There were only about a dozen true Arachnids in captivity; most of the others were either mutes or grafts from dicot stems, and I was lucky to have mine at all. I’d bought the place five years earlier from an old half-deaf man called Sayers, and the day before he left he moved a lot of rogue stock out to the garbage disposal scoop behind the apartment block. Reclaiming some of the tanks, I’d come across the Arachnid, thriving on a diet of algae and perished rubber tubing.
Why Sayers had wanted to throw it away I’d never discovered. Before he came to Vermillion Sands he’d been a curator at the old Kew Conservatoire where the first choroflora had been bred, and had worked under the Director, Dr. Mandel, who as a young botanist of twenty-five had discovered the prime Arachnid in the Guiana forest. The orchid took its name from the Khan-Arachnid spider which pollinated the flower, simultaneously laying its own eggs in the fleshy ovule, guided, or as Mandel always insisted, actually mesmerized to it by the vibrations which the orchid’s calyx emitted at pollination-time. The first Arachnid orchids beamed out only a few random frequencies, but by crossbreeding and maintaining them artificially at the pollination stage Mandel had produced a strain that spanned a maximum of twenty-four octaves.
Not that he’s ever been able to hear them. At the climax of his life’s work Mandel, like Beethoven, was stone deaf, but apparently by merely looking at a blossom he could listen to its music. Strangely, though, after he went deaf he never looked at an Arachnid.
That morning I could almost understand why. The orchid was in a vicious mood. First it refused to feed, and I had to coax it along in a fluoraldehyde flush, and then it started going ultra-sonic, which meant complaints from all the dog owners in the area. Finally it tried to fracture the tank by resonating.
The whole place was in uproar, and I was almost resigned to shutting them down and waking them all by hand individually—a back-breaking job with eighty tanks in the shop —when everything suddenly died away to a murmur.
I looked round and saw the golden-skinned woman walk in.
“Good morning,” I said. “They must like you.”
She laughed pleasantly. “Hello. Weren’t they behaving?”
Under the black beach robe her skin was a softer, more mellow gold, and it was her eyes that held me. I could just see them under the wide-brimmed hat. Insect legs wavered delicately round two points of purple light.
She walked over to a bank of mixed ferns and stood looking at them, her ample hips cocked to one side.
The ferns reached out toward her and trebled eagerly in their liquid fluted voices.
“Aren’t they sweet?” she said, stroking the fronds gently. “They need so much affection.”
Her voice was low in the register, a breath of cool sand pouring, with a lilt that gave it music.
“I’ve just come to Vermillion Sands,” she said, “and my apartment seems awfully quiet. Perhaps if I had a flower, one would be enough, I shouldn’t feel so lonely.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Yes,” I agreed, brisk and business-like. “What about something colorful? This Sumatra Samphire, say? It’s a pedigree mezzo-soprano from the same follicle as the Bayreuth Festival Prima Belladonna.”
“No,” she said. “It looks rather cruel.”
“Or this Louisiana Lute Lily? If you thin out its SO2 it’ll play some beautiful madrigals. I’ll show you how to do it.”
She wasn’t listening to me. Slowly her hands raised in front of her breasts so that she almost seemed to be praying; she moved toward the counter on which the Arachnid stood.
“How beautiful it is,” she said, gazing at the rich yellow and purple leaves hanging from the scarlet-ribbed vibro-calyx.
I followed her across the floor and switched on the Arachnid’s audio so that she could hear it. Immediately the plant came to life. The leaves stiffened and filled with color and the calyx inflated, its ribs sprung tautly. A few sharp disconnected notes spat out.
“Beautiful, but evil,” I said.
“Evil?” she repeated. “No, proud.” She stepped closer to the orchid and looked down into its huge malevolent head. The Arachnid quivered and the spines on its stem arched and flexed menacingly.
“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.