STEPHEN COOK
The possible permutations of life on other planets have always fascinated science fiction writers, but most of them have been content merely to describe odd life forms and use them as the basis of a conventional action plot. In this story, the bizarre “trapflower” becomes instead a focus for one man’s remembrance of things past.
One of the youngest and most promising Australian science fiction writers, Stephen Cook while in his middle twenties already had a reputation for individual and eccentric stories, erotically charged and enriched by a brilliant deployment of colour imagery. Their disturbing character indicates the seed of a major talent, now never to see maturity. In July 1967, Stephen Cook died at the age of 25.
This story, his last, has not previously been published.
* * * *
Sometimes a man sees something that he cannot help but watch. George Ryan stood with open eyes before the rose, the carnation, the thing of beauty, the huge non-flower in the cave, and knew the meaning of gratitude.
Large oval petals, overlapping, lapped gently against each other like ripples on sand. Subtle flows of movement ran out in concentric circles, washing out to the fringes and drifting back towards the centre. There were thousands of petals, millions of them, touching each other ... as cautiously as George, still innocent at fourteen, had once touched a finger to the lips of young Jenny Whiteford with her long fair hair, before she went away forever to a city on the other side of the world. Thousands of petals, and each ripple reminded his fingers of the feel of her lips. Some of the petals glowed for a moment with the same pastel orange, the soft shade of red that he seemed to remember. He would have given a great deal to see Jenny Whiteford’s lips again, to touch them without withdrawing and then perhaps to kiss them. But he had been a boy, younger at fourteen than Jenny at thirteen, too young to know what was possible in the world, and then Jenny had gone away forever.
There was also a voice: George! Oh, you stupid bastard— George! This way, for Christ’s sake!
He had seen sand rippling under water, but never as perfectly as the petals moved in the flower.
Once, on a cold planet, there had been a sunset over water. For a moment now he saw it again in a circle of hundreds of petals that took on the right colours in the very degree and proportion that he remembered. Gold and red at the top, melting down through blues and greens into a rich olive-grey in the lowest arc. The sphere of colours dropped down towards the water. Below it was the broken reflection that rose to meet it—in the flower, too, he could see it. There it was, slipping sideways upon itself, now this way and now that as the rippling petals carried it awry. In a moment the two images would move into invisibility. Over the violet sea there must have been an invisible haze, for before they could unite, the olive-grey arc had risen through the falling sun, fallen through the rising reflection, and blotted them both out against the olive-grey sky.
Deep amber sunlight came directly down into the clearing where he stood: midday light from a dying double sun. The flower stood back in the cave, half within and half beyond the outer fringes of the light. Its petals generated their own luminescence. The cave around and behind it glowed dimly with the reflection of its shifting colours.
What’s the matter with him? George, listen to me! Look this way!
It was less a cave than a deep hole in a pile of massive rocks. Now that he had moved closer, George found it beginning to open out around the flower, as if to give him a better view. He was grateful to the cave for protecting it, and grateful to his cold-eyed Fate, that had warmed to him at last. He was just a greaser, a half-educated space mechanic, a rowdy bum with dirty hands and old age creeping up around his knees ; he had been living without hope for a very long time.
There was beauty in the flower’s colour, in its undulation, in its depth and its width and height. It was as wide and tall as a man was long; he could plunge his arm into it up to the shoulder without coming to the end. Thousands of petals grew towards him and yet remained unseen, hidden by thousands more that grew on past them, still further out, and turned their tender oval tips around to face him—but were hidden, again and again, by thousands more that grew still further. And finally there were the petals that reached and formed the surface. They turned over against each other, lapping quietly, face by face, oval upon oval, beautiful beyond knowledge and almost beyond memory.
He had been in a satellite over Minerva when they dropped the sodium bomb that ended the Debrite Rebellion. The cloud of deadly golden gas had risen directly towards him, higher and higher. A thousand miles of airless space protected him, but at first he had been afraid. Then the cloud had begun to spread, still exploding as it expanded and tumbled outwards. The new clouds had risen further, still exploding and exploding. Puffs and bubbles of explosive smoke boiled across a whole green continent while George Ryan watched. He remembered it now as a beautiful thing, a wild driving chemical growth. The petals of the flower curved out from the centre like tiny clouds, and now they were golden, every last oval as golden as the thousands of poisonous puffs that he remembered.
It’s no good, Harry! That’s a trapflower he’s seeing in there.
George! He’s got to come out of there. Let me go get him; I’ve got to get him out of there!
It’s too late. We can’t do a thing without protection.
Five or six times in his life, George Ryan had known something so fine that nothing could soil the memory. Five or six times, he thought. A few months after Jenny Whiteford went away forever, he had lost his virginity to a girl who sold pronto leaves, and that night had seemed the finest in his life; but soon he had learnt that the leaves made her armpits stink when she sweated, and she had sworn when he couldn’t spend more money than he had. And there was a girl who had still been at school, who smiled when she was close to him and blushed when he touched her where nobody, she swore, had ever touched her before, and made him feel five times a king, and gave him a disease. But Jenny had let him touch her lips and then had gone away forever. The more dirty soil he piled around her memory, the more it grew. Like a flower in a bog, it rose higher.
In the cave, sheer beauty waved soft fronds like petals at him. It brought back Jenny, the golden cloud, the bottomless pit of Hudson IV, the sunset over the Calveranian Sea, the Fire Ceremony on the sulphurous slopes of Mount Sonora—and it brought back more, a simple song heard outside a party, a picture in a window, things he remembered and things he had never had the chance to know. Yet it was more than just memories of the past. It was here, it was now, and it was good to see for no other reason than these.
What else was here? Somewhere there were other memories ; and there was a voice. (George, please, it’s me, it’s Harry! They’re waiting for us, George, all the boys are waiting for us! Back in the bar! Remember the girls, George! Think of Olga!) He remembered a fat broad in a crowded, lonely bar. Olga laughed and kept him warm with her bawdy humour. The flower sparkled more brightly than the stars in black space, which had been such a disappointment after all he had heard about them. Somewhere there were hangovers, dead men, single bunks, double bunks, a drunk rolled in a lane, dogs that barked and bit, and his good, simple friend Harry. Even Harry must have known moments when he was more than a man. Even Harry would know what he was being granted, if he saw the flower.
Call a copter—bomb the thing! Isn’t there time for that?
He was close enough to see the immense, horny leaves that nestled around the flower. He understood them perfectly. Beauty needed protection. His memory of the golden clouds over Minerva was protected by several months of safe distance. It took that long before he met the crews that had gone down after the poison cleared, and heard their horrible stories. By then the clouds and the deaths were too far apart to touch.
The stupid bastard, he doesn’t know what he’s doing! What’s he thinking? It’s a Trapflower, George, it’s a f------g TRAPFLOWER!
He clambered over the first rock. Coruscating petals around the fringes of the flower dripped colour into the full red heart of it, feeding it with showers of tinsel flecks. And the scent. How could he have missed the scent? It had been so full in his nostrils that he had already forgotten what it was like to breathe anything else. Light and firm, like musk in a spring breeze, like the incense they burnt at the sacrificial altar near Mount Sonora, like Jenny Whiteford’s hair—like nothing he had ever known, sharing nothing, really, with hair or incense except for the simple fact of its magnificence.
He was close enough to hear the petals brushing against each other. The sound was yet another form of beauty; it took so many forms, why was it so rare?
Christ, he’s nearly out of sight in there! He doesn’t know what he’s doing!
Above and around him were the whispering petals, but before he could reach them he had to step across the first leaf. It lay upon the ground like a broad green mat. Crystal juices shimmered in its hollows. At the entrance to the temple, near Sonora, they had asked him to bathe his feet. Girls had placed bowls of perfumed water beside him, removed his boots and tended him as befitted an honoured guest. The juices would cleanse him while the spines darted from the leaves and made him still; then the petals would quietly lick his body until only the metals and plastics were left to be cast behind.
GEORGE!
He had given two months’ wages for one night with a six-limbed Feltian Whore. He had lost the thumb of his left hand in a fight over fifty dollars in a card game. He had sold his own teeth for three bundles of pronto leaf. Now he would give his life to end and protect the greatest, most worthwhile experience he had ever known. His body would help to feed this magnificent thing that had waited here so patiently for him to find it. Poor Harry, who would go back to live and die as a worn-out drifter, rather than live and die, here and now—as a man.
He stepped forward upon the leaf and thrust his arms into the petals up to the elbows. The plant let him caress it for almost a second before its spines painlessly broke his skin, made him quiet and held him close.
We’ll kill the bastard, George! We’ll get it for you!