Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

“Careful,” I warned her. “It’s sensitive to the faintest respiratory sounds.”

“Quiet,” she said, waving me back. “I think it wants to sing.”

“Those are only key fragments,” I told her. “It doesn’t perform. I use it as a frequency—”

“Listen!” She held my arm and squeezed it tightly.

A low rhythmic fusion of melody had been coming from the plants around the shop, and mounting above them I heard a single stronger voice calling out, at first a thin high-pitched reed of sound that began to pulse and deepen and finally swelled into full baritone, raising the other plants in chorus about itself.

I’d never heard the Arachnid sing before and I was listening to it open-eared when I felt a glow of heat burn against my arm. I turned round and saw the woman staring intently at the plant, her skin aflame, the insects in her eyes writhing insanely. The Arachnid stretched out toward her, calyx erect, leaves like blood-red sabers.

I stepped round her quickly and switched off the argon feed. The Arachnid sank to a whimper, and around us there was a nightmarish babel of broken notes and voices toppling from high C’s and L’s into discord. Then only a faint whispering of leaves moved over the silence.

The woman gripped the edge of the tank and gathered herself. Her skin dimmed and the insects in her eyes slowed to a delicate wavering.

“Why did you turn it off?” she asked heavily.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’ve got ten thousand dollars worth of stock here and that sort of twelve-tone emotional storm can blow a lot of valves. Most of these plants aren’t equipped for grand opera.”

She watched the Arachnid as the gas drained out of its calyx, and one by one its leaves buckled and lost their color.

“How much is it?” she asked me, opening her bag.

“It’s not for sale,” I said. “Frankly I’ve no idea how it picked up those bars—”

“Will a thousand dollars be enough?” she asked, her eyes fixed on me steadily.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I’d never be able to tune the others without it. Anyway,” I added, trying to smile, “that Arachnid would be dead in ten minutes if you took it out of its vivarium. All these cylinders and leads would look a little odd inside your lounge.”

“Yes, of course,” she agreed, suddenly smiling back at me. “I was stupid.” She gave the orchid a last backward glance and strolled away across the floor to the long Tchaikovsky section popular with the tourists.

“ ‘Pathetique,’” she read off a label at random. “I’ll take this.”

I wrapped up the scabia and slipped the instructional booklet into the crate, keeping my eye on her all the time.

“Don’t look so alarmed,” she said with amusement. “I’ve never heard anything like that before.”

I wasn’t alarmed. It was just that thirty years at Vermillion Sands had narrowed my horizons.

“How long are you staying at Vermillion Sands?” I asked.

“I open at the Casino tonight,” she said. She told me her name was Jane Ciracylides and that she was a specialty singer.

“Why don’t you look in?” she asked, her eyes fluttering mischievously. “I come on at eleven. You may find it interesting.”

I did. The next morning Vermillion Sands hummed. Jane created a sensation. After her performance 300 people swore they’d seen everything from a choir of angels taking the vocal in the music of the spheres to Alexander’s Ragtime Band. As for myself, perhaps I’d listened to too many flowers, but at least I knew where the scorpion on the balcony had come from.

Tony Miles had heard Sophie Tucker singing the St. Louis Blues, and Harry the elder Bach conducting the B Minor Mass.

They came round to the shop and argued over their respective performances while I wrestled with the flowers.

“Amazing,” Tony exclaimed. “How does she do it? Tell me.”

“The Heidelberg score,” Harry ecstased. “Sublime, absolute.” He looked irritably at the flowers. “Can’t you keep these things quiet? They’re making one hell of a row.”

They were, and I had a shrewd idea why. The Arachnid was completely out of control, and by the time I’d clamped it down in a weak saline it had blown out over $300 worth of shrubs.

“The performance at the Casino last night was nothing on the one she gave here yesterday,” I told them. “The Ring of the Nibelungs played by Stan Kenton. That Arachnid went insane. I’m sure it wanted to kill her.”

Harry watched the plant convulsing its leaves in rigid spasmic movements.

“If you ask me it’s in an advanced state of rut. Why should it want to kill her?”

“Not literally. Her voice must have overtones that irritate its calyx. None of the other plants minded. They cooed like turtle doves when she touched them.”

Tony shivered happily.

Light dazzled in the street outside.

I handed Tony the broom. “Here, lover, brace yourself on that. Miss Ciracylides is dying to meet you.”

Jane came into the shop, wearing a flame yellow cocktail skirt and another of her hats.

I introduced her to Harry and Tony.

“The flowers seem very quiet this morning,” she said. “What’s the matter with them?”

“I’m cleaning out the tanks,” I told her. “By the way, we all want to congratulate you on last night. How does it feel to be able to name your fiftieth city?”

She smiled shyly and sauntered away round the shop. As I knew she would, she stopped by the Arachnid and leveled her eyes at it.

I wanted to see what she’d say, but Harry and Tony were all around her, and soon got her up to my apartment, where they had a hilarious morning playing the fool and raiding my scotch.

“What about coming out with us after the show tonight?” Tony asked her. “We can go dancing at the Flamingo.”

“But you’re both married,” Jane protested coyly. “Aren’t you worried about your reputations?”

“Oh, we’ll bring the girls,” Harry said airily. “And Steve here can come along and hold your coat.”

We played i-Go together. Jane said she’d never played the game before, but she had no difficulty picking up the rules, and when she started sweeping the board with us I knew she was cheating. Admittedly it isn’t every day that you get a chance to play i-Go with a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes, but nevertheless I was annoyed. Harry and Tony, of course, didn’t mind.

“She’s charming,” Harry said, after she’d left. “Who cares? It’s a stupid game anyway.”

“I care,” I said. “She cheats.”

The next three or four days at the shop were an audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear. Unfortunately I couldn’t starve the plants down below their thresholds. They needed exercise and they had to have the Arachnid to lead them. But instead of running through its harmonic scales the orchid only screeched and whined. It wasn’t the noise, which only a couple of dozen people complained about, but the damage being done to their vibratory chords that worried me. Those in the 17th Century catalogues stood up well to the strain, and the moderns were immune, but the Romantics burst their calyxes by the score. By the third day after Jane’s arrival I’d lost $200 worth of Beethoven and more Mendelssohn and Schubert than I could bear to think about.

Jane seemed oblivious to the trouble she was causing me.

“What’s wrong with them all?” she asked, surveying the chaos of gas cylinders and drip feeds spread across the floor.

“I don’t think they like you,” I told her. “At least the Arachnid doesn’t. Your voice may move men to strange and wonderful visions, but it throws that orchid into acute melancholia.”