Prima Belladonna
James Graham Ballard
Prima Belladonna
by James Graham Ballard
“Barker’s Choro-Flora?” he said. “You’re guilty of overproduction. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.”
I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can’t believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself.
Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermilion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives.
We spent most of our time in those days on the balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer-we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level-yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer.
One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony.
When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree.
“Well?” I asked. “Where is it?”
Tony tilted his head slightly. “Over there.”
I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite.
“Careful,” he warned me. “Don’t gape at her.”
I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously.
“Fourth floor,” Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. “One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?”
“Dreaming,” I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. “I wonder what else she can do?”
Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. “Well?” Tony asked.
“She’s out of my league,” I said. “But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.”
Harry groaned. “Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.”
The woman was strolling around the lounge, rearranging the furniture, wearing almost nothing except a large metallic hat. Even in shadow the sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermilion Sands had never seen anything like her.
“The approach has got to be equivocal,” Harry continued, gazing into his beer. “Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.”
The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. She saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and lowered the blinds.
We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal.
Five minutes later the singing started.
At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost out of the audible range, a thin tremolo quaver which came out of nowhere and rose up the back of the skull.
Harry and Tony frowned at me.
“Your livestock’s unhappy about something,” Tony told me. “Can you quieten it down?”
“It’s not the plants,” I told him. “Can’t be.”
The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edges off my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leapt out of their chairs and dived back against the wall.
“Steve, look out!” Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top.
I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my hair.
“What the hell’s the matter?”
Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly.
“That was close. You all right?”
“It’s gone,” Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street.
“What was it?” I asked.
Harry peered at me closely. “Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor scorpion, big as a lobster.” He sat down weakly on a beer crate. “Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.”
After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got on to the table.
On the balcony opposite, wearing a gown of ionized fibre, the golden woman was watching me.
I found out who she was the next morning. Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor-key transpositions which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop it naturally affected all the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings, it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I’d fed the Arachnid and straightened out one or two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony.
There were only about a dozen true Arachnids in captivity; most of the others were either mutes or grafts from dicot stems, and I was lucky to have mine at all. I’d bought the place five years earlier from an old half-deaf man called Sayers, and the day before he left he moved a lot of rogue stock out to the garbage disposal scoop behind the apartment block. Reclaiming some of the tanks, I’d come across the Arachnid, thriving on a diet of algae and perished rubber tubing.
Why Sayers had wanted to throw it away I had never discovered. Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first chore-flora had been bred, and had worked under the Director, Dr Mandel. As a young botanist of twenty-five Mandel had discovered the prime Arachnid in the Guiana forest. The orchid took its name from the Khan-Arachnid spider which pollinated the flower, simultaneously laying its own eggs in the fleshy ovule, guided, or as Mandel always insisted, actually mesmerized to it by the vibrations which the orchid’s calyx emitted at pollination time. The first Arachnid orchids beamed out only a few random frequencies, but by cross-breeding and maintaining them artificially at the pollination stage Mandel had produced a strain that spanned a maximum of twenty-four octaves.
Not that he had ever been able to hear them. At the climax of his life’s work Mandel, like Beethoven, was stone deaf, but apparently by merely looking at a blossom he could listen to its music. Strangely though, after he went deaf he never looked at an Arachnid.
That morning I could almost understand why. The orchid was in a vicious mood. First it refused to feed, and I had to coax it along in a fluoraldehyde flush, and then it started going ultra-sonic, which meant complaints from all the dog owners in the area. Finally it tried to fracture the tank by resona
ting.
The whole place was in uproar, and I was almost resigned to shutting them down and waking them all by hand individually-a backbreaking job with eighty tanks in the shop-when everything suddenly died away to a murmur.
I looked round and saw the golden-skinned woman walk in.
“Good morning,” I said. “They must like you.”
She laughed pleasantly. “Hello. Weren’t they behaving?”
Under the black beach robe her skin was a softer, more mellow gold, and it was her eyes that held me. I could just see them under the wide-brimmed hat. Insect legs wavered delicately round two points of purple light.
She walked over to a bank of mixed ferns and stood looking at them. The ferns reached out towards her and trebled eagerly in their liquid fluted voices.
“Aren’t they sweet?” she said, stroking the fronds gently. “They need so much affection.”
Her voice was low in the register, a breath of cool sand pouring, with a lilt that gave it music.
“I’ve just come to Vermilion Sands,” she said, “and my apartment seems awfully quiet. Perhaps if I had a flower, one would be enough, I shouldn’t feel so lonely.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Yes,” I agreed, brisk and businesslike. “What about something colourful? This Sumatra Samphire, say? It’s a pedigree mezzo-soprano from the same follicle as the Bayreuth Festival Prima Belladonna.”
“No,” she said. “It looks rather cruel.”
“Or this Louisiana Lute Lily? If you thin out its SO2 it’ll play some beautiful madrigals. I’ll show you how to do it.”
She wasn’t listening to me. Slowly, her hands raised in front of her breasts so that she almost seemed to be praying, she moved towards the display counter on which the Arachnid stood.
“How beautiful it is,” she said, gazing at the rich yellow and purple leaves hanging from the scarlet-ribbed vibrocalyx.
I followed her across the floor and switched on the Arachnid’s audio so that she could hear it. Immediately the plant came to life. The leaves stiffened and filled with colour and the calyx inflated, its ribs sprung tautly. A few sharp disconnected notes spat out.
“Beautiful, but evil,” I said.
“Evil?” she repeated. “No, proud.” She stepped closer to the orchid and looked down into its malevolent head. The Arachnid quivered and the spines on its stem arched and flexed menacingly.
“Careful,” I warned her. “It’s sensitive to the faintest respiratory sounds.”
“Quiet,” she said, waving me back. “I think it wants to sing.”
“Those are only key fragments,” I told her. “It doesn’t perform. I use it as a frequency-”
“Listen!” She held my arm and squeezed it tightly.
A low, rhythmic fusion of melody had been coming from the plants around the shop, and mounting above them I heard a single stronger voice calling out, at first a thin high-pitched reed of sound that began to pulse and deepen and finally swelled into full baritone, raising the other plants in chorus about itself.
I had never heard the Arachnid sing before. I was listening to it open-eared when I felt a glow of heat burn against my arm. I turned and saw the woman staring intently at the plant, her skin aflame, the insects in her eyes writhing insanely. The Arachnid stretched out towards her, calyx erect, leaves like blood-red sabres.
I stepped round her quickly and switched off the argon feed. The Arachnid sank to a whimper, and around us there was a nightmarish babel of broken notes and voices toppling from high C’s and L’s into discord. A faint whispering of leaves moved over the silence.
The woman gripped the edge of the tank and gathered herself. Her skin dimmed and the insects in her eyes slowed to a delicate wavering.
“Why did you turn it off?” she asked heavily.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’ve got ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock here and that sort of twelve-tone emotional storm can blow a lot of valves. Most of these plants aren’t equipped for grand opera.”
She watched the Arachnid as the gas drained out of its calyx. One by one its leaves buckled and lost their colour.
“How much is it?” she asked me, opening her bag.
“It’s not for sale,” I said. “Frankly I’ve no idea how it picked up those bars-”
“Will a thousand dollars be enough?” she asked, her eyes fixed on me steadily.
“I can’t,” I told her. “I’d never be able to tune the others without it. Anyway,” I added, trying to smile, ’that Arachnid would be dead in ten minutes if you took it out of its vivarium. All these cylinders and leads would look a little odd inside your lounge.”
“Yes, of course,” she agreed, suddenly smiling back at me. “I was stupid.” She gave the orchid a last backward glance and strolled away across the floor to the long Tchaikovsky section popular with the tourists.
“Pathétique,” she read off a label at random. “I’ll take this.”
I wrapped up the scabia and slipped the instructional booklet into the crate, keeping my eye on her aE the time.
“Don’t look so alarmed,” she said with amusement. “I’ve never heard anything like that before.”
I wasn’t alarmed. It was that thirty years at Vermilion Sands had narrowed my horizons.
How long are you staying at Vermilion Sands?” I asked her.
“I open at the Casino tonight,” she said. She told me her name was Jane Ciracylides and that she was a speciality singer.
“Why don’t you look in?” she asked, her eyes fluttering mischievously. I come on at eleven. You may find it interesting.”
I did. The next morning Vermilion Sands hummed. Jane created a sensation. After her performance three hundred people swore they’d seen everything from a choir of angels taking the vocal in the music of the spheres to Alexander’s Ragtime Band. As for myself, perhaps I’d listened to too many flowers, but at least I knew where the scorpion on the balcony had come from.
Tony Miles had heard Sophie Tucker singing the “St Louis Blues”, and Harry, the elder Bach conducting the B Minor Mass.
They came round to the shop and argued over their respective performances while I wrestled with the flowers.
“Amazing,” Tony exclaimed. “How does she do it? Tell me.”
“The Heidelberg score,” Harry ecstased. “Sublime, absolute.” He looked irritably at the flowers. “Can’t you keep these things quiet? They’re making one hell of a row.”
They were, and I had a shrewd idea why. The Arachnid was completely out of control, and by the time I’d clamped it down in a weak saline it had blown out over three hundred dollars’ worth of shrubs.
“The performance at the Casino last night was nothing on the one she gave here yesterday,” I told them. “The Ring of the Niebelungs played by Stan Kenton. That Arachnid went insane. I’m sure it wanted to kill her.”
Harry watched the plant convulsing its leaves in rigid spasmic movements.
“If you ask me it’s in an advanced state of rut. Why should it want to kill her?”
“Her voice must have overtones that irritate its calyx. None of the other plants minded. They cooed like turtle doves when she touched them.”
Tony shivered happily.
Light dazzled in the street outside.
I handed Tony the broom. “Here, lover, brace yourself on that. Miss Ciracylides is dying to meet you.”
Jane came into the shop, wearing a flame yellow cocktail skirt and another of her hats.
I introduced her to Harry and Tony.
“The flowers seem very quiet this morning,” she said. “What’s the matter with them?”
“I’m cleaning out the tanks,” I told her. “By the way, we all want to congratulate you on last night. How does it feel to be able to name your fiftieth city?”
She smiled shyly and sauntered away round the shop. As I knew she would, she stopped by the Arachnid and levelled her eyes at it.
I wanted to see what she’d say, but
Harry and Tony were all around her, and soon got her up to my apartment, where they had a hilarious morning playing the fool and raiding my scotch.
“What about coming out with us after the show tonight?” Tony asked her. “We can go dancing at the Flamingo.”
“But you’re both married,” Jane protested. “Aren’t you worried about your reputations?”
“Oh, we’ll bring the girls,” Harry said airily. “And Steve here can come along and hold your coat.”
We played i-Go together. Jane said she’d never played the game before, but she had no difficulty picking up the rules, and when she started sweeping the board with us I knew she was cheating. Admittedly it isn’t every day that you get a chance to play i-Go with a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes, but never the less I was annoyed. Harry and Tony, of course, didn’t mind.
“She’s charming,” Harry said, after she’d left. “Who cares? It’s a stupid game anyway.”
“I care,” I said. “She cheats.”
The next three or four days at the shop were an audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear. Unfortunately I couldn’t starve the plants below their thresholds. They needed exercise and they had to have the Arachnid to lead them. But instead of running through its harmonic scales the orchid only screeched and whined. It wasn’t the noise, which only a couple of dozen people complained about, but the damage being done to their vibratory chords that worried me. Those in the seventeenth century catalogues stood up well to the strain, and the moderns were immune, but the Romantics burst their calyxes by the score. By the third day after Jane’s arrival I’d lost two hundred dollars’ worth of Beethoven and more Mendelssohn and Schubert than I could bear to think about.
Jane seemed oblivious to the trouble she was causing me.
“What’s wrong with them all?” she asked, surveying the chaos of gas cylinders and drip feeds spread across the floor.
“I don’t think they like you,” I told her. “At least the Arachnid doesn’t. Your voice may move men to strange and wonderful visions, but it throws that orchid into acute melancholia.”
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