Cross-Pollination
By Taylor Jones
Thank you for granting my request for indefinite assignment to the research team on Planet 108 as we continue to build a relationship with the bierzom. I hope this recording can bolster my future self’s patience, in addition to providing a first-hand account of the recent incident and subsequent communication breakthrough for posterity. I will try to be as precise as possible.

Forgive me if I take pauses. It is still a little difficult to speak.

I was forced to enter the flower on the sixty-fifth day of our ambassadorial deployment to Planet 108, due to a misunderstanding about the nature of post-mortem dissection. I take full responsibility for this misstep, as I broke protocol and went alone to the forest floor to examine a bierzom body that had fallen from the canopy after being killed and partially eaten by a predator. I was observed during my examination and then apprehended by seven bierzom who restrained me and transported me to the flower.

The flower is not technically an inflorescence according to Earth biology; it is an arboreal pitfall trap, most closely resembling a large pitcher plant. However, it does house reproductive organs, so I will call it a flower. The bierzom are only one-third the size of an adult human and thus the mature flowers can easily accommodate them, but most flowers would not be able to ingest a human body. However, the specimen they brought me to was particularly large and they were able to push me completely inside the pitcher, which closed its lid and hermetically sealed itself.

The pitcher was half-full of liquid; fortunately, the bierzom put me in feet-first. I was unable to stand to my full height, or move my arms much, as they were tied behind my back. A small amount of light entered the pitcher through its lid and walls. I struggled but was unable to make any holes in the fibrous material, restrained as I was. The pitcher began to secrete milky liquid from its walls that rapidly filled the interior chamber. It burned slightly. When there was no air left in the chamber, I intensified my attempts to escape, kicking the walls and pushing my head against the lid, but it did not yield, and I was eventually forced to respirate the liquid.

To my surprise, I did not die.
The bierzom have organs analogous to lungs; as we now know, they are much more like mammals than the winged insects they resemble. After a few extremely uncomfortable moments, I realized that the flower was providing me with liquid ventilation, as we also now know they do for the bierzom when they enter to communicate or shed their exoskeletons. The burning sensation disappeared. I began to calm. I calmed so quickly, in fact, that I suspected chemical intervention, but of course I was unable to do anything about it. My heart and respiration rates lowered dramatically, and I experienced a feeling of euphoria. I allowed myself to relax. I entered what I can only call a fugue state. That was when the flower began to speak to me.

It was not speaking in the way that I am speaking to this recorder. The conversation took place in seconds, in a flood of exchanged concepts that passed between us on a cellular level. I cannot translate it. But I will do my best.

[Are you comfortable?] it said. [Our sons have given us samples and thus we are able to approximate your chemistry and biology, but we have not interacted with one of you before.]

"Sons" was not the exact concept. It was more like sons/caregivers/mates/friends/sensory arrays/communicators. But given what we have learned about the biology, relationships, and emotions involved, I think "sons" is the most accurate approximation.

[You are very different from my usual visitors,] it continued. [I was wondering if one of us would have a chance to meet one of you. It is an honor. I hope I am not damaging you.]

I didn’t know how to respond to this, but my mind was instantly flooded with the experiences of the last hour; trying to explain to the group of bierzom, brandishing various tools or weapons, that their comrade was already deceased when I began investigating the body, and that their refusal to let us examine one of their dead before putting it into a flower to be digested was irrational, and that I simply needed more information on their physiology. They did not understand.

"You will be judged," they kept saying, through my imperfect translation device. "The flower will judge you." Then they pushed me in.

[I see,] the flower said. It seemed thoughtful, tinged with regret. [Forgive them. They are hasty, and not very intelligent.] This was said without judgement, purely as a statement of fact.

We had, indeed, been regularly frustrated in our attempts to communicate effectively with the bierzom, in part due to translator failures and in part because they appeared, individually, to be approximately as intelligent as a six-year-old human child. But they had rituals and oral traditions that, according to the linguists, went back generations and contained words for complex concepts that the bierzom themselves seemed barely able to grasp. It didn’t fit.

[Yes,] said the flower, with what seemed to be amusement. [We hold the knowledge and most of the thoughts. They are simple people, our sons. They are easily made happy, so we do not mind. We care for them, and they for us.]

[A symbiotic relationship?] I asked. The flower gave me the sense that she was pausing to think. At this point I began to think of the flower as female, because her relationship to the bierzom appeared maternal. This is obviously an oversimplification.

[Not in the way you mean it,] she said. [We are one species. Our sons carry messages in their exoskeletons between flowers. We encode them in the tissue when they climb in to visit. And when they rest within us to shed annually, we use the gametes in the shed exoskeleton to fertilize our seeds. The seeds drop to the forest floor and hatch into a multitude of young. Some are driven by instinct to return to the canopy and find a friendly niche where they become true seeds, ready to sprout into a young flower. Those who remain mobile and live to their first shed, we pass our knowledge to, as well as we are able considering their limited capacity to understand it. Their brains are not very large. They join the other mobiles and live their lives. We give them direction, and pass knowledge/memories/experiences/thoughts among ourselves by sending messages with them as they fly between trees and visit us. We only need hold them for a few minutes to understand each other and harvest the messages from our friends/colleagues/equals. We take care of them when they are injured or ill, and if they become too damaged or aged to live comfortably, we absorb them painlessly.]

She paused again.

[I have never had a direct conversation with one whose mind is so swift and full of thoughts,] she said. [It is fascinating. I speak much with my friends/colleagues/equals through my sons, but this interaction is remarkable. Your memories are copious. Your breadth of knowledge is incredible. I have learned so much.]

The physical structure of memory and thought is not well understood in humans, much less other species, and the way the bierzom transfer information is a current subject of intense study. But I was startled to realize, from the flavor of her communication, that she had read my mind like a book.

[Beautiful experiences,] she said. [Worlds beyond worlds. We had no way of knowing. We look inward. Our sons are the ones who travel out/use tools/build, and they have not travelled nearly as far as your people have. I cannot wait to share this with my friends/colleagues/equals.]

[Can you share your experiences with me as well?] I asked her. I was still feeling quite euphoric, and this interaction did not seem odd to me at all.

[I will try,] she said.

And on my next breath, I inhaled her life.

Humans have never experienced the feeling of cells dividing and growing, or the diffusion of water across membranes, the transformation of sunlight to nutrients, the rush of a pitcher lid closing on small prey. I did. I experienced the dawning of her consciousness, when her flower was finally large enough and the first mobile bierzom crawled inside her, bearing ancestral knowledge and greetings from her kin. I experienced the depth of her people’s slow understanding of forest cycles and continental shifts, her long life learning from her sons, from her tree, from the movement of the sun and stars, from the wisdom of her sisters. And I experienced her meeting me, saw myself through her —alien, wonderful, and precious— and mirrored her back to herself, her wisdom and her kindness, and we... Excuse me.

My apologies. I needed a moment. I'll continue.

I have always been, first and foremost, and sometimes to my detriment, a logical person. I'm not given to poetry or flights of fancy. So, the way our minds opened to each other is something I can't easily describe. But it felt as if we danced together, spiraling around each other like strands of DNA. We knew each other, in that moment, more intimately than any two humans have ever known each other. We knew each other’s mistakes, triumphs, pains, joys, and sorrows. They were utterly alien, one to the other; she had no framework with which to understand my often abortive attempts at relationships, for example, and I had no way to comprehend the satisfaction she gained from growing a leaf slowly into the sun, or from absorbing a mobile bierzom at the end of his lifespan. But we felt it all together, nonetheless. We shared all of ourselves. And even if we didn't fully understand each other's experiences, the feeling that grew between us during that moment that lasted a lifetime was delighted acceptance. We felt deeply, profoundly known.

It was the best thing I have ever felt.

We remained there in what I can only call ‘afterglow’ for an indeterminate time. Finally, she seemed to give the impression of a sigh, as if she regretted what she had to say next.

[I have adjusted the composition of the fluid surrounding you based on your body’s responses and my analysis of your biological processes,] she said. [But I am afraid it was initially too acidic. I appear to have caused some damage, in particular to your lungs. I am compensating for loss of function, but you will have to remain within me while I repair you.]

[I don’t feel any pain,] I said.

[I immediately identified and suspended those functions,] she said.

That, unfortunately, was when the crew located me by my tracker beacon, which I had activated when the mobile bierzom started acting aggressively toward me, and cut me out of the flower, destroying it in the process.

I did not feel any pain. I still do not. Those functions seem indefinitely suspended. But I was barely able to breathe after the fluid was expelled from my lungs, and my skin was damaged as if by severe sunburn. The crew subdued me, misunderstanding my wheezing attempts to speak and my distress as symptoms of my injuries. They transported me to the shuttle, put me on oxygen, and sent me back to the ship in orbit, where I was immersed in a nanotank for several days. My skin healed quickly, but I may never regain full lung capacity.

When I was able to speak again, I relayed my experience within the flower to the rest of the crew. They had suspended contact with the bierzom in the interim. It took some doing to repair relationships, even after we all understood what had happened. But we have since been able to start communicating with the older, larger flowers.
The volunteer who offered himself for a second attempt at communication was also injured, much as I had been. But he was allowed to remain within his flower while she analyzed her visitor, adjusted her internal chemistry, and healed the damage. It only took a few hours; even better than the nanotanks. Once he emerged unharmed, a mobile bierzom entered the flower and came out ready to transmit the information gained throughout the community via both spoken and unspoken languages. In this way it will be passed from flower to flower until they all carry the knowledge that will allow them to safely ingest and communicate with us. We are already learning so much. Their understanding of biology is cell-deep and incredibly advanced. It may be that they can give us cures for our most intractable diseases; in return, we can give them the memories and experiences we’ve gained out among the stars, where they cannot travel.

When I was more or less recovered, I went back to the site of the initial incident to see the bierzom I had spoken with. Her flower was gone, but the stem and rhizome structure, and the ‘nerve’ system within it, was undamaged. The mobile bierzom had tended to her, cutting away the mangled parts and applying a thick liquid, like sap, to the wounds. They tell me she will heal quickly. And there was already a new flower bud growing from her stem, as if impatient. It was barely the size of my finger. The bierzom say it takes about twenty years for the flowers to reach mature size; longer for them to grow large enough to accommodate a human body. I will have to wait quite some time to apologize to my love for the terrible damage we caused her. But I am very much looking forward to continuing our conversation.

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