We were using the baskets the other girls had made to carry things when necessary, but knowing they would be reborn from their new flowers soon, late in the summer when the reeds were tall, I planned a session to cut a bunch of them and teach the new group weaving. If possible, I wanted each of us, myself included, to make a new basket so each of us had one. But when I wanted to get started by cutting the reeds down, I found only one of our bone knives was sharp enough to do it. There was a steel tool that was supposed to sharpen them, but it had rusted and could no longer do that. So we made do with the one knife, but when this session was over, I knew I needed to go to the city.
When I told the others my plan, Sakura insisted on going with me. So the two of us bulked up on our meals. We filled two baskets with ripe pears (as that was the fruit which was then ripe), one basket to trade (though I expected, from the way the others had described it, that I would only need a small portion of these for the single tool I wanted, but maybe we could find other useful things as well) and one which would provide all the food we’d need going there and back.
At first we saw lots of fields like our own, clearly cared for by other groups of people, interspersed with areas nobody was tending to. As we got closer to the city we saw some odd structures. Each one looked like somebody had built a very small stone house and then extended something like a glass-and-steel greenhouse from one or more of the sides. Sometimes all four sides had this treatment. Later in the day we started seeing these more frequently, and occasionally in groups.
As the sun was going down, we came across a decaying wooden sign. I hadn’t seen any such signs anywhere else around my home nor along the journey, and as far as I knew, my people didn’t communicate with a written language, except by drawing pictures. And while there were some pictures on this sign, when I went up to it and pulled away the vines and weeds, I saw that in the middle of all the pictures, it read in English, “Welcome to Cincinnati.”
My mind was reeling! It should not be possible that I ended up back on Earth, a future Earth on which people had undergone some pretty massive changes. The ethertravel system pointed only away from the Earth, on purpose, to avoid accidentally depositing ethertravelers into human fetuses. And even if it reflected somehow back at the Earth, it should not have gone so far into the future that people had evolved this much. What would that take, 100,000 years? A million?
Then I realized that the sign would not have lasted that long. Some calamity must have transformed people rapidly into this form, probably not more than a century ago. But it explained why all the plants, apart from ourselves, are so much like plants from Earth. Why my friends didn’t just have flower names, but ones I recognize as Earth flowers. Why there are bears. This is Earth.
It was at that point I figured out why Sakura wanted to go, which was the same reason I wanted to go. After she saw my interest in the sign, and saw me mouthing the words (we didn’t have voices, but I moved my lips as if I wanted to speak in the human way), she asked me, using the private message kind of communication of the people here, if I was an ethertraveler. Of course there wasn’t such a concept in the speech of this place, so it came out more like “Jonquil, are you a hairless ape who came from another world, beamed across space, and turned into one of us?”
I told her “Yes,” and I wrote in the dirt in English, BOSTON to tell her I was from there. Sakura wrote out PARIS in the same way. It turned out that we did not have a language in common except the mental language of this world, but we still managed to share a lot as we walked into what was supposedly, at some time in the past, the city of Cincinnati.
At first, the city didn’t look any different from the region outside the city. The land was divided into fields like ours, typically smaller, with well cared-for fruit trees and other food crops, and each having one of the houses with greenhouse extensions on three or four sides. They were denser, and soon we reached a point where the entire landscape was filled in this way, each field having stones or logs used to mark its boundaries with others. The path, barely noticeable as a space with less grass growing when we had started, and which consisted of enough dirt and pebbles for the two of us to walk on side-by-side at the sign, was now clearly heavily used and there were many other paths connecting with it heading away from the river and deeper into the city. There were some taller buildings visible in the distance, though a far cry from what Cincinnati looked like in my time. I assumed that the nature of every person needing some green space had caused people to spread out.
The small houses made way for longer ones, rows of them connected together with double-wide rows of greenhouses attached. Some of these came quite close to the path, and we could easily see inside where each greenhouse contained one person’s flower, and sometimes some food plants.
Pretty soon, the paths became a grid of streets, still not paved, but laid out like you might have expected paved streets to be on Earth. We came upon what was clearly a parking garage, which looked entirely out of place due to the complete absence of any sort of motor vehicle. Along the outside of the first elevated level, facing the street, a sign had been painted, in pictures, suggesting this was a place for travelers to rest during the night. It was getting dark, so Sakura and I went in.
Where there should have been an asphalt parking lot on the ground, there was only dirt, but the concrete structure above it was intact. And though there was no parking lot, there were rows of small stones laid out in the dirt, exactly how I would have expected parking spaces to be divided. In the two rows of spaces nearest the edge, which were still lit enough for me to see them, a dozen or so girl forms each occupied one of the spaces, most of them in groups of two or three adjacent spaces. Some of them only had a few bags of goods as we did, while others had many bundles and wheeled carts full of goods.
We assumed the people lying in adjacent spaces were traveling together, and found a place where we could lie in adjacent spaces without being next to anyone else. We put our bags down and then lay next to them. Soon, the sunlight ceased, and it became pitch black. It felt weird to both of us to sleep outside our flowers, but it didn’t seem there was anything better to do. Naturally, the city closed down at night as the residents returned to their flowers, and it was almost night when we arrived.
We awoke at the first light of dawn, as our fellow travelers did. The ramp up to the next level had been closed off when we arrived, and now we could see a wall that had been erected there which had a sign painted on it with pictures we took to mean “Daisy’s scrap metal”. Presumably, the entire rest of this parking garage was full of the hulks of old, rusting cars which people scavenged for metal to make tools from.
Following those who took away their cartloads of goods, we soon came upon an open block where people were setting up what looked like stalls in a marketplace. Sakura and I watched people set up and ate a few of our pears, and it became clear that is exactly what it was. So we went over and asked the first person we saw about where we could get tools to sharpen bone knives, and she directed us to look two rows in, where in the middle of a row of other stalls we found what was clearly the right place. Showing the shopkeeper what we had, and asking for a new one, she produced one, offering it in exchange for our rusty one and 12 pears. As others appeared to be haggling, I got her down to 8 pears along with our old one, and tested it out right there by sharpening one of the dull knives we brought until it proved capable of slicing one of our pears in half with no difficulty whatsoever.
As we made our way out of the marketplace, we asked the same girl by the entrance where we could learn about history, which I described rather as “how things were before they became the way they are now.” She directed us to go 5 blocks one way and 3 blocks another from where we were, and there we found a large three-story brick building which had CINCINNATI PUBLIC LIBRARY painted on the side in actual letters, unlike most of the signs here. When we got close enough, we could see there were two or three small holes in each letter. I pointed them out to Sakura.
“There had probably been metal letters up there originally, and at some point they scavenged them for the metal and used paint to redraw the letters.”
When she asked about the building, to my surprise I was able to find a concept for a book in the mental language here. I translated the words to Sakura as “building with many, many books” and she indicated she understood.
There was, below that, an analog clock and a date display that appeared to have months and numbers on wheels, and spelled out “SEP 3 2013.” The date didn’t make any sense. How could I have gone into the past? And how could the past be so different from the past on the Earth I came from? A bored looking girl was standing by the entrance to the building but she perked up on seeing us approach. I repeated my query about history to her.
“That’s all that’s here. Books from the old times. Can you read?”
Just as I was able to find a concept for a book, there was a concept for reading a book, which she used.
“Yes,” I answered, while Sakura shrugged, since she actually did not know much English.
“Good. Few people can, these days.”
She stepped into the building for a moment and came back with a device she demonstrated was a sort of mechanical flashlight. Turn a crank and it produces light.
“Three pears for each person entering, including rental of one of these.”
I didn’t haggle with that price, and handed the girl six of our pears.
“Where can we find books about the change, when people started having flowers?”
The girl said, “There is an area labeled for newspapers, but all the newspapers long ago rotted away. There are books about the change there, though.”
At least, I think newspaper was the concept she was trying to get across. Holding up one hand, I wrote out with one finger against it the capital letters NEWSPAPERS one at a time, and she confirmed I understood her correctly.
“Last question,” I added, pointing up at the side of the building. “Is the date correct?”
“As close as anybody knows, based on the dates people estimated when they awoke after the first transformation after the wish. Time has been kept in one manner or another since then. We maintain that clock to keep track of time nowadays, as few people bother now but some still care.”
“Thanks,” I told her, and Sakura and I went into the building. I didn’t know what this wish was, but I hoped to find out. The librarian brought two lights, but we just took one. It was awkward carrying our remaining fruit and operating the light, but I carried both bags, letting Sakura operate a light for both of us.
We easily found the area labeled for newspapers. As she had said, there were no actual newspapers in it, but about a dozen handwritten books. Some of these were diaries, some binders with loose leaf pages. The binders only had pages relevant to the event; the diaries sometimes had pages before the event fastened together with paper clips or binder clips, as if to say, “Ignore this info, this was somebody’s private memories unrelated to why this diary was preserved here.”
Most of them had similar info, which I translated through the mental language to Sakura the best I could. April 12, 1957 was when some sort of wish was made, and sometimes there was an entry for that date, though what this wish was, I didn’t see. Every person that evening had the urge to put out roots, and did so in any convenient location, but most of them outside their homes. The subsequent entries did not have dates, for the people did not know the date, initially, but the more diligent diarists labeled the entry Day 1, and numbered the subsequent days likewise. It was fall when they awoke, and they found a transformed world. Electrical devices no longer operated, nor did devices that burned fuel to produce mechanical motion, like the engines in cars. Simple mechanical devices still worked. People, whether they were male or female originally, now had the two-part bodies, the green-skinned human-like parts female, and the flower parts male. Within the first year, three-fourths of the people died mainly due to their inability to adapt, but the remaining people mostly survived, learning that the instinct people felt to eat one’s flower or let it consume and rebuild your human body when either body was damaged was the correct way to live.
I skimmed through them, looking for interesting bits, because I was sure I did not have time to read them all. There were sections covering the various kind of adaptations people had to make. Most of these were already things I understood, but it was interesting to read how people made the transition. And some of the people were initially prudish in thinking their girl bodies were children and should not have sex yet. Within a year, people had figured out there was no such thing as children anymore. The girl bodies never get breasts because they never breast-feed; they never get wide hips because they give birth to only a seed the size of a golf ball, not a human infant. They are fertile from the day they hatch from their flowers, and the only real prohibition is that you don’t impregnate yourself.
One book was different. It had had the word DIARY on the cover crossed out and VISITOR LOG penciled in beneath, and next to it was a supply of pencils and a mechanical sharpener with a hand crank. I opened the book to find this written on the first page.
Michael Fitzsimmons, now known as Bluebonnet, placed this book here [”June 3, 1977” was written above this with an insertion mark]. I am an ethertraveler, and most of the people left on this world who still read are ethertravelers. While there is no shortage of people, the new lifestyle here was hard on the people from before the change, and few of them still live.
The technological path humans followed ended here at the wish, and the flower-people followed a different path, based on using the limited kinds of technology which still work to make their lives better. I have been on this world twelve years, reincarnated seven times so far. That entire time they have been tearing down parts of the city, buildings nobody lives in. I used to live here:
[There was a hand-drawn map, indicating the library and his old home and the number of blocks between them.]
I claimed the library as my home in 1976 to keep it from being torn down, and devoted my life to maintaining it. I scavenged the book, pencils, and sharpeners from homes as they were being torn down. There was an amazing amount of useful stuff within them, with first rights to claim small items from abandoned buildings going to those helping to tear them down. I found several books of various sorts where people had written down their accounts of the change after the wish, which I placed here in lieu of newspapers, the actual newspapers from 1957 all being a pile of useless shreds of paper by the time I arrived. I also found dozens of other blank books and writing supplies, all of which I placed at 901.2 in the Dewey Decimal stacks, where there is a whole shelf of otherwise empty space at the end of a row. I added the date display to the clock on the front of the building in 1979, setting it based on dates other non-ethertravelers have maintained since the awakening after the wish.
In a different hand, below this, it read:
Michael no longer lives as of January 27, 1991. - Byron
I explained what I was reading to Sakura in the mental language, just using “year” and pointing to the year in the text or “girl-body” and pointing to the old Earth names, and making do in a few other places where I couldn’t find the concepts. The next page had another entry.
Elisa Brokaw, now Chicory, visited March 30, 1980. Good to know other ethertravelers exist. Not good with English, sorry. Live here:
Another map followed and was all that was left of that entry, save for text from the same other hand as before.
Elisa moved or died by February 17, 2001. - Byron
Three other entries followed with similar minimal amounts of information, until finally I came to this entry:
Byron Greene visited here July 7, 1986. While Michael continued to maintain the library, I took it as my role to connect the ethertravelers. I visited those who had signed here and kept track of who was still alive and present in Cincinnati, trying to visit each at least once a year. I was amazed I was at least the sixth ethertraveler within 10 years to arrive in Cincinnati; that must mean there were thousands of us around this world.
His entry had several postscripts, going onto the next page. It then continued after a page where somebody else had signed. After several more such interruptions (now spaced farther apart in time) was this entry:
Byron Greene found Michael Fitzsimmons dead January 27, 1991 and took over as the Librarian. Marla McHugh has agreed to take over the role of Connector.
And Marla made several other entries, reporting various pieces of info learned from meeting with various ethertravelers. In 2005 Byron died, and Peter Blanken (Water Lily) took over as Librarian, who was apparently the one I met out front now, as there were no more changes in position noted.
There were a number of other entries from other ethertravelers. In recent years there were a lot of them, corresponding with a greater sending of ethertravelers from Earth. At this point, some of them did not bother with trying to write in broken English and just wrote their entries in German, French, and Russian. I had Sakura read the two French ones for me, but there was nothing interesting. Most of them at this point were just logging their presence, but increasingly many of them lived outside the city, giving directions to those places, and visited only after one or more years of being on this world.
We made our own entries, with my rough diagram of the route to our home. John Mullins and Jean Bardot, which I thought was funny, knowing “Jean” is the French equivalent of John. Then we returned to Peter.
“Water Lily?” I inquired?
“Yes?”
“We might at some point want to move closer to the city.”
“Where are you living now?”
“Most of a day’s walk downstream along the river and up one of the tributaries.”
“Oh, that’s far. I can understand why you might want to live closer if you intend on coming here with any frequency.”
“How would we go about getting one of the greenhouse-houses? I was thinking of living in the area beyond the city limits where it’s still country-like, but with one of the houses for protection from the weather.”
“You find a vacant home, you take it. Make sure there is no live flower anywhere on the lot or in any of the greenhouses. Do you know what new flowers and regrown ones look like when they are small?”
“Yes. Some of my friends back home had to replant after a bear attack, and we also mated and made new flowers.”
“Good. If there is nothing like that, then you can plant yourself there and claim it. If you can’t find one, you can plant yourself in an empty lot. There are plenty of those. In that case you’ll need to take a job here in the city making houses. Several different jobs are possible, and you have to work for two years building them to get one for yourself, with one greenhouse side. You’ll still have to find your own food during that time, too. After that you’re free to just go back to living like you do now and not working for anybody, or you can take on some other job. Or you can keep working and they will install more greenhouse sides for you, one per year of work.”
“So the ones I saw with greenhouses on 4 sides need 5 total years of work to pay for.”
“Right. Not necessarily all by the same person, if you have a family. And having at least one partner is a good plan; your partner can manage food while you work making houses or vice versa. Of course, some jobs come with housing.”
“I noticed you have the greenhouse attached here.”
“My predecessors provided three units worth of greenhouse space which I would make available to anybody who devoted themselves in any capacity to the effort here - whether you were a pre-determined replacement for me, the connector, someone dedicated to acquiring more books, or even one dedicated to writing up more of the way things are. Currently the only other person living here is a connector, but she’s out connecting with people.”
“Certainly something I’d consider when I am ready to move back here if it’s still available,” I replied. “But we have to be going.”
As we left, Sakura spoke to me privately, “Do we really have to be going already?”
“No, but I want to get myself away from here because I could spend all day here. Or all week. But I’ll die for sure if I do.”
“Right. You find the history interesting.”
“Definitely! This society went through an incredible upheaval. I read how everybody was sent into a forced planting and emerged as one of these green girls, but then what happened? The people had clothes they could have worn, but didn’t. Do we derive nutrition from photosynthesis through our green skins? Did people who wore clothes die? Or did they wear clothes until the old clothes wore out, and decided it was not worth the trouble to make new ones? And what about language? Was the new mental ‘speech’ so convenient everybody immediately abandoned the old language? Or did it phase out over time? Those log books only prove ethertravelers still spoke English, or sometimes other languages. Did other people still use the library in the years or decades after the change? And how did they handle the loss of technology? It looks to me like it set them far back and they may have abandoned technology and invention for a while, only to have a new crop of inventors come along later to create greenhouses and the hand-cranked lights Peter provided.”
At least, this was what I tried to say to Sakura, but several bits of it were not clearly translatable. She stopped me several times and I explained concepts in other ways.
When I finally stopped, she replied, “Yes, I see. You still have lots of questions in your mind of how this Earth got from the history you know to where it is today.”
“Yes. I could spend my life trying to learn these answers, even though I’m under no obligation to do so, and likely have no way to ever send the answers off-planet. I could at least write them down. Maybe some of those other books already have them written down, but I just didn’t have the time to read them. Not to mention books in other cities. If Cincinnati survived as a city, likely cities and towns all over the world survived in some form. Hundreds of cities comparable to this one just in the United States, thousands around the world where there might be answers historians have written down, but I’ll never be able to travel to see them all.”
“Not to mention the tools,” Sakura added. “Who knows what other kinds of tools people have learned to make with the limited technology possible?”
I continued, “I bet a lot of it is like medieval guilds. Each person only has to develop one useful skill, and most of them pass on that skill to a small number of the next generation by directly working with them. The people outside the city have chosen to be farmers; they trade their produce for other useful stuff. People in the city regrow their flowers every year or two, which is an opportunity to move. They move to wherever there is somebody they can learn from when they find such a person, and later move to wherever there is a need for the skill. Possibly even to other cities. They said people can travel for up to seven or eight days after eating their flower before they have to plant themselves, and they go day and night. You can easily get 25 or 30 miles in a day while sleeping half the day. That would mean people could travel perhaps 400 miles when replanting themselves, enough to get between cities almost anywhere if you knew where you were going. Not only can they carry technologies to cities that don’t have them, but they can carry news in their minds, too. That’s probably how the long-distance communication system works in this world.”
“It might take 10 years to cross the country, but they’ve been at this for many times that. I see what you mean. And just like your neighbors knew how to get to Cincinnati, I bet everybody knows how to get from wherever they live to one city, and people in the cities know how to get to the other nearby cities, even if those travels are so long they can only do them by eating their flower and semi-permanently relocating.”
“Yes. And we can do the same with ethertravelers if we have enough. And with the recent numbers, we probably do.”
“Wow! Well I know what you’re doing later in life.”
“Yeah. But we need to get back to our flowers now.”
We were outside the city before it was dark, and we spotted one of the stone houses that was unfinished. There were no greenhouse sides and no doors on it, just open doorways on all four sides. Was it damaged? Scavenged for parts? Never finished? Whatever the case, there were no people-flowers on the lot and we decided to camp there. While people who have eaten their flowers might have the energy to go day and night, we still needed sleep.
As we lay there before we fell asleep, Sakura asked me, “So we’re the females and our flowers are the males. And you say we can have sex already?”
“Yes. I did it in my first year. Each flower has two stalks. You can probably picture them for your flower. The large pipe that you sit on every night and use to exchange nutrition and eliminate wastes, and the other one you have probably not touched. That other one is the male part. The end of it, the anther, goes completely inside the body of another girl-form who comes to your flower for sex, and finds its way to her ovule.”
I sent the image of a regular flower’s ovule, but Sakura indicated that she understood.
“A day later you give birth to a seed which you can plant in the ground to start growing a new person-flower. It’s not at all like people on Earth giving birth. It’s dry and feels most like pooping, a hard constipated poop.”
It took quite a bit of work to express that last bit in thoughts from the mental language, but Sakura understood. “I get it. The people here don’t do that so they do not have the concepts for it.”
“Yes. You are the only person I have ever shared that thought with.”
“Do two girl bodies ever have sex? You know, like...”
I think Sakura was trying to say lesbians, and failing, because again it was outside the system here.
“Our neighbors never mentioned it, and since we cannot find a concept for it, I think they don’t. But we could try. It’s pretty far inside, but the opening is pretty large and you could probably fit your arm inside.”
“Let’s try.”
“Sakura, you go first. I’ve had sex from this side before, so I’ll be able to help you find the right hole inside me.”
“OK.”
Sakura put her hand at my hole, curled it up to fit in, and slid it inside. Then she started to explore. I told her, “No, not there. Not that. Nope. Yes, that one! Go in there.”
“So it’s the one all the way in the front. And the wet one,” Sakura responded.
I laughed (across our private connection) at that comment, but it was quickly replaced by something more the equivalent of moans of pleasure. Sakura turned so I could pleasure her too, and we kept that up until we passed out, sleeping the night with our arms deep inside each other. If anybody had come by at dawn, they would have seen us being nasty - assuming this was actually considered nasty in this world now - but there was nobody there. We awoke at dawn, extricated ourselves, rinsed off at the edge of the river, and after confirming our directions, proceeded on our way.
What we did discover, though, was that we had apparently used a lot of energy doing that, and the pears that should have lasted us until we got home ran out several hours early, and we ended up picking fruit in some of the unoccupied fields before we got back to ours (leaving for the occupants any fruit anywhere in sight of a person-flower). It was good to know if we ever did that again we would need to eat more, and to avoid it during times energy conservation was critical. I saved all the seeds, pits, or whatever from any fruit we didn’t have at home in hopes of planting some of them.
We got back home mid-afternoon, and I sharpened all the knives. Sakura and her sisters took them out and cut down some reeds to ensure they all worked well. But Sakura and I rightly claimed tiredness, ate a good meal, and went to rejoin with our flowers early. When we awoke, we found the others had put their skills to use, making two more baskets (working in pairs, which they found easier when doing the large weaves needed for our fruit baskets).
It was three days later when the reborn Lily and Pansy awoke, with Begonia the next morning, and Petunia and Rose (who were two days behind the others due to my training sessions) on the day after that. They all enjoyed meeting their children, and apologized for not being around the first several months of their lives. They were impressed I’d gone to the city, and even more impressed Sakura had gone with me.
There was plenty of fruit the next couple months, so everybody ate well, and we planted some more trees, a plum and a fruit I did not have a name for but which was delicious, using seeds we saved from the last part of our journey. But soon, it was time to prepare for winter again, and my flower was still holding up, so I stuck with it.