Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (18 page)

I had no proof of my insinuations. But I strove to cast doubt in Harriet's mind, hoping that she would prefer to blame someone else's conspiracy rather than her own incompetence. I wanted her to break free of Hudson's influence, which had caused us so much trouble over the past few months.

"Don't blame me," said Hudson. "I wasn't there. I heard it on the news the same as everyone else."

"You didn't seem very upset about it," Harriet said.

Hudson whirled round. "How dare you? I don't have to stand here and listen to this!" "No, you don't," I replied. "Let me get the door for you."

Over breakfast the next morning, I said to Harriet, "We need a fresh start."

She nodded. "Let's talk outside."

Harriet led me through the gardens until we reached an unkempt patch of scrub, full of shoulder-high saplings and spiky gorse bushes. The gorse sheltered us from the autumn breeze, its bright yellow blossom a welcome splash of color. Mossy rocks offered themselves as benches. I checked for dampness, then settled myself down. Harriet sat opposite me.

"If we're going to have any kind of a business, we need to start again," I said. "And it's got to be something you're happy with. Forget all the old commissions. What would you like to work on?"

Harriet smiled. "I'm so glad to hear you say that," she said. "I'm tired of trying to make plants represent people. It was a fad—we took it as far as it could go. Now we need to move on."

"Do you have anything in mind?" I asked.

"Yes, there is something. I got the idea from Dean Hudson—"

Seeing my scowl, she hastily continued, "—but I've changed it. You remember how he kept visiting us? He had another idea for customized plants. I didn't tell you because I knew you were already unhappy about the politicians, and I had problems with his idea anyway."

My expression brightened. I was relieved to hear that Hudson had simply been trying to get more plants, rather than making moves on Harriet herself. Assuming she was telling the truth, of course. But I didn't doubt her. As we sat in the gardens that we'd bought together, all our recent troubles began to seem like obstacles that were already behind us. We would make a fresh start, recapturing the spirit of when we first fell in love, with grand emotions and grand ambitions. Harriet went on, "I made the politicians smell bad, so people would be disgusted with them. But he wondered how far we could go with that. There's all sorts of pheromones that affect behavior. He wanted to make a plant with a truly revolting smell, one that would inspire a revolution."

I laughed. "You mean some kind of scent to make people go wild?"

"Yes. Except I thought it wouldn't be very ethical to influence people surreptitiously, so I was trying to think of ways around that."

I knew how Harriet's mind worked, and what conclusion she would reach. "You'd have to be honest about the effect you wanted."

"Exactly," she said. "I wondered what sorts of feelings could be evoked, and how to codify them. Then I realized that the answer already existed. The language of flowers!"

I frowned. "What's that?"

"It's a tradition dating back to Victorian times," Harriet explained. "Every flower has its own meaning. Take this gorse, for example." She pointed to the vivid yellow blooms. "You know what they say about gorse?"

I knew that much, at least. You don't live with a gardener without picking up a few country sayings. "When the gorse is in flower, it's kissing season." It's a rural joke, because some species of gorse is always in flower somewhere.

"So gorse means 'love forever.' And there's lots of other plants, all with their own meanings."

"Can you really create pheromones for all those meanings?" I asked.

"Some of them," she said. "In a subtle way. It's not mind control; it's just a little nudge—a way of communicating feelings."

"That's amazing. What did Hudson say about it?"

"I told him that the flower for 'resistance' is tansy. But he wanted to put the scent into everything, including all the politician seeds, and make it as strong as possible." She sighed. "I turned him down. He was rather angry."

"Is there a flower for that?" I asked jokingly.

"Petunia," she replied, grinning.

"There's one for everything!" I exclaimed.

My mind raced as I considered the commercial possibilities, and wondered how many pheromone-enhanced flowers we could sell. Yet I didn't want to pressure Harriet into anything. I'd learned the futility of that.

"Is this what you really want to work on?" I asked.

Harriet nodded enthusiastically. "There's so many flowers to play around with. It's completely different from what I was doing before."

"And when you've had enough of it, we'll stop," I promised.

"Can I get that in writing?" she asked, a mischievous glint in her eye.

"Hey, if I knew which flower represented sincerity, I'd pluck one right now for you."

She glanced around. "Well, you were supposed to ask what these other plants mean, apart from the gorse."

I raised my hand. "Please, Miss—what do these other plants mean, apart from the gorse?"

Harriet reached to the nearest sapling, and pulled off a yellowing leaf with a pointed end. She gave me a challenging glance.

"Hazel," I said confidently. "But what does that mean?"

She smiled, and put her arm around me. "Reconciliation."

Born in 1949, Sylvain Jouty is the author of five novels and a biography of Hungarian Tibetologist Sándor Körösi Csoma. An avid mountaineer, he has published more than a dozen books on mountains and climbing, including several reference works. For fifteen years, he served as the editor in chief of the magazine
Alpinisme et Randonée.
His three books of short fiction have won several awards, including the
Prix Renaissance
and the
Grand Prix de la Société des gens de lettres.
Sylvain is a member of the contemporary French fabulist movement
La Nouvelle
Fiction. His work has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Italian, and German. The author's first story for
Asimov's
investigates some unexplored terrain known as...

Translated from the French by Edward Gauvin

When the Finges Clearing was first found, it was immediately clear that the most incredible thing about the incredible discovery was that it had taken so long. If you saw it without knowing what it was (something no longer possible now), it was hard to find a single interesting thing about it, the slightest ounce of "picturesqueness," much less anything at all exceptional. It was just an ordinary clearing, a pond and the woods beside it, in the beautiful Clarins Forest. For sheer convenience, it was called a "clearing," but the actual area, once precisely demarcated, was little more than a hectare. Even the plant life on display seemed of no great originality. Admittedly the trees there looked nothing like those in the surrounding forest, which woodsmen had plied since time immemorial, but they were of the same species, mainly beech and English oak.

It was Swiss naturalist Albert Maëdschli who invented the clearing. Until then, Maëdschli had been known—at least to a small circle of specialists—mainly as the pioneer and best representative of historical (or as some called it, differential) ecology, a new discipline that had been gathering interest for a decade. True, in many respects it might seem miraculous to the layperson: with the help of all kinds of clues drawn as much from historical sources as from the meticulous study of a given area, it analyzes countless parameters thanks to sophisticated models generated by powerful computers and manages to retrace the biological evolution of the given area with astonishing precision. Call it an archeology of landscape, as many aestheticians might have attempted, but founded instead on purely scientific principles. In the same way, the musings of Goethe, Carus, and Viollet-le-Duc on relief contours and the soul of granite have been supplanted over time by precise notions of geomorphology. Strangely, however, even taking into account as it does parameters involving the planet as a whole, or events from halfway around the world (the famous "butterfly effect"), the discipline produces results only applicable to a very confined area.

The discipline would never have developed as it did had its uses been limited to retracing the ecological history of a given biotope. However, it was soon noted that, as humans were an integral part of a biotope, the new science would, in reaction, supply the most useful details on human occupation and its various "modes" over the centuries: thus an entire vein of historical research saw the light of day.

The Clarins Forest is located near the small town of Brenne, which dates back to the Roman Era (Tacitus mentions it in his
Germania
). Nearby is the Bronze Age town of Villars. It is thus entirely within reason to claim that even the remotest corners of the area the Forest covers have been thoroughly traveled ever since humans turned up in the region during the Stone Age. As a resident of Brenne, Maëdschli grew interested in the Forest of Clarins simply because it offered him a convenient terrain for studying the impact of human presence over time on a so-called "natural" area (Maëdschli being perfectly placed to know it was nothing of the kind). His research soon bore fruit; the human influence on Clarins Forest proved significantly different from what local scholars or forest history specialists had written, and in this he found enough material for a noteworthy book.

However, a few points remained unexplained. In certain places, the actual data from the area he'd studied didn't correspond at all with what it should have been according to all plausible hypotheses from the models used. He soon realized these anomalies marked the borders of a fairly specific area, and his astonishment only grew when he saw, to his great perplexity, that he had never set foot in this area although he was convinced he had, over more than twenty years of research, surveyed every last square meter of the Forest. The epicenter of these anomalies was, of course, the Clearing.

This was the absurd conclusion the scholar reached: his study proved—for with the precision of modern science, it was no longer mere conjecture—that no one had ever taken an interest in the Finges Clearing, or more precisely that no one had ever set foot there since the dawn of man. The clearing was literally virgin land, most certainly the last in all of Europe, and perhaps even the world.

Of course, the clearing had probably not been spared the last two decades of pollution insidiously ravaging the earth; but this can no longer be determined as the Clearing has (quite rightly) been declared a preserve. The historical irony is that Maëdschli had picked the Clarins Forest as an object of study for exactly the opposite reason, believing that, as it was close to a large city, human evolution could be read there like an open book.

Such circumstances would have roused, in any man of science, the explorer's old instinct to conquer, to take possession in the sacred names of Science and Progress. And explain, or rather, find an explanation at any cost, which is but another way of taking possession. The Clearing would have been lost. Maëdschli grasped this at once. He took great care never to set foot in the Clearing, and made do with marking its borders as precisely as possible, respectfully pacing its perimeter. He himself admitted to casting glances at it "in which something like the terror men of old felt before sacred mysteries might be discerned." These were his exact words, in the inimitable, slightly pompous, and old-fashioned but sincere style that made his students smile so.

But up until the last moment, Maëdschli failed to suspect his discovery would be of any great significance. For a long time, he even believed he had made a mistake. No sooner were they published than his findings stirred interest; some thought it a joke, which was why reviewers for a few prestigious scientific journals refused to print it. However, Maëdschli's reputation was excellent; the affair became a debate and, as a result, drew the attention of specialists in other fields, finally entering the ranks of great protoscientific enigmas, in which quackery and seriousness are indistinguishable, to which lovers of the "paranormal" flock in droves.

The ecologist was content to point out a fact; historians wanted explanations. But that was the most astonishing part: there were no plausible explanations. Logically, the clearing, woods, and pond at Finges should have seen dozens of individuals pass through; prehistoric man should have hunted bear there; druids harvested mistletoe; medieval peasants gathered wood, collected acorns, exercised their grazing rights (for the Clearing, its status as anomaly notwithstanding, had not escaped property law). Citydwellers of today and yesteryear should have gone there for a stroll, picked flowers and mushrooms, and made love under the trees.

None of this ever happened. Every time someone approached the clearing, fate mysteriously turned him aside. This did not in any way change the order of the world, nor lead to felt consequences for any individual, except perhaps Maëdschli himself and those who filled the few jobs the anomaly had just created. The fact is utterly insignificant yet intolerable: for some inconceivable reason, which may be no more than inconceivable chance, human steps were without fail turned away from the Clearing (capitalization somehow suits it). There was no more to be found here than anywhere else, nor any less. Of course we have sought explanations, with every imaginable method from the maddest to the most rational. The usual cranks have called on magnetism, cosmic rays, and flying saucers without offering a shred of evidence, or attracting supporters. Perhaps one day another explanation will be found? Can we not imagine, for example (this is a mere conjecture), that the Clearing was a religious site so sacred, so taboo that it was forbidden not only to enter it, but even to speak of it— and that this proscription was secretly perpetuated by some memory buried in the collective unconscious long after the religion that decreed it had died away?

Of all the virgin territories, dwindling daily, that subsist on this cramped planet— a few mountain tops, a few acres of primeval forest—the Finges Clearing is the most surprising and the least known, precisely because it perfectly resembles the perfectly known territory around it. It is the most remarkable because there is absolutely nothing remarkable about it. For the visitor, this is what makes the mystery of the Clearing so irritating: that it should look so much like the woods all around, that in the end there is nothing to be seen and even less to understand. Of course, it has none of the lovely groves rangers are so proud of, since these are result of human industry; it seems fairly neglected, with its weeds and windthrow trunks where toadstools grow, but in any forest one finds such places, left artificially unkempt to give hikers the illusion they are in a natural area. The uninformed hiker will notice nothing unusual—but then no hiker has ever set foot there.... Most anomalous of all is its utter banality coupled with the certainty of its radical inhumanity.