by John Boyd
“I’m supposed to give you a physical and mental,” the Doctor said. “How many fingers?”
“Two,” Paul said, “but what about the earth woman? She looks a little peaked.”
“Sit on the rock,” the Doctor said, brandishing a rubber hammer, “and cross your legs.”
“Stand clear when you tap, Doctor. I might punt you over the cliff.”
Paul passed the physical, and Freda supervised the unloading of her equipment crate while Paul talked to the Doctor. Paul’s crate was packed and ready to go back, and the pilot loaded it aboard.
“What about your field log?” Freda asked.
“I’ll talk you into a landing,” Paul told her.
After the wave-off, and the helicopter soared away to leave them standing on the three-thousand-foot level, Paul turned to her. “All you’ll need for tonight is your machete. I wanted you here before sunset to show you the view from Sunset Point. It’s a ten-mile hike, and I’ll show you the orchids as we walk. Fall in.”
He strode over the coral, barefooted, toward the orchid line in the distance, saying, “The old reefs captured the lava flow from the volcano, and once inside the ring of coral, the soil is fertile. There’s a terrace of orchids above us and one below. Above the orchids is a temperate forest, above that a grassland, and then the cone. There’s a lake inside the cone, and that fissure in the cliffs, over yonder, is from a stream that drains the lake. Now, these first orchids are males. They grow on the outer perimeters and near the fissures the streams cut.”
“They go a-courtin’ at night, I understand,” Freda remarked.
Paul laughed. “That was a feedback from Hal Polino. I never took it seriously, but so much was going on that I couldn’t understand, I was willing to work on anything.”
“Out with it, Paul. How do they pollinate?”
“I have a theory. Basically, it has to do with the ecology of the island, and it explains why the males are stationed on the perimeters.”
They were nearing the grove, and he reached down and pulled a dead stalk that had gained an isolated foothold on the coral strand but had not been able to survive. He showed her the bifurcated roots with their twin orchis, and she hefted the plant.
It was stiff, brittle, and light. “I’m glad it’s a plant,” she said. “The Caron tulips were twixt and tween.”
“They were lower on the scale,” he commented, not saying which scale he referred to, and added, “I suppose you had to destroy them.”
“Yes. They were deadly,” she said, as they entered the grove, following a cleanly demarked pathway of grass four feet wide. “Did you cut this path?” she asked.
“No. The groves are crisscrossed with them. The broad paths, between male and female groves, are wider, invariably six feet. The consistent width of the paths gave me my first hint of their pollination method.”
Freda was as grateful as she was curious. Without the paths, it would have been difficult to maneuver through the thick stalks, some towering as high as eight feet, with tendrils trailing from above the hip swelling and coarse blades branching from the stalks below the hips. Walking behind him, she gazed up at the huge blossoms, ranging from white to pale pink.
Once he stopped and lifted her to his shoulder for a closer view of a bloom, its calyx petals folding outward to three feet in diameter. Delicate traceries of red on the corolla petals and the lip gave it the appearance of a Cymbidium alexanderi, save for the fact that there was a single stamen with no stigma. Its stamen was almost six inches long.
From below, Paul remarked, “The stamen’s compacted with the rostellum. In the female, there’s a single stigma at the oviduct, almost vestigial, although it’s sensitive.”
“With a single, terminal inflorescence,” she said, “you should have named them cornstalk orchids.”
“The hips are more pronounced on the female,” he said, “so I deferred to the weaker sex.”
From her perch she could look out over the fields, and in the distance she spotted a bright-red orchid. “It’s beautiful from up here,” she said.
“Then I’ll carry you,” he said, moving off with an effortless glide. On earth, she remembered, he had started and stopped by jerks when his attention was drawn to some phenomenon, but here he seemed to sweep up to a subject and over it without effort, and his physical movements had the same flowing grace. “We can go faster,” he said, “and I want to get to the point before sunset.”
“You seemed to know I had to eradicate the tulips. Were you aware they were intelligent?”
“If you wish to call it that,” he said. “Theirs was the intelligence of a social insect, and if they were deadly, so is a bee swarm. What pollinators did they use on earth?”
“Wasps,” she said.
“Like to like,” he said contemptuously. “The orchids could never adapt to earth. They only seed once a year, and then only a single seed.”
“How did they get started in the grass?”
“They swung down from trees, like we did,” he answered. “Ages past, they were epiphytes. When the lava covered the ground, it killed the grass but left a few tree trunks with their orchid guests. So the orchids got a foothold before the grass returned.”
Without her slower pace to retard him, he was covering at least five miles an hour, and carrying her in ease and comfort. From her height, she could see a coral knob soaring fifty feet from the terrace in the distance, and Paul was making for it.
“You’re easier to ride than a Tennessee walking horse,” she complimented him when he finally lowered her at the base of the coral knob.
“It’s hand over hand from here to the top,” he said.
From the summit, in the slanting rays of the sun, they could see over the rim to the terrace below and over the orchids to the ramparts three miles distant. A waterfall soared from the tier above from a deep chasm it had cut in the coral, and she noticed that the face of the cliff seemed pitted. They were old sea grottoes, Paul explained, which became caves when the coral reef lifted.
Above the cliff soared other terraces, rising in tiers of pink to the green base of the mountain, which lifted a snowcapped cone to trailing wisps of clouds. “The sun’s rays,” Paul said, “glance from off the coral to tint the snow and clouds. We re a little late. The blush is beginning now… Here, lie down. Cradle your head on my arms, and watch with me as I lay the day to rest.”
She hoped the transponder had picked up the last sentence. Paul had gone Florian to a fare-thee-well. Flowers were growing out of his sentences. Perhaps the liquid flow of his stride she had admired on their walk over might be more aptly defined as a swish. Snuggling into the cradle formed by his deltoid and trapezius, she found the muscles harder than the coral: he might be nuts, she decided, but he wasn’t fruit.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, falling in with Paul’s mood, leading him on. “The snow and clouds look like strawberry ice cream.”
He chuckled. “It will deepen to a Manhattan cocktail, and just as the sun goes down, become a cherry cordial.”
Now, she thought, would be the ideal time to check his reaction to shock, as he lay musing in the sunset. “The tulips killed Hal Polino.”
For a moment he was silent, and she thought him stupefied by the news, but when he spoke he said, “Now that the snowfield’s incarnadined, watch the scarlet swallow the cloud tops.”
Freda could feel the tranquility and beauty flowing from the sunset. Death seemed suddenly far away, remote, not merely Hal Polino’s death, but all death. It was as if the island and orchids shut out thoughts of mortality. But she persisted, “Paul, I said the tulips killed Hal.”
“He would have died, hereafter… How did they do it? With high-frequency sound waves?”
Now it was her time to be shocked, but not into silence. “How did you guess it?”
“Their air chambers were Helmholtz resonators with high-frequency filters, and their petal configuration focused sounds. I diagramed the structure to Hal before he left a
nd pointed out the dangers… He must have been teasing them. But they didn’t kill him. If he invaded their stimulus-response area knowing what I told him, he committed suicide.”
So, all of Hal’s fancy theories were Paul’s, dressed up by Hal to impress her. No, to seduce her! He had taken Paul’s ideas and run away with them. In actual fact, the Caron-Polino theory was the Caron-Theaston theory.
Swiftly she told Paul what Hal had done, and how she had used the theory to get to Flora. Paul was very tolerant, or bemused by the sunset. “We’re coming to the Manhattan-cocktail hour now, Freda… Let the theory stand as a monument to the boy. He was a good student and a dear friend.”
“I don’t know if Hal was your dear friend,” she said with genuine indignation. “He persuaded the tulips that he and I were their mother and father and started their vibrations to working on me. He almost succeeded, too. We were going to the Mexicali Café, but he got too eager. To get a rival out of town, he rushed the experiments, and the very weapon he was using to seduce me saved me.”
“Look, Freda. The clouds seem on fire!”
She looked at the fiery glow from the clouds, thinking that the orchids had not tampered with Paul’s libido. He was still as romantically inclined as an oyster undergoing metamorphosis.
“It looks like the volcano is alive, at least,” she said.
After the colors died, he spoke. “I wish you’d gotten to the Mexicali. It was high class, as such joints go, and Hal would have died happy.”
She snuggled closer, charmed and dismayed by his answer. “Aren’t you being rather generous with my favors?”
“I love you as a woman, and loved Hal as a man.” He chuckled. “Love is a sharing, even if it’s a three-way split.”
“Did you ever go to that horrible place with him?”
“I took him there,” he answered candidly. “Since he was a good assistant and bordello-minded anyway, I wanted to minimize absenteeism caused by knife whacks, Montezuma trots, cupid’s pox, and all the attendant ills of the meaner cathouses.”
Freda sat bolt upright and whirled on him. “Paul Theaston! I’m disgusted! Here, you courted me for a year before you even kissed my hand. And I suppose you had some little hot tamale who called you El Toro?”
His eyes twinkled at her anger. “Yes,” he admitted, “but that was on another planet, and besides, the wench couldn’t tango.” His arm was encircling her, drawing her down to him. “I feared to hug you too hard, lest your veneer crack and cut me… Look, its cherry cordial now!… And your virginity frightened me. As a pragmatist, I find virgins have no practical value; but, on the other hand, I’m not the Holy Ghost.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore!”
“You mean you’re not a virgin any longer?”
“Would you be jealous if I told you I’m not sure?”
He looked at her in amazement. “I wouldn’t be jealous, but I’d be damned curious. You either are or you aren’t.”
“I’ll tell you about that later. Right now, I’m more interested in your licentiousness. And, to think, your profile was just like dad’s.”
“Yes, indeed,” he agreed. “Since your mother was a professional, I’m sure he didn’t find her at a convention of horticulturists.” His other arm was around her now, and she hoped the pressure of his chest against her was jamming the transmit signals from her button. “In some circles, your parentage might meet with disapproval, but for me you represent the best of my two favorite worlds.”
He was nudging her neck, kissing her, and his arms were wringing out any residual anger not spun dry by her thoughts. His implied admiration for her mother shook her, for she had never considered her mother’s side of the marital arguments. Perhaps she had been as wrong in accepting her father’s judgment of her mother as she had been wrong in underestimating the amorous potential of Paul Theaston.
“Darling,” she whispered.
“Yes, sweet.”
“Would you do something for me?”
“Yes, dearest.”
“Get me off this damned rock!”
Without a word, he stood, lifting her to his shoulder, and gripping the incline of coral with his bare feet, he carried her down, saying, “I don’t want you slipping and breaking a thigh bone.”
As always, Paul had immaculate control. Even with his inward excitement, while balancing himself and his burden on the dangerous descent, he had not specified her arm or leg or neck; he was specifically concerned with her pelvis. On the other hand, in the excitement of their reunion and his revelation of the real Paul, she had completely forgotten the voice pickup in her button.
As night fell and the first moon of Flora rose over the mountain, they set up camp by a broad path in a male grove near trees by the stream from the fissure in the rampart and in earshot of the waterfall. “Well weave a lattice of tendrils to shade our eyes from the second moon, which gets so bright at its zenith it can awaken a sleeper.”
He showed her how to plait the tendrils, and when she had gotten the hang of the task, he said, “I’ll go hustle up supper while you finish. Ill not be gone long, but don’t leave the male grove. You’ll be safe here.”
“Safe from what?” she asked in alarm.
“A theoretical danger,” he said vaguely, “something from above, I think, from the forest or from the sea grottoes in the cliff.”
“If there’s a threat,” she said, “I’d like to know what it is. I’ll be here for four months.”
“There’ll be no threat now if you stay among the males. After you’ve learned quickness with your machete you can defend yourself against anything you wish to defend against.”
“How does one learn quickness?” she asked.
“You’ll be adapted,” he grinned, “like this.”
Suddenly he was gone, vanishing into the grove as silently as a Mohawk, to leave her weaving and wondering.
Emotionally, mentally, and physically, Paul was in perfect condition; but there was the absence of records, which was unusual, even though he had promised to ‘talk her into a landing.’ So far his talk had been a skimming over of facts that should have been analyzed in detail, and half-answers to whole questions.
He knew too much to say so little. He said he had warned Hal of the danger from the tulips, yet he had not mentioned the danger in his field notes to her. On their hike from the landing, he had told her that the paths had furnished a clue for a pollination theory, but he had told her nothing about the theory. Male groves were “stationed” on the perimeters, a military term. He thought he knew why the sexes were segregated, but he had not told her what his thoughts were. Now there was this theoretical threat from the forest above, or was it from the sea grottoes? And why would she “be adapted,” rather than “adapt,” to learn quickness. He had realigned her life with a few hammer strokes of honesty, yet there was a furtiveness in his candor when he spoke of Tropica, and his methodology had certainly grown slipshod.
He came back to her down the path bearing a stalk of sugarcane and singing an Elizabethan song with a “hey, ho, and hey nonino.” Moonlight bathed his bronze with silver, and she said, “Sire, the tent is raised.”
“Whet lips and tongues for a feast,” he said, hacking off a section of the cane and peeling it, “and to tell me about this virginity codicil to our late marriage contract… Your supper, milady.”
It was a delicious cane with an edible pulp, and as he squatted before her, munching away, she found herself recounting in detail the incidents in Washington, beginning with her first dinner with Hal and finishing with her outwitting of Gaynor. Then she told him bluntly, “Hans Clayborg’s theory that intellectuals didn’t fall in love was out of joint with Hal’s remark that you kept him out of the groves. I had the feeling the orchids might have aroused your ardor.”
“Clayborg told the truth. A wise man’s love is a value judgment.”
“Then why did you keep Hal out of the grove?” she asked, stifling a yawn.
His
answer marked him as irrevocably her soulmate. “Hal could have ‘fallen in love’ because his overactive hormones impaired his reason. With two males in the groves, I would have had an organization with a love-smitten, useless subordinate. I’m a scientist, not an administrator.”
“Aren’t you an organization man?”
“By and large, I detest organizations. Legally they’re only theoretical bodies, but they squirm with genuine maggots spawned by real blowflies… You’re getting sleepy. Let’s get in the tent.”
“But I want to know what you’ve found out about the pollination process—”
“Tomorrow,” he interrupted. “It’s all abstruse deduction, and I could be wrong.”
“You’re never wrong, Paul, but I am sleepy.”
Stretching out beside her, he stroked her hair. “No, I could be wrong. Did it ever occur to you that in the primal innocence of life there were no pollinators in Eden?”
“But I came to Eden by the back door,” she said, remembering Heyburn, “chewing on an apple core.”
“No, dearest,” he said. “You’ve come in innocence, and you’ve entered by the servant’s entrance… Now, go to sleep.”
His hand was stroking her hair, and a lassitude was descending over her mind. “You’ve got so much to tell me, Paul. You must spend tomorrow with me.”
“Of course, dear Freda, I’ll stay with you tomorrow.”
She was drifting off to sleep, but she heard his voice whisper, from far away, “I’ll never leave you. We’ve come to Eden to stay. Now, sleep. Sleep. Sleep.”
She heard him, and she knew he was lulling her fears to lull her to sleep, lulling her with soporific sounds, suggestions, and she loved to be lulled by Paul. Drowsily she smiled and turned her lips to his good-night kiss. She knew he was manipulating her, but she did not mind. It was one thing to be manipulated at the hands of an office politician, like Gaynor; it was quite another to be manipulated by the hand of a lover.
She awakened once, when the second moon’s orbit carried it above the cloud on Tropica’s cone and its brightness on the snow cone filtered through the tendrils. She could hear Paul’s even breathing in the moonglow beside her, and, reassured, she drifted back to sleep.
