Wolfe, Gene - Morning Glory.pdf

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MORNING-GLORY
Gene Wolfe
Smythe put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. He
was a short and untidy man now well entered on middle age, and his face
showed embarrassment.
"Well, go on," Black said.
Smythe said, "My father felt bread was sacred; if a piece was accidently
dropped on the floor he would demand that it be picked up at once and
dusted off and eaten; if someone stepped on it he was furious."
"Was this element of your father's character present in reality, or is it only
a part of the dream logic?"
Smythe put his head down and looked at Black in irritation. "This is just
background," he said. "My father would say, 'Bread is the life of man, you
dirty little hyena. Pick it up.' He had been brought up in Germany."
"Specifically, what was your dream?" Black opened his notebook.
Smythe hesitated. For years now he had been giving Black entries, and
he had almost always made them up, thinking them out on the bus he took
to the campus each morning. It seemed now a sort of desecration, a cheat,
to tell Black a real dream. "I was a vine," he said, "and I was pounding on a
translucent wall. I knew there was light on the other side, but it didn't do me
any good where I was. My father's voice kept saying: See! See! See! Over
and over like that. My father is dead."
"I had supposed so," Black said. "What do you think this dream has to do
with your father's reverence for bread?"
More disturbed by the dream than be wanted Black to know, Smythe
shrugged. "What I was trying to communicate was that my father had a sort
of reverence for food. 'You are what you eat,' and all that sort of thing. I
chewed morning-glory seeds once."
"Morning-glory seeds?"
"Yes. Morning-glory seeds are supposed to be a sort of hallucinogen,
like LSD or peyote."
"I suppose your father caught you and punished you?"
Smythe shook himself with irritation. "Hell no. This wasn't when I was a
child; it was about three years ago." He felt frustrated by Black's invincible
obtuseness. "All the blah-blah was going on in the newspapers about
drugs, and I felt that as a member of the department I ought to know at
least a little bit about it. I didn't know where to get LSD or any of those other
things, but of course I had morning-glory seed right in the lab." He
 
remembered the paper seed packet with its preposterously huge blue
flower and how frightened he had been.
"You didn't think you should obtain departmental permission?"
"I felt," Smythe said carefully, "that it would be better for the department if
it were not on record as having officially approved of something of that
sort." Besides, he told himself savagely , you were afraid that you would
get the permission and then back out; that's the truth, and if you tell too
many lies you may forget it.
"I suppose you were probably right," Black said. He closed his notebook
with a bored snap. "Did you really have hallucinations?"
"I'm not sure. It may have been self-hypnosis."
"Nothing striking though?"
"No. But you see, I had eaten - at least in a sense - the morning glory. I
think that may be why my father-" He hesitated, lost in the complications of
the thought he was trying to formulate. Black was the Freudian; he himself,
at least by training, a Watsonian behaviorist.
"Further dreams may tell us more about what's going on," Black said. It
was one of his stock dismissals. "Don't forget you've got counseling
tomorrow." As Smythe closed the door Black added, "Good-bye, Schmidt."
Smythe turned, wanting to say that his father's father had been American
consul in Nuremberg, but it was too late. The door had shut.
To reach his own laboratory he went down two flights of stairs and along
a seemingly endless hall walled with slabs of white marble. The last lecture
of the day had been finished at four, but as he approached the laboratory
area in the rear of the building he heard the murmur of a few late-staying
students still bent over their white rats. Just as he reached his own door
one of these groups broke up, undergraduates, boys in sweaters and
jeans, and girls in jeans and sweaters, drifting out into the corridor. A girl
with long blond hair and a small heart-shaped face stopped as he opened
the door, peering in at the twisting, glowing, rectangular tubes that filled the
bright room. On an impulse Smythe said, "Come in. Would you like to see
it?"
The girl stepped inside, and after a moment put the books she was
carrying on one of the lab benches. "What do you do here?" she said. "I
don't think I've ever seen this place." The light made her squint.
Smythe smiled. "I'm called a vine runner."
She looked at him quizzically.
"People who put rats through mazes are called rat runners; people who
use flatworms are worm runners."
"You mean all these square pipes are to test the intelligence of plants?"
"Plants," Smythe said, allowing himself only a slight smile, "lacking a
nervous system, have no intelligence. When they display signs of what, in
such higher creatures as flatworms, would be called intelligence, we refer
to it as para-intelligence or pseudo intelligence. Come here, and I'll show
 
you how we study it."
The rectangular passages were of clouded, milky white plastic panels
held together with metal clips. He unfastened a panel, showing her the
green, leafy tendril inside.
"I don't understand," she said. "And I don't think you really believe that
about pseudo intelligence. Intelligence ought to be defined by the way
something responds, not by what you find inside when you cut it open.
"Out of fear of being accused of heresy I won't agree with you - but I
have, on occasion, been known to point out to my departmental superiors
that our age is unique in preferring a pond worm to an oak tree."
The girl was still looking at the twisting white passages sprawling along
the bench. "How does it work?" she asked. "How do you test them?"
"It's simple, really, once you understand that a plant 'moves' by growth.
That's why it has no musculature, which in turn, by the way, is why it has no
nervous system. These mazes offer the plants choice points in the form of
forked passages with equal amounts of light available in each direction. As
you see, we keep this room brightly lit, and these plastic panels are
translucent. The trick is that we have more than twenty grades, ranging from
ones which admit almost as much light as plate glass to ones which are
nearly opaque." He held up the panel he had unfastened so that she could
see the light through it, then rummaged in a drawer to produce another of
the same color which nonetheless admitted much less light.
"I see," the girl said. "The smart plants find out by and by that there's less
and less light when they go down a wrong turn, and so they stop and go
back."
"That's right, except that the tendrils don't, of course, actually turn around
and grow backward. The growth of the 'wrong' tendrils just slows and stops,
and new growth begins where the bad decision was made."
The girl reached down and gently, alinost timidly, stroked a leaf. "It's like
a society more than it is an animal, isn't it? I mean it sort of grows an
institution, and then if it finds out it's going the wrong way it grows another
one. What's the name of this plant?"
"Bindweed," Smythe told her. "It's one of the most intelligent we've
found. Far brighter, for example, than scarlet runner bean - which in turn is
more intelligent itself than, say, most varieties of domestic grapes, which
are among the stupidest vines.
"I ought to be going now," the girl said. She picked up her books. "What's
that big one, though? The one that sprawls all over?"
Smythe was replacing the panel he had removed for her. "A
morning-glory," he said. "I should rip it out, actually, so that I could use the
room and the maze components for something else. What I did was to
subject the seeds to radiation, and apparently that destroyed the vine's
ability to discriminate between light levels. Once it makes a wrong turn it
simply continues indefinitely in that direction."
 
"You mean its mind is destroyed?"
"No, not really. That's the odd thing. On other types of tests - for
example, when we lop off tendrils until it memorizes a pattern of 'safe'
turns: right, right, left, left, or something of the sort - it still does quite well.
But it will keep running down a passage of diminishing light level until it
reaches nearly total darkness."
"How horrible," the girl said. "Could I see it?" While he was unfastening a
panel for her she asked suddenly, "Did you see that awful show on
television the other night? about the turtles?"
He shook his head.
"They showed this atoll where there had been a hydrogen bomb test
years ago. The sea turtles come there every year to lay eggs, and when
they came after the test the radiation made them forget, somehow, that they
were supposed to go back to the ocean. They just kept crawling inland,
crawling and crawling until they died in the jungle and their bodies rotted.
The shells are still there, and the birds have built nests in some of them."
She looked intently for a moment at the spindly, white vine he showed her
inside the maze. "It never blooms in there, does it?"
"No," he said, "it never blooms."
"I wonder what it looks like, to it, inside there."
"Like marble corridors, I suppose. As though it were walking down
marble corridors."
The girl looked at him oddly, shifting her books on her hip.
After she had gone he wondered why he had said what he had, even
putting four plastic panels together and peering down the short passage
they formed. The white plastic did not actually look a great deal like marble.
On the bus he found himself still thinking of it, and forced himself to divert
his attention, but everything he found to focus it on seemed worse.
Newspaper headlines warned him of the air pollution he could see by
merely looking through the windows of the bus, and the transistor radio of
the man in the seat next to his told him that France, the world's fifth-ranking
nuclear power, had now joined the "total destruction club" by acquiring (like
the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Britain) enough hydrogen
bombs to eliminate life on Earth. He looked at the man holding the radio,
half tempted to make some bitter remark, but the man was blind and for
some reason this made him turn away again.
Once at home he worked on his book for an hour (Publish or Perish!), ate
dinner, and spent the remainder of the evening watching television with his
wife. They went to bed after the late news, but Smythe found he could not
sleep. After an hour he got up, made himself a drink, and settled into his
favorite chair to read.
He was walking through an enormous building like a mausoleum, trailing
behind him a sort of filmy green vapor insubstantial as mist. To either side
of him doors opened showing gardens, or tables piled with food, or beds
 
so large as to be nearly rooms themselves; but the doors opened only after
he had gone a step beyond, and he could not turn back. At last he made a
determined effort, turning around and flailing his arms as if he were going to
swim through the air back to one of the open doors - but the column of mist
behind him which had seemed so insubstantial was now a green ram
propelling him relentlessly down the corridor.
He woke up sweating and found that he had knocked his glass from the
arm of his chair, spilling tepid water which had once been ice cubes over
his crotch.
He changed into dry pajamas and returned to bed, but he could not sleep
again. When his wife got up the next morning she found him reading the
paper, shaved and fully dressed. "You look chipper," she said. "Sleep
well?"
He shook his head. "I hardly slept at all, really. I've been up most of the
night."
She looked skeptical. "It doesn't seem to have hurt you."
"It didn't." He turned a page of the paper. "I've got graduate counseling
today - you know, suggesting topics for a thesis - and I've been thinking up
ideas for them."
"You usually hate that," his wife said.
And he usually did, he reflected as he boarded his bus. But today, for
almost the first time since that terrifying day (which he could not date) when
he had wakened to find himself not only a man, but a man whose life had
already, in its larger outlines, been decided in incompetency and idiocy by
his father and the callow boy who had once been himself, he found he no
longer regretted that his father had shattered forever the family tradition of
diplomacy to become a small-town lawyer and leave his son a scholar's
career.
What he was going to do he had decided in the dark hours while his wife
and the city slept, but there were ramifications to be considered and
possibilities to be guarded against. To propose a program was not nearly
enough. He would have to sell it. To the head of the department, if at all
possible. To as many of his fellow department members as he could;
taking care to make no enemies, so that even those not in support were at
least no worse than neutral. In time to the university administration and
perhaps even to the public at large. But first of all to at least one intelligent
graduate student. Two or three, preferably, but at least one; one without fail.
He was ten minutes early reaching his office. He unlocked his desk and
spent a few moments glancing over the list of prospective doctoral
candidates who would be coming in to see him, but he was too excited to
pay it proper attention - the names danced before his eyes and he threw it
back into his in-box and instead arranged the chair in which the students
would sit and squared the bronze plaque reading Dr. Smythe on his desk.
Seated, he looked at the empty chair, imagining it filled already by an
 

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