The Pollinators of Eden

by John Boyd

  But she was too tactful to raise a question about her strangest and strongest distraction—Doctor Hector himself. In the classroom, his voice rustled with a flow of data so precise, valid, and constant that, when studying under him, she had developed the agility of her writing hand by taking notes. Now his remarks were as passionate and as irrelevant as a lovers. When she found a fact in the flow of his poetry, she pounced on it.

  One fact came with startling abruptness during a peroration on swimming in the streams of Flora. “… floating down those tunnels of green lined by gray colonnades of boles, or trailing a phosphorescent wake at night, somehow renews the innocence of boyhood, its joys amplified by the dreariness of the years between, and with no bees to sting one’s bare behind. There are no insects on Flora.”

  His remark shook her. If there were no insects, why did blooms exist at all? Why a visual lure for pollinators that didn’t exist? Of course, she would find out from the seminars given by specialists during the following week, but she liked to establish her 10 guidelines during the briefing. Hector was exasperating with all his fury and no sound data. Obviously the blooms were lures, but for what? Apparently for the members of Project Able, she thought ruefully, since they had inspired such poetry and camera art. Flora had sex appeal.

  “A perfectly balanced plant ecology,” Hector was saying. “Absolutely no menace to life. You can’t fall down and break a bone: the turf’s too springy. You can’t starve: the berries, fruits, and nuts ripen continuously. An acid quality of the grass hastens decay, so the lawns are never littered. Since the axis tilt is slight, the climate is constant and there is no need for clothes in the temperate zones. There are no beasts of prey, no animals at all, in fact, save the one tropical spot on the globe, an island we named Tropica, where we will now go to join Paul Theaston.”

  Freda was happy to flee the camp and its poetry to the no-nonsense comments of her fiancé. Paul would give her facts, she knew. Her pet name for him was “The Prince of Pragmatism.”

  Getting to Tropica proved another problem in cinematics. In a helicopter approaching low over the ocean, the cameraman shot interminable footage from the moment the island’s sixteen-thousand-foot peak, snowcapped and trailing clouds, rose beyond the horizon. Project Able’s geologist, sounding awed, explained the tiered formation as they neared the island: a coral reef had formed around a volcano, and, at intervals of epochs, succeeding upheavals had lifted succeeding coral reefs, one above the other, to form a seven-storied mountain. Now its layers supported the parent cone, which soared eight thousand feet above the topmost plateau. Tropica was colorful, Freda admitted. With coral escarpments surrounding terraces covered with growth, it was pink and green topped by white above the blue sea.

  She had found the design for her wedding cake!

  As she expected, Paul let his camera do most of the talking. Her tulips were on the lowest level, and Paul had set up a sound-and-motion-activated camera to study a female tulip’s pollination, germination, and seeding. His only preparatory remark, apart from pure explanation, was simply, “What follows is the ii most remarkable example of plant-animal symbiosis I have ever encountered.”

  Even that was an understatement. As the sound recorder focused on the flutings, sighings, and duckings normal to the tulip, Paul remarked, “As nectar clogs the seed duct, the tones change.” She listened, noting that he had underexposed the color of the tulips to avoid distracting attention from the process itself, and she heard a distinct tone change. The sounds in general grew higher-pitched, more melodious, although the lower notes gained huskiness.

  Now the tulip was trilling in the breezes, piercing the air with beckonings so enchanting and resonant that she cupped her ear and leaned forward, fearing lest she miss a nuance or intonation. Then… some oafish enlisted man whistled a wolfs call, and laughter broke the spell.

  Her vexation subsided when a furred animal bounced onto the screen, a shrewlike creature, roly-poly in its plumpness, with a face which bore the wide-eyed innocence of a koala bear. “I’ve named this the koala-shrew,” Paul said, as the animal, no larger and more attractive than a kitten, sat back on its haunches, its forepaws quivering, to listen. A breeze stirred the air chamber of the tulip, sounding a note sensual in its urgency and its invitation. Bouncing and tumbling, the koala-shrew scampered to the source of the sound. In a movement so deft and gentle it was dainty, the tiny forepaws reached up to bend the bloom downward. The koala-shrew snuggled its face closer to the beckoning flower, and a serpent’s forked tongue flicked out and slithered into the bloom of the plant.

  When Paul replayed the process of pollination in slow motion, Freda averted her gaze from the screen. She felt she had witnessed a violation, and the faces in the darkness around her substantiated the feeling. They were leaning forward with the avidity of lewdness, like so many voyeurs in the shadows.

  Later she watched as the seeds germinated and were expelled from the sac of the plant, to glide and loop for distances of forty feet, according to Paul. “They must strike the ground with enough force to penetrate the turf,” he added, “or the acid in the grass will destroy them.”

  Freda was happy to get to the higher levels, where the orchids grew, some as tall as eight feet. The heavy, straight stalks were not characteristic of their terrestrial cousins, but the flowers and tendrillike branches were unmistakably and exquisitely those of orchids.

  In the beginning, Paul’s lecture on the orchids was straightforward, without the continental rhapsodizing, although he skirted the edges of propriety with one observation that brought titters from members of the audience who grasped his meaning. “This is a segregated plant society. The female root system demands a growing radius of at least four feet from the stalk, so the males are relegated to the outer circles in less desirable growing areas. The bifurcated root system of the males demands less growing room, and an inspection of the system reveals tubular appendages, which reveals that the ancients used scientific precision when they named the plants ‘orchis.’ ”

  When Paul entered the female groves, he pulled aside the tendrils to reveal a hiplike swelling on the stalk of the plant, approximately one-third of its height from the ground. “As Boyle remarked, it’s difficult for an orchidologist to refrain from comparing orchids with the animal kingdom. What you see here is a seed pod, but the cellular striations around this portion of the stalk suggest muscular tissue. A single seed at a time is germinated, and all births are Caesarean.

  “I’ve not been able to determine how pollination occurs. On the mainland, seed-feeding birds and air currents do the job.” (Ah, there is the answer, Freda thought.) “But here the birds avoid the orchids, and the pollen nectar cannot be airborne. I am extending my tour of duty to determine how pollination occurs.

  “I have named this species ‘hipped orchids,’ but there is another enchanting aspect to these flowers. When the girls are ready to be courted, the nectar makes them hang their heads and blush from shyness. Observe Sally.” He reached up and pulled 13 the flower down to the level of his own head, watching as the nacrelike shimmering of the orchid gradually diffused into pink.

  “Oohs” and “Ahs” and spontaneous applause broke from the audience as the house lights went up. Freda arose and walked down the aisle, disturbed and pondering. Paul had not reached up and grabbed the stalk of the flower in his palm merely to lower it. He had cupped his hand around behind the stalk and drawn it down to his shoulder, in the manner of a man drawing a girl’s head down.

  Preoccupied, Freda forced a smile when Hal Polino came over with a manila envelope. “Here are Paul’s notes on the Caron Siren tulip, Doctor, and his mash note to you. As I mentioned, there is a lengthy postscript he wanted me to add verbally.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “You’re supposed to read the letter first. The postscript is the reason for Paul buying our dinner. He doesn’t want the conversation overheard by technical people.”

  “Then drop by the greenhouse later a
nd pocket the money… By the way”—she added a sentence quickly to show her goodwill—“I want to thank you, Hal, for hanging the tulip.”

  “No strain. No pain. The temperature in the glasshouse is almost the optimum for the tulips, so the plant is safe… But, Doctor, no dinner, no message.”

  His eyes were not pleading now, but confident.

  “Very well, you Valentino of the working girl, but don’t let the rumor that I whistled at a passing sailor get you started in the wrong direction. It was the tulip who whistled, not I.”

  “Oh, hell,” he exploded, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I should have known the scuttlebutt was wrong. I should have known Galatea was impervious to mortal longings.”

  Almost laughing at Hal’s fallen crest, she said, “I’ll be ready at seven,” and walked across the lawn toward the distant greenhouse, recalling that she had referred to the tulip as “who.” Some of the insanity of Flora must have communicated itself to her during the briefings.

  In a mild way, she had been touched by Hal Polino. Before he learned the truth about the whistle, his expression had been similar to Paul’s when Paul looked at the orchid he called Sally.

  Paul had not inspected the blossom with the eyes of an empirical scientist; he had ogled it with the longing of a lovesick adolescent.

  Chapter Two

  Paul’s letter was by no means the “mash note” of Hal’s peculiar vernacular, nor had Freda expected one. She would not have elicited a proposal of marriage from a sentimentalist lacking restraint and self-control. She had seen one marriage wrecked from rampant emotionalism born of sensuality. Pulling the bit on an overeager stallion was not her ideal of romance. She was pleased with the formality of Paul’s opening paragraphs.

  My dearest Freda,

  Enclosed are my notes on the Tulipa caronus sireni. By now you have seen the briefing and understand my reasons for accepting a second tour of duty, but not all of the reasons.

  Hal will brief you on what I choose to call Hypothesis X, concerning the pollination of the orchids of Flora. Hal himself suggested it in one of his fanciful moments, but I support it for reasons of my own. I dare not put the hypothesis onto paper. If the paper were lost or stolen, it would be sufficient evidence to send me to Houston, permanently.

  Hal Polino does not have the bookkeepers mind which the methodology of science requires…

  “Bookkeeper’s mind!” She liked that! If the accurate tabulation of scientific data deserved such gratuitous dismissal, then Doctor Freda Caron was wasting her time outside a kitchen.

  … nor does he have the power of analysis, the genius for synthesis, to compare with a Freda Caron, if this “cat” may comment on a queen. Yet, when his whimsies drift in the right direction, Hal is capable of inspired suggestions.

  Now she saw what Paul meant. Mere accumulation of data could be tedious, particularly when one could not foresee directions. But she disapproved of his use of Hal’s argot, even facetiously, since it suggested student influence over the teacher.

  But there is empirical evidence to substantiate Hypothesis X: tendrils grow from the hipped orchids in pairs, on opposite sides of the stalk, and the leaves along the tendrils are of the same striated cellular structure as that of the female hips—muscle cells. In addition, the tendrils of the male, as well as the stalk, are much thicker than the female’s.

  You can see immediately that the project needs a cystologist. If you wish to delay our wedding and come with Section Charlie to Flora, you have my consent and blessing.

  … Incidentally, if you need my advice on wedding plans, feed my profile to the computer and get my decision by proxy.

  Back to the orchids. You have, by now, inspected the tulips and know these plants are aeons ahead of their earth cousins in evolution. Mark you, the beauty of the tulips is but a shadow of the beauty of the orchids.

  Each orchid in the segment of the grove I have chosen to study has its own personality. They are lovable. Sometimes the wind blows a tendril across my face in a certain way, and I am intrigued by the thought that they are capable of loving me.

  There was no doubt about it! Hal Polino had inveigled Paul to read outside of his field, perhaps even poetry.

  But this thought is purely intuitive and less than supported by evidence. Birds shun the groves, and a basket of koala-shrews I loosed among the orchids ran squealing in terror over the edge of the escarpment and fell to their deaths, over a thousand feet below.

  Probably, Freda thought, the koala-shrews were fleeing from the pressure on their eardrums caused by the increased altitude.

  I had brought the shrews as an experiment. With my limited laboratory facilities, I believe I have detected hemoglobin in the sap of the orchids. Are the plants, then, carnivorous…

  It would be easy to detect if the plants were meat eaters—feed them radioactive beefsteak and trace the hemoglobin.

  … or so highly developed along lines of evolution that they are part animal? If the latter is true, then it would directly support Hypothesis X.

  Frankly, there is a logic here, beyond human logic. A question which on earth might seem sacrilege comes easily to the lips on Flora: is the goal of life the superman or the superplant? It is written, “God is no respecter of persons,” but He certainly respects species.

  Freda smiled ruefully. Paul had been reading outside of his field.

  Our heliologist says that the sun here is much older than the sun of earth. Flora is in her death throes. If I were Evolution, seeking a life form to survive the contraction and explosions of the universe, I would choose a seed. Incidentally, the orchid seed I have enclosed is the only one I have been able to find, and it is partially eaten by the grass.

  She was positive now. These speculations were alien shoots grafted onto Paul’s stalk by Hal Polino. Paul would have to be rid of this influence. At tomorrow’s conference, she would suggest a quarterly rotation of students—to broaden their academic backgrounds—and the present quarter ended next week.

  But the great mystery was, and still is, how do the orchids pollinate? Sometimes I feel that they are deliberately concealing their secrets from me.

  Whatever Hypothesis X might be, Freda thought, Paul had already revealed enough to get himself committed to Houston!

  I have thrown nets over females in estrus…

  Ah, there was the Freudian slip to end all slips. Flowers in estrus!

  … only to find the nets torn aside. I have strung nets for night-flying birds and caught nothing. I have dug pits deep enough to trap cattle and covered them with the living grass, but I have captured no animal. Whatever the pollinators are, they have vision, for the orchids are so beautiful that they expand human awareness. Whatever the pollinators have, they have olfactory organs, for the female orchids exude a perfume so enchanting that if I could bottle it and ship it home it would devastate the ecology of earth in nine months. And the pollinators must have intelligence, for I have come to a flowering garden—a virtual Eden—with the equipment of a technological society, and still the question abides.

  What are the pollinators of Eden?

  Love,

  Paul

  An interesting letter. But Freda could see behind Paul’s open-faced, Anglo-Saxon scrawl the fine Italian penmanship of Harold Polino. She laid it aside and picked up the packet of tulip seeds plus the carefully wrapped but tattered orchid seed, which resembled a partially husked black walnut.

  Freda deduced that the seed had been much larger—at least as wide around the girth as a tennis ball—and ovate. Despite the wrapping, it exuded the faint odor of vanilla, and she recalled that vanilla was processed from orchid seeds. Possibly a grove of Florian orchids on earth would be of commercial value to a manufacturer of food flavoring.

  She placed the remnant of the orchid seed in the refrigerator and returned to Paul’s field notes on the Caron tulips.

  One item intrigued her. “Plant the seeds six inches apart, and as soon as the tulip’s sex is determined, separat
e the males by at least three feet. Apparently their root systems drain some element from the soil, for they do not thrive in close proximity with each other. Spot them among the females.” In this respect, she noted, the tulips were opposite from the orchids.

  Automatically she began to record his data into a logbook. As she wrote, she was aware of sounds—the drone of a jet plane, the hum of traffic drifting up from the Paso Robles Freeway, the distant whirr of her air-conditioner. She was reminded of Captain Barron’s admiration of the silence of Flora. His feeling was probably related to the Freudian wish to return to the womb, which was probably a misinterpretation on Freud’s part of a racial instinct from prehistoric days, the desire of the caveman to scramble back to the safety of the cave. But progress was outside the cave, where the sunlight and the strange noises were.

  Personally, she loved the sounds of civilization. For her, society hummed as pleasantly as a dynamo, and she was proud to be a part of its machinery.