(09) Poppy Fields


"Opium poppies represent between forty and fifty percent of the gross national product of Afghanistan," Legggs said. She was sitting beside Jukebox in a Ford passenger van, turned back toward Archer Prax and his four personified aspects. "Under the Taliban opium production was outlawed and declined, but with the American invasion it flourished again, and Afghanistan now supplies up to ninety percent of the world demand. The United States decided to spend three hundred million on eradication, but only a hundred and twenty million to help farmers switch to legal crops."

"I thought it was the United States that had a war on drugs," Speedy said.

"Not the United States," Jukebox said, "the government. It's like the War on Terrorism; you create a threat, give it a name, and declare war on it. Then you can scare everybody and with the fear you can manipulate them into getting into an argument over guns or drugs or abortion, instead of voting to use the wealth for educating their children, providing health care for themselves, and creating a moral society. When immorality wants to trick people it always dresses up as morality."

"Say no more," Archer said. "It works the same way on Prax."

"Is that your home planet?" Jukebox asked.

"Planet? No, it's not a planet. It's more like a collection of stories that keeps growing and dividing into an increasingly sophisticated organism. But it doesn't have a physical existence like this planet."

Jukebox was driving over a dirt road, past fields of opium poppies. Along the rural road was a series of homemade billboards, in the tradition of Burma Shave:

"Best damned opium on the planet,"

"Smoke it, shoot it, snort it or can it."

"Two kilometers straight ahead."

"Roadside stand in black and red."

"Poppy Town."

"They're getting Americanized all right," Jukebox observed. "Nothing like direct marketing."

He and Legggs were still giddy from the experience of being without bodies while they were in the Mother Ship. The last thing he remembered, after they had come out of the passageway, was the laughter of the Masters of Prax. , "How are we going to get everybody in the Saab?" he'd asked.

"We'll take my car," Archer had quipped, which inspired an out of control hilarity amongst his troupe, and a puzzled crooked smile from Legggs.

"That's what I do," she said, "when I get anxious."

"You aren't anxious now?" Jukebox asked.

"They seem to have stolen my act," Legggs said. "The impulse is just gone now."

"We'll have to store the rentals," Archer said, and before Jukebox could remind him that he and Legggs were human, and not aliens in rentals, he heard Speedy say, "All aboard who's coming aboard," and the reality he had always known shifted to something unimagined.

Without a body, Jukebox had no senses. That is, he did not hear or smell or see or touch in order to know the world. His thoughts were not separated from the field which included a total of fifteen aspects. He knew instantly that he and Legggs, like Archer, were not one but five aspects. They weren't visible aspects but they were nonetheless aware of themselves as separate from his ego, and they had their own experiences and identities. He suddenly wondered how he could know anything at all if he had no sensory apparatus.

"It's a tasteless existence," Archer quipped, inside his mind. And then Jukebox had a sudden understanding that his individual identity was not an illusion, but that neither was the collective identity, in which individual boundaries disappeared, as had happened to him now. There was no question separate from the answer. He was in a place of direct knowledge. There were levels and levels of understanding, but they required no logical thought. They were just there.

"Holographic storage," Archer said. "Look at the poppies." Jukebox wondered how he could do that without eyes. But he was seeing in a different way, now. He was seeing with his understanding instead of his senses. The awareness was visible in some strange way, though there was no optical instrument directed toward the poppy fields. They were in some energetic symbiosis to the entire field of the planet's consciousness, and they were electric with energy. Instead of a field of flowers they were a stream of popping energy. For the first time he understood why they were called poppies.

"The earth has her own secrets and her own religion," Leggg was thinking, inside the commonality of the field. "The poppies are sacred. The poisonous pedagogy hates the earth's powers, and demonizes them. Without ritual, power plants become destructive because they are so powerful. The rituals have been crushed by laws."

Jukebox came out of his reverie as the Ford van he was driving approached a simple wooden stand, like a fruit stand, beside the road just ahead. He looked over at the field of flowers and wondered how it could be so different from Space. Something had shifted in him while he was in the Mother Ship. Now his wondering was inseparable from his understanding. He could "see" that the poppies existed in two different universes, just like he did. There was a spiritual and a material world, and in the material world they were flowers filled with opium paste. In the spiritual world, they were a religious mystery. Overhead, three jets roared low over them, breaking apart the stillness with their screaming display of power.

At the poppy stand an old Afghan was selling opium paste, which both Legggs and Jukebox assumed was what Archer and his crew were after. "No," Speedy said, "just the flowers, man, just the flowers."

"You just want the flowers?" Legggs asked. "You can't do much with just the flowers."

"You can't," said the slender, dark-haired woman called Cici. Her voice was full of insinuation so that the most innocent comment seemed pregnant with sexuality.

"We can," said Eva, her blonde, buxom companion. They were already wading into the poppy field, picking flowers and eating them like candy.

"These are excellent," Archer said. "Excellent." He popped a poppy into his mouth and chewed it with evident pleasure.

Jukebox and Leggs were following the five aliens into the poppy field, while the Afghan watched in stunned silence, stroking his beard and sipping a cup of opium tea.

"We pop them like candy," Archer said.

Eva said, "Poppy pops poppies."

Cici said, "This is the best rental I ever had."

Speedy said, "I think I've had enough."

"I agree with that," Jukebox said. "How do they make you feel?"

"Concentrated," Speedy said.

"Heavenly," Hans said.

"Sexy," Cici said.

"Calm," Eva said.

"Intense," Archer said.

When they had eaten all the flowers they wanted they paid the farmer and asked him how business had been. "Business is good since the Americans came," he said. "They understand the profit motive, and how to use public relations."

"What do you call yourself?" Archer asked.

"A florist," the old man said, grinning widely.

"Excellent." He turned to Legggs. "Why does America have a war on plants?"

"Because some plants take away pain," she said. "That power is reserved for patented pharmaceuticals."

"Let's get back to the Mother Ship," Archer said. "I want to talk to the American President."

"You can't get close to the President," Jukebox said. "He's protected by an army of dogs that were weaned too early."

"Well, let's beam him up to the ship and take him for a ride."

"Now that ought to make news," Legggs said. "The President gets beamed up into a flying saucer."

Posted: Thu - May 26, 2005 at 10:36 AM