The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  “We’re barely middle-aged,” cried Aymon, as they drove away. “We have half our lives ahead!” And went off into one of his one-man brainstorms: Microgeneration. Virtual Tourism. The billions to be made in the development of efficient recycling. Get the basic patents, the ones that are going to change the entire world… We are both drowning, thought Viola, fully aware that her age was no excuse for anomie. We are both lost; we’ve always been lost. It’s just that Ay doesn’t know it. And deep inside her, like a tiny stone fetus curled around her heart, she felt what she might have been: shining, shining.

  Discontent was all she had left, her only proof that life could have been better, could have been wonderful —

  Down on the plain, when they reached the boundary of Aymon’s new real estate, there was certainly a sense of crossing some kind of crucial border. The wide fields of ethanol-fated corn (where Aymon muttered about the dumb European energy policy, not yet woken up to the exploded concept of biofuels) gave way to water meadow; then suddenly they faced a wall of trees. There was no signage. The road surface, equally suddenly, deteriorated to dirt, with a few scabby patches of asphalt.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  Aymon had been enlarging on the fortunate partnership of Jean-Raoul and Madeleine. Their daughter the biochemist, brilliant and flighty, who’d taken up computer science as a sideline, was currently spending her time modeling neurotransmitters, out in the wild blue yonder. Jean-Raoul Martigny, however, was a scientist with a sound business mind, always took Aymon’s advice, and understood that sustainable dies if it means non-profit-making.

  He paused in this pleasurable rant — leaving Maddy with her head in the clouds, Raoul with his feet on the ground — and punched up the help menus on the dashboard map.

  “Heck. Something’s wrong with this —”

  The Aston Martin was a beautiful car and as guilt-free as a classic performance roadster can well be, but its subsystems had proved unreliable. Or else there was something in the air, interfering with the signal…Aymon could feel the prickling heaviness, an electric storm on the way.

  There was an old man watching them from the edge of the trees.

  A welcome sight, in the ringing, silent emptiness of this countryside, where you could hardly believe that crowded old Western Europe was all around. Aymon pulled up, meaning to try some diagnostics. He leaned out, and made his inquiry. The old fellow set down his axe — he really was carrying a long-handled, ancient-looking axe — and came ambling over, cautious of his joints as the Tin Woodsman.

  “Hi,” said Aymon, ever trustful of the universal power of the English language. “Would you mind telling us where we are, sir?”

  The old fellow stared at the foreign car as if he’d never seen anything like it and said something Aymon didn’t catch at all, except that the word forêt was in there. Viola explained the problem, in her passable French. The Tin Woodsman scratched his seamed and bristly chin, peered into the car, and looked long at their GPS screen, shaking his head and murmuring: a voluble excursion, presumably in the local dialect, from which Viola could only snag “unbelievable!” She tried again, and managed to learn that he’d never heard of the projected Bock Foundation and didn’t recognize the number of the minor Departmental Road they were looking for —

  “But there are roads through the forest?” she persisted, still in French.

  The old man looked completely blank, a senior moment, then he spoke again, in a careful, strangely-accented English. “There are plenty of paths.” He smiled. “Perhaps too many. You can go in, easily. But you may not come out.” He nodded, pleased with his joke, and went back to his axe.

  “Let’s go,” snapped Viola. “We were heading in the right direction five minutes ago. And we have the paper maps.”

  “What a damned language,” remarked Aymon, consolingly, as they passed into the embrace of the trees and the world behind disappeared. “Don’t feel bad. It’s okay in print, but I can never understand a word when they start talking. Beyond restaurant dialogue, anyhow.”

  “I understand French. I can’t do quaint dialects.”

  “Yeah, well. They always remember a little English in the end.”

  The forest had a placid, timeless air of expectation: as if it had been waiting for them and welcomed them with quiet satisfaction. The trees were poplar and ash, oak, beech, and hazel, and other nameless European species. None of any great size. The understory was a mass of climbers, vines, briars, and ferns: but there was nothing sinister, no dripping, ghostly lichens. Still no signage, and the GPS screen was a fuzz of grey. Aymon grinned at his wife and took a turn at random down another of the dirt-paved tracks. He drove slowly, appreciating the experience. Strangely, although the driving surface was horrible, the broad verges were evenly shorn to the height of a healthy suburban lawn. Maybe the Tin Woodsman came down here weekly, on a horse-drawn mower —

  “Are you trying to get us lost? I should be throwing out a trail of breadcrumbs,” Viola commented, uneasily.

  “I want to get a feel for the place, never been here in the flesh before. We’ll meet a landmark of some kind soon. If we don’t, there’s a compass on the dash. You’re sure we have the right numero in that map folder of yours?”

  Viola was not sure. She kept paper maps out of nostalgia for the old days, when she’d been the map-navigating queen of their travels; but she’d come to rely on that fickle modern technology… She decided, in the interests of marital harmony, that she wouldn’t check the folder yet.

  Aymon had been noticing long, regular shapes among the trees by the roadside: mostly wrapped in some kind of tarp. Then he saw the numbered tags, like mailboxes without the mailbox, and it dawned on him that he was seeing cords of firewood. The forest belonged to the commune; to the local people. It was not farmed for timber, it was portioned out, household by household, for winter fuel; sound energy policy for a change. This was one of the rights he’d agreed to respect, for an interim period, while he investigated the issue. But now the woodpiles, the dismembered flesh of the wood laid out like that, right under the noses of the living trees, were somehow very disturbing. He found himself wondering how the forest felt about the arrangement. Death by inches, endlessly repeated. Reminded him of the story of the hillbilly with the three-legged pig.

  “A hog as good as that, you don’t eat him all at once…”

  Viola felt nothing, except a practical concern about the coming storm — something in the air, not exactly oppressive, but electric. She looked up. The sun was invisible; the flowing band of sky was cloudless, a billowing deep blue canopy, a bride’s train, a robe… At last they reached a crossing where several tracks met around an open green crown. Aymon pulled up, carefully parallel to the mown grass, as if he feared a sudden rush of traffic. The sun was still invisible, the electric sky without a cloud, the forest vistas unbroken. A jaybird flashed across the clearing and called loudly, one indignant note. They smiled at each other.

  “The old guy said we were ‘À L’Orée de la Forêt de la Reine,’” said Viola. “On the threshold of the Forest of the Queen. So we’re in the right woods, unless there are multiple Queen’s Forests around here. Which queen was it, Ay? When did she reign? What was her name?”

  “I don’t remember. Could be Marie-Antoinette for all I know. The history’s on file, it’s in the documents, we can find out. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Not out of sight of the car.”

  “Okay, okay… Hey, I have my pocket knife, I’ll cut flashes on the trees. It’s just a small, suburban, European forest, honey. It won’t bite.”

  “Oh no? I bet there are mosquitoes.”

  “So bring your repellent.”

  Aymon didn’t suffer from mosquito bites. Viola hated them, and hated the smell of any effective repellent, but she shared his mood. There was something about this place that made you want to let go and drift… They took one of the tracks, deeper into the world of green. There were mosquitoes. She stopped to ano
int her bare legs and stooped lower, curious about the texture of the turf. It didn’t seem to have been mown recently, every shining blade was pristine, curved like a baby’s fingernail —

  “What’s the matter?”

  She was startled at the edge in his voice. Was the forest, like Viola, a disappointment? Or was he spooked? She felt a little spooked herself: the enticing lethargy had a thread of tension in it, a tug of adrenalin. An insect, a butterfly with pretty marbled wings, looked up at her from the grass blades under her nose and seemed to wink one of its faceted eyes.

  What the hell — ?

  “A butterfly. A really tiny one, very pretty. It’s gone now.”

  “I wonder who does the mowing,” muttered Aymon. “And why. What for? I don’t see this as a picnic spot —”

  But the reproach of the living harvest, those piles of dead limbs, had aroused his defiance, so he proposed they leave the path. Viola followed him without a murmur, though she was hardly dressed for it. She prided herself on her docility: it was one way of dealing with constant low-level despair. Aymon could complain of her negativity, her lack of enthusiasm, her sarcasm. He could never call her high maintenance.

  She picked her way, getting scratched, hoping this would soon be over. Aymon kept stopping and peering at bark, examining leaves. She knew he was looking for an unusual bug to match the “pretty butterfly” he’d missed. It was one of his strengths, maybe all wealthy men were the same. He was always playing to win, every second, on every scale. It could be exhausting. But it was Viola who first noticed that the leaf mould underfoot was alive with hopping, creeping dark-skinned little frogs.

  “My God.”

  “So many of them —” whispered Viola, horrified, afraid to take another step, repulsed at the thought of carnage on her shoe soles.

  “My God,” breathed Aymon again. “Now I call that a good omen. So much for the world-wide catastrophic decline of amphibians.”

  He managed to catch one of the critters without crushing it and held it up to his eye, threadlike limbs dangling. It had a pointed snout and two green stripes down its crooked back that glittered when they caught the light and disappeared in shadow. Its irises were striated gold around the slippery, bulging pupils. The frog grinned toothlessly, and Aymon laughed. His unease vanished. He felt innocent and adventurous, like a little boy —

  “These little guys are having a ball.”

  “My watch has stopped,” announced Viola, rummaging in her oversized, arm-and-a-leg purse. “Damn, and my cell seems to have run out of charge, however that happened. What time is it?”

  “About mid-afternoon. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  She looked up. He’d dropped the frog and his hands were dug so deeply into his pants pockets that both his wrists were hidden. She guessed at once that his watch had stopped too, and a chill ran down her spine.

  “Where’s your cell, Ay?”

  “Calm down honey, what’s the panic? It’s in the car.”

  They could not see the car. Every direction looked the same.

  Something has happened, thought Viola. I felt it, when we drove in here. Wild thoughts went through her mind. Hostage-takers with some kind of ray, killing their digital communications. Electro-Magnetic Pulse, the Third World War, UFOs, a natural disaster —

  “We left the fucking car wide open,” she said. “These trees all look identical, and there’s just about to be a cloudburst.”

  “We can retrace our steps. You stay where you are, marking our last known position, I’ll cast around for our footprints.”

  He cast around, examining the leaf mould and the creepers. Viola doubted if even Aymon could suddenly acquire finely-honed tracker skills, from nowhere. She stayed put because she hated the idea of taking another step into chaos, and stared all around her: intently, slowly —

  “Aymon! There’s light over there! Sunlight, it must be the clearing where we left the car!”

  “No, it’s not, honey. It can’t be. You’re pointing downhill, we were coming downhill. We left the car on kind of a hilltop, don’t you remember?”

  “I can see buildings.”

  She was right. Aymon could see the leaf-broken outlines too: hard to say what kind of buildings, they could be in ruin… Defiantly, silently daring her to laugh, he took out his pocket knife and sliced a rectangle of white bark from the pink flesh of a birch tree beside him. “I’m going to go on doing that. So we can get back to here, whatever else.”

  “Go ahead. Be a vandal.”

  The sunlight lay over the valley of a clear brown stream that ran between beds of flowering rushes. Fine trees, untrammeled by close neighbors, grew on the natural turf on either side. There was a footpath, well-maintained if not well-trodden, and the buildings they’d seen were close. They saw white weatherboard and cranky little gabled roofs, a crooked white wooden bridge, the glimmer and the laughter of a modest weir —

  “It’s an old mill,” said Aymon.

  “So now you know where we are?”

  He shrugged. “If you’d taken an interest, you’d know there are several of them on the property, all disused.”

  “Oh my God, look at that!” cried Viola.

  But what she’d taken for an exquisite glass statue, a naked, transparent young woman crouching in the stream, was gone at a second glance. All she could see was a mass of iridescent, blue-green damselflies, demoiselles, darting over the surface. The cloud of wings suggesting, maybe, the turn of a girl’s smooth shoulder, the waves of her hair —

  “How perfectly lovely,” she finished, uncertainly.

  “Told you.” Aymon beamed, striding along. I will make her happy, he thought. I will do one great deed before I die, and she’ll be proud. “I told you. This place is a dream. It’s going to be great, inspirational, relaxed: our people will love to work here.”

  He was somewhat piqued to discover that the “disused mill” seemed to be in use, as a shabby old-fashioned forest information point. They wandered the covered porches, looking at quaint, half-effaced picture boards. Forest animals, birds, flowers —

  “Did you know about this, Ay?”

  “I don’t exactly remember.”

  He was looking for a map of the forest (tourist guide shack like this has to have a map, even if it’s out of date). He couldn’t find one, but he discovered that if he looked at the picture boards directly, with attention, they changed. The animals, birds, and plants came alive; he couldn’t put it any more clearly. As if something extra was passing from the vaguely suggested images directly through his eyes to his brain. They were more than alive, they were conscious, these images were the creatures themselves, looking back at him, wise and wicked, fun to know, but by no means entirely friendly —

  He was fascinated, and passed from one array to another for several minutes (for time without measure) before he noticed how weird this was and began to get scared. What the hell have I eaten, drunk, smoked today: without knowing it? Was there something in the slimy skin of those tiny frogs? Some hallucinogen that passed through my skin?

  A door opened, and a young woman came out, smiling. She wore a full-sleeved, black, belted smock and cap, with a white bib and collar at the throat — like an old-fashioned nun; except that her slim brown legs and feet were bare. She greeted them in pretty French, which for once they found easy to understand, announced herself as the gardienne of this Center, and ushered them inside. The room she showed them was a store, selling natural forest products: toiletries, herbal infusions, food, and candy: not the usual tourist lines, but genuinely unusual, quirky products. Viola was charmed. Aymon followed her around, grinning loosely — feeling young again.

  “Do you take cash or cards?” asked Viola, hoping she had enough euros. There was no sign of a paypoint or a till, nothing to suggest the twenty-first century at all.

  The little gardienne dipped her head. “We accept all the usual kinds of currency or credit. Would Madame and Monsieur like to take something to drink? We have tables on th
e terrace.”

  She brought them eglantine tea in the souvenir forest china, which was patterned in blue-green, iridescent as a damselfly’s wings. They were the only customers on the rustic terrace above the weir. It was the kind of place, thought Viola, where you want to be the only customers, you want to have discovered a hidden treasure. But it was a little disquieting.

  “I wonder what happens in the other buildings.”

  “I wonder where they’ve hidden the damn car park,” growled Aymon, trying to frown, to mask his drug experience. “It’s got to be around here somewhere. Hidden up in the canopy, maybe, with the big butterflies —”

  Viola’s attention had been caught by a frog on a lily pad, on the water right below the rail beside their table. He was bright green all over and much larger than the minute creatures teeming on the forest floor, maybe the size of the palm of her hand. Or larger than that: it was hard to be sure of the scale of him, there was a trick of perspective —

  The frog looked up, bright-eyed, beamed at her, and began to sing.

  Dedans ma chaumière

  Pour y vivre heureux

  Combien faut-il être?

  Il faut être deux…

  Or rather, he began to croak: but it wasn’t a bad voice, not at all.

  In my li-tel co-ttage,

  what do I need there?

  for to be so happy,

  what I need is you…!

  The words, that turned to English in her head with no effort at all, seemed so charming. And his bright eyes, his lipless, toothless grin, were so lively, so funny; and, if this wasn’t too ridiculous, decidedly sexual —

  Oui ma chaumière,

  Je la préfère!

  Avec toi, oui avec moi

  Avec toi, oui avec moi!

  Au palais d’un roi…!

  “I think I’ll take a little walk,” said Viola, abruptly: very startled by the feelings she was getting about that frog —