The Core of the Sun (20 page)

VANNA/VERA

August 2017

I close the door to my room behind me. I rearranged the room a little to suit my tastes when I moved in, although it pained me a bit to take the ruffled pink curtains and bedspread that Manna had picked out up to the attic.
Here I go again, the cruel morlock big sister, meddling in your life.

I take the Core of the Sun out of my apron pocket and look at it, holding it by the stem to avoid touching the fruit itself with my bare fingers, turning it this way and that. Normally you can handle a chili without gloves as long as you don't puncture the skin. The thin but tough skin keeps the capsaicin nicely inside. But with this one you can't be too careful. The way of the chili is not the way of the finger.

Is this what it feels like to handle an unexploded bomb?

On the desk in front of me is a pair of disposable gloves from the stash under the living room floor. They're not exactly disposable for us; we use them as long as they don't have any holes in them and wash them with hot water, wearing a face mask, always outside, since the hot water can cause such a cloud of capsaicin fumes that your eyes water and you cough and you get a little buzz just from the steam.

Next to the gloves is a little cutting board from the kitchen that we used for slicing cheese back when there was still cheese in the house, and one knife that I've carefully sharpened.

The knife is so sharp that I have no trouble cutting a slice as thin as a hair from the Core of the Sun. It doesn't have the usual penetrating, fruity, almost citrus smell that a habanero might have. But it does have that same tropical scent, plus something more aromatic, a smokiness. My nostrils quiver. I sneeze violently and gasp for breath.

This baby's so full of capsaicin I can apparently feel it from a meter away.

Are you sure this is a good idea?
I ask myself as I stare at the nearly invisible sliver lying on the wooden board.

Pshaw.

I grab the piece of pepper and toss it in my mouth.

I chew.

I wait.

I don't feel anything.

But something is happening because my heart is starting to gallop and time is slowing to a crawl . . .

An absolute white light goes right through my head. It's so bright that I think it must show through the seams in my skull.

It is such a white white that there isn't even a word for it; it's on the other side of whiteness; new-fallen snow on the brightest winter day is gray by comparison. It's ultrawhite, lacerating white, blinding white, the combination and negation of all the other colors in the world, and an impossibly high-pitched tinnitus starts ringing in my head, as if I'm suddenly able to hear a dog whistle, a dog whistle so shrill, so close to the very edge of perception, that it's as if the light of a distant star has become sound.

Then the sound turns so high that I can't hear it anymore.

I stand there and my vision starts to return and time has stopped. Although my mouth is full of saliva and my whole body's covered in sweat, my tongue isn't burning, and there's no lava in my throat, no convulsing iron band around my stomach.

This stuff is off the sense receptor scale.

Because the needle's gone off the dial, my brain doesn't know how to react. Since it doesn't know what to do with such a powerful sensation, it's decided not to do anything.

My brain has thrown in the towel.

There's a swishing in my head and I feel light, so full of endorphins that I'm starting to rise into the air. I actually do rise into the air, and it feels quite pleasant, to be substanceless, almost carried by the wind. I see a layer of dust on top of the wardrobe. It probably doesn't get dusted because it's so tall, almost reaches the ceiling. There's a spider's corpse lying in the dust, and below me an eloi standing motionless, with a little cutting board and knife and a dark-colored chili in front of her.

It takes me a moment to realize,
Oh, that's me.

I try to move and realize that if I wanted to I could slip through the partly open window. I sense the rush of life on the other side of the glass, the birch trees and spruces and grass and roses and earthworms and beetles and gnats, and there's a fox skulking somewhere and a brown hare loping along, and I could hop along with it, become part of its brain, ride inside it into the sunset. I could hear what it hears, see what it sees.

Somewhere at the edge of the world of my senses hovers a cluster of ghostly white noise, like distant echoes. It must be the Gaians.

A fly buzzes at the window, its sound echoing, piercing, hypnotic. I move, just a small motion, and in a split second I'm inside something else and that
something else
is a darting, precise, persistent little clockwork that sees the world in a pattern of flickering, dizzying points of light—then I pull away, nimble as air.

This is the breakthrough.

The Core of the Sun works.

Oneness with nature.
It isn't just mystical mumbo jumbo after all. It's a clear, straightforward, practical goal.

Merging with the world. Escaping the shackles of the body.

Our escape will be inward, not outward.

JARE SPEAKS

August 2017

I drive right up to the front door at Neulapää, like I did when I posed as a Food Bureau inspector; hit the brakes hard, leaving tire tracks on the driveway; and get out at a run, scanning the area, wondering where everybody is. In the forest greenhouses, of course. I stand in the door and yell V's name, but there's no answer. She might be in the house though, too absorbed in reading to hear me. I run to the door of her room and yank it open without bothering to knock.

V is standing motionless in front of her desk. There's a little wooden cutting board in front of her, and a knife and a dark red chili like a splash of coagulated blood. I recognize it immediately.

Core of the Sun. V, oh V, what have you gone and done?

I grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “V! V!”

She doesn't answer. Her eyes are glassy with the empty look of brain damage.

VANNA/VERA

August 2017

Jare comes running into my room. It's interesting, like watching a silent movie in slow motion. His movements are big, exaggerated. The room fills with tartness and rosemary, a smell that's almost suffocating, and—

My perspective jerks so suddenly that it almost hurts. I'm looking at my own face, my own waxy, frozen expression, from very close, almost like looking in a mirror, but it isn't a mirror.

I'm looking at myself through Jare's eyes.

And at the same time, I'm
here
,
inside
, and I sense pale colors, bluish and reddish and greenish, but they're just hints, a drop of watercolor in a tumbler of water. Everything else is bright gray, the shade of heavy crystallized snow in late spring, and like snow it refracts the light from every imperfection, every crystal facet; but the light isn't coming from the sky—it's a glow from inside.

I'm in a completely different world. On an alien planet. But it's not a planet, there is no direction, no gravity. I'm swimming, floating among strange mountains and leafy tendrils. The shapes that surround me are rough, semitransparent, rising up on every side randomly, chaotically, but with an underlying logic, emerging from above, below, and beside me. They remind me of snowdrifts, the south side of snow-covered furrows when the sun at the end of March warms the snow and melts sharp, beveled, granular shapes into it, as if the melting of the snow uncovered the rough scales of a dragon sleeping beneath it. Tapered points, crystalline towers, jagged stalactites repeating just as they do in drifts of snow: all from the same root, a result of the same process, and yet every form as individual as a ledge of coral in a vast reef.

I'm moving in a way that I can't understand—maybe my brain is telling me to swim, or fly—and I'm soaring through rushing scales of snow and crystal towers and somewhere ahead I see a darkish spot and I speed toward it, or rather I will myself to go to it, or rather it sucks me toward it and I'm not floating anymore, I'm streaking toward it, and it gets bigger and bigger, it's like a well, or an open jaw, and I fall into the abyss, or maybe I'm shooting upward, like a diver forced up toward the surface, but I'm going toward something that looks dark but isn't dark, it's a friendly blackness, a warm, starry night, and there's something there.

It's smooth and firm and slippery and squirming; it's pulsating, panicked, hard-shelled, cautious; it's alive and supple and soft and unyielding; it changes its shape and yet stays the same; it's unpredictable and safe and it's calling my name. I can't hear it but I sense it, like a dream where you can tell that a thing looks like one thing but means something else. It's saying V, but it means Vera, and it pulses toward me and engulfs me in itself, and it no longer matters who or what is pushing the coral- and snow-scale-shaped rosemary and lavender and apple and citrus and cranberry into me, the light, colors, forming something to grasp, something to understand, something that I don't know how to feel but it knows how, something akin to the smell of fresh-cut grass that floated around Manna so that the air was full of it, back when she had her crush on Jare, and this is the same smell but it's ripened into rosemary, adult, plaintive, saturating everything, every single thing that can fit right now in Jare's head, and all of it mixed with the sour of worry . . .

I know what that smell is now.

Oh no oh no oh no.

I come out of the shock with a jerk and it takes a fraction of a second before my eyes can focus. There he is. Jare, his face a couple of centimeters from mine, his hands shaking my shoulders and his mouth shouting something into my sealed ears.
V, V, V, V, V, what's wrong, what happened, what—

Another jerk, and although I can't hear anything, I sense the change in air pressure in my clogged ear canals—someone else has come into the room, and Terhi steps into my narrowed field of vision and immediately starts to open her mouth, vehement, and exchanges gestures with Jare and they're talking about me. I sense that it's lunchtime and that's why they've come in from the farm, but that doesn't matter because I'm still floating half outside of myself and
nothing
seems to particularly matter much. Jare and Terhi lead me between them into the living room and over to the sofa and they sit me down and put two blankets over me, and Jare brings me hot sugar water and half forces me to drink it. The hot liquid hurts my mouth, burns like fire, and for a moment I think that it has capsaicin in it, too, but that's just because my mouth is tender and sore. Once I'm wrapped up and have a warm drink the trembling in my body starts to gradually subside.

Through the sweat and the shivering and the soreness in my mouth I'm aware of Jare and Terhi and Valtteri and Mirko looming around me. A real tribal council.

“You had to try it,” Terhi's voice says.

I don't answer. I might not be able to, because at the moment my teeth are chattering uncontrollably.

Terhi looks at Jare. “Did you know about this?”

Jare is extremely agitated—I can easily sense it. On overdrive. Why? This isn't some great crime, is it?

“Vanna's not an eloi. She doesn't have a masco who's personally responsible for her! I didn't know!”

“No need to get you knickers in a bunch. Just asking.”

Terhi sits on the edge of the sofa. The blankets and sugar water and time since the Core of the Sun began its work have all calmed the worst of the shakes. Terhi reaches under the blanket and takes my hand.

“Vanna, you're like ice.”

I nod; her hand feels burning hot in mine. As if all the blood in the veins under my skin had retracted into my organs to extinguish the raging fire inside me. The look of genuine worry on Terhi's face and what I've just learned about Jare and the sensitivity the capsaicin has lent to all my senses and the pain in my mouth fading to a dull throb—it's all too much, and I start to cry.

Terhi pulls me against her chest and holds on to me, not squeezing, not patting me, just holds me in her arms. When I close my eyes I'm with Aulikki for a moment.

“Congratulations,” I mutter.

Although my face is half pressed against Terhi's chest, I can tell by the movements of her muscles that she's looking at the others. At Mirko and Valtteri.

“I left my body.”

Terhi pushes me back by the shoulders and looks at my face to see if I'm serious. Her cheeks start to redden. “What happened?”

“I saw myself from the outside, from the ceiling. Look on top of the wardrobe. Is there a dead spider there? I can't reach it, but I saw it.”

Valtteri and Mirko both let out a sound like a sigh mixed with a whine, then they burst into talk at the same time, and Terhi joins the chorus.

“Trance possession!”

“But what if it's just some kind of . . . self-hypnosis?” Jare says doubtfully.

“No, it couldn't be. It's a state that has real neurophysiological changes that can be measured with an EEG. And there are physical signs, just like the ones Vanna had: convulsions, tremors, shivering. In former times the shamans' possession trances were a precursor to a loss of consciousness. With practice you can succeed in deepening the experience to the point that your connection to waking life is cut off completely.”

Valtteri looks into my mouth with a little pocket flashlight. “You have inflammation in your mouth. The insides of your lips are quite swollen. But that's to be expected, of course. It will go away in a few days.”

“We have to remember Vanna's tolerance. If it works for her, . . .” Mirko says, almost to himself.

“It's a breakthrough.”

“It's a
definite
breakthrough.”

“We can concentrate on just this variety—”

“We have to get the variety stabilized as soon as we can—”

“It's just a matter of time.”

“We've got it.”

“We've got the Core of the Sun!”

They ask some more questions, and I'm filled with immense energy, my knowledge boundless—I own all of Europe and I rule half of the rest of the world, too—telling them about my experience in clever turns of phrase, how it felt as if I could move into an earthworm, a little bird, or a lynx slinking around Neulapää. I haven't even gotten to the fly, not to mention Jare, when I realize that something about the mood has changed. The Gaians look at one another, at Jare, at me. There's a whiff of tar and smoke.

That's when Jare takes a deep breath and clears his throat and everyone gets quiet. There's something so significant in that sound, and I look at Jare and his eyes are filled with hopelessness, and even though I'm as far away from the Cellar as I could be, an icy avalanche of fear flashes through my belly.

“I should have told you right away, but V . . . well, now that she seems to be OK, listen. We've got a hell of an urgent situation.”