Earth was able to reliably locate the planet to send people here. Once we narrowed it down to a small piece of the sky, the communication team had helped by aiming communicators in that direction to hunt for a target. Upon finding the target, the telescopes were able to confirm the existence of the stars that should be visible there.

My team had transcribed all the various binders into a single long report. But they told me it was too long.

“We have to type this out on modified manual typewriters which are tougher to use than even normal manual typewriters because of the extra attachments, and we have to do it with little girl hands. We can get maybe 30 words a minute. That’s 1800 words an hour, or 14400 in an eight-hour day you might ask a crew to work. You’ve written volumes; we think this would take 6 or 7 days to send. Cut it down to one day’s transmission.”

So I made the abridged version you are now reading. I couldn’t get it quite that short, but it is half the length it started.

There was one gap: We had no automated receiver. There was only the pen plotter. We couldn’t make an automated decoder with the level of technology on this world. So I prefaced the report with a notice about this, requesting they keep their responses brief. In 2025, with all the parts working, we sent off the report. It took nine hours to send all that we had, and team members had to move the antenna in accordance with the planet’s motion, occasionally stopping to re-establish contact. We sent it every day for 4 days straight until we detected their simple short response.

This also provided us with typed copies of the report, which some of our team took to the nearest cities. They were instructed to pass along the message that Earth had been contacted and to make copies of the report and send them along to the cities they could reach, so that eventually ethertravelers around this world would know our job was done. And we appended this info to the later transmissions of the report.

Receiving

Back on Earth, the report set off a frenzy of activity. At first, it was simply, “Planet 4276 reported back!” A planet that had gone 60 years since the first people were sent to it, and had had thousands of people sent there, was finally reporting their results. Somewhat surprising was that the reporter was only 13 years old. Not surprising at all was that it was a low-tech world with a low life span, making it more understandable that it had taken generations for an army of ethertravelers working together to figure out how to call home.

But as they read the report, many people were disturbed to find it was a Djinn World. Rumors of some of the ethertravelers landing on modified copies of Earth had circulated for years, but this report was hard to deny with its level of detail and the number of different receiving stations that got parts of it.

The Board

“Clearly, it’s time,” Gregorevich said as he addressed the board. “As much as we hate to admit it, this impossible-seeming Djinn World phenomenon is real. With the parts of four copies of this report hitting 11 different receiving stations, and several of them leaked so that there are fragments of it comprising almost a complete copy circulating the Internet, it’s time we came clean.”

“You mean admit that we hid the Djinn Worlds for decades?” one of the other board members asked.

“Yes, but tell the truth. We thought it was a hoax; it was too difficult to believe, and we have been targeted by hoax reports from the beginning, from before the first ethertravelers would have even had time to grow up. As the number of these reports increased, with their details varying by planet but consistent within any one world, there were only two viable options: Either we’ve been targeted by a massive unified conspiracy to hoax us, or there really are copies of Earth out there which have been created by some supernatural being, each modified in some way, sometimes small, sometimes, as with this one, massive.”

“And I suppose, release an official, consolidated version of the flower world’s report?”

“Not just that. Let’s go back and release some of the other Djinn World reports, and list them in the catalog of target worlds. There are at least a hundred that only have brief descriptions, so they’ll only be in the catalog, but some sent detailed reports. Flower world didn’t mention the Djinn at all, so let’s go back to the first one that did. Which if I recall was one where everybody was told as children that things are the way they are because the Djinn made it that way.”