The Pollinators of Eden Read Free Page A

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