by John Boyd
Moving carefully through the flowers, Hal reached over and pulled up a female tulip whose pod was unopened. She braced herself for the lament for the dead, but the tulips stood mute.
“Maybe no one liked this one,” he said, holding the limp stalk in his hand and prying a vane apart with his thumbnail. Before it opened, she could see the row of eight tiny seeds inside.
“It would have borne seeds,” she said, “as soon as the temperature had risen.”
“That’s why they’re not chanting their death chant,” he said. “It’s too cold. Do you have a motion-activated camera in the store room?”
“No. I have to requisition them from photo, and they’re not open.”
“Then I’ll make a side-door requisition,” he said, peering among the tulips for another unopened pod. “Keep an eye on this old girl, Freda, while I get the camera.”
He was back with the camera in less time than it would have taken after the stockroom was opened. “I used my I.D. card on the door latch,” he explained, “an old burglar’s trick. Any movement?”
“None at all.”
He focused the camera on the unopened seed sac and set the motion activator with a zoom attachment. When he had completed preparations, he stooped to pick up the dead plant and held it before her. “Look, Freda, cavity but no seeds.”
“The wasps!” she exclaimed.
“You’re right,” and to her surprise his face was flooded with relief. “And I’ll wager that within five days we’ll find shoots growing in H and I patches, exactly six inches apart.” He opened the remaining vanes and laid the plant down so the wasps could reach the seeds. “I don’t mind assisting in a Caesarean,” he said, “but I’m no abortionist. Since I’m convinced you’ve won your bet, Freda, I’ll buy your coffee and doughnuts at the canteen.”
It was not proper for teachers to fraternize with students; it hurt the teacher’s standing in the eyes of Gaynor. Since she was perfectly sure she had no standing with Gaynor, the consideration had become academic. Happily she accepted and strolled over several lawns with Hal to the canteen.
“What makes you so confident the seeds will be placed in the right beds?”
“The tulips know that the soil has been primed with rare earths. They’re not ready to try their wings yet. But I had better put a twenty-foot tarp up next Monday, as a temporary policy of containment. We should start a long-range policy, here and now. If those brutes get out of hand, it could be very serious.
“But, Hal, they’re so fragile and delicate and small and beautiful.”
“So are you, Freda, but they’re females, and, like you, they can be dangerous. If Old Pete can learn to talk to the boys, maybe we can reason with the males, learn to coexist.”
Once her strangely scheduled disturbances around Hal had passed beyond the working hours, working in the beds became, once more, enjoyable. The movies of the wasp transport carrying seeds to the H and I beds turned out exceptionally well, to the vast relief of both, who had feared a random expansion, and to their gratification, since the movies added valuable documentation to their monograph on the plants.
For a ground wasp to lay an egg in a flower which resembled a wasp cell presented a phenomenon, however unusual, which reflected the adaptability capabilities of ground wasps only. For the same wasp to transport a tulip seed and bury it in a wasp cell in the ground, laid out according to a pattern favoring the plants, would create questions in the mind of any scientist. Once the Caron-Polino theories were published, Freda knew, they would gain a wide hearing in scientific circles.
Of course, the entomologists and behaviorist psychologists would swoop down on their thesis and tear it to bits in defense of the modified behavior of social insects, but she and Hal would be able to count on the support of plant scientists and free-will psychologists. Ecologists would probably be split down the middle, but both sides would be fascinated by the symbiosis.
Hal pointed out a curious ramification when they were assessing potential supporters. Without a shadow of a doubt, the powerful florists’ lobby would be on their side. “Freda, I can see the headlines now: ‘Own a Flower Pet—Buy a Caron Tulip.’ ”
Despite their fun and games, once on the job Hal obeyed her promptly, never questioned her decisions, and even cut down on his profanity. Only once did he question her judgment. Immediately after they viewed the film of the wasp carriers in action, she commented, “You see, Hal, how wrong you were! The tulips are cooperating with me because they know I love them. They want to show their appreciation by being obedient.”
“Wrong,” he snorted. “They know if they get out of line, I’ll whip hell out of them.” In the darkness of the projection room, she giggled. She and Hal were behaving like a mother and father discussing the rearing of children.
Beyond their skylarking, and in a great measure responsible for it, lay the invisible, to her, and godlike figure of Peter Henley; and Hal was fast developing into the god’s first representative on the botanical station. Officially, or unofficially, Henley represented Linguistics, which had once spurned them, and he definitely represented a cloud on the veto Linguistics had issued. They used the code name ’Old Pete’ when discussing him at the canteen, an ideal cover name, since no one would think of referring to the real Peter Henley as “Pete.”
Hal was so enthusiastic about the man that Freda felt a beginning resentment toward the paragon of the irrational approach. “This man is an authentic genius, Freda,” Hal said. “The other night, we were out having a couple of brews, and he gave his interpretation of the United Nations Council in an emergency session, speaking in twelve different languages, including Swahili, and interpreting into English in an undertone. At the end, when they all started yelling at each other at once, the poor interpreter almost cracked up, and everyone at our table was fractured, completely fractured.”
“Who was at the table with you?” she asked, her voice suddenly harsh and suspicious.
“Oh, no one from the base,” he said, misinterpreting her anxiety. “Just a bunch of truck drivers on the L.A.—to-Frisco run.”
Nevertheless, she felt she would rest easier once Peter Henley was out of town and Hal was out from under his influence. As a footloose young bachelor with an Australian accent who had lain on nude Swedish beaches, he couldn’t be entirely innocent. Hal was weak around women anyway, and she didn’t trust Peter Henley. She remembered how his Adam’s apple had bobbed up and down at the sight of her bikini.
“How long will it take Old Pete to finish analyzing the tapes?” she asked.
“He figures on wrapping them up by the end of the week and going on to Dubuque. He wants to see what he can find among the Iowa cornstalks.”
“Oh,” she said, “I see your boy is a wit. Are you inviting him to join us Saturday night?”
“Absolutely not,” Hal explained. “He’s a wit, a raconteur, a genius, but I don’t want anybody entertaining Freda Caron Saturday night but Hal Polino.”
Freda had experienced a sudden hope that the man from Linguistics might be her salvation—she wanted Peter Saturday night—and at the moment she was disappointed in Hal’s too emphatic answer. Later in the evening, after she had stretched out to relax, the sirocco blew in with gale force, and she felt differently.
She would face her evening with Hal, and she wanted no assistance in overcoming the darker angels of her nature. She would fight her battle alone against the Prince of Darkness, and by opposing, end him.
Contrary to the dire prophecies of the sibyl, the ides of March passed in a flurry of pleasant excitement, when the first crop from the D beds blew in with the conventional trajectories and landed precisely in the K and L beds. The tulips were halfway to the fence now, and on Monday Hal was preparing to rig the tarp to prevent the seeds from encroaching onto the freshly plowed field of the San Joaquin Land Company.
Thursday morning—Freda was ticking off the days now, to the moment of confrontation—Hal came to work with a large carrying case. He told he
r, “Peters winding up his phase of the experiment today. It looks like a good day for action. The forecast calls for eighty-two degrees at one-thirty, clear and bright… What’s on the agenda?”
“I want you to collect some wasp larvae for me this morning. I’m making a comparative study of tulip-born wasps and cell-born wasps to see if there’s been any mutation.”
“Peter came up with a beautiful theory about the wasps, if you have no faith in our golden horde. He thinks the little Huns direct the wasp by focusing high-frequency sound cones that they have to travel in or suffer the consequences. I’d like to talk to Paul about that.”
“What’s wrong with my knowledge?” she snapped.
He caught the hurt in her voice, and standing behind her, he tapped her head. “Nothing. But my question takes a morphologist. I want to know if they could focus their sound without bending their heads. You know, Freda, we have a time-focus camera on the blossoms. If one petal folds down, however slightly, that might indicate—”
“You get so lost in sound theories,” she said, reaching into her drawer, “you overlook the unsound areas. Here are your photos.”
One photo showed all petals cupped. Another shot of the same tulip, five minutes later, showed the tip of a petal turned slightly. She had noticed the changed conformation a week before, when taking stills for her album. At the time, she had attributed no significance to the change. Now she handed him the photos condescendingly, and the look of awe he gave her was worth the deception.
“This would indicate that they can and do,” he said after studying the pictures. “After lunch I want to wrap it up for Old Pete, and I wanted you to clear the tulip beds when I do. Pete says he gets an aberrant reaction when you walk through the beds, because the tulips think you’re their mother.”
“Then he’s getting a pattern?”
“It seems so. He gave me this high-frequency howler to jam their frequency, to see how it affects their jabber. My mikes will pick up their reaction to the jamming. Which bed do you want the larvae from?”
“The C bed.”
“May I delay long enough to transcribe a few notes, Freda?”
“Certainly.”
Over a hamburger-and-coffee lunch at the canteen—Freda had not lunched in the executive dining room all week—Hal made one of his rare confessions of sentimentality. “I’m getting ambivalent about the tulips. They seem willing to cooperate. Maybe we can coexist. The first human reaction to anything strange is hostility, but the tulips seem to get to me.”
“We may not have to erect the tarp,” she said between bites, “if you’ll just put your foot down and be firm with them. You’re the father figure. The children will obey you.”
“Someone has to balance the overindulgence of their mother,” he said.
Hal and she were children, she thought, playing mama and papa, and Hal never smelled more like elm trees.
After lunch she went with him to the slight knoll on the southeast corner of the plot and watched as he set up his howler. His hands moved with a surgeon’s deftness, and, shirtless in the sunlight, his corded muscles rippled and flowed. Michelangelo, she recalled, was his middle name, and standing, looking down over the garden, he reminded her of the statue carved by his namesake. His dark hair lay in ringlets, and if he had taken off his dark glasses and put on a fig leaf, he would have been the model of Michelangelo’s David.
“Stretch out on the grass,” he said. “Relax and enjoy the view. But keep an eye on the howler. The children might get annoyed and strike back.”
He unrolled a lead line from the howler to clear himself of the machine and stretched out on the grass beside her, cuddling his head on an elbow and looking down over the tulips. “I’m setting it to sweep a thirty-degree arc, three times, over the bed.”
“It won’t injure the tulips, will it?”
“No, it won’t injure them, but it might be a little painful. If you were a dog down there, it would make you howl. All the little ones will pick up, if anything, will be a sound on their frequency which they can’t understand. Old Pete wants to hear how they react to a strange voice. Whatever their reaction is, it’ll be picked up by the mikes. If we can decipher the sounds, we can talk to them on their frequency, maybe.”
“Oh, Hal, you’ve had it! You’ve gone wild.”
“I’m starting the howler now.”
“They aren’t paying any attention.”
“They don’t seem to be. Maybe it’s a wolf whistle. They have heard that sound before. Don’t they glitter from up here?”
“They are beautiful,” she agreed, looking down over the scene. Obviously they were not responding to the sound, but they were certainly responding to the sunlight. They shimmered in waves of color. “You know, Hal, you spoke the truth when you said we humans might err in thinking everything hostile. Don’t you think we throw up our defenses unnecessarily, like cavemen, constantly overmobilizing for defense? Probably the universe is neither hostile nor friendly, and we might serve ourselves better by assuming that it’s friendly, don’t you think?”
She cast a glance in his direction, but he was entranced by the tulips, a devilish half-grin playing over his smile.
“I think you and I should sign a mutual-delusion pact, Hal, and agree to accept all things as friendly until proven differently. Papa used to say that he treated all women as ladies, until after he got married. Of course, he was joking… Hal!”
His face still reflected the same sardonic enchantment, and she leaned over and removed his dark glasses. Behind the glasses, his eyes were not focused on the garden, or anything at all. She had been chatting happily to a dead man.
Freda took the extension cord from his hand, rolled it, and hooked it to the howler. She would have to smuggle the howler back to Peter somehow, for it was doubtlessly a valuable piece of equipment. Historically, it had become the most valuable specimen of scientific machinery in the world, for the howler had established, beyond a doubt, that the flowers communicated; but the howler’s historical value would never be recognized, because Hal’s death had complicated matters.
If the tulips were found guilty, they would be destroyed as hostile to an earth environment. The Crusades had been fought over religious relics. Down through the ages men had sacrificed their lives, for sculpture, painting, monuments, for all things of beauty, and Hal Polino was born of a nationality which had, perhaps, suffered the most to protect things of beauty. She would not deny him a place in the tradition of his people.
She folded the tripod around the howler and scuffed the grass where it had rested. She took one final glance at the boy who sat gazing at the flowers he had loved, and walked down the hill, carrying the equipment.
Looking out over the tulip fields, more beautiful than ever, she knew that she could never let them be adjudged hostile to earth. Who among earth’s inhabitants would be capable of sending a high-frequency sound wave ripping through those blooms: Who would have reason to? And no one would ever hear her testify that Hal had done so. She could never permit the Caron tulips to be executed without even the dignity of a trial.
Back at her office, she dialed the coroner’s detail and told the duty officer, “This is Doctor Caron speaking. I have a dead man at greenhouse five, Hal Polino, a student.”
“We’ll be right over, Doctor.”
She put the howler back into its carrying case and noticed the slots for tapes. She started to place the case on Hal’s desk, when she noticed an envelope lying there: “To Freda—Personal.”
She opened it and read:
Dear Freda,
If I don’t come down from the hill with you, take the tapes from the garden and put them in the case with the howler, and call dispatch. Ask for Fred. Tell him the package is ready.
Don’t blame the tulips too harshly. The howler did not injure them, but it pained them terribly. Besides, I owe much to the tulips. They were the golden band which wedded my spirit to yours.
You see, I loved you. Deep inside your
austere and methodist exterior is a very warm and catholic woman. Deeper yet, I saw a little girl, lost and wandering, whom I longed to take by the hand and lead back to her elm grove. If you are reading this, sticks and stones may break my bones without hurting me, so I make bold to confess my love without fear of your lecturing tongue.
Dearly beloved, God grant you, always, elm trees.
Hal
Gently she folded the letter and returned it to the envelope, which she placed in the pocket of her smock. She arose and went into the garden and collected the microtapes. Returning to the office, she put the microtapes into the packing case and called Fred at dispatch.
Fred came before the coroner’s men and took the package. As the men went to pick up Hal’s body, Freda answered the few questions the coroner’s chief asked her, establishing the time of the death and asking if there had been any erratic or unusual behavior on the part of the dead man prior to his death. She answered all questions truthfully but volunteered nothing.
In twenty minutes Freda was alone again.
She walked to the doorway and looked out. Her tulips seemed to beckon her, and she walked among them. Bending down over the most active patch, she whispered, “He loved you.”
Rippling away from her, the tiny voices answered, “He loved you.”
“He loved us,” she said, getting to her knees.
“He loved us.”
“We loved him.”
“We loved him… loved him… him.”
“I’ll never betray you.”
“I’ll never betray you… betray you… you.”
“I loved him!”
“I loved him… loved him… loved him… him.”
Only two persons on earth had come to love the tulips, and, knowingly and unknowingly, they had come to love each other, till death did them part. Tulips had forged the golden band, and the band would not be broken, though now there were two persons on earth who knew the tulips could kill. Peter Henley’s knowledge would be suppressed by the very administrative processes he had sought to subvert, and the tulips would live forever, her secret tribute to the boy she loved in secret.