by John Boyd
“Reams of them,” he yelled.
“Why did you keep them secret from me?”
“You weren’t ready yet,” he shouted, and Freda fell backward to the canvas, tears of happiness and joy rolling toward her earlobes. Hal Polino had earned a four-and-one-quarter-martini weekend. He had been forging in secret the key to unlock her administrative basement. The Caron-Polino experiment would knock the scientific world into a cocked hat; and the black arch above her, graying now with the diminishing plops from the pods, were proof, written in the sky, that the Caron tulip would survive on earth.
Chapter Eight
It took them four days to get Hal’s notes in order, but he wrote the first draft of the letter all by himself, and he read it aloud to her in the office with gestures:
From: Director of Cystology, Bureau of Exotic Plants, Department of Agriculture.
To: Chief of the Bureau of Linguistics, Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Subject: Student request for cryptographic-sound analysis. Forwarded without comment.
Reference: Administrative Directive 38753-42, Office of the President of the United States.
It is requested that enclosed tapes of sounds made by the exotic plant, Tulipa caronus, habitat Flora, be analyzed for phrase repetitions, dissonance patterns, or coherent frequency changes. This request is made to establish the validity of interplant communication based on the nonrandom ejection of seed from seedpods and from the plant’s control of the pollinating agent. Pertinent copies of log sheets enclosed.
“Does it have the roll of thunder which heralds a new discovery,” he asked, “or, more to the point, is it sufficiently non-sensational?”
Freda shook her head. “When you drop a firecracker in the middle of an old ladies’ sewing circle, it matters little whether you toss it gently or lay it down. Its going to cause an explosion… But put in ‘selective control’ instead of merely ‘control.’ The tulips don’t make the wasps dance.”
“Yes, I see.” He made a notation on the sheet.
“Another discrepancy—nonrandom discharges of seeds implies visual control. Are you saying that the tulips can see?”
“Statistics point that way,” he admitted, “but I hope they’ll slur over that.”
“They won’t,” she said emphatically. “Here’s the fluoro print of the vein system. Enclose it with this log sheet. Those white strands are nerve fibers, so add this paragraph: ‘Strands of nerve fibers converging to a nexus beneath the air chamber indicate a rudimentary system for control of the air chamber and ova. These fibers diverge in a fanlike system onto the upper leaf system and connect with areas rich in fluoride and phosphide compounds of rare earths.’ ”
He whistled. “You’ve agreed with me all along.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “When I was in Washington, I was taken by psychiatrists who wrote books: they first advance the theory and then find the facts to back it up.”
“Freda, that ganglion would be a brain, those spots eyes. Are you sure you want to send this?”
“Yes,” she answered, “but I wish to make another change. Delete ‘Forwarded without comment’ and insert ‘Forwarded with approval and addenda.’ ”
“Freda, I didn’t ask this,” he protested. “I’m willing to put my future on the line, but my ante isn’t worth much. I’m not asking you to commit professional suicide.”
She looked at him and smiled with mock sadness. “Hal, you’re risking a great career.”
She rose and walked to the door, looking out. The first three rows were blooming now, with the C row singing its children’s songs. Mr. Hokada and two helpers were spading the G and H beds, and the wasps were out in force over the A and C beds, ignoring the pollinated B beds.
“As Doctor Caron,” she said, not looking at him, “I would still advise you not to send the letter. You are sending yourself with it, through a maze more devious than any you imagine, with every Bureau subassistant and departmental junior executive adding an endorsement, slashing at you to prove his own wit and worth by drawing your blood.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said.
“Doctor Caron would say ‘no,’ ” she continued, “but Freda will go with you into the labyrinth to protect you with her body from their knives. Then, maybe you’ll survive, or well bleed to death together… Take the draft over to steno and get three extra copies, one on onionskin, for my files, before I weaken and refuse to sign.”
Going out of the door, he said, “You must come and hear ‘The Caron Can-Can,’ Freda. It wasn’t really named for the tulips.”
Small chance, she thought, turning back to the desk. She was done with tacos and tangos, flamencos and frijoles, rumbas and “Carambas.” She selected from the innermost recess of her lowest drawer a box of personalized stationery, colored lavender and reeking with Eau de Chat Château that some misled sophomore had given her in college. She began to write:
Dear Hans,
We have graffiti boards for scurrilous gossip, an underground press for all the news not fit to print, but with this note I lay the groundwork for an infrastructure of science.
My impetuous student, Hal Polino, your spiritual godson if you ever had one, sparked the letter to Linguistics, copy enclosed, which I felt it my duty to approve and supplement. If his idea is valid, and my experiments support his hypothesis, it will be invaluable to the thesis I am writing on the possibility of intelligent plant life, “An Inquiry into Plant Communication.”
My rump still pains me from the Icarian pratfall, but it only hurts when I rumba or when Gaynor sticks pins into the voodoo doll made in my image which he has hanging by a noose in his office. After this letter reaches “channels” administratively, I’ll be a corpse with a sore sacroiliac.
I’m sending the onionskin of Hal’s letter in my most flagrantly fragrant and lushest lavender envelope in order to render it inconspicuous amid your incoming mail.
Almost yours,
Freda
She had barely finished the note and hidden the stationery when Hal returned and laid the typed letter before her to sign.
“Freda,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder, which did not offend her, “sign this and you become a pioneer of science. My name will be linked to yours long after you’ve lost yours to Paul Theaston.”
“If there are coherent patterns to the sounds,” she reminded him.
“I feel in my bones that the patterns are there,” he said.
“Yes, but you are pattern-happy and find cause to give to dissonance rhythms,” she paraphrased Shakespeare to shock him. “Now, get thee to the tulip beds.”
He was gone, but the memory of his touch on her shoulder lingered like a fragrance. He was a strange boy. Unbeknownst to him, he had kept her awake last night, speedreading Shakespeare; but she would have to shun him more in the future. In his direction lay her ancestral madness, though the problem was strictly her own. Hal Polino would never know why he attracted her so strongly, for she would never tell him that he smelled like elm trees.
She took one of the green shoots Hal had thinned from the new bed, slid it under the electron microscope, and back-lighted it. The plants were coming along fast, she thought, and the observation reminded her of the latest prophecy she had read this morning from the washroom sibyl: “Coming down the homestretch, Hal’s ahead of Paul and gaining.”
She smiled to herself. The underground press had wires to Washington, but there were no wires to the future.
She put the letter “in channels” on Thursday afternoon. The next day, for the first time in a week, Gaynor stopped by her table. “Doctor Caron, I forwarded your request to the Secretary without approval.”
Freda flashed a radiant smile. “Thank you, Doctor. I’m so happy you did. I wouldn’t want my request to reflect on the efficiency of your team.”
As a reflex, he smiled, nodded, and walked away, leaving around her, she was gleefully aware, a confused group of power speculators who had seen the
smiles without hearing the words. Her stock this Friday would shake the market with rumors.
In a beginning flurry of excitement and seeds from the C beds to the G and H plots, the week passed swiftly to a climax on Thursday, when the oldest flowers in the A beds shot a long-range barrage toward the newest plots, the J, K, and L beds, sending seventy percent of their discharge over a range of forty yards.
“Whooee!” Hal said as he gathered the undershot seeds from the canvas. “In another month, we’d better start thinking of a canvas wall along the Land Company’s fence, or they’ll be picking talking cotton, come August.”
On Tuesday of the week following, a mystery developed. Hal came into her office wearing a quizzical expression. “Freda, the new shoots are showing. To me, it seems impossible that some of the undershots didn’t land in the E beds, but not a single new shoot has sprung up, and the geometry is perfect.”
“Perhaps all the undershots landed on the divider, at least,” she suggested.
“Could be, but I’m suspicious of these brutes. Bed A waited for a favoring wind before shooting its broadside, but even so, such accuracy means either that each tulip is a mathematical wizard or that there’s a central fire-control plotting station somewhere in the bed.
“That’s an incredible thought, but my other thought’s even worse. If each tulip plotted its own trajectory when it shot its seeds, that means their average intelligence is greater than mine. in I don’t mind bowing to a genius, now and then, but I hate to think they’ve all got more brains than me… And they even spot the males in their harems when they shoot those seeds.”
“Male placement is random shooting,” Freda said. “Females outnumber the males thirty-two to two.”
“I’ll buy that theory,” he said, “but I’m beginning to sense something wrong. Look, Freda, did you see this?”
He had stood by her desk, thumbing through the mail, and he pulled out an “Action” pouch.
She opened it. Gaynor had read it, and forwarded it by routine mail, a deviation from procedure denoting either lack of urgency or contempt. Inside the pouch were the four tapes and a letter from the Chief of Linguistics, which, stripped of its gobbledygook, said: “Madame: Careful analysis of the enclosed tapes show no significant repetition of sound patterns.”
She handed the letter to Hal, who read it and sat down, slumped with such abject dejection that she walked over and laid her hand on his shoulder. He looked up, smiled wanly, hugged her briefly around the waist, clapped his hands together, and stood up. Walking to the door, he said, “Don’t worry, Freda. Truth crushed to earth shall rise again as a nonisometric polyhedron.”
Looking at the tulips, he had dismissed the letter. “There’s something wrong out there. That bed is a brain, each tulip a cell, and the larger it grows, the smarter it gets—a great amoral beast who would smite us for its sport.”
His words suggested ideas she should think about, but his embrace had opened areas of feeling she had never felt before. Warm and humid, a sirocco blew in from the Saharas of her being to strum soundless pizzicati down her spine, plucking the low notes last. She heard her voice, vibrating with an alien resonance, say, “Hal, did the girls in Old Town give you the name ‘El Toro’?”
He cocked his head at her non sequitur, then nodded. “In contempt. I haven’t made a veronica since you kissed me.”
“Was I that effective?”
“From your kiss, ‘The Caron Can-Can’ was born.”
“I thought the tulips composed it.”
“That floral computer contributed four notes only, one morning when you walked by. Your song is all mine, and you’ve never heard it.”
Her voice coiled around him and drew him toward her with its beckonings. “I’ve been inconsiderate, Hal.”
She paused, then softly added, “Play it, and I’ll come to you, my lad, when twilight tints adobe walls with pink. And if your song has half the grace of you, I’ll dance a Caron can-can to your tune. Next Saturday, at the Mexicali.”
“Of all Saturdays!” He was genuinely crushed. “I leave for L.A. Friday to make the recording, and I canceled at the cantina. My dad needs the money, but I’ll break the contract.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “Well make it the following Saturday, the eighteenth. Here, I’ll mark it on the calendar. Now, begone.”
Freda returned to her desk after he left and sat musing.
For a moment they had stood naked before each other, stripped of pretense, each aware of the other’s membership in some secret order of depravity, and their eyes had signed an agreement with all clauses understood. She squirmed in her seat, conscious of thighs grown heavy, liquid, and warm with intimations of a four-and-one-quarter-martini tryst.
Ebbing, the surge left her stranded on drier ground. There had been no contract pledged; what she had seen in the boy as perception of her soul’s hunger had been, if anything at all, an animal’s awareness of her femality. She could never expend her spirit in a waste of shame. She had taken Polino to spare Paul, and it would be madness to let herself be spitted upon a staff of dissonant music. And she would not be. There was more to life than dancing, and she rallied her resolve around one certitude—it took two to tango.
Their turndown and her passion came at noon, Monday, March 6, a date she would later think of as “the morning of the first day.” Tuesday morning she went about her lab work, and her responses to Hal were normal. She gave him orders with crispness and precision, which he fulfilled promptly in a ripple of muscles. There was no familiarity in his manner, and his smile resembled an ogle no more than a mist resembled rain. By noon the Mexicali Café incident had assumed proper proportions in her mind: she had merely hinted she was willing to attend his musicale, and he had extended an invitation.
When she hurried back to the tulip beds after lunch, to what she and Hal jokingly referred to as her “conversations with the tulips,” she went into the greenhouse to get her air mattress. Engrossed in a manual on radar which he was currently studying in hopes of relating the principles to tulip communication, Hal failed to notice her entrance. Bent over the book, he was singing to himself an old song, “An Apple for My Teacher,” but he was singing the word “apple” in the plural, and he changed the case of the objective phrase to the genitive.
Irked by the Heyburnian connotations of his song, she slammed her locker door to signify her presence and stalked out with her deflated mattress. Unrolling and inflating her mattress helped ease her indignation, but when she stretched out, her ears close to the D-row tulips, the sirocco blew in, and she swayed once more in the winds of her desire.
In her madness she retained her methodology, carefully noting that the attack commenced at one-fifteen. Here was empirical proof that the boy neither knew nor shared her longings. He was in the greenhouse, and she was in the garden.
Listening to the tulips hum, chatter, and gurgle around her, the pangs subsided, and in her thoughts she could consider Hal Polino with a widening field of vision. Basically, there was little wrong with the boy apart from his ancestry. Latin volatility took the weights from his mind and made it difficult for him to concentrate on his chosen field. Socially, this defect was partly an asset, since it permitted him a range of conversation that could be engrossing and even charming. (Charm was another of his defects.) He could shift from Byzantine art to the mathematics of music and point relationships between the rococo paintings of Rubens and the poetry of John Dryden. In a way, he was a latter-day Leonardo da Vinci; but in the modern world of specialists there was simply no market for a generalist.
It was as a generalist—she tried to be frank with herself—that he offended her most. As a teacher, it was her axiom and policy to read ahead of her students; one should always be prepared to answer a student’s questions promptly and accurately. Vis-a-vis Hal, she had zipped through Shakespeare to footnote her student’s frequent quotes, but Shakespeare had a charm. Hefner, McLuhan, and Leary frankly repelled her. To read ahead of Polino demanded
first a knowledge of the direction he was taking, and the agility to leap ahead of him in that direction, the speed of a sprint reader and the endurance of a long-distance reader. He ate books like slugs on Carston 6 ate foliage, and he pounced on ideas like a sex maniac.
On Wednesday the sirocco struck at two-thirty, and she fled to the library to get completely outside Hal’s influence. Once safe, she constructed a graph of her emotions and found, to her alarm, that on the morning of March 19 she would peak at one-forty-five a.m. Her date with Hal was on the evening of the eighteenth. Bars in Southern California closed at one a.m. Allowing half an hour to finish drinks and stow musical instruments, she and Hal would be leaving the Mexicali at one-thirty a.m., fifteen minutes before her wave crested. Morning discount rates at Fresno motels went into effect at two a.m. At her period of highest receptivity, Hal would have her trapped between closing time and motel time.
Looking down at the graph paper, Freda felt tiny and alone. Once she had thought Paul needed her on Flora; now she knew she needed Paul on earth. There was no one she could turn to. With her father dead and her mother in Tijuana, only Hans Clayborg could have helped; but Hans was in Santa Barbara, too busy solving God’s problems to work on hers. There was one other man whose sympathy and support she could count on to help her through this crisis, but he was Hal Polino, who was the problem.
She had known from childhood, with a knowledge since reinforced by analysts, that she was emotionally unstable, a woman living on the edge of a volcano. Hal Polino was less the cause than the catalyst of the cataclysm which threatened her, but as such he could still be catastrophic. With a Paul Theaston to steady her, she could walk the thin edge for a lifetime. But a Mexican hat dance with Hal Polino around the volcano’s rim could be a one-and-a-two-and—a catapult into the chasm.
She couldn’t keep moving Polino around like a pawn, particularly since she had cosigned the Linguistics letter, which was evidence she trusted his judgment. Her other alternative was to move herself.
