The Core of the Sun (18 page)

VANNA/VERA

June 2017

I'm like a kid with a new toy.

We screw, fuck, hump, copulate at every opportunity, and there are lots of opportunities. But we still haven't moved into the same room; I would rather sleep alone, and besides, the only double bed in the house makes my skin crawl.

Sex is like a game in many ways, each person taking turns being in charge. Sometimes the best strategy is to let the other person lead, but sometimes it's more interesting to take over. It's especially interesting learning what gets a reaction out of Jare and making the same discoveries about myself. Having an orgasm masturbating has always been for me a matter of reaching the goal as efficiently as possible, but with two people the whole end climax part is actually sort of a side issue. The journey is almost more interesting than the destination. I've also learned that sighs and moans aren't just something you do to bolster a masco's self-esteem.

When I manually stimulate myself my body knows what to expect the whole time, but the unpredictability of another person's touch is an entirely different thing. The bright blue of an unexpected light caress, the deep red of a new kind of movement, the neon yellow of rising passion, the pulsating ocher of the nearness of skin—they are an exotic landscape that I roam through, drown myself in, dashing and digging around like a happy animal set free. Sometimes I can smell Jare's startled feeling when I come up behind him in the middle of some everyday task and lick his neck—he's not used to this sort of thing—but he's quickly ready to play the game, and before we know it we're in one or the other bed, on the sofa, on the bench in the sauna dressing room, or lying on tufts of brush, within hearing distance of the greenhouse.

Luckily Jare has condoms. He only had a couple, but he bought some more. Since I'm a married eloi I can't get them without a doctor's prescription for valid health reasons, because mascos determine the size of a family. I don't want a baby. It might be a girl.

I've started to realize why there's so much fuss about the whole thing. Why it's such a central part of adult life that going without it could be considered a violation of human rights.

I read anything I can get my hands on about it. Sex releases a flood of neurochemicals in the brain—dopamine, oxytocin. They're what make me snuggle up against Jare's side even when we have no particular intention of doing anything erotic. Sex makes your body and brain alert, but it also makes you sleep deeply. The mesolimbic dopamine pathways, the amygdala, and the ventral tegmental area are my new best friends.

I don't think about getting a fix as much now. I haven't been to the Cellar in ages.

Honestly, sex might be addictive.

It's also easier for me to understand some aspects of the eusistocratic system now. Sure, adrenaline and endorphin pathways can be activated in other legal ways, like exercise or taking a sauna or gambling, but this fix has something absolutely fundamental in it.

I bring the subject up with Mirko. He thinks for a moment.

“No, not all mascos wanted this kind of system. Not even close.”

“Then why did it end up this way?”

“Because they didn't ask everyone's opinion about it.”

“You mean voting? Like in a decadent democracy?”

He explains patiently:

“They didn't need the support of the majority. Sometimes all that's needed is a group of people loud enough and influential enough to change the world and make it the way they want it to be. It doesn't even have to be a huge group, as long as some of them establish their own personal preferences as the only real truth, and make enough noise to give the impression that the forgotten, neglected masses are behind them. Even for a person who's satisfied with things the way they are, it's easy to give support to an idea if it's going to personally benefit you. A lot of people might be perfectly happy without a car, or think it's reasonable that to get a car they're going to have to work or give up something else. But if enough effort's made to put the idea in people's heads that life without a car is impossible, that not having a car is an infringement of their rights—who's going to turn down a free car if the government's handing them out?”

Excerpt from
Emancipation and the Sex Life of the Human Male

National Publishing (1956)

As far back as 1885, Gustaf Johansson, the bishop of Kuopio, wrote in a letter to the clergy of his diocese that the emancipation of women was contrary to God's natural order and dangerous to both the female sex and society as a whole.

Further light can be shed on our modern concept of a proper and harmonious society by the Swedish author G. af Geijerstam, writing around the same time, who brought to public attention the fact that women have difficulty understanding the problems that a demand for abstinence can cause in a man. Geijerstam understood that men have an intrinsic and compulsive sex drive that is outside their rational control.

In the process of intercourse and procreation, man is active and initiating, woman passive and receptive. Men's and women's roles in the continuation of our species and our country are easily distinguishable and reflect the division of labor in our society. This idea was confirmed by the physiology professor Max Oker-Blom in his 1906 description of the differences between men's and women's sex drives. The libido of the male chiefly consists of a drive for ejaculation, while that of the female seeks adoration and surrender.

Many of Oker-Blom's contemporaries stressed that a woman's sex drive is at its base a wish to marry—instead of basic sexual satisfaction, she has a lust for the joy of motherhood. This entails a female desire to surrender to male control and thus find a fitting place within society. This quintessential female characteristic has been a protected and encouraged trait throughout the history of eusistocracy, because it produces unparalleled peace and well-being in the family.

The esteemed Professor Oker-Blom stated as early as 1904 that “the grand and wonderful task of mothering and raising children that is given to women by the Creator places on them a responsibility not just to themselves but also to family, society, and future generations.”

VANNA/VERA

June 2017

The greenhouses are like the tropical jungles I've seen in books, lush with green foliage, with a sweet and sour smell of chlorophyll and dirt, damp and muggy, the sun shining from high in the sky down through the spruce trees onto the transparent roof. Some of the plants are already taller than a man, with white or violet or mottled brown flowers among the branches. I walk behind Valtteri between the rows until we step in front of one dense-leaved plant.

“In nature, bees or other nectar-seeking insects would take care of this. Because it doesn't matter to them whether they mix the pollen of two varieties or strains, they create natural hybrids. If there doesn't happen to be a pollinator around, the chili flower can fertilize itself, and the offspring of the fruit will be identical to the mother plant. But since we're trying to develop new varieties, we want to control the plants' reproduction. That's why we don't grow them outdoors, even though it's quite possible to do that for part of the year in Finland. Some random buzzy bee might come along and spoil our painstaking work. We also don't want the plants to self-pollinate, so we have to intervene before that happens.”

Valtteri has an assortment of tools in the pockets of his utility vest: a small brown glass bottle, tweezers with tapered tips, a magnifying glass, pens, rubber bands, slips of cardboard cut from empty food packages, and a blue-covered school notebook.

“I'm looking for a flower that hasn't had a chance to be naughty yet. Like a masco looking for a virgin wife so he can be sure their children carry his genes.” He soon shows me a plump white flower bud. “This is just right. If I left it alone it would open on its own in a couple of days.”

He takes out the tweezers and carefully pries open the sepals and petals and plucks them off. He looks at the flower through the magnifying glass now and then to make sure his work is precise. Then he removes the stamen. It looks to me like forcible rape of the flower. I say so. Valtteri laughs.

“More like a castration. It leaves only the female sex organ, the pistil, behind. Now let's find a daddy for this baby.” He checks the information on a tag attached with a rubber band to the stem of another plant, then chooses an already open flower and removes one of its stamens. He touches it to the castrated flower's pistil, then writes the father plant's number and the date on a plant tag and attaches it to the mother's stem. He writes the same information on the father plant's tag. “You can transfer the pollen with a swab, but we don't want to consume too many natural resources or produce any waste, so we prefer this technique. Of course, the tweezers have to be disinfected each time before we use them for another crossing.”

“With that?” I ask, pointing at the little brown bottle.

Valtteri grins. “Yes. It's alcohol, actually.”

“I had no idea you could buy it.”

“Yes, you can get it for sterilizing instruments and for other hygienic purposes. But it's denatured alcohol. Just one drink of it could kill a horse.”

He fertilizes a few more flowers. “If the cross-pollination doesn't work the flower will wilt and fall off within a week. If it does work it will produce a fruit with seeds that we can use to grow a new plant, and then we can see how well the desired characteristics have been passed on.”

“But it doesn't always work?”

“Of course there are dead ends and setbacks. But if we have enough patience and perseverance, we should start to see the varieties we want begin to establish themselves within four or five generations. By the eighth generation we might already have a relatively stable strain. Sooner or later the traits we want will be showing up in nearly a hundred percent of the daughter plants.”

Excerpt from
A Short History of the Domestication of Women

National Publishing (1997)

The juvenilization or paedomorphism associated with the domestication of women is biologically a straightforward and one might even say inevitable process. Juvenilization is nature's way of retreating from the evolutionary dead end that women's excess of independence and autonomy was leading to.

The sexual dimorphism between men and women nearly disappeared from our species until a concerted effort was made to control reproduction to favor neotenic features in the female. A human female's task is to compete for males, but the cultural characteristics of the human species do not lend themselves to a situation in which the female is merely seeking an inseminator. The physically and intellectually weaker female also needs a breadwinner. In such a case, childlike features that arouse a feeling of protectiveness are a female's best tool in her relations with the male of the species. It's a formula that works: in females' competition for males we have an almost ideal meeting of supply and demand, for sexual satisfaction on the one side and security on the other.

VANNA/VERA

July 2017

Valtteri cuts a piece of freshly picked chili, plastic gloves covering his hands. The slice of pepper is vanishingly thin. From that slice he cuts another, a bit of chili about as big as a nail clipping from a baby's finger. The working name of the fruit is Nuclear Meltdown; it's a cross of Valtteri's own Harrisburg with Naga Jolokia. Valtteri is nervously excited, muttering to himself, “Let's see how this works . . . I'm also growing another entirely new hybrid, the fourth one I've bred myself. It's hard sometimes to find the right combination of characteristics because not all varieties that you cross are productive; some hybrids just produce mules.”

He tells me in a rush how the
annuum
variety crosses very readily with the
chinense
, which is high in capsaicin. I'm surprised, because I thought chili was native to South America.

“The name
chinense
was an error. Some early botanist screwed up.” He laughs. “Yes, it's from the Amazon region.” He says that the name
annuum
was a mistake, too. It means “annual,” and chilis are perennials.

“Some people claim that the name of the genus,
Capsicum
, supposedly came from the Greek word
kapto
, which means ‘I bite.' Personally I think it has to do with the shape of the fruit, that it's from the Latin
capsa
, meaning ‘purse' or ‘pocket.'”

He spears the tiny slice of chili on the end of his knife and offers it to me. “Let's see if this little devil bites.”

I put out my tongue and take the piece in my mouth.

I let it rest on my tongue for a moment. Then I chew to spread the capsaicin through my mouth. I breathe out through my nose—the taste buds on the tongue are dullards; they can taste only the most basic flavors. The smell receptors are more discriminating. Of course the point now isn't the flavor, but the heat. Capsaicin itself is tasteless and odorless, but it wakes up the inside of my mouth, and the chili's own flavors start to come out, too. The flavor will matter if they plan to sell this chili.

The tip of my tongue goes numb, which is a good sign. Then I start to cough. My airway fills with something that feels like it might have been used as a weapon in World War II.

“Do you need some water? Yogurt? Bread?” It's Jare, always the worrier. I'm not listening to him, or rather not hearing him, because my ears have closed up.

My heart breaks into a frenzied pounding; my mouth is full of molten metal. I swallow and hot lava crawls down my esophagus.

I try to move my tongue inside my mouth and every movement releases a school of microscopic piranhas that bite the membranes of my mouth with greedy, needle-sharp teeth, followed by tiny atomic explosions that scorch my jaws until they feel as if they're about to be burned to a crisp and crumble down my front. Sweat from my forehead mixes with the liquid that is pouring uncontrollably out of my nose.

“How does it taste?”

Valtteri's voice comes from behind some kind of wall. Stupid, stupid masco. I'm above all of them right now, can hardly be bothered to spit out a few words to them.

“Dark. Very dark bass notes—so low they're almost black. Ultraviolet black . . . but it also has some high, shrill overtones, like impossibly high flutes. They have a lot of violet in them, too, and the color's so cold that it's hot! Like iron going through the spectrum as it melts.”

Through the fog of tears in my eyes I can see Valtteri's and Mirko's perplexed faces.

Now I'm shaking. Jare fetches a wool blanket from the sofa in the living room and puts it around my shoulders. All of my senses are intensely alert; the outlines of people and objects are excruciatingly sharp on my retinas. The screech of the legs of Valtteri's chair as it slides across the floor almost bursts my eardrums, though my ears are still half sealed up.

“I don't understand any of this,” Mirko says, his sharp tone ringing in my ear canals. “It's a simple question. What's the degree of heat compared with, say, a habanero? If a habanero is a ten, what would you say this is?”

“This is how V always talks about chilis,” Jare says almost apologetically, but I can also smell his desire to defend me, that malty scent. “I always thought it was some weird morlock thing.”

Terhi slowly shakes her head.

“She's gone totally bonkers,” Mirko says. “We'll call our regular taster tomorrow.”

My head is spinning, there's a buzzing inside my skull, and as I look at them all helplessly, it's only Terhi's face that shows some kind of understanding, and I get a whiff of epiphany.

She's speaking excitedly in a low voice. The only word I catch is “synesthesia.”

I look at her through the veil of sweat. It's rare for me to hear somebody use a word that I don't know the meaning of.

“Quick, Vanna—without thinking about it, what color is the letter
A
?”

“Red.”

“What color's the number
5
?”

“Light green, a little yellowish.”

“What does a habanero sound like in your mouth?”

“A high counterpoint, like a violin at the top of the scale. But there are lower sounds, too . . . like muted trumpets . . . that come later, once the taste reaches the back of my tongue, especially if I move my tongue in my mouth and the burn starts again.”

“This is all very interesting, but that's not what we're talking about. What's the strength of the sample?” The odor around Mirko is almost angry now.

“Let me put it this way. If the Authority had some kind of simple scoville meter set to test basic varieties, the indicator would have spun off the dial and the whole device would have exploded in a puff of smoke with springs and screws flying everywhere.”

Mirko looks at me with an air of contained amusement. “All our regular taster can say is ‘strong,' ‘quite strong,' and ‘not all that strong,'” he says.

“Nuclear Meltdown is a very accurate name,” I say, trying to turn the conversation to something other than my own embarrassing peculiarities, which are one more reminder that I'm a freak in every possible way. “I don't really know if it'll make a good selling name, though. Not many people appreciate irony. The average chiller isn't exactly hyperaware of nuclear power issues in the decadent democracies. Why not give it a Finnish name, since your customers are Finnish?”

Valtteri raises his eyebrows and laughs.

“That's what happens when you follow old habits like a goat on a tether. I guess I just have the English names stuck in my head, but of course there are names in other languages, too. Quite well-known names. Like Naga, the Indian snake god. A Finnish name would fit perfectly, since it's not just the heat I'm working on with this one. I'm also trying to develop a hybrid that's cold hardy. If it works we could grow them outdoors for a longer season and wouldn't have to bring them in except for the coldest part of the winter.”

Mirko straightens up. “The Incas associated chilis with lightning strikes and with those mysterious rock formations said to be found in places where lightning has struck. The old Finnish name for them is Ukko's darts, for the Finnish god of thunder. Let's name this one Ukko's Dart.”