The Pollinators of Eden

by John Boyd

  Freda was awakened to bright sunlight by the sound of bacon sizzling on a frying pan. She stretched luxuriously and turned to Paul to find him gone. Still yawning, she leaned out and looked down the path, and grabbed her machete.

  Three human beings were approaching, clothed in rubber guards and masked in plastic bubbles. Two of the waddlers carried cylinders on their backs. As they advanced, they sprayed a fine mist to left and right, keeping the third man, who was armed with a rifle, between. In the split second before she acted, her mind comprehended the full horror of the scene. Sometime during hibernation they had planted a transponder under her flesh, probably in her earlobe, and they had tracked her, listening to every word she and Paul had spoken. Her words had branded her a defector, and her orchids, now white and brittle beneath the spray of liquid oxygen, were powerless to protect her as they themselves died beneath the frost.

  “Murderers!” she screamed, and charged, brandishing the machete in her naked fury, as she hurled herself at the trio. She saw the central figure raise the rifle, and she swerved but swerved too late. The tranquilizing pellet struck her thigh with the impact of a truck, crushing her into oblivion.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “How many fingers?” a voice asked.

  Freda focused her eyes. “Three,” she said.

  “What is your name?”

  She was beginning to see a face behind the voice, and above the face a receding hairline. “Freda Janet Caron.”

  “That will be all, nurse,” the doctor said. She could see him plainly now, seated on a straight-backed chair beside her couch. Beyond him was a door opening onto a white-tiled bathroom. She saw a desk with a bookshelf nailed onto the wall behind it, a bed with a lavender counterpane, and a green carpet on the floor. Turning her head, she saw a high window which admitted haze-filtered sunlight. There were bars on the window.

  The doctor looked up from the pad on which he had scribbled a note and said, “Freda, my name is Doctor Campbell. I am a Platonic psychiatrist, and you are in the neuropsychiatric ward of the Institute for Space Ailments at Houston, Texas. You have suffered a traumatic episode, and I am here to help you. You have been undergoing deep analysis, under narcosis, since your arrival two days ago. Following the methods of Plato, I intend to ask you questions. Your answers will lead to self-enlightenment. Platonism holds that sanity is innate in man’s mind.”

  “Then I must be insane!”

  “Insanity is a loaded term, Freda. Let us say your attitudes need adjustment. You suffer a mild earth-alienation induced by the transference of your affections to another planet. In Freudian terms, your libido is fixated on the Planet of Flowers, but the fixation is indicative of a deeper malady still. However, Freda, your libido itself is somewhat unique, since it has an entire planet as its love-object, a condition known to the trade as ‘Nymphomanic omniphilia,’ meaning a passionate love of everything.”

  She cut through his pedantry with a question. “What’s the ‘deeper malady’?”

  “Humanism. It’s a social aberration. Basically, you’re antiorganization; proindividual, anticivilization; pronature, nonaltruistic; hedonistic. Since the function of society is to function, you are similar to a left-handed screw in a machine using only right-handed screws.”

  “You make it sound awful, Doctor.”

  “ ‘Serious to grave’ is the preferred terminology, Freda; but we know an awful lot about you, and we think we can help. Now, listen carefully to my questions and take your time answering.”

  Campbell’s analytic technique was a subtle exercise in dialectics. He began by asking her simple questions that explored her attitudes toward status: would she prefer to be mistress of a house or a serving maid? He related his status questions to mobility relationships, which led her to defining freedom as action initiated by free will. Leading her with questions, he made her admit that pollinators in a plant-insect symbiosis did not behave with free will. “It is self-evident, then,” he declared, “that your relationship with the orchids of Flora was a master-slave relationship. Does it not follow that you were either an insect or a slave?”

  His name-calling aroused in her a Bloody-Grant-Clayborg reaction. “Yes,” she agreed, “in the sense that a wife-husband is a mistress-slave relation and that men are infrastructures designed to support their procreative equipment.”

  His dialectics faltered after that remark. Doctor Campbell shied away from overt discussions of sex or any questioning of the sanctity of marriage, the logic of monogamy, or the capabilities of the male. Even as Freda answered his questions or listened to his evasions of her counterquestions, she was planning on another level.

  To get released from Houston was not enough; she must get back to Flora, to her red princes and her blond Moses. She was needed on Flora for precisely the reason she could not be used on earth. She was an unusual screw.

  Doctor Campbell was in his mid-forties, a stage of life, Freda knew, when a man simultaneously sensed the approaching end and came to realize the futility of the beginnings, a time of suicide or licentious excess. Beneath the pedantry of Campbell, she sensed a man who favored excesses, one still eager to clutch life but unequipped with grappling hooks.

  “Now, Freda”—he looked at his watch—“for the next nine minutes and forty-five seconds, we’re permitted an informal chitchat.”

  With the placebo words of the New Analysis, he was saying the recorded session was over and that off-the-record talks, to relate analyst with patient, had begun. It would serve her ends, she decided, to equip this boy with grappling hooks and provide him a few excesses to grapple.

  “Oh, goody!” she said. “Now I have you for my very own.”

  He squelched a smile and glanced at his watch. “Yes, you have nine and a half minutes of me.”

  “You’re such a scrupulous timekeeper, Doctor. Do you sometimes hear time’s winged chariots hurrying behind you, and feel there’s so much to be accomplished, so much loving to be—”

  “I’m not a Frommian,” he reminded her.

  “Well, so many questions to be asked that you will die like a sick eagle looking at the sky?”

  “Yes, Freda, I do have a sense of urgency. But the main problem in this business is that there’s nothing you can put your finger on. If I could just get inside skulls, shake up a few neurons, realign a few synapses, like a mechanic can jerk out a carburetor and clean it.”

  He threw up his hands in despair. “It’s ‘now you have it, now you don’t.’ Once a man came to me who smoked too much. It took me three months to analyze the smoke out of him. Then he developed a tic! Well, two months and the tic yielded, but he started having migraine headaches. It took me a solid month to cure his headache. When he got up from that couch, he had not a ghost of a headache, was absolutely ticless, and would not look at a cigarette, Freda, he was in radiant health. He complimented me profusely, he shook my hand, he walked out of my office, down the hall, and the ungrateful bastard jumped out of the window to the alley, forty floors below. Six months’ work shot to hell!”

  “Relax, Doctor,” Freda said. “If he had lived and smoked, he might have died of lung cancer. By the way, what is your given name?”

  “James,” Campbell answered, and, almost furtively, he lowered his voice, “My friends used to call me Jimmy.”

  “What do you mean, Jimmy—‘used to call’?”

  “I don’t have friends anymore. I’m a father image to my patients, and the average neuro wants to kick hell out of his old man. Off the record, this is one area where you’re normal. You wanted to seduce your father, but he was so fond of your mother—”

  “He divorced her, Jimmy.”

  “Sure. She had to lock him out or die of overwork. You don’t remember any of this consciously. That’s where you get your libido, and, girl, you’ve got one that won’t quit! To my knowledge, you’re the first woman who ever did it to a flower, and the first case of space madness localized in the primary erogenic zone.

  “Space madn
ess!”

  “Technical only.” He brushed it aside. “Nonobsessive. By definition, all which is not of earth is of space. To use the lay term, you’re not a neck-snapper.”

  Jimmy was too tense, too wrought-up, still glancing at his watch. She stirred on the couch and smiled at him. “Sort of a pelvis-twitcher, eh, Jimmy?”

  He smiled. He had a beautiful smile. She said, “Light me a cigarette, will you, Jimmy?”

  Lighting a cigarette might help him relax, she thought, but his hand trembled so that he could hardly find the end. To divert him, she remarked, “You know, not all my libido is fixated on Flora.”

  She told the truth. When she mentally superimposed an image of a red orchid around his balding head, she found she could sense the needs of others as she had on Flora, and she could pinpoint Campbell’s frustrations. He had devoted his life to helping others, who had returned his aid with ingratitude, and he was terribly perplexed. Inside him a child was crying, and the oversensitive adult he had become needed assurance of his manhood. She could hear Paul saying, “Guide the young with your experience, and help the old with your strength.”

  When he finally handed her the cigarette, she asked, “Are you married, Jimmy?”

  “Not anymore. I failed as a husband, too.”

  “That father image again?”

  “No. Professional duties kept me from home so much, and I was detached around the house, thinking about problems, so my wife got bored.”

  “I should think she would be willing to make sacrifices for the honor and prestige of being the wife of a lay saint.”

  “A lay saint!” He took out a cigarette and lighted one for himself. “That’s the first time anybody ever called me that.

  “Although your tool might be a question, Doctor, your art is love,” she said. “The moment I awakened, I felt in the presence of an old friend. Your wife did not know what flowers were at her feet. If I had been gifted with a husband such as you, not all the ills that earth inherits could have sundered us. I’m happy, Jimmy, that you’re my doctor, and I can never be completely alienated from a world that has such analysts in it.”

  He dropped his eyes modestly, and they must have fallen on his wristwatch, for he leaped to his feet. “Enjoyed it, Freda. Books on the shelf. Read them. No correspondence. No visitors. Your nurse is Wilma Firbank, RN, and I’ll send her in. Don’t let her show you her judo chop.”

  He was gone, and not a second too soon or too late.

  She walked over to the shelf above the desk and looked at the books: Jowett’s Plato, Hegel’s Dialectical Materialism, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. As she pondered the rather odd trio of volumes, she heard the key turn in her lock, and a square-shouldered, square-jawed woman of thirty entered, freshly scrubbed and wearing a starched uniform. Freda looked over and said, “You must be Miss Firbank?”

  “Yes, ma’am, and I got to show you how to push some buttons, tell you about the hospital’s schedule, and explain some house rules.”

  Freda listened, sizing the woman up. Wilma Firbank had open-faced candor, but her eyes seemed sad. Freda asked the nurse if she had been briefed on her case.

  “They tell me, ma’am, you sort of fell in love with a planet. Must have been some planet.”

  “It was a planet of love,” Freda said, “and it was glorious. Wilma, let me ask you: have you ever been loved by a man, totally, and for yourself alone?”

  “No’m. I’m flatfooted and sort of waddle when I walk. Men like girls with curvy hips. Tell the truth, I kind of agree with them.”

  “On Flora, I was once loved by a lissome, redheaded maiden with a caress lighter than a butterfly’s wings.”

  “Sort of reminds me of a dietician who works here, Ruby May Washington, except Ruby May’s not redheaded. You’ll meet her.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting Ruby May Washington,” Freda said, superimposing a red orchid around the sandy hair of Wilma.

  In cultivating friends in high places, Freda thought, it never paid to ignore the rank and file. Wilma would have connections with the hospital’s underground, and Freda’s private bathroom truly rendered her incommunicado. Besides, if her plan worked, she’d need two other women. Wilma Firbank would be ideal for the top terrace on Flora. If any more pigs came down from the forest, Wilma looked perfectly capable of converting them to pork with one judo chop.

  It took Freda three days to persuade her doctor to smuggle a letter out to Hans Clayborg, because Doctor Campbell’s problems were far more deep-seated than she had assumed. He was terribly shy. His professional ethics had conditioned him, like Pavlov’s dog, against the use of his own couch. There were also technical problems, among them the lock on Freda’s door. The lock was operated from the outside, and Campbell had to use all of his persuasive powers to get the committee to move it to the inside.

  On the day after she got her lock moved inside, she had a visitor from the Great Beyond, as inmates called the outside. Hans Clayborg bounced into her room, his electric hair atingle. Ostensibly he had come to discuss defects in the Stanford-Hammersmith theory with the head psychiatrist. Actually he had come in response to Freda’s letter.

  They spent an excited preliminary half-hour swapping news, she of Flora and he of earth. The Caron-Polino theory, she learned, had taken the scientific world by storm. “The Caron Can-Can” had been banned from the airwaves as deleterious to the morals of the young, and Doctor Hector was new Chief of the Bureau of Exotic Plants. Doctor Gaynor was now supervisor in charge of floral arrangements at the San Diego Zoo. “I could spring you on a writ of habeas corpus,” Clayborg said, “but you’d have to stand trial for defection.”

  “Getting out of Houston isn’t enough, Hans. I must get back to Flora, with your help. I want you to demonstrate mathematically that a few rungs from a human being’s DNA ladder can be spliced onto the double helix of a Florian orchid to produce seeds with enough human genes to bridge the death-creation gap between universes. Show that Mendelian laws, over generations, would produce functioning human beings from the seeds who could selectively breed out the nonfunctioning orchid traits. Give me imaginary seeds, Hans, to store in real urns.”

  Hans lost his ebullience. “If I advanced that hypothesis, they would not put you on Flora. They’d put me in Houston. Whoever heard of human-orchid seeds?”

  “I got the idea from your human corn.”

  “Girl, that was simply boy-talk to polarize you along a germinal axis. The idea’s impossible!”

  “You deal with impossibles at Santa Barbara, remember?… Hans, for the love of me, write a letter to the President. Tell him a union of dissimilar DNA molecules is theoretically possible—the Caron-Polino theory has laid the groundwork—and name me as field cystologist best qualified to conduct the experiment on Flora. Make the letter persuasive. Please, Hans!”

  “Freda,” he groaned. “I deal with impossibles, true. But I persuade presidents with possibles. I know nothing about the DNA of Florian orchids.”

  “There’s part of a seed in my greenhouse icebox at the station. Get it and formulate a theory. When Einstein sent his letter, Roosevelt probably neither knew nor cared that E=MC2, but he trusted Einstein.”

  “But this would be a perversion of science to serve a human want!”

  “It’s about time science was perverted to serving human wants! You’ll pervert your knowledge to seduce an innocent girl but balk at using it to persuade a callous chief executive. Very well! Then, think of this, you acolyte of pure science: if life just happens to be an entropic function, some of you altarboys are missing a devotional by not integrating the life force into the Unified Field Theory.”

  “I never thought of that,” he said in genuine amazement. For a moment he was silent, numbed by the knowledge that there was something he had not thought of, but he waved his hand in dismissal. “I cannot flaunt my disciplines and bend an entire technology to the whims of a… a…” He managed a weak smile. “… a nymphomanic omniphiliac. I do worship sci
ence as an abstraction, and I’ll continue to, until someone shows me a better Truth.”

  In desperation, Freda superimposed the image of a red orchid onto the head of Hans Clayborg, and the petals fitted his flaring hair perfectly. Now she could read his mind: he was throwing up verbiage to ward her off while he considered life force as part of a unified field. But he had thrown out the words “show me,” and the words were a rope with which she could hog-tie him.

  “Hans,” she said slowly, “I can prove to you that the poetry of the human heart holds truths as valid as the abstractions of science.”

  “Just how can you do that?”

  “Turn the key in yonder lock,” she said, “and lay your teeth on the desk.”

  Freda found that Doctor Campbell’s father had been so weak that his son could not identify with him, so Jimmy had become his own father image and had played the role of surrogate so strongly that he had repressed the growing boy. When his problem was finally analyzed, Doctor Campbell responded to therapy with enthusiasm. His haggard look faded with his father image, and what he lost as a psychiatrist he gained as a man. Empathy was replaced by character.

  At the end of six weeks, Jimmy Campbell resigned from the hospital staff to become an automobile mechanic. His last favor to Freda was to pronounce her incurable. “It won’t do any good, Freda,” he said, “because they’ll never let the records out of this nut house, but anything you want from me, you get. We humanists must stick together.”

  Doctor Campbell was replaced by a Frommian named Williams who lasted only two weeks. His philosophy of love and tender care was so amplified and reinforced by his patient that he was dismissed from the staff for laying siege to a nurse who had fled him and locked herself into a linen closet. Wilma, who was becoming a reliable pipeline to the hospital’s underground, told Freda that Williams left for Hollywood to become a movie producer.