The Pollinators of Eden (3 page)

“No strain. No pain. The temperature in the glasshouse is almost the optimum for the tulips, so the plant is safe… But, Doctor, no dinner, no message.”

His eyes were not pleading now, but confident.

“Very well, you Valentino of the working girl, but don’t let the rumor that I whistled at a passing sailor get you started in the wrong direction. It was the tulip who whistled, not I.”

“Oh, hell,” he exploded, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I should have known the scuttlebutt was wrong. I should have known Galatea was impervious to mortal longings.”

Almost laughing at Hal’s fallen crest, she said, “I’ll be ready at seven,” and walked across the lawn toward the distant greenhouse, recalling that she had referred to the tulip as “who.” Some of the insanity of Flora must have communicated itself to her during the briefings.

In a mild way, she had been touched by Hal Polino. Before he learned the truth about the whistle, his expression had been similar to Paul’s when Paul looked at the orchid he called Sally.

Paul had not inspected the blossom with the eyes of an empirical scientist; he had ogled it with the longing of a lovesick adolescent.

Paul’s letter was by no means the “mash note” of Hal’s peculiar vernacular, nor had Freda expected one. She would not have elicited a proposal of marriage from a sentimentalist lacking restraint and self-control. She had seen one marriage wrecked from rampant emotionalism born of sensuality. Pulling the bit on an overeager stallion was not her ideal of romance. She was pleased with the formality of Paul’s opening paragraphs.

My dearest Freda,

Enclosed are my notes on the
Tulipa caronus sireni
. By now you have seen the briefing and understand my reasons for accepting a second tour of duty, but not all of the reasons.

Hal will brief you on what I choose to call Hypothesis X, concerning the pollination of the orchids of Flora. Hal himself suggested it in one of his fanciful moments, but I support it for reasons of my own. I dare not put the hypothesis onto paper. If the paper were lost or stolen, it would be sufficient evidence to send me to Houston, permanently.

Hal Polino does not have the bookkeepers mind which the methodology of science requires…

“Bookkeeper’s mind!” She liked that! If the accurate tabulation of scientific data deserved such gratuitous dismissal, then Doctor Freda Caron was wasting her time outside a kitchen.

… nor does he have the power of analysis, the genius for synthesis, to compare with a Freda Caron, if this “cat” may comment on a queen. Yet, when his whimsies drift in the right direction, Hal is capable of inspired suggestions.

Now she saw what Paul meant. Mere accumulation of data could be tedious, particularly when one could not foresee directions. But she disapproved of his use of Hal’s argot, even facetiously, since it suggested student influence over the teacher.

But there is empirical evidence to substantiate Hypothesis X: tendrils grow from the hipped orchids in pairs, on opposite sides of the stalk, and the leaves along the tendrils are of the same striated cellular structure as that of the female hips—muscle cells. In addition, the tendrils of the male, as well as the stalk, are much thicker than the female’s.

You can see immediately that the project needs a cystologist. If you wish to delay our wedding and come with Section Charlie to Flora, you have my consent and blessing.

… Incidentally, if you need my advice on wedding plans, feed my profile to the computer and get my decision by proxy.

Back to the orchids. You have, by now, inspected the tulips and know these plants are aeons ahead of their earth cousins in evolution. Mark you, the beauty of the tulips is but a shadow of the beauty of the orchids.

Each orchid in the segment of the grove I have chosen to study has its own personality. They are lovable. Sometimes the wind blows a tendril across my face in a certain way, and I am intrigued by the thought that they are capable of loving me.

There was no doubt about it! Hal Polino had inveigled Paul to read outside of his field, perhaps even poetry.

But this thought is purely intuitive and less than supported by evidence. Birds shun the groves, and a basket of koala-shrews I loosed among the orchids ran squealing in terror over the edge of the escarpment and fell to their deaths, over a thousand feet below.

Probably, Freda thought, the koala-shrews were fleeing from the pressure on their eardrums caused by the increased altitude.

I had brought the shrews as an experiment. With my limited laboratory facilities, I believe I have detected hemoglobin in the sap of the orchids. Are the plants, then, carnivorous…

It would be easy to detect if the plants were meat eaters—feed them radioactive beefsteak and trace the hemoglobin.

… or so highly developed along lines of evolution that they are part animal? If the latter is true, then it would directly support Hypothesis X.

Frankly, there is a logic here, beyond human logic. A question which on earth might seem sacrilege comes easily to the lips on Flora: is the goal of life the superman or the superplant? It is written, “God is no respecter of persons,” but He certainly respects species.

Freda smiled ruefully. Paul had been reading outside of his field.

Our heliologist says that the sun here is much older than the sun of earth. Flora is in her death throes. If I were Evolution, seeking a life form to survive the contraction and explosions of the universe, I would choose a seed. Incidentally, the orchid seed I have enclosed is the only one I have been able to find, and it is partially eaten by the grass.

She was positive now. These speculations were alien shoots grafted onto Paul’s stalk by Hal Polino. Paul would have to be rid of this influence. At tomorrow’s conference, she would suggest a quarterly rotation of students—to broaden their academic backgrounds—and the present quarter ended next week.

But the great mystery was, and still is, how do the orchids pollinate? Sometimes I feel that they are deliberately concealing their secrets from me.

Whatever Hypothesis X might be, Freda thought, Paul had already revealed enough to get himself committed to Houston!

I have thrown nets over females in estrus…

Ah, there was the Freudian slip to end all slips. Flowers in estrus!

… only to find the nets torn aside. I have strung nets for night-flying birds and caught nothing. I have dug pits deep enough to trap cattle and covered them with the living grass, but I have captured no animal. Whatever the pollinators are, they have vision, for the orchids are so beautiful that they expand human awareness. Whatever the pollinators have, they have olfactory organs, for the female orchids exude a perfume so enchanting that if I could bottle it and ship it home it would devastate the ecology of earth in nine months. And the pollinators must have intelligence, for I have come to a flowering garden—a virtual Eden—with the equipment of a technological society, and still the question abides.

What are the pollinators of Eden?

Love,
Paul

An interesting letter. But Freda could see behind Paul’s open-faced, Anglo-Saxon scrawl the fine Italian penmanship of Harold Polino. She laid it aside and picked up the packet of tulip seeds plus the carefully wrapped but tattered orchid seed, which resembled a partially husked black walnut.

Freda deduced that the seed had been much larger—at least as wide around the girth as a tennis ball—and ovate. Despite the wrapping, it exuded the faint odor of vanilla, and she recalled that vanilla was processed from orchid seeds. Possibly a grove of Florian orchids on earth would be of commercial value to a manufacturer of food flavoring.

She placed the remnant of the orchid seed in the refrigerator and returned to Paul’s field notes on the Caron tulips.

One item intrigued her. “Plant the seeds six inches apart, and as soon as the tulip’s sex is determined, separate the males by at least three feet. Apparently their root systems drain some element from the soil, for they do not thrive in close proximity with each other. Spot them among the females.” In this respect, she noted, the tulips were opposite from the orchids.

Automatically she began to record his data into a logbook. As she wrote, she was aware of sounds—the drone of a jet plane, the hum of traffic drifting up from the Paso Robles Freeway, the distant whirr of her air-conditioner. She was reminded of Captain Barron’s admiration of the silence of Flora. His feeling was probably related to the Freudian wish to return to the womb, which was probably a misinterpretation on Freud’s part of a racial instinct from prehistoric days, the desire of the caveman to scramble back to the safety of the cave. But progress was outside the cave, where the sunlight and the strange noises were.

Personally, she loved the sounds of civilization. For her, society hummed as pleasantly as a dynamo, and she was proud to be a part of its machinery.

An evening breeze stirred, and behind her the female tulip laughed. Freda smiled at its imitation of her laughter at the spaceport, for the sound was joyful, and she entered into the log, “Plastic memory of female specimen exceeds five hours.”

She closed the door—temperatures dropped rapidly with the declining sun—and walked over to type the label for the logbook. She typed, “
Tulipa caronus
” and halted, thinking: In the classical sense, the siren was a sweet singer, but time had warped the connotations of the word. She was not a vamp who lured men to their deaths; if they chose to die of frustration, she might aid and abet, but the decision was their own.

She decided to drop the term “siren” from her tulips. Paul had grown a little fanciful on Flora. His major influence had been Polino, but the planet had furnished the environment. As she pasted the label on the logbook, she was grateful that the Space Administration permitted no more than two tours of duty on an unclassified planet.

Even with two tours behind him, she wouldn’t be surprised if Paul Theaston returned wearing long hair and strumming a lyre.

She carried the female plant to the photo table, poured plant dye into the loam around its roots, and set the fluoro camera for five-minute exposures. She had two hours before Hal Polino called for her, time enough to check the plant’s rate of osmosis.

She cut a blade from its lower stalk, and the movement of her hands caused the tulip to sigh deliciously.

Under her electron microscope, the leaf pattern showed no difference from that of its terrestrial cousin, although she compared the blades only in her memory. The veinlike pattern of osmosis ducts appeared the same to her casual inspection, but the feel of the blade in her fingertips was more rubbery than that of an earth tulip.

Ordinarily Freda would have preferred to eat a sandwich and spend the evening with the tulips, but Hypothesis X had aroused her curiosity. She was looking forward to dinner with Polino. It was against her sense of justice to condemn Paul’s assistant for exercising undue influence without a trial, so she would try him first. She bent to the tulip and said, “Good night, dear one.”

As she opened the door to leave the room, the tulip answered, “Good night, dear one.”

She smiled as she closed the door, thinking there was also a matter of name-calling she wanted to settle with Polino. To her the word “Galatea” sounded suspiciously like Italian for “jellyfish.”

As Freda showered, she caught herself humming a currently popular revival of a folk song, “Sock It to Me, Baby,” and her voice dwindled into a self-conscious silence, more from wonder at herself than from the ribaldry of the tune. Rarely had she felt so exuberant, and her happiness disturbed her.

A moment’s analysis told her what prompted the caroling: an afterimage of the Caron tulip was casting a golden light through her mind. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” somebody had said, and for the past quarter hour the saying had proved to be true.

As she prepared her toilet, spending less than five minutes on her makeup, the laughter of the tulip kept returning to her, pleasantly at first. After she slipped into her green cocktail dress and stretched on her bed to relax a few minutes, the memory of its laughter touched her with sadness. She submitted her changed reaction to analysis: when Polino had met her at the spaceport, she was anxious about Paul and disappointed over his absence. When she laughed at the male tulips wolf whistle, her laughter had been a release of tension as well as a reflection of merriment. This afternoon all the anxiety had been filtered from the tulip’s imitation, and she had heard herself laughing as a child, as she had before her parents had divorced. She had not laughed with such spontaneity since she was ten, and her sadness had been a nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood.

She had tidied her emotional closets when Hal called for her in the afterglow of sunset, and she could appreciate the sincerity in his voice when he said, “In your dress of green with your hair of gold, Doctor, you’re as fetching as a Caron tulip.”

She smiled in spite of herself and said, “Save your apple-polishing for the señoritas in Old Town. Here, hold my wrap!”

“May I call you Freda, Doctor Caron, because I didn’t come prepared for a formal dinner?”

She didn’t approve of first names between department heads and graduate students, although the practice was general, but she didn’t wish for him to be inhibited tonight. She preferred that he behave around her in much the same manner as he acted with Paul. “You may call me ‘Freda’ after we get off the station. And I’m glad you’re not prepared for formalities tonight, because I have some heavy labor for you. Well stop by the greenhouse and hang the female tulip I am fluorographing.”

As they walked along the flagstone path to her office, he said, “I was able to get reservations at the Napoli.”

“The Napoli!” Indeed he had chosen a restaurant where they would not be seen by station personnel—it was too expensive.