The Signature of All Things

with drink. Mr. Pike was still in his brown corduroy suit, with his hair even more disarranged than earlier in the day.
    “We’ve awoken you,” Mr. Pike said, looking up. “My apologies.”
    “Can I assist you with something?” Alma asked.
    “Alma!” Henry cried. “Your boy here has come up with a piece of brilliance! Show it to her, son!”
    Henry wasn’t drunk, Alma realized; he was simply ebullient.
    “I had trouble sleeping, Miss Whittaker,” Mr. Pike said, “because I was thinking about the vanilla plants in Tahiti. It occurred to me that there might be another possibility as to why the vines have not fruited. I should have waited until morning so as to not disturb anyone, but I did not want to lose the idea. So I rose and came down, looking for paper. I fear I woke your father in the process.”
    “Look what he’s done!” Henry said, thrusting a paper at Alma. It was a lovely sketch, minutely detailed, of a vanilla blossom, with arrows pointing to particular bits of the plant’s anatomy. Henry stared at Alma expectantly, while she studied the page, which meant nothing to her.
    “I apologize,” Alma said. “I was asleep only a moment ago, so my mind is perhaps not clear . . .”
    “Pollination, Alma!” Henry cried, clapping his hands once, and then pointing at Mr. Pike, indicating that he should explain.
    “What I believe may have occurred, Miss Whittaker—as I was telling your father—is that your Frenchman may have, indeed, collected the correctvariety of vanilla from Mexico. But perhaps the reason the vines have not fruited is that they have not been successfully pollinated.”
    It may have been the middle of the night, and Alma may have been asleep only moments earlier, but still her mind was a fearfully well-trained machine of botanical calculation, which is why she instantly heard the abacus beads in her brain begin clicking toward an understanding.
    “What is the pollination mechanism for the vanilla orchid?” she asked.
    “I could not say for certain,” Mr. Pike said. “Nobody is certain. It could be an ant, it could be a bee, it could be a moth of some sort. It could even be a hummingbird. But whatever it is, your Frenchman did not transport it to Tahiti along with his plants, and the native insects and birds of French Polynesia do not seem capable of pollinating your vanilla blossoms, which do have a difficult shape. Thus—no fruit. No pods.”
    Henry clapped once again. “No profit!” he added.
    “So what are we to do?” Alma asked. “Collect every insect and bird inthe Mexican jungle and try to ship them, alive, to the South Pacific, with the hopes of finding your pollinator?”
    “I don’t believe you will need to,” Mr. Pike said. “This is why I couldn’t sleep, because I’ve been considering that same question, and I think I’ve come up with an answer. I think you could pollinate it yourself, by hand. Look, I’ve made some drawings here. What makes the vanilla orchid so troublesome to pollinate is the exceptionally long column, you see, which contains both the male and female organs. The rostellum—right here—separates the two, to prevent the plant from pollinating itself. You simply need to lift the rostellum, and then insert a small twig into the pollinia cluster, gather up the pollen on the tip of the twig, and then reinsert the twig into the stamen of a different blossom. You are essentially playing the role of the bee, or the ant, or whoever would be doing this in nature. But you could be far more efficient than any animal, because you could hand-pollinate every single blossom on the vine.”
    “Who would do this?” Alma asked.
    “Your workers could do it,” Mr. Pike said. “The plant only puts out blooms once a year, and it would take but a week to finish the task.”
    “Wouldn’t the workers crush the blossoms?”
    “Not if they were carefully trained.”
    “But who would have the delicacy for such an operation?”
    Mr. Pike smiled. “All you need is little boys with little fingers and little sticks. If anything, they will enjoy the task. I myself would have enjoyed it, as a child. And surely there is an abundance of little boys and little sticks on Tahiti, no?”
    “Aha!” Henry said. “So what do you think, Alma?”
    “I think it’s brilliant.” She was also thinking that first thing tomorrow, she would need to show Ambrose Pike the White Acre library’s copy of the sixteenth-century Florentine codex, with those early