The Pollinators of Eden

by John Boyd

  When she awakened again, it was not to certain wakefulness, for dream images impinged on her consciousness. Both as a dreamer and as a wakeful sleeper, she felt hands disrobing her, and she thought Paul had come to her, though she could not hear his breathing. “He has come for me,” she thought, “my bridegroom, my beloved.” But the dream imagery returned, and she lay in a chamber as vestals disrobed and anointed her, vestals of the moon goddess preparing her for a ritual sacrifice.

  She was not afraid as they lifted her and bore her up temple steps, and she knew, so light was their touch, that she was being borne down the corridors of a dream, past rows of silent priests. Although the priests neither sang nor chanted, she felt the variety of their love as she was carried past them, the worshipful love of the stripling, the detached love of the kindly brother, the fatherly love of a patriarch toward his daughter. It was as if she were being wrapped in a coat of many colors, and though the wrappings bound her straitly, they bound her lightly, and they did not cover her completely.

  The long procession wound along and led her, finally, to the altar of Isis. It must have been her altar, for the moon was directly behind the high priest, who stood with sacrificial knife upraised. Then, in the manner of dreams, the forms changed. She was not being draped onto an altar but bound into a fetal position, and she wanted to giggle: she was being offered up to the high priest, breech foremost.

  He stood with knife upraised, and the knife was altered to a belaying pin. In the split second before the downsweep of the instrument, she knew she had been tricked. She was not being slain on the altar of Isis. The priest was an orchid, dark in the blaze of the moon, and she was a ritual sacrifice to an orchid god.

  She felt a prick, but there was no death agony. In the manner of dreams, she had become a rodeo rider, aboard a bucking stallion, upside down. With each lunge upward she sank lower, rising to the thrust with a metered rhythm and falling, with an ingasp of agony at the outdrawn stamen, to the bottommost dip of the highest rollercoaster ever built. Then the ride was over and she was swaying down the fairway in a jinrikisha loaded with all the Kewpie dolls at the fair, hearing the hurdy-gurdies play and smelling the odors of hot-buttered popcorn, peanuts, and elm trees.

  She awakened to sunlight and to Paul, squatting before her on the grass and hacking a casabalike melon with his machete. He looked over as she rubbed her eyes, hacked a half into two pieces, and handed her a quarter, saying, “Here, have the best breakfast you’ve ever eaten.”

  Lying out of the grove and on the grass, where he, apparently, had dragged her, she could admire the washboard configuration of his stomach, the ripple of his thigh muscles, without hindrance. Paul Theaston was stark naked.

  “You have no clothes on,” she commented.

  “You haven’t either,” he said, and she didn’t have.

  She bit into the melon, thinking that it was easier to be honest without clothes. “You left me alone last night.”

  “You had them.” He waved his hands to the orchids.

  “I dreamed they had me… Your friends were delightful.”

  “One night in Eden, and you’re dreaming like a wanton… But you have the body for such dreams. Come, eat breakfast on the way, and I’ll take the most beautiful girl from earth to meet the most beautiful girl on Flora.”

  He led her down the path and entered the female grove, moving easily through the widely spaced stalks, and with such sureness that she asked, “How can you find an individual beauty among this galaxy of beauties?”

  “By the color of her bloom in daylight and the odor of her perfume at night.”

  “Were you out here last night?”

  “Yes, I patrol the groves in early morning, by the light of the second moon. By noon the plants are dormant… Ah, here’s the lissome lovely… Freda, meet Susy.”

  Susy was a splendid plant, her stalk shining with the pale green of adolescence, and her bloom was deep red. Her tentacles seemed to quiver as Paul approached, guiding Freda by her arm, and the curve of the flower’s hips had a boyishness that matched the freshness of her fragrance. She was at least seven feet tall. “Why, Paul, she’s lovely.”

  “She likes you, Freda. You set her tendrils aquiver. Stand closer. Let her embrace you.”

  He bent forward and lifted a tendril from midway of the stalk and draped it over Freda’s shoulder. It seemed to her that the leaves of the vine cupped as it touched her to massage her shoulder lightly, and the other leaves on the tendril, one by one, formed delicate suction cups which clung to her back and swept down her waist, clinging to the small of her back and coiling around her hips. Its tip fluttered lightly against her navel. Other tendrils were moving from the stalk to embrace her, and Freda moved closer, pressing against the stalk and looking up at the bloom with the awe of an artist before the Mona Lisa.

  Now, all tendrils were coming into play, fluttering along her thighs and encircling her hips. She lifted her arms and folded them behind her head to give the vines more freedom with her torso. They enwreathed her, the lower tendrils sliding between her thighs and upward to weave a green cocoon that held her lightly with its suctions and caressed her with its quiverings. The leaves seemed to sense her areas most sensitive to their touch, kissing her lightly at first and then more amorously, finding zones of maximum response to become her suckling babe, her lover, her sister, her spouse; and though they stroked her cheeks and lips, they left her nostrils free to breathe in quickening gasps of delight.

  Looking up at the blossom, she saw it sway backward, moving slowly at first, and downward in a sinuous arc as the vines tugged at her, trying to lift her. Sensing the orchid’s intent, she stood on tiptoe, feeling the tendrils below her trunk parting for the culmination of the bloom’s sweet journey, and she strained higher, so avid now for the union that she was oblivious to Paul as she would have been to a band of Indians circling the stalk with war whoops. Nearing its journey’s end, the blossom slowed, and she saw the petals of its labellum opening to encompass its desire.

  The petals unfolded and enwrapped her, to close again and cup her in their beauty, and in her green bower she shivered with the shivering leaves. Inside the blossom’s cup, she could feel the stigma, a lark’s tongue of love, fluttering, quivering, probing.

  Then it touched.

  As her buttocks tensed, her torso relaxed and her spine arched back as if to a sudden blow, while a shudder in her loins foretold an ecstasy unbearable. She would have torn herself from the glory loosening her thighs, but in the green rush of its caress her fear wished less to flee than her love wished to pursue. She was flung into a vortex of exquisite agony and searing rapture. Around her the tendrils shivered in joy and release, and she answered thrust with throb. Her breasts were torn from the vines’ embrace by the backward snap of her arching spine, and for long moments she quivered in matching joy and release while her breasts heaved like twin roes leaping in the sunlight. Thus it was that Freda Caron, with breasts palpitant and loins tensed, found what earth had denied Hal Polino—the ultimate expression of dissonant rhythm.

  Suddenly the vines grew lax; the tendrils ceased to cup and whirl. She was lowered gently, to slump backward into the grass, her legs folded around the base of the stalk, and she slept.

  Paul awakened her, patting her cheeks. “Ten minutes is all you get. It’s a nervous reaction.” He bent down to help her to her feet. “Up, girl, those thews were also made for walking. A dip in the pool will snap you out of it. That was a classical pose. Reminded me of the statue of Leda and the swan.”

  “Statues again,” she said, getting to her feet. “What you were watching was the Caron can-can.”

  “Never heard of the Caron can-can.”

  “Boy, you never will.”

  Freda moved in heavy-thighed languor behind him as he led the way down the path, pausing occasionally to lop off a sere bottom blade from a stalk. “They like it,” he said. “Its like trimming toenails. The plants are very sensitive to the desire of others. Your act b
ack there was a mirror image of your own desires, desires you repressed for no good reason. And as you get to know the orchids, you’ll find you’re sensitive to them, and to other human beings, in a manner you were never aware of before.”

  “Paul,” she said suddenly, “I have a monitor planted in my jacket.”

  “We’ll fix it,” he said. “Trim a few blades with me, and save them.”

  She chopped, carefully avoiding the stalk, and felt the satisfaction gained from rendering a service appreciated. Inside her, some pickup system registered thanks from the orchids.

  When they reached the bivouac area, Paul gathered her clothes and bound them with the stalks, using her belt, and put them under his arm. He led her toward the tree line and down a path toward the sound of rushing water, which had cut a glen through the lava. He circled east along the ravine, toward the ramparts. “There’s some of the cane you ate last night.” He pointed. “It’s both soporific and aphrodisiac.”

  “That was a Clayborgian trick… Why didn’t you let me stay awake?”

  “It was a safety measure. I feared you might not like the blind date.”

  They had broken through a grove of live oaks to a pool of green water and were standing on a ledge fifteen feet above the surface. Above them the waterfall poured from a crevice in the terrace above, dropped five hundred feet to a cairn of crumbled coral rubble, and roared downward to scoop out the pool above which they stood. It was thirty yards long, and they stood above its widest point, which was at least twenty yards, and it was deep. Looking downward, she could see water-carved stalagmites of lava jutting up from a sandy bottom.

  Paul tossed her clothing into the pool, and they watched as, buoyed by the dry stalks, it floated down to the exit narrows and dipped once and swirled down the rapids toward the sea. “It’ll be out to sea in three hours, and the husks will grow sodden and sink, and that is the end of the earthly career of Freda Caron.”

  “You were serious last night when you told me you were staying. Does this mean we’re defecting?”

  “Why not? You leave nothing on earth but bad memories and office politics.”

  “But what about all my equipment?”

  “Crated and ready to go back. All you took was a machete. As defectors, our property will be seized. Even after probate there should be enough left to pay for the machete.”

  “Isn’t this treason?” she asked.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “We’re not betraying our country. By the terms of the Social Compact, a government rules only by consent of the governed. We are merely exercising our right to withdraw our consent… Last one in’s a bum!”

  He turned and dived cleanly into the water.

  It was the most delightful and uninhibited game of underwater tag she had ever played. When she tagged him, he knew he had been tagged, and with the residual oxygen from her space pill, she could stay under him for five minutes at a stretch. But once he lunged from a grotto and sent her spinning to the surface, and she knew she had been tagged. Afterward they lay on the narrow sand beach and laughed in the sunlight.

  “Say, boy,” she accused him, “you’ve been keeping secrets. What’s this mysterious threat you hinted about?”

  “I spoke guardedly,” he said, “in order not to alarm you last night, and because the evidence is partly deductive. Apparently there was, and may still be, a tusked mammal as large as a peccary, probably with the tongue of an aardvark, which the orchids used as a pollinator, much as the tulips use a koala-shrew. They must have been permitted to dig up a few dead stalks, or stalks that couldn’t defend themselves, to eat the tubers.”

  “Defend themselves?”

  “With their tendrils. The tendrils are tentacles, and the males can tear chunks of flesh from a body with their suction leaves. But a population explosion must have occurred among the pigs, and they started to raid the orchid groves in force.”

  “How do you deduce this?”

  “Tusk marks on the trees on the sixth level. Swaths of new growths in the orchid groves on the fifth level. The fifth level is a battleground. But over the years, the orchids learned to put the males on the perimeters, letting a few of the pigs through as pollinators, killing them when an ecological overbalance brought the pigs out in force.”

  “This is all deduction?” she asked.

  “Not quite,” he admitted. “One night I heard animal screams on this tier near the canyon’s mouth, and in the morning when I investigated, I found flecks of blood on the stalks, and blood on the grass. Once, on a cliff ledge, I found a skeleton fallen from above.”

  “Or thrown,” she said.

  He nodded. “The paths were runs for the pollinators. Four feet between the female groves, because they have a shorter killing range. Six feet on the broad paths. The orchids could control them when they ran amok.”

  “You speak of them in the past tense,” she said. “How do the orchids pollinate without them?”

  “Well, they could use hand-pollination with their suction leaves.”

  “But they don’t,” she said. “Quit hedging. What else have you found?”

  “The scream I heard that night. When I reached the spot where the blood was, the only orchid uprooted was a dead stalk. They had killed the pollinator while it foraged for fair game.”

  “Why should they turn against the animal?”

  “It was dangerous and inefficient. There was no true animal-plant symbiosis, but an ecological cold war.” He raised his eyes to the snow cone, and there was a steel in their grayness. “Someday, with my sons, I’m going up to the forest and show the pigs how men can kill.”

  She turned on her side and raised her head to him. “You are still evading my question. If the orchids are killing their pollinators, how can they pollinate without them?”

  He sat up and looked down at her, his eyes burning with a zeal that reminded her, more than ever, of a young Moses, but when he spoke his voice was gentle. “Dear girl, they’ve found the ideal animal for their purpose. We are the pollinators of Eden.”

  Freda rolled onto her back and looked up at the snow cone, swept free of clouds and gleaming in the sunlight. She and Paul could establish a new race on Flora, one reared in brotherhood with nature. Awareness and pride in her fecundity gave the prospect charm, particularly for a girl who had spent most of her life in Southern California. She lamented young ladies who married organization men and went into split-level houses, never to come out again; and she herself did not care to be numbered among those living dead. But there were technical considerations.

  “What of our findings? Our records would be lost to science.”

  “Let them,” he said. “I’m tired of accumulating facts for the sake of facts. Let science be lost if it doesn’t serve us.”

  “Very well. Out goes science, and culture too. But we have a more immediate problem. Granted the Botany has neither the detectors nor the manpower to find us, there is a pack of bloodhounds aboard—”

  “Which would last five minutes among the groves.”

  “Are the orchids hostile?”

  “Not unless I want them to be. In Eden, the word of Adam is law.”

  She had waited to spring the hardest question last “How can I find time to be a race mother, or the inclination, after a night out with the orchids?”

  “Pollination by proxy,” he answered, grinning. “Susy was the third leg of a three-legged stool.”

  Freda’s last night on Flora was a night to remember. At Paul’s suggestion, and riding on his shoulders, they spent the remainder of the morning looking for the rare bright-red bloom of an orchid lover. “The one I spotted for you yesterday was past his prime,” Paul said, “but it was a rush assignment, and a man can’t truly select a lover for a woman. There are so many subliminal factors involved.”

  After an hour’s search, she found a Prince Charming among the orchids, almost in the corner of the terrace formed by the river’s canyon and the sea wall. It was a gorgeous specimen, young, and fully six inc
hes taller than its closer neighbors. Paul let her guide him over to the plant, at his suggestion, so she could look at it, get acquainted, and find food to feed her fantasies.

  She tingled as she looked down on the sleeping prince, and though it was completely dormant in the sunlight, it seemed to quiver with eagerness when she laid her cheek against its petals and tweaked its pollen-engorged stamen. “Get me away from here, Paul, before this thing wakes up,” she squealed in mock fright, kicking him in the ribs.

  That evening for supper she ate only half a segment of the cane stalk from a portion near the roots, where the aphrodisiac qualities exceeded the soporific. They wove their canopy against the moonlight early, so she would be rested, and Paul counseled her on attitudes, banishing the old taboos and shearing away inhibitions with his words. Yet nowhere in his indoctrination did he deny the spiritual values inherent in the ritual, and he urged her to see the affair as a communion and to look upon herself as a sacred chalice for the fluid of life. He counseled her on humility, saying, “Aid the young and immature with your experience, and help the old with your strength.”

  Briefly he discussed their means of communication, touching tendril to tendril, and told her that an orchid needing her could find her within five hundred yards. They were bedding down within fifty yards of the chosen one because there was no point prolonging her suspense. “Once the tendrils lift you and the courtesans carry you to their prince for the night, there is no turning back. So relax and enjoy it.”

  So it was that she came to her second communion by moonlight and found the consummation exceeded the fantasies she had prepared for it. She was lifted to heights of adoration by her surging acolyte and lowered to rise again, and again, but now no dream images cloaked her delight, and she well knew what was up and who was down. As the third and final tidal wave bore her toward the second moon, she felt an expansiveness of psyche, a plumbing to depths never reached before, and she thought, “If this be treason…” but the thought was whipped to spume by nonverbalizable tremors that spun the loved and the lover into homogenized ecstasy, and she sank with a sigh into the profound sleep of repletion.