Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

“Perfectly delicious!”

“A rare Oriental spice?”

“How could it be a family secret when we don’t have a family?” I said. Marian’s eyes were inscrutable.

“It’s not yohimbine. It’s zilphion,” just as if she knew.

Our guests were restless and the meeting broke up early that night. I was eager to see them go. Yohimbine is a crystalline alkaloid substance with a chemical analysis of C 21H 26N 2O 3. It derives from the bark of the yohimbe tree Corynanthe yohimbe, found in central Africa, where it has been used for centuries by the natives to increase sexual powers. A plant explorer sent it to Beltsville when I was there, but it had no appreciable insecticidal properties. Those of us who in the interests of science personally checked out its reputed attributes, found it to be without merit. Well, when I got Marian alone we were distracted somehow, and it was not until much later that I remembered to ask her about zilphion.

“The silver didrachma coins of Cyrene,” she said drowsily.

“What are you talking about?”

“Snuggle-pup, Cyrene was a Greek city in Libya and made its fortune exporting zilphion, which grew wild in the hills. The plant was in such demand that a syrup made from the stem and root cost a pound of silver for a pound of syrup. This commerce went on during the golden age of Greece. The plant was never brought under cultivation. By three hundred A.D. zilphion had been exterminated at Cyrene and what little grew in Syria was also gone. It was extinct, and Pliny the Elder mumbles about the cure of hemorrhoids and scrofulous sores. Absurd!”

“Marian, doll-baby,” how do you know about this?”

“My family collects things. Father is a philatelist and my mother is a numismatist—”

“Yeah-yeah, coins—”

“And two of the didrachmas show zilphion. I looked it up again in the library. Sprouts are going to come up from each leaf base and grow a round flower. The central stalk will have a larger blossom on top. I imagine they’ll be something like onion flowers, or maybe agapanthus. You wait and see. But while we’re waiting, Snuggles—”

So that’s the way it is at our house.

You’ll see my pickup parked around Fletcher Hills during the day. I cut grass and prune shrubs and sell exotics and suck in my breath politely. Behind my inscrutable Oriental face, brother, I got problems.

You buy a man a drink and he buys one back.

We inadvertently gave the beetles a whee, and they gave us zilphion seeds. Now, dammit, are they friends or foes? Was the flowering of Greece due to zilphion? Or the decay? Demographers, the guys who study populations, guess that Greece grew like mad during that time. But no one has a monopoly on plants. What about the Egyptians and the Minoan Cretans, or was the Greek way of making olive oil different?

Olive oil is a synergist for zilphion. So is alcohol.

That’s what Haru Watsonabe thinks about while he trims hedges and empties cuttings into plastic sacks for the compost pile. When he’s feeling cheerful, that is. But look at our ZPG chapter. It has splintered off into SPG. That means Select Population Growth. “Why let the stupids outbreed us?” said Hazelrigg. “We can do anything they can do better,” said Connie Wechsler.

While I don’t think zilphion is habit-forming, the predisposition induced gives me withdrawal symptoms when I go to work.

Will the bettles be back, or do they drop in every twenty-five hundred years?

Marian was quite right about the flowering of the plant. The central stalk grew fibrous but the shoots were delicious. She found an old cider press with a hand-crank macerator, and I put a belt-drive, geared-down electric motor on it. We collected two pounds of mature seed and then I pulled the plants, washed the roots, ran stalk and all through the macerator, and we squeezed twenty-two quarts of sweet, spicy syrup. We used a cupful as the sugar base for daiquiris at our last ZPG meeting—the one that turned into a little orgy by the swimming pool.

And the withdrawal symptoms when I leave Marian.

And the overpopulation of the world.

And the Arabs of North Africa boil and eat the leaves of a thorny plant called zilla, oddly a brassicacea, but not to be confused with zilphion.

And the Egyptians used the scarab as the symbol of the sun god Khepera, though the scarabaeus beetle rolls dung balls, and did those old Eygptians know something I don’t know?

And the golden age of Greece.

I lowered the moisture content of the seeds by sealing them into a large tin container over calcium chloride, using enough so the moisture absorbed produced no visible change in the chemical. Marian and I don’t talk together as much as before, so I made the decision myself. I gathered all the seeds into eight containers and rented space in a cave owned by a data storage company. Judging by the Malpighian layer—the seed-coat—zilphion seed is mesobiotic—three to fifteen years of viability. With a moisture content of six percent and a constant temperature of 50°, the seeds should be vigorous for five years minimum.

Somebody has got to be responsible.

I never asked for the honor. I was just standing there watching beetles dip water from the swimming pool. But the buck stops somewhere and I have five years of grace to think it over. If I don’t last that long—some mornings I’m not sure I will—the seeds and a short cover letter will be mailed to eight U.S. Agricultural Experiment stations.

But it’s not easy—

As a right-thinking man—

Go home and—uh—talk to Marian—

A tiger by the—

You see why I’m snarled up, why I bumble and buzz like a bee in Japanese tennis shoes from garden to garden. I wonder what the other gardeners think about?

Ugh!

WE ARE IDIO:

Genadee: Her hair is short and black and sleek, and grows down to a fraction of an inch from her eyebrows. To look at her eyes alone, you wouldn’t know she was once brainless. They’re dark and shiny. She has a nice smile. Her build is like a pumpkin. No, a gourd. She has damp hands.

Creel: One of her ancestors must have been a spider. She has four arms. She can’t wear shoes because her feet leak. Anytime you want to find her just look for a yellow trail; at the end of it is Creel. Since she has become part of this three-in-one trinity, Creel has taken to stealing. When anyone misses something they look in her locker.

Risa: Me. How do I know what I look like? I’m back here gawking the other way. Except that I have big legs. Big arms, too. The hair on me is about half an inch long. Not bad.

We would rather be one trinity than three human vegetables. Now we don’t scream without making noise. Now if we want to scream, we do it.

Idio is a scientific experiment. It is living proof that anyone can perform meaningful work. It is a kick in the prunes of women who buck for abortion and mercy killing.

Right after Creel and Genadee and I were born, our mother gave us to the government. If anyone asked me what our I.Q. was, I wouldn’t know what to tell them. We vary from 60 to 75, except when the Cycler breaks down, then our I.Q. is about 25. For a dog, that’s okay. For a woman, it means she might as well be growing out in the garden.

The integrator in my head stimulates the waking parts of my brain, then it gathers up the energy and passes it on to the machine in the second brain of the trinity, which passes it on to the third brain. The Cycler takes all this current and sends it back through me. Each of the brains in Idio gets to share the energy produced by all three.

What this means is that our I.Q. is high enough so that we can get out of bed and act human. Without the machines, we would just lie still with our mouths open.