The Pollinators of Eden (2 page)

As she stepped from the elevator and strode across the rotunda toward the officers’ mess, she was wondering so strongly why Paul had entrusted a message to his student assistant that she was beginning to suspect a plot: Hal Polino might have invented the entire stratagem simply in order to date her and enhance his prestige as a “Latin lover” in the eyes of other students. The idea was worth further analysis, she thought, staring down the beginning leer of a sailor who approached down the corridor.

As he passed, an air current created by the sailors passage in the corridor played against the tulip’s air chamber. Suddenly it emitted, low but piercing, a wolf whistle. She heard the sailor stop behind her, sensed him staring in disbelief, and she distinctly heard him mutter, “By the fondling flares of Orion!”

Freda was happy that the sailor could not see the grin which came to her face. He would have accepted it as a further invitation and, once the word was passed, she would be fighting off landing parties from the naval contingent attached to the station.

Commodore Minor was sympathetic over Paul’s absence and amused by her anecdote on the tulip and the sailor, but Captain Barron, who had joined them for lunch, was depressed. Two of his ratings had jumped ship on Flora. “Both ten-year men with families on earth,” he commented in amazement. “We expect to lose a few apprentices who bluff their way past Navy psychologists and join the Navy with the intention of getting off earth.”

“That would take a rather high order of intelligence, I imagine,” Freda said.

“Most of the deserters are eggheads,” the Captain commented, “who haven’t the guts to compete in a technological society.”

Commodore Minor whistled the first four bars of “Anchors Aweigh” into the tulip’s air chamber and fanned it with his hand, and the tulip responded with the same four notes. “Try him again, Commodore, and let’s see if I can harmonize.”

Singing to the tulip’s whistle perked the Captain up slightly, but his problem still gnawed.

“I can’t blame the boys. We’ve forgotten what pure silence is like on earth. It’s a pleasure to hear nothing but the sough of wind through trees or to look up at night and really see the stars, but now I’ll have to organize a search-and-seizure party for the Charlie Section. We can’t use heat tracers. The trees give off as much body heat as animals. Even probabilities based on the deserters’ profiles are out. One of them was a chief computer’s mate who knows how the brain operates.”

“Have you thought of bloodhounds, Captain?” Freda asked.

“Freda, that’s the first usable suggestion I’ve had!”

“Freda has a beautiful I.Q., also,” the Commodore said.

“What gripes me,” Captain Barron said, “is that this breach of discipline will put Flora off limits, and I wanted to recommend the planet for Navy Rest and Recreation.”

“If Paul Theaston breaches discipline, Freda,” the Commodore said, “I’m putting my chit in as a substitute for the deserter.”

“Flora isn’t that attractive,” the Captain demurred.

Freda appreciated their banter, but she wanted to set the record straight. “We scientists have a different discipline from the military, gentlemen. To us, Flora is an object, not a subject. We are as indifferent as a surgeon would be to the body of a beautiful woman he was operating on.”

“Now, Freda, I’m sure Paul didn’t feed your profile to a computer before he proposed, so he’s not completely indifferent to beauty. He even timed the flower to arrive during its blooming period.”

Age had not weakened the Commodore’s perceptiveness. She chided herself that she had not been first to recognize Paul’s consideration, and she, too, was sure that he had not fed her profile to a computer. She had not matched her profile with his, either, although she had secretly matched his with someone else’s—proving a compatibility which had assured her “Yes” to his proposal.

With relief, she welcomed Captain Barron’s remark, “But the blooms are permanent on the flowers of Flora.”

Analyzing her sense of relief, Freda reasoned that remorse was allied to fear, and fear was allied to doubt. Somehow Captain Barron’s words restored her belief in Paul’s insensitivity, which bolstered her confidence that he would never defect from earth to the planet Flora.

After Doctor Gaynor, in his official capacity as Bureau Chief, had welcomed the audience to the briefing, and after Doctor Hector had commenced with the films taken on the planet, Captain Barron’s remark kept running through Freda’s mind. If the blooms were permanent on the flowers of Flora, were the plants pollinated even as they were germinating? There was a logic to plant fertilization: a permanent bloom deviated from that logic as completely as human behavior on earth deviated from the logic of the reproduction patterns of other animals. She had to force herself to concentrate on Doctor Hector’s voice.

Concentrating on Hector’s voice was difficult. “Oohs” and “Ahs” arose from the audience when a new scene flashed on the screen, and the photography was distracting. Colors were far too exaggerated, either from poor camerawork or the quality of Flora’s sunlight. Freda suspected the former. The cameraman was running amok. He would sweep a full circle around the horizon to show the parklike landscape, tilt the camera up to catch a cloudscape, swing down to a grove of trees lining some valley brook in the distance, then zoom in to focus on a particular tree bole, as if conducting a seminar in the texture of tree bark. He did not show details of flowers, he composed still lifes of flower arrangements, shooting the same bed four or five times from different angles. His alternation of panoramic sweeps with static pauses was enough to give one a headache, and she made a note to herself to ask questions from the floor concerning camerawork at the next administrative meeting. She was not one to quibble with other departments, but Personnel should be restrained from employing cameramen who were obviously refugees from underground movie productions.

But she was too tactful to raise a question about her strangest and strongest distraction—Doctor Hector himself. In the classroom, his voice rustled with a flow of data so precise, valid, and constant that, when studying under him, she had developed the agility of her writing hand by taking notes. Now his remarks were as passionate and as irrelevant as a lovers. When she found a fact in the flow of his poetry, she pounced on it.

One fact came with startling abruptness during a peroration on swimming in the streams of Flora. “… floating down those tunnels of green lined by gray colonnades of boles, or trailing a phosphorescent wake at night, somehow renews the innocence of boyhood, its joys amplified by the dreariness of the years between, and with no bees to sting one’s bare behind. There are no insects on Flora.”

His remark shook her. If there were no insects, why did blooms exist at all? Why a visual lure for pollinators that didn’t exist? Of course, she would find out from the seminars given by specialists during the following week, but she liked to establish her 10 guidelines during the briefing. Hector was exasperating with all his fury and no sound data. Obviously the blooms were lures, but for what? Apparently for the members of Project Able, she thought ruefully, since they had inspired such poetry and camera art. Flora had sex appeal.

“A perfectly balanced plant ecology,” Hector was saying. “Absolutely no menace to life. You can’t fall down and break a bone: the turf’s too springy. You can’t starve: the berries, fruits, and nuts ripen continuously. An acid quality of the grass hastens decay, so the lawns are never littered. Since the axis tilt is slight, the climate is constant and there is no need for clothes in the temperate zones. There are no beasts of prey, no animals at all, in fact, save the one tropical spot on the globe, an island we named Tropica, where we will now go to join Paul Theaston.”

Freda was happy to flee the camp and its poetry to the no-nonsense comments of her fiancé. Paul would give her facts, she knew. Her pet name for him was “The Prince of Pragmatism.”

Getting to Tropica proved another problem in cinematics. In a helicopter approaching low over the ocean, the cameraman shot interminable footage from the moment the island’s sixteen-thousand-foot peak, snowcapped and trailing clouds, rose beyond the horizon. Project Able’s geologist, sounding awed, explained the tiered formation as they neared the island: a coral reef had formed around a volcano, and, at intervals of epochs, succeeding upheavals had lifted succeeding coral reefs, one above the other, to form a seven-storied mountain. Now its layers supported the parent cone, which soared eight thousand feet above the topmost plateau. Tropica was colorful, Freda admitted. With coral escarpments surrounding terraces covered with growth, it was pink and green topped by white above the blue sea.

She had found the design for her wedding cake!

As she expected, Paul let his camera do most of the talking. Her tulips were on the lowest level, and Paul had set up a sound-and-motion-activated camera to study a female tulip’s pollination, germination, and seeding. His only preparatory remark, apart from pure explanation, was simply, “What follows is the ii most remarkable example of plant-animal symbiosis I have ever encountered.”

Even that was an understatement. As the sound recorder focused on the flutings, sighings, and duckings normal to the tulip, Paul remarked, “As nectar clogs the seed duct, the tones change.” She listened, noting that he had underexposed the color of the tulips to avoid distracting attention from the process itself, and she heard a distinct tone change. The sounds in general grew higher-pitched, more melodious, although the lower notes gained huskiness.

Now the tulip was trilling in the breezes, piercing the air with beckonings so enchanting and resonant that she cupped her ear and leaned forward, fearing lest she miss a nuance or intonation. Then… some oafish enlisted man whistled a wolfs call, and laughter broke the spell.

Her vexation subsided when a furred animal bounced onto the screen, a shrewlike creature, roly-poly in its plumpness, with a face which bore the wide-eyed innocence of a koala bear. “I’ve named this the koala-shrew,” Paul said, as the animal, no larger and more attractive than a kitten, sat back on its haunches, its forepaws quivering, to listen. A breeze stirred the air chamber of the tulip, sounding a note sensual in its urgency and its invitation. Bouncing and tumbling, the koala-shrew scampered to the source of the sound. In a movement so deft and gentle it was dainty, the tiny forepaws reached up to bend the bloom downward. The koala-shrew snuggled its face closer to the beckoning flower, and a serpent’s forked tongue flicked out and slithered into the bloom of the plant.

When Paul replayed the process of pollination in slow motion, Freda averted her gaze from the screen. She felt she had witnessed a violation, and the faces in the darkness around her substantiated the feeling. They were leaning forward with the avidity of lewdness, like so many voyeurs in the shadows.

Later she watched as the seeds germinated and were expelled from the sac of the plant, to glide and loop for distances of forty feet, according to Paul. “They must strike the ground with enough force to penetrate the turf,” he added, “or the acid in the grass will destroy them.”

Freda was happy to get to the higher levels, where the orchids grew, some as tall as eight feet. The heavy, straight stalks were not characteristic of their terrestrial cousins, but the flowers and tendrillike branches were unmistakably and exquisitely those of orchids.

In the beginning, Paul’s lecture on the orchids was straightforward, without the continental rhapsodizing, although he skirted the edges of propriety with one observation that brought titters from members of the audience who grasped his meaning. “This is a segregated plant society. The female root system demands a growing radius of at least four feet from the stalk, so the males are relegated to the outer circles in less desirable growing areas. The bifurcated root system of the males demands less growing room, and an inspection of the system reveals tubular appendages, which reveals that the ancients used scientific precision when they named the plants ‘orchis.’ ”

When Paul entered the female groves, he pulled aside the tendrils to reveal a hiplike swelling on the stalk of the plant, approximately one-third of its height from the ground. “As Boyle remarked, it’s difficult for an orchidologist to refrain from comparing orchids with the animal kingdom. What you see here is a seed pod, but the cellular striations around this portion of the stalk suggest muscular tissue. A single seed at a time is germinated, and all births are Caesarean.

“I’ve not been able to determine how pollination occurs. On the mainland, seed-feeding birds and air currents do the job.” (Ah, there is the answer, Freda thought.) “But here the birds avoid the orchids, and the pollen nectar cannot be airborne. I am extending my tour of duty to determine how pollination occurs.

“I have named this species ‘hipped orchids,’ but there is another enchanting aspect to these flowers. When the girls are ready to be courted, the nectar makes them hang their heads and blush from shyness. Observe Sally.” He reached up and pulled 13 the flower down to the level of his own head, watching as the nacrelike shimmering of the orchid gradually diffused into pink.

“Oohs” and “Ahs” and spontaneous applause broke from the audience as the house lights went up. Freda arose and walked down the aisle, disturbed and pondering. Paul had not reached up and grabbed the stalk of the flower in his palm merely to lower it. He had cupped his hand around behind the stalk and drawn it down to his shoulder, in the manner of a man drawing a girl’s head down.

Preoccupied, Freda forced a smile when Hal Polino came over with a manila envelope. “Here are Paul’s notes on the Caron Siren tulip, Doctor, and his mash note to you. As I mentioned, there is a lengthy postscript he wanted me to add verbally.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“You’re supposed to read the letter first. The postscript is the reason for Paul buying our dinner. He doesn’t want the conversation overheard by technical people.”

“Then drop by the greenhouse later and pocket the money… By the way”—she added a sentence quickly to show her goodwill—“I want to thank you, Hal, for hanging the tulip.”