by John Boyd
“Dearly beloved, God grant you, always, elm trees,” Freda murmured, and her iron controls vanished. She threw herself to the canvas, and cradling her head in her arms, she wept as she had wept as a child beneath the elms. Around her the tulips were weeping.
Chapter Ten
Although Freda knew that the dynamo had to keep purring, she would have liked it better if the pulsations had wavered slightly when such a saintly discard as Hal Polino was tossed into the scrap bin. On her way to her Friday-morning lecture in cystology, she paused to check the official bulletin board in the administration building. Gaynor’s economy drive was in full force, she noticed. With characteristic originality, he had posted a typeset notice: ATTENTION—ALL PERSONNEL—ECONOMY MEASURES MUST BE IMPLEMENTED AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY. A SHEET OF CARBON SAVED IS TEN CENTS EARNED. HASTE MAKES WASTE. THE MANAGEMENT.
Among the memoranda and trivia, she noticed thumbtacked on the lower-left corner a simple card trimmed in black:
In Memoriam
Harold Michelangelo Polino. Born, March 22, 2216. Passed to his eternal reward, March 16, 2237. Funeral Mass, 10:30 a.m., Saturday, March 18, at Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Fresno.
Arrangements by Hanarihan Mortuaries, 470 Sutter Street, Fresno. Fine Funerals Since 2218.
She was surprised to find that Hal Polino had been religious. Not that she disapproved. She herself occasionally attended nondenominational services at the chapel on the base, but her attendance was more a matter of form than conviction. Religion was outside her field of study.
Now she was grateful that Hal had been a Catholic, since his denomination was permitted ground burial in soluble coffins. Somehow she gained comfort from the knowledge that Hal’s upright skeleton would nestle awhile in the loins of earth. His bones would be his monument, and as long as Freda Caron lived, some of his spirit would survive. Winter hills would be a little greener for her, the mountains more majestic, her tulips more golden because Hal Polino had walked the earth. A tightening of the throat as she paused before the board was evidence that she had been touched by the poet, and she breathed aloud one of Hal’s own lines, plucked from her memory: “Now, boast thee, death, in thy possession lies a lad unparalleled.”
As she hurried onward, a thought occurred to her: the prophecy on the washroom wall had named the ides of March as a day of foreboding. On that day, the plans had been laid which had led to his death on the sixteenth. The oracle of the ladies’ lounge had not erred!
It was unseasonably warm Saturday morning. A Santa Ana was blowing off the Mojave, and Freda chose light clothing for the funeral. She donned a black skirt and a white blouse with a wide collar that overlapped a black shoulder cape trimmed with narrow bands of white and secured at the front by two large white buttons. She chose a white pillbox bonnet with black-lace netting to simulate a veil, and matching gloves of white lace. Whirling before her mirror, she could almost hear Hal say, “Fetching, Freda. Very fetching.” He would have loved her in mourning.
Deliberately she was one of the last to arrive at the cathedral. Funerals were arenas for emotions, and emotionalism depressed her, especially at funerals for those who had died young. Once inside, she felt embarrassingly blond and out of place among the snifflers; her greatest consolation was that Old Platinum Head, in official attendance, must have felt even more conspicuous than she. Understandably, though not to her, the ceremony was conducted in Latin, and it was delivered briefly, with restraint.
Freda had hardly adjusted her ears to the flow of words when the priest, gorgeously robed, was rattling a mace over the coffin and sprinkling it with sand out of deference to the high solubility of the compressed nitrate of soda from which the coffin was molded. Then the mourners knelt, said a prayer, counted a few beads, and the rites were over.
She waited for Doctor Gaynor to clear the aisle before she arose and left, to stand for a moment atop the cathedral steps looking out over the grass and newly leafing trees. Tonight was the night for their date at the Mexicali Café, but she could not quibble over her Hal’s excuse for breaking the date.
One benefit she gained from his death was the right to wear white to her wedding with Paul, she thought. True, there had been the encounter with Clayborg, but she didn’t count Clayborg. Although she was not well informed legally on such matters, Freda felt that a woman should not be held accountable for a liaison during which she had felt nothing. Pragmatically, she wasn’t even sure there had been a liaison. She had been too drunk to remember anything but Hans’s gentleness in dropping her under the shower, and there should be something more to a tryst than mere tenderness, unless that Frenchwoman in the Library of Congress had been right.
“Very fetching, Doctor Caron,” a voice said behind her. “Black becomes you.”
She turned to Peter Henley, ears aflop and Adam’s apple abob, standing behind her and to her right. No doubt, while she stood lost in thought, he had circled around her rear.
“Good morning, Mr. Henley.”
“Too bad about Hal,” he said.
“Death comes to us all,” she consoled him, “sooner or later.”
“In ninety-nine deaths out of a hundred, that’s a comforting thought,” Henley said, “but not with this death. Hal had something to give.”
“You bet your sweet burro he did,” Freda said, “and something to get!”
Peter looked out over the greenery and shook his head. “He would have a go at it, against my advice. He seemed to be trying to rush the experiments, to get me out of town; but the bloody little beggars did him in. Haste makes waste.”
“The coroner said he died of natural causes, a brain hemorrhage,” Freda said.
“He died of a brain hemorrhage,” Peter said, “caused by high-frequency sound waves focused on his thalamus.”
“Are you accusing the tulips of his murder?” Freda feigned surprise.
“Of course not!” He looked at her in amazement. “How would I bring murder charges against a bloody bed of tulips?”
“You don’t,” she agreed, “particularly when you’re carrying out an unauthorized investigation at a Government Research Center without a security clearance.”
“I wasn’t sent here to prove anything in court, fortunately,” he said. “My assignment calls for me to prove it only to you.”
“You were assigned! By whom?”
“Clayborg.”
“Hans?”
“Yes.”
“Why all this sudden consideration from a man who won’t even acknowledge my correspondence?”
“Clayborg’s a thinker… not a writer.”
“You say you have proof?”
“In my diggings, five blocks north of here. But I’m afoot.”
“Is this some Bloody-Grant-Clayborg procedure,” she asked haughtily, “for getting a woman into your apartment?”
“Nothing of the sort!” he snapped. “Your virtue’s safe in that apartment.”
His horizontal fins had stabilized, she noticed, and his Adam’s apple was at rest. Either he was calm or this was part of the famed illogical methodology. Two months ago she would have gone to his apartment without a thought, but Hal had told her there was a woman inside her—she already knew about the little girl—and with Hal gone, she wanted to reserve the woman for Paul. Still, if Clayborg was involved, she wanted to get any evidence against the tulips before Clayborg saw it. “Very well,” she said, “I’ll drive you down.”
Easing into the seat beside her, he commenced what she was almost certain was an approach. “Hal was quite smitten with you, though I’m sure you knew that.”
“I gathered it, not so much from his words as his gestures.”
“He thought your sense of humor was exceptional.”
“Is that all he thought exceptional?”
“That’s all I’m discussing in mixed company.”
“My sense of humor is a shield,” she said. “My wit is my rapier, so let’s not discuss personalities, Mr. Henley. You’re vulnerable.”
/> There were other areas that rendered him vulnerable, she thought, as she steered the car to his directions. His ears stuck out too far. If he tried a direct assault, she would grab him by his ears.
Henley’s quarters were on the tenth floor of a rooming house entered through a lobby containing a chained sofa and decorated with a lithograph of a desert scene in a plastic frame. Beside the entrance was an artificial aspidistra in a styrofoam tub painted to resemble terracotta. He conducted her across the lobby and pushed the button of an elevator, whose shaft moaned and shook until the door wheezed open. They crowded in with the odor of a disinfectant, as Henley apologized obliquely. “Winos,” he said.
Their lift-up led to a trek down a tunnel to a three-room apartment whose street-front exposure must have cost the Australian fifty cents extra a month. The three rooms were ingeniously disordered. Henley had unfolded a card table above his coffee table to store electronic equipment on three decks, counting the floor. Actually, he had been defeated in his struggle for storage space: Freda considered it a violation of the rules to store tubes on the divan and put coiled wires on the chairs. All the electric outlets had plugs plugged into plugs with a Medusa-like sprouting of electric cords from the top of his only floor lamp. Despite the evidence, she assumed he was very sparing with electricity, since he flicked on a forty-watt overhead light when they entered.
She waited while her host removed a dismantled speaker assembly on his single upholstered chair and flicked the cushion in a grand manner with his pocket handkerchief. She took the hand he offered to aid her Cakewalk to the chair over the coiled lines. When she turned and lowered herself into the chair, she saw into his bedroom, where crates were piled on his bed. She relaxed. As he had said, there would be no seduction in this apartment, unless he hung her from wall hooks.
“I see why you call these your diggings,” she said. “You dig your way in and dig your way out.”
“It’s a mess, but I’m pulling out Monday.”
“Literally and figuratively,” she agreed, thinking of all the wires in all the sockets. “So, you’ve found incontrovertible evidence that the tulips talk to each other?”
“No evidence is incontrovertible, ma’am. A man throwing a brick through a jeweler’s window at four in the morning could be a baseball pitcher warming up for tomorrow’s game.” He was tiptoeing to pull the drapes as he spoke, leaving illumination of the room to the single bulb. “I have edited and spliced the tapes you’ll hear. That box beside the telly converts its picture tube to a spectrograph, so you can watch the tapes as you listen through the telly’s speaker. My formulae are figured from the spectrograph. I’ll mail them to you Monday, to attach to the Caron-Polino theory. Your acoustics department can check them out… Now, listen!”
He turned on the television set, and the viewing screen lighted as a recorder atop the set began to play the tape. Sounds came from the speaker, and a black line zigzagged across the screen. “I’ve lowered the pitch and slowed the frequency so you can hear the sound as you watch it.”
Both sight and sound were repetitive. The sound came in lilting whangs, which reminded her of someone flexing the blade of a handsaw.
“Sounds Greek to me,” she said.
“More like Mandarin,” he corrected. “The grammatical structure resembles Chinese. But listen.”
Suddenly the lines wavered in a variation on the pattern. Her own voice issued from the speaker, saying, “Hal Polino.”
“The mikes picked up my voice!”
“Not at these frequencies, ma’am,” he said. Suddenly the Mandarin coming from the speaker began to click and jabber, like Swahili.
As the Swahili began merging back into Mandarin, he said, “The tulips used your name for Hal, even your tone of voice. When he walked into the garden, a tulip gave warning. The stepped-up frequency, the agitation, signifies fear or alarm even in rabbit language. Now, listen.”
Gradually the staccato died and the singsong recommenced. Again the pattern changed, and suddenly, clearly, she heard a feminine version of Hal’s voice say, “Freda.”
Her name was not followed by the clicking jabber. Instead, the tulips’ singsong slowed, grew more rhythmical.
“Your presence calms them,” Peter said. “You’re their blooming mother. You couldn’t hear their sounds, but you could pick up sympathetic vibrations in sensitive areas of your body.”
They listened, while the tape ran out and the flickering died on the screen.
“This tape was taken Tuesday, at the beginning of the experiment,” Peter said as he removed the reels. “By Tuesday last, the tulips were calming down in Hal’s presence, accepting him as a father figure. That’s when he started to feel safe.
“But he wasn’t safe,” Peter added, putting a new reel onto the recorder. “The next sounds were recorded from individual tulips—you’ll be able to tell male from female. Mind you, Doctor, what’s taking seconds to play back was recorded in microseconds… This tape was spliced from those you sent me Thursday morning and are the most interesting from a linguistic point of view, because they were taken just before Hal died.”
He clicked on the machine, and the now familiar singsong came from the speaker; the darting lines showed on the screen. Suddenly the sound changed to a high whine, soaring, to peak and decline. At the peak, the darting lines on the screen narrowed, became no wider than a heavy pencil mark, and then spread again as the sound died. “The first sweep of the howler,” Peter commented. “Now, listen to the tulips react.”
As if attempting to match the howler, the tulips were talking with a chittering buzz that narrowed visibly on the tube. Several times, blurred but distinguishable, she heard, “Hal Polino… Freda.” Then the sound died into the whine, which peaked again and fell back into sudden silence. “I’m picking up a single male tulip following the second sweep,” Peter said, speaking rapidly.
Very distinctly, and surprisingly baritone, she heard her voice say, “Hal Polino.” There was a finality in the voice that made her shudder, and it helped little when Peter commented, with Australian sang froid, “He’s making a choice. If he had said ‘Freda,’ Hal and I would be discussing this tape… Third sweep commencing.”
Again the high whine peaked and fell into silence. Peter said, “I’m picking up everything on the tape now. Listen.”
At first there was silence. Then, over the stereophonic tape, she heard a male to her right say, “Hal Polino,” and far to her left another male echoed, “Hal Polino.”
Now the silence seemed as sinister as that which precedes the second creak of an opening door at dead of night, and she was an awakened sleeper, waiting, with a scream gathering in her throat. On the screen there was only whiteness. She waited.
Suddenly, with the quick rasp of a striking match, a streak darted across the screen. The rest was whiteness and silence, and Freda sat shaken by this almost subliminal vision of sudden death.
“In a rather ironic sense,” Peter said as he clicked off the machine and began his ballet toward the drapes, “what you heard was a bunch of flowers picking a human. Hal would have been safe if he had stopped after the second sweep. When he came back with the third sweep, the tulips didn’t know when it would end. Two males on the outer edge of the howlers traverse triangulated on him, using sight, X rays, heat perception—some form of detection—and the tulips zapped him.”
He pulled the drapes, wheeled, and toe-danced back, saying, “Their silence before the zap was to store up energy. Their silence afterward was to recoup. Most important, from a linguistic point of view, was their agitation and argument after the first sweep. Since I know what they plan, I can fairly well figure their language, though only mathematically, but that’s all you’ll need for the thesis. When I send the formulae Monday, I’ll send along Hal’s request that the tulips be eradicated.”
“But Hal loved those tulips!”
“I know. But I wouldn’t give him the howler until he signed a recommendation. They were seducing him through
his paternal feelings, just as they pranged you. Given another week, they might have had you two in front of an altar, playing mama and papa’ for keeps. Hal couldn’t see this because he wasn’t that sort of a thinker, but I’m sure you must have felt it.”
Indeed she had, she thought, with regularity and increasing gusto. But she said, “When will you tell this to Clayborg?”
“I report to you, Doctor Caron. Nobody tells Hans Clayborg anything. They only listen. And don’t be misled by his setback in the Senate. He’ll get representatives on Flora if he has to bootleg an expedition via the Jordanian Space Navy.”
He put the two tapes into a mailing container he pulled from beneath a woofer and handed them to her. “Send your request for a reevaluation of these through channels. Linguistics will comply, and H.E.W. will ask questions, like—why weren’t the bloody tapes evaluated correctly the first time? Then I’ll catch hell.”
“Will this hurt your career?”
“What’s my bloody career when the earths ecology is at stake? Anyway, when the Chief eats me out, he’ll be wondering if I have friends in high places, if I’m setting him up for a kangaroo kick, as we say Down Under.”
“What’s a kangaroo kick?”
“A bash in the head you give a former superior when you hop over him to higher levels in the organization… Let me help you out of the coils, Doctor. I don’t want to hurry you, but Hal’s funeral set me back, and I’ve work to do.”
“Will you report Hal’s murder?”
Henley seemed taken aback by her question. “My field’s linguistics, not homicide detection. I’ll have my hands full deciphering their code. If you’re thinking of preferring charges, forget it. Spliced tapes can’t be used in a felony case, though they could get Hal’s parents a handsome settlement for damages in a civil suit.
“Anyway,” he added, as she stood clear of the coils, “it wasn’t murder. As Hal guessed, the tulips are individual intelligences which operate as a unit. You can’t try an army for the death of a single enemy, particularly when the army smites in anger and not in malice… I’ll see you to the street. Women aren’t safe in buildings anymore.”
