“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.”
MINISTRY OF HEALTH PUBLICATION SERIES ON DANGEROUS SUBSTANCES TO BE AVOIDED
Capsaicin is an alkaloid made up of various capsaicinoids. Scientist L. T. Thresh gave the name to the crystal extract of the fruit of the chili plant in 1846.
Capsaicin alone is tasteless and colorless. Its effect is caused by stimulation of the pain receptors in the mouth and nose. When the pain signal reaches the brain, it begins to release a variety of chemicals into the body. These chemicals may cause a false feeling of euphoria, but some of their side effects are quite dire. In large doses capsaicin is a neurotoxin—it causes damage to the nerve cells. Side effects of capsaicin use include sweating; stomach pain; heart palpitations; damage to the digestive tract; serious inflammation of the urinary tract, mouth, and other mucous membranes; irrational behavior; and sometimes hallucinations. Capsaicin is powerfully addictive and even experimenting with small doses quickly leads to increased levels of use.
The danger of capsaicin is indicated by the fact that it is in the same family of plants as the Solanaceae, or nightshades, which include such toxic plants as belladonna (deadly nightshade) and datura (devil’s trumpet). Just a few belladonna berries are enough to kill a person. The toxins in both plants cause powerful hallucinations and delirium. Another extremely dangerous plant, tobacco, is a member of this same family of plants.
One milligram of pure capsaicin on bare skin feels like a hot iron and causes visible damage.
Because chili peppers and the capsaicin they contain can be preserved for long periods by means such as drying, freezing, or various cooking methods, the task of tracing and destroying this terrible substance is a challenge. However, through its tireless determination, the Ministry of Health has almost completely eradicated the drug from Finland.
VANNA/VERA
August 2017
This summer has been like a plant reaching up out of the soil. It seemed to develop slowly, like a seedling, unhurried, and yet also to come in a rush, like a garden at the height of the season, bursting to send out sprouts and fruits as fast as it can. The chili production and the Gaians’ methods for growing vegetables have given me a lot to learn; every day something new and exciting happens, and I feel as if I’ve packed a hundred hours into the day before it starts to fade into the limpid darkness of a summer night. But then I’m suddenly startled to notice that the time has stealthily flowed away like water sinking into sand, and seeds that seem to have been sown just yesterday have already pushed their first leaves out of the ground, and now here I am pulling up bright orange carrots twice as long as my hand.
Sometimes I even forget about Manna. Now that I basically have unlimited access to the hottest chilis to be found in Finland, and maybe in the whole world, I don’t need a fix as often. The mere knowledge that I can get a fantastic high at a moment’s notice whenever I feel like it keeps the Cellar door closed and the water low. I can go days without one, since the stuff is literally within arm’s reach all the time.
And I have Jare, too. His skin and his hands saturating my senses with colors, a burning landscape that I can step into whenever I want.
The time sinking into the sand hasn’t passed to no effect. Time and sun and rain have given us tomatoes and lettuce and root crops and herbs and squashes, onions and potatoes, leeks and peas. Jare and I drive a truck of vegetables to the Tammela Market every Saturday. We openly refer to them as “bioaura-dynamically grown,” although I find it a bit embarrassing, and even though we ask a little higher price for them they sell well. That’s not surprising because the Gaians are very skillful farmers and teachers, and the plants and seeds they brought with them are of an extremely high quality. Our crops are abundant, beautiful to look at, and flavorful. The tomatoes are vine ripened and most of what we sell was picked the same day, early in the morning, practically still wet with dew.
By July we were already overhearing market shoppers say things like, “I never buy my turnips from anyplace but Neulapää now—they have some flavor to them,” or “Have you tried the Neulapää potatoes? There’s really nothing like them. They make the Sieglindes pale in comparison.”
Time has worked its changes on the growing operation in the woods, too. The place is voluptuous. The green branches hang heavy with drops of yellow and orange and red and brown and pale green and purple in different sizes and shapes and aromas. When we close up at the market aro
und noon, we go out to do some dealing.
At first the customers were shocked, then excited. Word has spread and demand is many times greater than our supply. That’s why we purposely keep the sales of the fresh stuff to a minimum. Nobody sells diamonds by the kilo. We bring out individual Harrisburgs or Ukko’s Darts as if they were rare jewels, when we actually have great piles of them, enough that we’re drying part of the harvest and grinding them up—even learning to smoke some of them for the real aficionados—because the dried flake is much easier to store, hide, transport, and slip to another person than whole dried peppers would be, never mind fresh ones. We’ve been putting the flake in that familiar old hiding place under the living room floor.
There’s also a lot of cash there. We’ve switched containers from a briefcase to a suitcase.
Jare will soon have enough.
I ought to be thinking about that moment, preparing myself for Jare to leave, figuring out what I’ll do after that. Neulapää doesn’t belong just to me anymore; it belongs to Jare and me. But the only way I can hold on to Neulapää and prevent it from being transferred to the state would be for Jare to sell it to Mirko for a nominal sum before he leaves—some negligible price between brothers in the faith that wouldn’t arouse any suspicion—and include the condition that once Jare has left the country Mirko will marry me. That would give me a legal guardian I could at least trust a little. And why not? The Gaians like it here, the place feels safe, and I’m getting better at farming all the time.
But since we sell at a high price, we sell slowly. We don’t use any middlemen at all, so we get the highest possible street price. We make only a handful of deals, but they add up to a lot. Jare is very careful not to let our prosperity show. He never buys expensive clothes or luxury goods and makes his car payments only when he can afford to with the money from his part-time work for the Food Bureau or from selling vegetables.
The Core of the Sun Page 18
