The Black Gondolier and Other Stories

by Fritz Reuter Leiber

  Ever present was the fear that someone would do something the papers or the police could seize on, something gauche, like becoming naively romantic or drunkenly ribald or substituting for Kitten the forbidden word Pussy.

  All looked dreadfully tired but masking it with grinning resolution.

  As the Lord and Master of Kitten Kastle came trotting along, manila envelope under elbow, each man drew aside respectfully, with a fawning manly smile ready to pop if the ruddy, bald, sharp-bearded Satan's face should glance his way, while each girl assumed her melting ready-to-please-milord expression and thrust forward invitingly, but not at all pushingly, her lips, throat, bosom, hip, dimpled knee or whatever other portion of her anatomy she considered her chef-d'oeuvre and main strength.

  But Taggart Adams looked neither to the right or to the left. Men irritated him, and as for girls his hypnotist had been trying for the past three years to revive his aggressive male interest in them, with little success. He was hardly the bold lusty wastrel indicated by his beard and tiny mustache, which were merely his variant of G.I. standard for publishers and editors of “magazines for men."

  At the moment the only girl who interested him in any way was one with blue-black tresses draping a pale mask of contempt, and she would soon be taken care of in a rather special fashion.

  As for the stuff crowding the corridors ... well, the jeweled sex-puppets—poupes de l'amour—were jigging around the well-disciplined dark-suited male marionettes, the tombstones were jumping at an hour when squares went to work ... it was sufficient.

  Downward and ever downward trotted Taggart Adams. Past the turquoise swimming pool with its bevy of bikinied beauties, each with her invisible guard rail. Past the pool's 25-foot-deep “basement,” where a lone girl with aqualung and with silver blue hair streaming like the beautiful long iridescent deadly filaments of a Portuguese man-of-war, glided among the living corals behind the 2-inch-thick view window—and in front of which a boy and girl in passionate embrace jumped apart tremblingly at Tag's approach, blanching at the merciless frown he shot them. Until he was alone in the somber oak-paneled male-tapestry-shrouded corridor below even the watery basement.

  A quick glance either way to make certain of privacy, tapping of an oaken rosette in a quick three-one rhythm, then a silvery-tawny panel had silently slid aside, moist warmth and flower odors and a kind of tangible night had billowed out, and Tag had slipped inside. The panel closed swiftly behind him.

  He was in an extensive room that was in deep darkness except for a dab of bluish light forty feet away dimly illuminating four photos on a wall and silhouetting just in front of it a table set with a few small earthenware pots, a phone, and hand-size gardening tools.

  But although the rest of the room was black-dark at first sight, there pressed from it an intense aura of femininity, a faint musky sweet various sleeping-woman-scent coming in wave on wave.

  And as one's eyes got fully adjusted, there was the barest suggestion of ranks on ranks of thick-stemmed, leaf-hooded flowers—flowers giving ghostly disturbing gleams of russet and gold and auburn and ivory and rosier hues ... or perhaps the suggestion was more of rows of slim living sleeping dolls hung by their hair deep amid greenery ... or ... at any rate, most tantalizing and strange and disturbing.

  With a confidence born of perfect knowledge of the room's contents, Tag walked briskly to the potting table and went to work. He set the phone aside. From a tiny shelf below the photographs and their bluish night-light he took a brownish bulging envelope labeled in spidery hand and brown-faded ink “Mimics” (after quickly setting back one labeled “Vamps” which he'd first picked up.)

  From the almost crumbly old envelope he carefully withdrew a round black gleaming seed a little larger than a plum's, wrapped around it eleven times Erica Slyker's hair, thrust it two inches deep into the moist grainy soil of one of the pots, and patted the surface flat.

  “Requiescat,” he said solemnly as he dusted the gritty loam off his fingers above the pot, “but not in peace."

  He carefully leaned the color print of Erica face-inward against the pot and drew a second seed from the envelope, but then he grew lazily pensive and his stern expression softened as his gaze went to the four large old photos affixed to the wall. The one figure common to them all was that of a tall elderly lady in the chin-high, wrist-and-floor long dress of the last century, with a piercing-visaged aristocratic face, the thin beaky nose and narrow jutting chin pointing a little toward each other like those of a story book witch.

  A genuine soft affectionate smile came to Tag's lips, instead of the tight Satan's grimace he invariably showed the world. It was always so nice and relaxing to be, even fancy-wise or photo-wise, with truly elderly women—sprightly, gossipy, thankful old girls, wittily waspish at times, even vastly malicious, but totally devoid of the insolence of the sex-urge. And then Tag had so many reasons, including the supreme one, for feeling friendly and grateful toward his brilliant Great-aunt Veronica, world-famous as a biologist in certain mystical and unstuffy scientific circles, who ten years ago had bequeathed him much more than her monetary riches.

  He gently rubbed the second seed between his fingertips and touched the still-bulging envelope with a miser's tenderness as he rested his eyes and his feelings on the four photographs.

  The first showed his Great-aunt, not quite so elderly, standing with Luther Burbank in a cactus garden.

  In the second, very elderly indeed, she was accepting in Tiflis the reverent handclasp of Trofim Lysenko, Soviet proponent of the theory that environment shapes genetic heredity, at some time before that rogue-scientist's nominally voluntary resignation as head of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Science.

  In the third she stood alone and grimly smiling in front of the shut doors of what a brass plate identified as the head-quarters of the American Botanical Society. That was the one signed “Veronica Adams, D.

  S.” in the same large spidery script as that on the old brown envelopes.

  The last showed her in a Parisian dining room together with a group of quaintly bearded men in full evening dress—all the faces almost flat white from an overly powerful magnesium flash. She was receiving from them the Meta-Lamarckian Medal for her paper, “Seventeen Verified Instances of the Shaping of Plant Development by Thoughts, Symbols, Pictures, and Exodermal Tokens."

  Tag's expression grew more pensive still and he began to tug gently and rhythmically with the hand holding the seed at his wide-based sharp-pointed chin-beard. His eyes closed and his face grew tranquil. He began to snore very softly.

  His hands did not fall asleep, however. After a bit, although his face did not change at all, they went busily to work, planting the second seed without more ado in the second pot, over which he was leaning closely, extracting from its envelope and planting a “Vamps” seed in a third pot just beside the second, finally replacing both envelopes on their shelf.

  Then his hands grew still and his face woke up with a shake and a start. For a moment he was frightened, then he realized he'd simply been dozing standing up—he'd been driving himself lately and Great-aunt Veronica was such a pleasantly soporific topic for reverie. Strange, though, he thought, the dazed abstraction he'd felt for a moment had been very like the state of mind he used to experience when his hypnotist had implanted some particularly strong suggestion—but he hadn't summoned the man for the last three months.

  He'd had a flash of the same sort of feeling sometime earlier today, he recalled. Yes, it had occurred during the first part of his interview with the abominable Erica Slyker.

  But she was well taken care of now. In fact all his work here was done, he decided after the quickest of glances, and it would come to fruition in due course.

  Meanwhile he had no business loitering away a moment more at this time of the month, he reminded himself as he spun around and trotted through the dark toward the secret panel.

  There was a sharp bzzz behind him. It made him jump—for an instant it activated hi
s old fear of bees, a fear most unsuitable in a gardener, but so deep that even his hypnotist had never been able to counteract it.

  Then he realized it was only the phone ... and he kept on toward the secret panel. In a flash of intuition he'd know it had to be his Executive Managing Editor and that for once the bumbler had a thoroughly adequate reason for calling him at his secret number.

  There was grueling work to be done for the next five days, and not one moment to delay.

  Specifically, Kittens had to be put to bed—not stupid pushy cuddle-crazy girls, but something really important ... the next issue of a stunningly successful national magazine!

  * * * *

  For the next five hectic days Taggart Adams hardly thought once of his secret garden or of the incidents leading up to his last visit there, though he did remember to fire the staff boy and girl he'd caught embracing.

  During these periods when he couldn't spare time for himself, the garden was cared for by an elderly Sicilian deaf-mute of submoronic intelligence but absolute trustworthiness with growing things—his ancestors had trained vines and coaxed hedges for the ancient Romans.

  But now at least the next Kittens was abed on its whirring ink-acrid presses, the first run mercilessly checked and rechecked, and Tag had a full recovery-week to do exactly what he wanted—no parties to appear at, no avidly hopeful new girls to check over, no boringly abstract undress photography sessions, no new geniuses to give a grudging hearing, no V.I.P.'s to bully and charm ... and only one or two members, if that many, of his house-or-magazine staff knowing what he really was up to or even where he really was.

  He could canoe—copt through Canada's hidden-most lakes, submarine the West Indies in this technically illegal private submersible, dig London, take a whirl through the Continental capitals, shoot Africa with the seventh wealthiest man in the world, study the Swiss banking system from the inside, or simply tend his secret garden ... quietly vegetate ...

  Well, in any case he would start off with a look-see at the last, he decided.

  This time when the panel closed behind him, it was “day” inside. Great glowing checkerboards of window-simulating sunshine-shedding panels in ceiling and walls made him squint. He patiently let his eyes accommodate and after a minute he saw his garden in its full glory.

  To either side of the aisle between him and the potting table, row on row of potted plants went back in rising banks to the walls of the huge room. Each plant was like a large jack-in-the-pulpit or love-in-a- mist or fever-tree flower, in that each thick stemmed bloom was canopied and bowered by great dark green leaves of the sort botanists called spathes and bracts.

  But these must be jill-in-the-pulpit, for each green alcove enshrined a flowering slip girl about twelve inches high. Many showed only their faces, though with swellings in the stem indicating where bosoms and hips were developing.

  The less developed showed just a tassel of blonde, brown, reddish, or other-colored hair above a green head-bulge, or perhaps the green husk opening enough to reveal pale forehead and tiny darting eyes.

  In the more developed the sheath of the stem had split down the front and peeled back, like a bolero jacket or green dressing robe, half revealing a delectable torso, baby pink yet an anatomically perfect replica of some celebrated figure.

  For as one studied these flower-girls, it became apparent that they were not some exotic genus unlinked to individual humanity. One began to recognize faces and forms.

  Here were the opulent or sweetly up-tilted breasts of some reigning screen star. There was the profile of a celebrated society beauty, or winsome junior member of a royal family. A few of the more memorable Kittens-of-the-month were represented, but on the whole the social trend was upward.

  There is a rather crude joke in which one Thames barman asks another, “Bill, which ‘ave you enjoyed the most—the women you've ‘ad in real life, or the ones you've ‘ad only in the realms of your imagination?” And Bill replies, “The latter, Jim—for there you meets a better class of women."

  The same was true of Taggart Adams and his garden.

  Not every plant was unique, however. There were several groups of identicals, including three full blooms in a front row which resembled Erica Slyker just enough to make one realize they or their plant- ancestor must have been grown with the help of photos and exodermal tokens of her sister Alice.

  A very few of the long-stemmed girls bulged with seeds. These had their eyes closed, but most of the rest were peering about, chiefly toward Tag.

  And although they were armless they clearly had more than ocular powers of movement, for a small rustling went through the ranked flowers now, as if a tiny breeze were sifting through the subterranean hothouse, troubling the canopy leaves; stems twisted just a little toward Tag; minute lips parted and there was the faintest shrill sibilance in the air, as of voices almost too high to be sensed even as noise.

  Tag took deep languorous breaths of the varied girl-scent, feeling utterly content.

  This was the place where the world was perfect for him, he decided for the thousandth time: the place where girls were not big troublesome bounding meaty things with rights and ideas and desires, but fragile blooms with just enough consciousness and limited life to make them interesting; fragile blossoms, blooms to be potted and repotted, tenderly nurtured, watered and fertilized and sprayed, brought to the acme of perfection, and then carefully hand-pollinated and set to seed, or ruthlessly snapped off and extirpated forever as the whim took him.

  Pinning up girls in a million-copy magazine was pretty good, admittedly. But potting them in a garden ... oh, how much he owed to his Great-aunt Veronica and her patient largely-unappreciated research and her mimic-seeds! What stretches of bliss he'd enjoyed during the seven years since he'd chanced on the black spheroids in her effects and stumbled on their purpose!

  Here was the secret of his power in the real world, the sweetly-flowering earth from which like Antaeus he periodically renewed his strength.

  Almost his sole regret was that he couldn't regrow his Great-aunt herself. He'd tried—he had a daguerreotype of her as a 17-year-old and a lock of her girl hair—but it had turned out that the process wouldn't work for dead women. Else he'd have had not only his perpetually blooming row of “Veronica's” but his Cleopatras, Madam Dubarry's, Nell Gwyns, Lola Montezes, and Jean Harlows— granting he could locate authentic pictures and/or genuine exodermal tokens, even if only a pinch of ashes.

  But apparently for a girl plant to develop properly it needed to “draw on” the living original girl in some obscure vampirish way, telepathic or sub-etheric, who could say?—since even his Great-aunt had no wholly satisfactory theory.

  The effect on the girl whose seed had been planted with proper picture and token varied greatly. Frequently there was none at all, so far as Tag could discover. Sometimes she would be reported as confined to bed or sent to hospital with a mild undiagnosed fever or in a light (or occasionally heavy) coma, especially during the period of blooming. Such symptoms generally terminated, and the girl returned to her normal life, with the withering and/or seeding of her plant. If Tag continued to re-seed her, as in the case of Alice Slyker, there might be rumors of protracted depressions together with periods of retreat in some mental hospital.

  Once a Swedish beauty queen he'd terminated (with hedge shears) had died the same night (decapitated in a traffic accident), but Tag was inclined to attribute that to coincidence. What the devil, he wasn't trying to work black magic or hurt anyone, he was only satisfying an aesthetic impulse, using tools supplied by a very high-minded old lady. No, he wasn't trying to hurt a soul.

  Of course condign punishment, as now of the abominable Erica Slyker, was something else again! That thought stirred him from his delightful lethargy and he trotted to the potting table, past rows of Alices and Bridgettes and Margarets and Sonias and a single Jacquelin.

  He started grinning before he got there. His “Erica” had developed with commendable rapidity. Clearly Ans
elmo had remembered the vitamin and hormone supplements. Already the face was in full bloom and the bosom had begun to bulge nicely. The haughty archings of the minuscule eyebrows as she glared at him and the petulant poutings of the tiny lips were balm to his injured psyche—and as much so was the thought of her twisting and moaning now on some hard couch or hospital bed while doctors went over her baffledly; he'd asked one of his earlier victims about her coma and she'd unsuspectingly told him it had been filled with horrid half-formed dreams of being buried alive and bound to a stake and subjected to nameless indignities.

  “And serves you right, Slyker,” he said now to the flower, lightly flicking one pale cheek with a fingernail.

  The resemblance was perfect. The eleven-looped hair and the inward-facing color print had done their work well.

  But something was wrong: the second pot he'd planted had no photo tilted against it. Automatically he glanced to the floor and there was the manila envelope, where it must have slipped from under his elbow five days back. He stooped and drew from it the print of the off-Broadway redhead talent with the small white envelope still clipped to it containing the three green nail clippings.

  What the devil had he buried with the second mimic seed?

  His eyes came up over the edge of the potting table and he looked for the first time at the plant rising sturdy-stemmed from the second pot.

  It was topped by a walnut-size replica of his own head, leaf-ruffed. The face, in full bloom even to the wide-based pointy beard, was staring at him anxiously and gaping its mouth, as if shouting an inaudibly shrill message.

  His first impulse, an instant one, was to rip it out by the roots and stamp on it.

  His second impulse, which was so violent it rocked him back on his heels and sent his clutching hands flying up into the air, was to nurse and protect and watch over the thing as if it were a hundred-thousand gulden Dutch black tulips—at least!