The Pollinators of Eden (26 page)

“You speak of them in the past tense,” she said. “How do the orchids pollinate without them?”

“Well, they could use hand-pollination with their suction leaves.”

“But they don’t,” she said. “Quit hedging. What else have you found?”

“The scream I heard that night. When I reached the spot where the blood was, the only orchid uprooted was a dead stalk. They had killed the pollinator while it foraged for fair game.”

“Why should they turn against the animal?”

“It was dangerous and inefficient. There was no true animal-plant symbiosis, but an ecological cold war.” He raised his eyes to the snow cone, and there was a steel in their grayness. “Someday, with my sons, I’m going up to the forest and show the pigs how men can kill.”

She turned on her side and raised her head to him. “You are still evading my question. If the orchids are killing their pollinators, how can they pollinate without them?”

He sat up and looked down at her, his eyes burning with a zeal that reminded her, more than ever, of a young Moses, but when he spoke his voice was gentle. “Dear girl, they’ve found the ideal animal for their purpose. We are the pollinators of Eden.”

Freda rolled onto her back and looked up at the snow cone, swept free of clouds and gleaming in the sunlight. She and Paul could establish a new race on Flora, one reared in brotherhood with nature. Awareness and pride in her fecundity gave the prospect charm, particularly for a girl who had spent most of her life in Southern California. She lamented young ladies who married organization men and went into split-level houses, never to come out again; and she herself did not care to be numbered among those living dead. But there were technical considerations.

“What of our findings? Our records would be lost to science.”

“Let them,” he said. “I’m tired of accumulating facts for the sake of facts. Let science be lost if it doesn’t serve us.”

“Very well. Out goes science, and culture too. But we have a more immediate problem. Granted the Botany has neither the detectors nor the manpower to find us, there is a pack of bloodhounds aboard—”

“Which would last five minutes among the groves.”

“Are the orchids hostile?”

“Not unless I want them to be. In Eden, the word of Adam is law.”

She had waited to spring the hardest question last “How can I find time to be a race mother, or the inclination, after a night out with the orchids?”

“Pollination by proxy,” he answered, grinning. “Susy was the third leg of a three-legged stool.”

Freda’s last night on Flora was a night to remember. At Paul’s suggestion, and riding on his shoulders, they spent the remainder of the morning looking for the rare bright-red bloom of an orchid lover. “The one I spotted for you yesterday was past his prime,” Paul said, “but it was a rush assignment, and a man can’t truly select a lover for a woman. There are so many subliminal factors involved.”

After an hour’s search, she found a Prince Charming among the orchids, almost in the corner of the terrace formed by the river’s canyon and the sea wall. It was a gorgeous specimen, young, and fully six inches taller than its closer neighbors. Paul let her guide him over to the plant, at his suggestion, so she could look at it, get acquainted, and find food to feed her fantasies.

She tingled as she looked down on the sleeping prince, and though it was completely dormant in the sunlight, it seemed to quiver with eagerness when she laid her cheek against its petals and tweaked its pollen-engorged stamen. “Get me away from here, Paul, before this thing wakes up,” she squealed in mock fright, kicking him in the ribs.

That evening for supper she ate only half a segment of the cane stalk from a portion near the roots, where the aphrodisiac qualities exceeded the soporific. They wove their canopy against the moonlight early, so she would be rested, and Paul counseled her on attitudes, banishing the old taboos and shearing away inhibitions with his words. Yet nowhere in his indoctrination did he deny the spiritual values inherent in the ritual, and he urged her to see the affair as a communion and to look upon herself as a sacred chalice for the fluid of life. He counseled her on humility, saying, “Aid the young and immature with your experience, and help the old with your strength.”

Briefly he discussed their means of communication, touching tendril to tendril, and told her that an orchid needing her could find her within five hundred yards. They were bedding down within fifty yards of the chosen one because there was no point prolonging her suspense. “Once the tendrils lift you and the courtesans carry you to their prince for the night, there is no turning back. So relax and enjoy it.”

So it was that she came to her second communion by moonlight and found the consummation exceeded the fantasies she had prepared for it. She was lifted to heights of adoration by her surging acolyte and lowered to rise again, and again, but now no dream images cloaked her delight, and she well knew what was up and who was down. As the third and final tidal wave bore her toward the second moon, she felt an expansiveness of psyche, a plumbing to depths never reached before, and she thought, “If this be treason…” but the thought was whipped to spume by nonverbalizable tremors that spun the loved and the lover into homogenized ecstasy, and she sank with a sigh into the profound sleep of repletion.

Freda was awakened to bright sunlight by the sound of bacon sizzling on a frying pan. She stretched luxuriously and turned to Paul to find him gone. Still yawning, she leaned out and looked down the path, and grabbed her machete.

Three human beings were approaching, clothed in rubber guards and masked in plastic bubbles. Two of the waddlers carried cylinders on their backs. As they advanced, they sprayed a fine mist to left and right, keeping the third man, who was armed with a rifle, between. In the split second before she acted, her mind comprehended the full horror of the scene. Sometime during hibernation they had planted a transponder under her flesh, probably in her earlobe, and they had tracked her, listening to every word she and Paul had spoken. Her words had branded her a defector, and her orchids, now white and brittle beneath the spray of liquid oxygen, were powerless to protect her as they themselves died beneath the frost.

“Murderers!” she screamed, and charged, brandishing the machete in her naked fury, as she hurled herself at the trio. She saw the central figure raise the rifle, and she swerved but swerved too late. The tranquilizing pellet struck her thigh with the impact of a truck, crushing her into oblivion.

“How many fingers?” a voice asked.

Freda focused her eyes. “Three,” she said.

“What is your name?”

She was beginning to see a face behind the voice, and above the face a receding hairline. “Freda Janet Caron.”

“That will be all, nurse,” the doctor said. She could see him plainly now, seated on a straight-backed chair beside her couch. Beyond him was a door opening onto a white-tiled bathroom. She saw a desk with a bookshelf nailed onto the wall behind it, a bed with a lavender counterpane, and a green carpet on the floor. Turning her head, she saw a high window which admitted haze-filtered sunlight. There were bars on the window.

The doctor looked up from the pad on which he had scribbled a note and said, “Freda, my name is Doctor Campbell. I am a Platonic psychiatrist, and you are in the neuropsychiatric ward of the Institute for Space Ailments at Houston, Texas. You have suffered a traumatic episode, and I am here to help you. You have been undergoing deep analysis, under narcosis, since your arrival two days ago. Following the methods of Plato, I intend to ask you questions. Your answers will lead to self-enlightenment. Platonism holds that sanity is innate in man’s mind.”

“Then I must be insane!”

“Insanity is a loaded term, Freda. Let us say your attitudes need adjustment. You suffer a mild earth-alienation induced by the transference of your affections to another planet. In Freudian terms, your libido is fixated on the Planet of Flowers, but the fixation is indicative of a deeper malady still. However, Freda, your libido itself is somewhat unique, since it has an entire planet as its love-object, a condition known to the trade as ‘Nymphomanic omniphilia,’ meaning a passionate love of everything.”

She cut through his pedantry with a question. “What’s the ‘deeper malady’?”

“Humanism. It’s a social aberration. Basically, you’re antiorganization; proindividual, anticivilization; pronature, nonaltruistic; hedonistic. Since the function of society is to function, you are similar to a left-handed screw in a machine using only right-handed screws.”

“You make it sound awful, Doctor.”

“ ‘Serious to grave’ is the preferred terminology, Freda; but we know an awful lot about you, and we think we can help. Now, listen carefully to my questions and take your time answering.”

Campbell’s analytic technique was a subtle exercise in dialectics. He began by asking her simple questions that explored her attitudes toward status: would she prefer to be mistress of a house or a serving maid? He related his status questions to mobility relationships, which led her to defining freedom as action initiated by free will. Leading her with questions, he made her admit that pollinators in a plant-insect symbiosis did not behave with free will. “It is self-evident, then,” he declared, “that your relationship with the orchids of Flora was a master-slave relationship. Does it not follow that you were either an insect or a slave?”

His name-calling aroused in her a Bloody-Grant-Clayborg reaction. “Yes,” she agreed, “in the sense that a wife-husband is a mistress-slave relation and that men are infrastructures designed to support their procreative equipment.”

His dialectics faltered after that remark. Doctor Campbell shied away from overt discussions of sex or any questioning of the sanctity of marriage, the logic of monogamy, or the capabilities of the male. Even as Freda answered his questions or listened to his evasions of her counterquestions, she was planning on another level.

To get released from Houston was not enough; she must get back to Flora, to her red princes and her blond Moses. She was needed on Flora for precisely the reason she could not be used on earth. She was an unusual screw.

Doctor Campbell was in his mid-forties, a stage of life, Freda knew, when a man simultaneously sensed the approaching end and came to realize the futility of the beginnings, a time of suicide or licentious excess. Beneath the pedantry of Campbell, she sensed a man who favored excesses, one still eager to clutch life but unequipped with grappling hooks.

“Now, Freda”—he looked at his watch—“for the next nine minutes and forty-five seconds, we’re permitted an informal chitchat.”

With the placebo words of the New Analysis, he was saying the recorded session was over and that off-the-record talks, to relate analyst with patient, had begun. It would serve her ends, she decided, to equip this boy with grappling hooks and provide him a few excesses to grapple.

“Oh, goody!” she said. “Now I have you for my very own.”

He squelched a smile and glanced at his watch. “Yes, you have nine and a half minutes of me.”

“You’re such a scrupulous timekeeper, Doctor. Do you sometimes hear time’s winged chariots hurrying behind you, and feel there’s so much to be accomplished, so much loving to be—”

“I’m not a Frommian,” he reminded her.

“Well, so many questions to be asked that you will die like a sick eagle looking at the sky?”

“Yes, Freda, I do have a sense of urgency. But the main problem in this business is that there’s nothing you can put your finger on. If I could just get inside skulls, shake up a few neurons, realign a few synapses, like a mechanic can jerk out a carburetor and clean it.”

He threw up his hands in despair. “It’s ‘now you have it, now you don’t.’ Once a man came to me who smoked too much. It took me three months to analyze the smoke out of him. Then he developed a tic! Well, two months and the tic yielded, but he started having migraine headaches. It took me a solid month to cure his headache. When he got up from that couch, he had not a ghost of a headache, was absolutely ticless, and would not look at a cigarette, Freda, he was in radiant health. He complimented me profusely, he shook my hand, he walked out of my office, down the hall, and the ungrateful bastard jumped out of the window to the alley, forty floors below. Six months’ work shot to hell!”

“Relax, Doctor,” Freda said. “If he had lived and smoked, he might have died of lung cancer. By the way, what is your given name?”

“James,” Campbell answered, and, almost furtively, he lowered his voice, “My friends used to call me Jimmy.”

“What do you mean, Jimmy—‘used to call’?”

“I don’t have friends anymore. I’m a father image to my patients, and the average neuro wants to kick hell out of his old man. Off the record, this is one area where you’re normal. You wanted to seduce your father, but he was so fond of your mother—”

“He divorced her, Jimmy.”

“Sure. She had to lock him out or die of overwork. You don’t remember any of this consciously. That’s where you get your libido, and, girl, you’ve got one that won’t quit! To my knowledge, you’re the first woman who ever did it to a flower, and the first case of space madness localized in the primary erogenic zone.

“Space madness!”

“Technical only.” He brushed it aside. “Nonobsessive. By definition, all which is not of earth is of space. To use the lay term, you’re not a neck-snapper.”

Jimmy was too tense, too wrought-up, still glancing at his watch. She stirred on the couch and smiled at him. “Sort of a pelvis-twitcher, eh, Jimmy?”

He smiled. He had a beautiful smile. She said, “Light me a cigarette, will you, Jimmy?”

Lighting a cigarette might help him relax, she thought, but his hand trembled so that he could hardly find the end. To divert him, she remarked, “You know, not all my libido is fixated on Flora.”

She told the truth. When she mentally superimposed an image of a red orchid around his balding head, she found she could sense the needs of others as she had on Flora, and she could pinpoint Campbell’s frustrations. He had devoted his life to helping others, who had returned his aid with ingratitude, and he was terribly perplexed. Inside him a child was crying, and the oversensitive adult he had become needed assurance of his manhood. She could hear Paul saying, “Guide the young with your experience, and help the old with your strength.”