Fritz Leiber Gondolier

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head-bulge, or perhaps the green husk opening enough to reveal pale forehead and tiny darting eyes.
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TheBlackGondolierandOtherStories
In the more developed the sheath of the stem had split down the front and peeled back, like a bolero
jacket or green dressing robe, half revealing a delectable torso, baby pink yet an anatomically perfect
replica of some celebrated figure.
For as one studied these flower-girls, it became apparent that they were not some exotic genus unlinked
to individual humanity. One began to recognize faces and forms.
Here were the opulent or sweetly up-tilted breasts of some reigning screen star. There was the profile of
a celebrated society beauty, or winsome junior member of a royal family. A few of the more memorable
Kittens-of-the-month were represented, but on the whole the social trend was upward.
There is a rather crude joke in which one Thames barman asks another, Bill, which ave you enjoyed
the most the women you've ad in real life, or the ones you've ad only in the realms of your
imagination? And Bill replies, The latter, Jim for there you meets a better class of women."
The same was true of Taggart Adams and his garden.
Not every plant was unique, however. There were several groups of identicals, including three full
blooms in a front row which resembled Erica Slyker just enough to make one realize they or their plant-
ancestor must have been grown with the help of photos and exodermal tokens of her sister Alice.
A very few of the long-stemmed girls bulged with seeds. These had their eyes closed, but most of the
rest were peering about, chiefly toward Tag.
And although they were armless they clearly had more than ocular powers of movement, for a small
rustling went through the ranked flowers now, as if a tiny breeze were sifting through the subterranean
hothouse, troubling the canopy leaves; stems twisted just a little toward Tag; minute lips parted and
there was the faintest shrill sibilance in the air, as of voices almost too high to be sensed even as noise.
Tag took deep languorous breaths of the varied girl-scent, feeling utterly content.
This was the place where the world was perfect for him, he decided for the thousandth time: the place
where girls were not big troublesome bounding meaty things with rights and ideas and desires, but
fragile blooms with just enough consciousness and limited life to make them interesting; fragile
blossoms, blooms to be potted and repotted, tenderly nurtured, watered and fertilized and sprayed,
brought to the acme of perfection, and then carefully hand-pollinated and set to seed, or ruthlessly
snapped off and extirpated forever as the whim took him.
Pinning up girls in a million-copy magazine was pretty good, admittedly. But potting them in a garden ...
oh, how much he owed to his Great-aunt Veronica and her patient largely-unappreciated research and
her mimic-seeds! What stretches of bliss he'd enjoyed during the seven years since he'd chanced on the
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black spheroids in her effects and stumbled on their purpose!
Here was the secret of his power in the real world, the sweetly-flowering earth from which like Antaeus
he periodically renewed his strength.
Almost his sole regret was that he couldn't regrow his Great-aunt herself. He'd tried he had a
daguerreotype of her as a 17-year-old and a lock of her girl hair but it had turned out that the process
wouldn't work for dead women. Else he'd have had not only his perpetually blooming row of
Veronica's but his Cleopatras, Madam Dubarry's, Nell Gwyns, Lola Montezes, and Jean Harlows
granting he could locate authentic pictures and/or genuine exodermal tokens, even if only a pinch of
ashes.
But apparently for a girl plant to develop properly it needed to draw on the living original girl in some
obscure vampirish way, telepathic or sub-etheric, who could say? since even his Great-aunt had no
wholly satisfactory theory.
The effect on the girl whose seed had been planted with proper picture and token varied greatly.
Frequently there was none at all, so far as Tag could discover. Sometimes she would be reported as
confined to bed or sent to hospital with a mild undiagnosed fever or in a light (or occasionally heavy)
coma, especially during the period of blooming. Such symptoms generally terminated, and the girl
returned to her normal life, with the withering and/or seeding of her plant. If Tag continued to re-seed
her, as in the case of Alice Slyker, there might be rumors of protracted depressions together with periods
of retreat in some mental hospital.
Once a Swedish beauty queen he'd terminated (with hedge shears) had died the same night (decapitated
in a traffic accident), but Tag was inclined to attribute that to coincidence. What the devil, he wasn't
trying to work black magic or hurt anyone, he was only satisfying an aesthetic impulse, using tools
supplied by a very high-minded old lady. No, he wasn't trying to hurt a soul.
Of course condign punishment, as now of the abominable Erica Slyker, was something else again! That
thought stirred him from his delightful lethargy and he trotted to the potting table, past rows of Alices
and Bridgettes and Margarets and Sonias and a single Jacquelin.
He started grinning before he got there. His Erica had developed with commendable rapidity. Clearly
Anselmo had remembered the vitamin and hormone supplements. Already the face was in full bloom
and the bosom had begun to bulge nicely. The haughty archings of the minuscule eyebrows as she glared
at him and the petulant poutings of the tiny lips were balm to his injured psyche and as much so was
the thought of her twisting and moaning now on some hard couch or hospital bed while doctors went
over her baffledly; he'd asked one of his earlier victims about her coma and she'd unsuspectingly told
him it had been filled with horrid half-formed dreams of being buried alive and bound to a stake and
subjected to nameless indignities.
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TheBlackGondolierandOtherStories
And serves you right, Slyker, he said now to the flower, lightly flicking one pale cheek with a
fingernail.
The resemblance was perfect. The eleven-looped hair and the inward-facing color print had done their
work well. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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