Robert Silverberg: Valentine Pontifex

It was always a nuisance when the old agent retired and some youngster took over. As she moved deeper into vast old age it became ever harder to establish any sort of useful relationship with the new ones until several seasons had gone by. But that had not been a problem when Caliman Hayn had turned up two years ago. He was a young human, thirty or forty or fifty years old—anyone short of seventy seemed young to Aximaan Threysz these days—with a curiously blunt, offhand manner that was much to her liking. He showed no awe for her and did not seem interested in flattering her. “They tell me you are the farmer most willing to try new things,” he said brusquely, no more than ten minutes after they had met. “What would you say to a process that can double the size of lusavender seeds without harming their flavor?”

“I would say that I am being gulled,” she said. “It sounds considerably too good to be true.”

“Nevertheless the process exists.”

“Does it, now?”

“We’re ready to put it into limited experimental use. I see by my predecessors’ files that you’re known for your willingness to experiment.”

“So I am,” said Aximaan Threysz. “What sort of thing is this?”

It was, he said, something called protoplast augmentation, which involved using enzymes to digest the cell walls of plants to give access to the genetic material within. That material then could undergo manipulation, after which the cellular matter, the protoplast, was placed in a culture medium and allowed to regenerate its cell wall. From that single cell an entire new plant with greatly improved characteristics could be grown.

“I thought such skills were lost on Majipoor thousands of years ago,” Aximaan Threysz said.

“Lord Valentine has been encouraging some revival of interest in the ancient sciences.”

“Lord Valentine?”

“The Coronal, yes,” said Caliman Hayn.

“Ah, the Coronal!” Aximaan Threysz looked away. Valentine? Valentine? She would have said the Coronal’s name was Voriax; but a moment’s thought and she recalled that Voriax was dead. Yes, and a Lord Valentine had replaced him, she had heard, and as she gave it more thought she remembered that something odd had happened to that Valentine—was he the one who had had his body exchanged with another man’s? Probably that was the one. But such people as Coronals meant very little to Aximaan Threysz, who had not left Prestimion Vale in twenty or thirty years and to whom Castle Mount and its Coronals were so far away that they might just as well be mythical. What mattered to Aximaan Threysz was the growing of rice and lusavender.

The imperial botanical laboratories, Caliman Hayn told her, had bred an enhanced clone of lusavender that needed field research under normal farming conditions. He invited Aximaan Threysz to collaborate in this research—in return for which he would agree not to offer the new plant to anyone else in Prestimion Vale until she had had the chance to establish it in all her fields.

It was irresistible. She received from him a, packet of astonishingly immense lusavender seeds, great shiny things as big around as a Skandar’s eye, and planted them in a remote corner of her land, where there was no likelihood of their cross-pollinating with her normal lusavenders. The seeds sprouted rapidly and from them came plants that differed from the usual kind only in having stems of a thickness two or three times normal. When they flowered, though, the ruffled purple blossoms were enormous, as broad as saucers, and the flowers brought forth pods of awesome length, that at harvest time yielded huge quantities of the giant seeds. Aximaan Threysz was tempted to use them for the autumn planting, and cover all her acreage with the new kind of lusavender in order to reap an amazing bumper crop next winter. But she could not, for she had agreed to turn most of the oversize seed over to Caliman Hayn for laboratory study in Mazadone. He left her enough to plant perhaps a fifth of her land. This season, however, she was instructed to mix the augmented plants among the normal ones to induce interbreeding: the augmented characteristics were thought to be dominant, but that had never been tested on so large a scale.

Though Aximaan Threysz forbade her family to speak of the experiment in Prestimion Vale, it was impossible for long to keep the other farmers from learning of it. The thick-stemmed second-generation plants that sprang up everywhere on her plantation could hardly be concealed, and in one way and another, news of what Aximaan Threysz was doing spread through the Vale. Curious neighbors wangled invitations and stared at the new lusavender in amazement.

But they were suspicious. “Plants like that, they’ll suck all the nourishment from the soil in two or three years,” some said. “She keeps it up, she’ll turn her place into a desert.” Others thought the giant seeds surely would yield tasteless or bitter lusavender-meal. A few argued that Aximaan Threysz generally knew what she was doing. But even they were content to let her be the pioneer.

At winter’s end she harvested her crop: normal seeds, which were sent off to market as usual, and giant ones, which were bagged and set aside for planting. The third season would tell the tale, for some of the big seeds were of the pure clone and some, probably most, were hybrids between normal and augmented lusavender; and it remained to be seen what sort of plants the hybrid seeds would produce.

In late winter came the time for planting rice, before the floods arrived. When that was done, the higher and drier lands of the plantation received the lusavender seeds; and all through the spring and summer she watched the thick stems rising, the huge flowers unfolding, the heavy pods elongating and turning dark. From time to time she broke open a pod and peered at the soft green seeds. They were large, no question about that. But their flavor? What if they had no flavor, or a foul one? She had gambled an entire season’s production on that.

Well, the answer would be at hand soon enough.

On Starday came word that the agricultural agent was approaching, and would arrive at the plantation, as expected, on Twoday. But the same report brought puzzling and disturbing news: for the agent who was coming was not Caliman Hayn, but someone named Yerewain Noor. Aximaan Threysz could not understand that. Hayn was too young to have retired. And it bothered her to have him vanish just as the protoplast experiment was nearing its end.

Yerewain Noor turned out to be even younger than Hayn, and annoyingly callow. He began at once to tell her how honored he was to meet her, with all the usual rhetorical flourishes, but she cut him off.

“Where’s the other man?” she demanded.

No one seemed to know, Noor said. Lamely he explained thai Hayn had gone off without warning three months ago, saying nothing to anyone and dumping an enormous administrative mess on the rest of the department. “We’re still figuring it all out. Evidently he was mixed up in a bunch of experimental studies, but we don’t know what sort or with whom, and—”

“One of them took place here,” said Aximaan Threysz coldly. “Field testing of protoplast-augmented lusavender.”

Noor groaned. “The Divine spare me! How many more of Hayn’s little private projects am I going to stumble into? Protoplast-augmented lusavender, is it?”

“You sound as if you’ve never heard the term.”

“I’ve heard it, yes. But I can’t say I know much about it.”

“Come with me,” Aximaan Threysz said, and marched off, past the paddies where the rice now stood hip-high, and on into the lusavender fields. Anger sped her stride: the young agricultural agent was hard pressed to match her pace. As she went she told him about the packet of giant seeds Hayn had brought her, the planting of the new clone on her land, the interbreeding with normal lusavender, the generation of hybrids now coming to ripening. In a moment more they reached the first rows of lusavender. Suddenly she halted, appalled, horrified.