by John Boyd
“But that would take hundreds of years.”
“They don’t care.”
“But they couldn’t eliminate us.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t think they could hurt us… Unless Paul brings the orchids, and the orchids and tulips form an alliance. Then, watch out! The orchids could kill men with ease.”
“Are you telling me Paul’s life is in danger?”
“Absolutely not, Doctor. The orchids wouldn’t raise a tendril against Paul.”
“Why are you so confident, Hal?”
“Thanks for calling me ‘Hal,’ Doctor.” He grinned, visibly relieved. “The orchids would save Paul because he’s the only specimen they have, and they want to study him.”
Hal’s conversation on Sunday began a week of change for Freda, as Gaynor’s frostiness became publicly apparent. In the executive dining room he spent shorter and shorter periods of greeting at her table, busying himself with other department heads. Her stock went down two points because of his shortened greetings. When, by Thursday, he had not invited her into the Bureau Chief’s alcove to lunch at his table, other administrators were beginning to notice, and her stock dropped another three points.
Thursday was a particularly bad day. Hal had forecast a second crop of seeds from the A beds, but they didn’t materialize. Friday he was still worried, but Freda’s stock readings improved slightly. Captain Barron returned from Washington, and he and Commodore Minor joined her at lunch. Up four points!
“Captain Barron,” she said archly, “I was certainly surprised to learn of your boyhood among the bloodhounds of Arkansas.”
“Admiral Creighton sends you his apologies, Freda. His aide briefed him wrong… But I was surprised, also, that you presented the petition after you found my name on the list.”
“Doctor Gaynor thought my costume jewelry might help offset navy gold braid. We matched a foil against a broadsword.”
“Commodore,” Captain Barron said suddenly, “did you ever land on Carston 6?”
“Ah, yes,” the Commodore nodded. “The slugs.”
“Come, now, gentlemen,” Freda said, “what are the slugs on Carston 6?”
“Huge snails without shells. They travel through the dense foliage of the planet’s tropics,” Minor said, “by eating everything that gets in their way.”
Neither of the officers had indulged in gossip. They had not mentioned a name, but Freda knew she had allies. She belonged to another jurisdiction, and she was being rejected by her peer group; yet she had an anodyne for her hurt in the tulip beds. The A beds, heavy with seeds, had little time for music now, but the B group still sang lustily, and she found herself hurrying from lunch to spread an air mattress near the tulips and listen to their melodies while she looked up at the clouds.
Hal spent most of the week rolling out strips of canvas to catch the seeds and preparing the E and F beds for planting. He would lean over the A beds to point to his distant squares of spaded loam. “There’s your target, girls. Now, hit it. I don’t want to be cleaning up after you. And keep those seeds six inches apart. I don’t want to spend a week thinning the shoots.”
According to his calculation, the second crop from the A row, closest to the greenhouse, was overdue. The seeds should have been ejected from the pods on Thursday. When noon came Friday, Freda was tempted to pluck a pregnant female and dissect the ova pod, but Hal protested. “No, ma’am. I planted them in geometrical alignment. You could destroy my pattern. They’ll come along. The temperatures this week have averaged about four degrees less than the week before, and they’re sensitive to temperature.”
“About four degrees!” Freda exclaimed. “A detail as important as this shouldn’t be left to speculation… Give me the exact figures.”
Shaking his head ruefully, Polino went to the greenhouse to prepare a graph of the temperatures. The week ending on Thursday, February 9, showed a mean temperature 3.8 degrees higher than on the week following. On Friday, no seeds were ejected.
Saturday was Hal’s day off; but she found him, lithe and bare-torsoed, marking off with whitewash the next beds for Mr. Hokada to spade on Monday. She went inside to prepare notes for her monograph, and when she emerged she saw him, his tasks completed, pacing the canvas path downwind from the A row and anxiously trying to spot the first airborne seeds. His harassed face made her smile.
“Hal Polino,” she called, “you’re the picture of an expectant father!”
“Father, hell,” he exploded. “I’m having labor pains. No wasp appreciates what a man goes through to deliver his child. What was the temperature, Doctor?”
“Seventy-six.”
“Come on, get up. Get up!” he yelled to the temperature, walking down the path, his hands folded behind his back, bent forward, peering truculently at the tulips. He was suddenly an old young man.
“Where are the wasps?” she called as she unfolded her air mattress.
“The tulips have a few standing by, probably to give homing signals to the rest of the wasp fleet cruising around the neighborhood somewhere. The tulips don’t need them at this stage of the game. Besides, they might get hit by a seed. But nothings happening. I can’t even find a bloom in my C row.”
A wind stirred in the garden, and the B row fluted musically. “They’re trying to tell you to cheer up, Hal.”
“Liars, sluggards, goldbrickers,” he snarled at the A beds, swaying back and forth with their heavy pods.
By two p.m. the temperature had dropped a degree, and a cold, moist air front was moving in from the ocean. “There’ll be no deliveries today, Hal,” she called, “unless I perform a Caesarean.”
“You’re no obstetrician,” he called. “Besides, they deliver eight at a time, in four rows.”
“But remember the dying tulip. She delivered them herself.”
He walked over and looked down at her. “Give them another day,” he said.
“Polino, you claimed she shot those seeds at the pot. Here’s an opportunity to demonstrate pragmatic empiricism. I’m pulling one up. We can replant a seedling in her spot to preserve your precious geometry.”
“Doctor, you’re sap-thirsty. You’d murder little girls in the interest of science.”
“Come, now, Hal. You’re supposed to detest the brutes.”
“Doctor, I don’t care for them as a group, but I like them as individuals.”
“Then concentrate on your bigotry and pull one up.”
“Pull it yourself,” he said flatly. “You’re the scientist.”
“Chicken.” She hurled one of his twentieth-century epithets at him as she reached over and plucked a tulip from the edge of the bed. As she pulled it up, she heard, definitely this time, a soft explosive sigh from its air chamber, the same sound she heard the night she cut the leaf from the tulip that died. Suddenly she was glad he was out of earshot, standing, dramatically posed, his hand over his eyes. Polino would have written a thesis on that sound, weaving from it all sorts of airy theories and dreamy hypotheses to prove that the plants could feel.
“It’s done,” she said. “You can look now.”
“Murder, most foul,” he exclaimed, walking over to stoop down by the tulip she had laid out on the canvas. Its swollen seed pod was cracked on one of the vents to show a row of eight tiny capulins, but the pod was completely inert. With her thumbnails, she pried the vent open. “They’re fully as mature as the other premature seeds were, and those lived.”
“But she isn’t ejecting them in her death throes,” he complained.
“The other plant died slowly,” she said.
“You’re right,” he agreed, “and it knew it was dying. This one didn’t expect death. She trusted you.”
“I’m sure that once the stalk has dried, the seeds will pop out.”
He thought for a moment. “When I thinned out the beds and threw the shoots into the bin, they didn’t dry… Listen!”
A slight breeze stirred the garden, triggering air chambers of the tulips
with faint rustlings which returned the echo of the dying tulip’s sigh. Sounding in unison, the air chambers produced a sound as loud as a moan, tinged with regret and sorrow. Each tulip passed the sound to its neighbor, and the sigh too rose and fell in ululations of sorrow and grief. Freda looked up bewildered, as Hal said, slowly, with no intention of profanity but only of regret, “Jesus!”
The wind had died, but the sound was rising.
It had become a sobbing, and Freda felt herself pervaded by a sadness from out of her childhood and its agony under the elms, a distillation of grief and regret, acute and personal, yet poignant and general, as if she were feeling the sadness of all children. She felt her spirit drawn down corridors that led to a void where nothingness waited, not life or death or joy or pain, but only an emptiness eternal. Still, the sound was rising, keening and throbbing, scaling heights of anguish, and the void was opening. “Stop them, Hal!”
He was on his knees, shouting to the tulips, “She didn’t know. Stop it! She didn’t know!”
And the sound was gone.
Freda was slumped on the canvas, her torso twisted, her head dropping, leaning on her arms. Echoes of the anguish still sounded in her memory, as Hal bent beside her. “I felt like I did the night my mother died,” he said. “They were keening for the dead.”
He laid his arm across her shoulder. It was a spontaneous gesture of brotherhood and humanity, and she appreciated it. Squatting beside her, he said nothing for long moments, then, taking her by the waist, he said, “Come, Freda,” and he led her back to the office. She was aware that his arm encircled her, and she welcomed his touch. Out of the voids of space and time had come a grief that touched her, a mourning for the death of universes, and her concerns were lost in the vastness of the sorrow.
He helped her to her chair before the desk, and she heard him move behind her to his own desk, and she knew, vaguely, that he was making an entry in the log; then she heard the logbook close, heard the rustle of waxed paper. As the sorrow withdrew from her mind, as she emerged from the grief of the tulips, she heard him chant softly some twentieth-century lament for the dead, chant softly but clearly, and she caught every word:
The chambers in the temple of my heart,
In every one whereof your image dwells,
Are black with grief eternal for your sake.
His lament, so appropriate and so profound, drew her gaze to him. She saw he had brought the tulip in and laid it on a piece of florists’ paper, which he was folding, tucking in the edges, enclosing the tulip. As she watched, he took the flower in both hands and bore it reverently through the door, into sunlight whose colors it would no longer reflect, into air where it would sing no more. The song and its singer were done. At her desk, and alone now, Freda dropped her head and wept uncontrollably. She was glad Hal had not invited her to the burial.
In fifteen minutes he returned, and she had dried her eyes and made her face. He sat down at his desk, slumped in his chair, and swiveled toward her. “You mustn’t grieve, Doctor Caron. What’s done is done and cannot be undone.”
“Call me ‘Freda,’ Hal,” she said.
“They were talking to us, Freda.”
“They communicated with us. Grief is universal, as two times two is four, anywhere in the universe.”
“True. But they communicated. I would like your permission to send some of my tapes to the Bureau of Linguistics to have them analyzed for repetitions or recurrent patterns.”
“To determine if the tulips communicate with each other?” she asked.
“Between us, yes. ‘It’s my wish,’ I would phrase the letter, ‘to have the enclosed tapes analyzed for musical dissonance.’ I think I could get that much accomplished without getting us both sent to Houston.”
“Hal, you’re being naive. I saw your purpose immediately. By the time your request passed through channels to Agriculture, over to Health, Education and Welfare, and down to Linguistics, you and I would both be notorious and our Bureau would be the laughingstock of all departments. Our careers would be ruined, our reputations smirched, our honor stained.”
“The only honor I honor is honor,” he said, “and the one sure way I can dishonor myself is by worrying about my reputation. If a thing’s worth believing in, it’s worth fighting for.”
“Ah, yes,” she nodded, “and I was spitted on that spear in Washington.”
“If you refer to the Gaynor Station, all you were fighting for was a monument to Gaynor; if you believed in that,” he added bitterly, “then you were born without honor.”
“I agreed with the administration’s policy and volunteered to enter that petition,” she flared. “But I don’t wish to discuss administrative matters.”
“I’m not going to,” he said, “but if the truth is our goal, it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose the approval of the apparatus. If we are right, we are right for eternity, and let the administrators be damned. In my considered opinion,” he flared, “those puke-lickers—But, I don’t wish to discuss administrators. All I want is information from the linguistic-computer banks. If you approve the letter, they’re required to honor it. If Linguistics detect a pattern, I’ll buy a secondhand copy of Crypto-Analytics and decipher the pattern myself… If I find what I think I’ll find, no bureaucrat in the world will be able to challenge or demean or suppress the Caron-Polino theory of plant communication.”
He had invaded her temple and whipped her priests as money changers, and she more than half-agreed with him. He had made her ambition seem shameful, and she felt shamed. He had linked her name with his in a coupling as ridiculous as an Einstein-Valentino Theory of Relative Ardor, yet his idea might be the key to a Cabinet post for her.
His idea also held dangers, and for the moment she was most concerned with the dangers. No matter how valid this boy’s contempt for the power structure, it still had the power. And ridicule was bureaucracy’s deadliest weapon.
“I’ll not permit you to send the letter. We haven’t a shred of evidence to support such a theory, and there’s no place for intuition in an exact science. It’s not enough to ‘have a hunch’ that the tulips communicate: it must be shown how they communicate.”
“But, I’m seeking evidence only…”
“Based on sheer intuition,” she snapped. “You would need evidence to justify the man-hours Linguistics would have to spend analyzing the tapes. I’ll forward your request only when it’s backed by evidence.”
“Yes, ma am.”
“You’ve been under a strain, Hal, pacing the delivery-room floor. Get out, and go play your guitar.”
“You’re under a strain too.” He grinned. “Why don’t you drop by the Mexicali tonight and relax to the dissonant rhythms of El Toro Polino?”
“Is that what the señoritas call you?”
“That’s my bandstand name. I’m playing my new composition tonight. The Caron Can-Can.’ I’m too cowardly to admit that the tulips composed it, but I can dedicate it to them in the title.”
“Polish it up,” she said. “Maybe someday you can play it for me, but never in Old Town.”
She did not know what hours he kept on Saturday night, but he was in the tulip beds before her Sunday morning, in shirtless informality. Sunday had dawned clear and warm, and she came to the beds early to find him pacing the paths, cursing the “brutes” and “beasts.” “I’ve got a feeling about today. Last night I played to standing room only at the Mexicali, and ‘The Caron Can-Can’ had the oles shaking the cantina. A promoter hit me up to make a recording.”
“Oh, won’t it be lovely,” she said, “when in all the low dives of the world, lissome legs are being flung to ‘The Caron Can-Can.’ ”
“Oh, it’s not a French can-can,” he explained. “It’s sort of a four-and-a-half-beat Spanish can-can with a boogie-woogie bounce.”
“With a little chili pepper added, no doubt,” she said.
“Freda, you don’t know good music. You should come by some Saturday. I’ll play it speci
al for you.”
“Perhaps I may,” she said.
“Just let me know in advance,” he warned seriously, “so I can make table reservations.”
Oh, what a sly one, she thought, as she unrolled her air mattress. He wanted to make arrangements, all right, this el toro, Polino, but there were going to be no four and one-quarter martinis drunk by Freda Caron to the four-and-one-half-beat measure of a Spanish can-can in the Mexicali Café, Old Town, Fresno, California. Stretching out in her navy-blue slacks with the gold sweater to dampen enthusiasms, she relaxed to the pleasant sounds emitting from row B.
Hal had said that the tulips were more musical during their pollinating period, and he was correct. She was beginning to have more confidence in his record keeping: he could probably draw her a graph of the decibel levels from his tapes, and this morning the flutings were almost all from row B. In the beds of row A, there was an ominous silence. Lying and listening, she heard a distinct “plop” sound from row A, like the sound of a crushed maypop, and she raised to one elbow to look. Four beds down the row, Hal sang out, “Thar she blows!”
He was crouching, facing her, looking to his left, seeking the source of the sound, when she heard one nearer, followed by a plop-plop-plop and a whirring sound that made the B beds rustle. Suddenly Hal was on his hands and knees, crawling toward her, under a blurred and darkening archway of flying seeds. And she was crawling to meet him.
On her right, the ova sacs in the A beds were popping, like popcorn in a popper, and the B beds were singing to the whirr of seeds. She and Hal met halfway, their inner tensions breaking with seedpods, and sat cross-legged, kneecap to kneecap, slapping shoulders, laughing and crying, under a bridge of flying seeds.
Hal was shouting in near-hysteria, “Talk about communicating! Freda, the little bastards are doing just what I told them to do. The A beds are shooting at the E and F rows. The A buds are aiming at the E and F plots. Now I’ve got pragmatic damned, empirical damned, statistical damned proof in my secret damned logbook.” He pounded the canvas in his glee.
“Have you been keeping secret papers?” she shouted over the whirring and singing and plopping.
