The Pollinators of Eden (4 page)

“Twenty dollars won’t cover the tip at the Napoli, Hal. We’ll go dutch.”

“No, ma’am,” he said firmly. “There was once a kitty in the students’ dorm. For three years it sat there, growing with each quarter of the school year, waiting for the first student to take you out on a date. Tonight I walked off with it.”

“You have won a bet on me?”

“Not without an argument. Some claimed unfair tactics, since they knew you wanted to hear about Paul—Doctor Theaston—but I convinced them it was my Italian charm. However, there were bylaws adopted when the pool was formed. The winner had to promise a blow-by-blow description of his night with you in a motel.”

“You know very well there’ll be no motel.”

“Right,” he agreed. “But they’ll get the description they paid for. So, as long as your reputation’s ruined anyway, you may as well relax and enjoy the whole evening.”

As he opened the door for her, she said with feigned indignation, “You’re not trapping me with your specious logic… Look, Hal!”

He had flipped on the lights, and her first glance revealed that the female tulip was dead. It had fallen toward the fluoro screen, spewing its seeds as it fell. Some had struck the fluoro screen, but most of the tiny black seeds trailed across the white linoleum.

“It
fell
dead,” Hal said.

“Gather the seeds, Hal, and put the corpse in the freezer. I want to look at the fluoro prints.”

“Done in by plant dye,” Hal said sadly as he picked up the seeds, “after less than a day on earth. I always said this was a tough world.”

Freda removed the roll of prints from the camera and took them to her desk. The last pictures, taken before the plant collapsed, showed a network veinal system outlined by the fluoro screen. The lines were not osmotic channels, because they had resisted the stain. The system rose upward from the base, spread outward along the branches, and joined in a cloudy nexus beneath the air chamber, diverged again, and rose upward.

“I counted thirty seeds,” Hal said, placing them in a humidor on her desk.

“There should be thirty-two. But I’ll find the missing pair in the morning. Put the corpse in the freezer; I’ll take it over to the lab tomorrow.”

Behind her, Hal lifted the pot and bore it toward the refrigerator, moving with stateliness, softly chanting a Te Deum.

“Quit the clowning,” she said. “You make me feel like a murderess.”

Hal slammed the refrigerator door and turned back to her. “What’s your theory, Doctor? Plant stain shouldn’t kill a flower.”

“I have no theory, but the likely place to look is in the tulip’s cellular structure. It has a network, here, that resembles veins.”

He looked down. “Or a nervous system with a ganglion… Let’s go, Doctor. We might lose our reservation.”

As they turned to go, Freda looked at the male tulip for a long moment before she switched off the light. “If there’s any way this flower can be adapted to earth, I’m going to find it. The Caron tulip will be the heritage I leave for future Theastons.”

“Sometimes, Doctor Caron, you sound as much like a woman in love as a plant scientist.”

When they passed through the gateway onto the parking lot, Hal said, “Now, Freda, you’re technically off base.”

“I’ll concede the parking lot—But look at all the cars. After four months away, you’d think the bachelors of Section Able would be on the town.”

“After a man has said good-bye forever to a woman he has loved, it takes him at least a week to get back into the mood for chasing flippers.”

“What’s a flipper?”

“It’s a twentieth-century term for girls who flirt. Derives from the word ‘flippertogibbet,’ meaning fool around with a flipper and she’ll have you hanging from the gibbet of marriage.”

“Don’t you find it a waste of time, digging up all these oddities?”

“Now you’re being Doctor Caron… Freda would only be pleased that she’s being taken out despite her escort’s memories of Flora.”

“Thanks for the compliment, then, Hal,” she said as he held the car door open for her.

After he seated her, he went around and got into the driver’s seat, arching back to reach into his pocket for the car keys. He should have taken the keys from his pocket before he got into the car, she thought, but she held her tongue. Tonight she was plain Freda.

“Ordinarily,” he apologized, “when I get into a small car with a beautiful woman, I have the instincts of an octopus, but out of respect to the memory of my late friend and mentor and your fiancé, Paul Theaston, I intend to conduct myself with propriety. It’s my way of putting in my chit for the job of sideboy since Paul has defected to Flora.”

“You aren’t really serious?”

“He
could
be seduced. He’s a specialist, and they’re like monks, carrying a cross of innocence to the Calvary of womanhood. Flora’s a female planet. You heard Doctor Hector babbling. What’s a lady of sweet silences to an inexperienced man would be a dumb broad to me… I can speak freely around you, Freda. Your intelligence is attested by computers.”

“Thanks, boy.”

“Knowing females, I landed on Flora like a karate expert walks onto a mat. But, seriously, I think Paul’s safe. He has no weaknesses, and he has you.”

“Thanks, boy.”

His voice sank to a low, husky whisper as his arm snaked across the seat behind her. “Strange evils lurk in the colors of Flora. I know, for I’m a Green Hornet.”

“Down, boy,” she said, moving away. “Now, tell me, Green Hornet, what’s a Galatea?”

“Galatea was a statue so beautiful her sculptor fell in love with her, and his love gave her life. But Venus de Milo was jealous and got Galatea stoned—”

“Oh, that’s Greek mythology. You’re Italian.”

“Rome conquered Greece. Anything a Greek can do, Italians can do better.”

“Another question. What’s this Hypothesis X Paul tells me about?”

His features, visible now in the neon glare of downtown Fresno, grew serious. “You aren’t ready for that idea, Freda. I want you to fungo a few easy ideas first, to get your mind limbered up. Hypothesis X is a high and inside fast ball that could low-bridge Einstein.”

Freda had no intention of conducting a study of the comparative abilities of Greeks versus Italians, but she conceded the laurels to the Italians in the matter of obtaining reservations at Italian restaurants. They were conducted to a window table by a phalanx of centurions, seated to rest by an extremely unctuous maître d’, and presented with a view of the lights of Fresno twinkling forty floors below and stretching as far south as the topmost towers of Bakersfield, whose lights were visible beyond the horizon. Even so, her attention was drawn away by the wine-pouring of a waiter who must have learned his trade conducting the Milan Symphony Orchestra. When Freda commented on the camaraderie of paisanos, Hal dismissed her admiration. “A Swede could do it the way I did it. How do you like the wine?”

“Exquisite. How did you leave Paul?”

“Buck naked in a breeze from a helicopter. I didn’t get to work with him on Tropica because Hector assigned me to the continent after I helped Paul set up camp. After that, I only saw him twice, once to pick up soil samples and once to pick up your package. That soil, by the way, is loaded with rare earths. Some of the plants glow for a while after sunset, and on my second visit I mentioned that if the plants could emit light, they could possibly receive it. Personally I knew of maple trees with a psychic lure, but Paul jumped on my idea of light reception. By then, he was hung up on the pollination bit, and he figured the orchid blooms could be visual lures for other orchids.”

“But it wouldn’t explain the fragrance,” Freda said.

“There is none. Just a musky odor… More wine?”

“Please.”

As Hal poured, she was remembering Paul’s lines, “… the female orchids exude a perfume so enchanting… it would devastate the ecology of earth in nine months.” If Hal spoke the truth, and he should have no reason to lie, his remark meant that he had not seen the female orchids. Casually she asked, “Where did you talk to Paul when you landed?”

“Usually by the helicopter. We landed on a stretch of bare coral near the edge of the escarpment.”

“Did you ever go back into the groves with Paul?”

“Never did. As a matter of fact, I once accused him of having a still back in the groves. He said they all looked alike. See one orchid, you’ve seen them all, he said. Besides, he liked the view from the escarpment, and it was impressive. A thousand feet, straight down, and across the terrace, about three miles, rose another escarpment, this one about six hundred feet.”

Hal paused as bowls of minestrone were wafted before them. She sipped the soup, thinking: If Hal spent only an hour at a time with Paul, he could not have exerted a tremendously erratic influence on his teacher. Hal was bent in benediction over the soup, which was delicious, and suddenly he raised his head. “Why did you ask if Paul ever took me back into the groves?”

“Oh, I’m just generally interested. You were saying something about maple trees.”

“Oh, yes!” He grinned. “You know, psychologists have a theory about something called abreaction, where a fellow works out his fears in his behavior. They say that a man such as I am, who appreciates women—”

“Like a karate expert walking onto a mat,” she interrupted him, partly as Freda, from sheer impishness, and partly as Doctor Caron, to point out the inconsistencies of thought.

“Touché,” he almost shouted in glee, waving his soup spoon in his right hand and reaching out impulsively to take her hand with his free one. “All joking aside, there’s two of you—Freda, warm and witty, and Doctor Caron, the authoritative perfectionist. Never desert Doctor Caron, Freda, for she will carry you to the heights of policymaking, and her advice is needed in the halls of the mighty, but never forget Freda, Doctor Caron, because she’s a lot more fun.”

He withdrew his hand. Such a pretty, impulsive speech, she thought; and he was sincere. But, judiciously, she was not affected by his charm: the more attractive Hal was, the more subversive Polino was.

“Anyway, the theory holds that a great lover is actually a latent homosexual, which is about as sensible as saying that you became a botanist cause you subconsciously wanted to practice animal husbandry.”

A mere graduate student daring to attack an entire science, Doctor Caron thought; but, to Freda, he made sense. She listened closely, disapproving of the way he waved his spoon for emphasis. Bad table manners indicated a lack of restraint.

“Back on the continent,” he continued, “I used to go up to a grove of maple trees once in a while to read. All those dancing daffodils can get distracting, and the grove gave me a quiet place. There’s nothing sexual about a tree. Even on Flora they’re hermaphroditic.”

Ah, there was the source of Paul’s flowers in “estrus.”

“… After a week in the sanctuary, I began to favor a particular tree. This is normal! You’ve had a favorite tree…”

Indeed she had, Freda thought. There had been an elm grove she had fled to for comfort and solitude, as a girl, when her parents’ quarrels had risen to hysteria. She would always love elm trees.

“In the beginning, I thought nothing of it. It was comfortable to sit between its roots and lean back against its bole. It was just a tree tree.” He paused for a moment; a dreaminess came into his eyes. “But it was beautiful, in a masculine way. Strong-limbed, sturdy. It was the sort of tree that a blue jay would trust.

“One day I was sitting under my tree reading, when a naval rating wandered by. None of us wore clothes, but I could tell he was a navy man from the decal on his arm. He had come up to look for acorns… They are large and edible on Flora… and he was cracking one between the heels of his palms as he wandered over to see what I was reading. He started to sit down on one of the roots of my tree, and I ordered him away. In very specific terms I told him what I’d do if a certain part of his body touched the tree. He walked away, looking back at me and saying, ‘Okay, matey! Okay!’ as if he knew I was squirrely.”

“How interesting,” Freda remarked as she forked into the lasagne the waiter placed before her. It was as light and as fluffy as a soufflé, without a hint of garlic, and the Chianti complemented it perfectly.

Hal shifted from a soup spoon to a fork and into high gear. “When it struck me that I would have killed the sailor for fooling around with my tree, I got scared and fled the grove, figuring I was ready for Hollywood. Later, thinking about it, I figured the headshrinkers were still wrong, but the point is—they scared me.”

His fork beat like a metronome. “I had let the Freudians of earth defile my mind. I had dishonored the grove with my fear!”

“Mmmm, good!… I don’t follow you,” Freda said.

“What I mean, all that clings to a tree is not necessarily fruit, and I had felt—”

“You’re right, Hal,” she interjected, partly in agreement but mostly to break the rhythm of the fork, “nuts cling, also.”

“What I felt with the maples was spiritual communion. That’s all! The sailor’s naked behind was desecrating my shrine, for, in rites beyond ritualism, I had achieved rapport with the spirit of the grove. Freda, you observe before you the last surviving druid priest.”

She was observing that and more. “Logic beyond logic” was another airy phrase Paul had borrowed from this boy. Harold Polino was the moral equivalent of the Napoli’s lasagne, she thought, but, as Paul had said, he did produce usable insights.

“Do you think Paul would be as impressionable?”

“No, Paul’s a morphologist. He studies the structure of plants. He’s not primarily interested in their spiritual qualities or their personalities. He might favor a certain orchid in a grove. So would you. So would I. On the scale of plant evolution, the orchids are demigods compared to the trees. I’m not saying he’s completely indifferent to plants. But it would have to be a very dark night before old Paul would try to make love to a mandrake root.”

“Eat your lasagne before it gets cold!”

Rebuffed by her tone, he withdrew into his lasagne, and she let him eat, slowly sipping her Chianti. She was drinking more, by far, than she usually drank, but it was not impairing her judgment. The wine only relaxed her, made her feel more open. When he was almost finished, she said, “If you think my mind is stretched sufficiently, I feel ready for Hypothesis X.”