Elena could give the lecture half-asleep. She’d done it more than once: earbuds shoved in haphazard in the dark and micbead balanced on her sternum, the rest of her cocooned in 30 pounds of weighted blanket. Warm, serene and bodiless. When she needed to do an onboarding for someone in a time zone radically askew to her circadians, she’d even skip VR. The lecture didn’t need an image, just a voice. In Elena’s opinion, it worked better with just a voice. She had the data analytics to prove it, and those data analytics earned her the top end of her salary band.
Perfume chemistry is dependent on the interaction between a precision-crafted molecular architecture of volatile compounds – the perfume itself – and any number of individual human skins, Elena would say, and it didn’t particularly matter who she was saying it to: they were already inhaling their own pre-prepared mix of terpenes and coumarins, carvone and limonene, all suspended in a high-oxygen room air mix suitable for closed-envelope office buildings. Elena had smelled it herself. All professional noses tried their own designs; all company noses knew the proprietary formulas down to the molecule. The standard scent for corporate installations was mostly spearmint and shiso leaf. It smelled like clear thinking and productive energy, and it was next to impossible to notice the proprietary mix of inhaled stimulants that her company added to particular rooms, when a particular person needed them.
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Human skins were the variable factor, the uncontrollable random draw – the heat and the oil of them, the particular variations in hormones, nutritional factors, age, humidity. The skins, Elena often thought, were where the plan encountered the enemy. And no plan survived the encounter with the enemy, according to both proverb and companyspeak fable.
Or, at least: no plan survived unchanged.
The vial she wore on a chain around her neck was blood-heat warm. If she unstoppered it, the scent of the waxy substance inside would be different from how it would smell in a lab or a distilling facility. Different, even, than it would smell when it was first ground and pulped from rhizome. Heat did that. Proximity to her own skin oils – not even touch, merely proximity – made those infinitesimal alterations. Elena rarely unstoppered her vial. Wearing this much orris root – the concentrated powder of the rhizome of the bearded iris, Iris pallida, grown in the sandy soils outside of Florence, aged for five years underground and dried for three more before processing – well. It was ostentatious, even for a professional nose. Especially because all of that growing and harvesting and waiting had been done in the first half of the century, before the fields outside of Florence had ceased to produce rhizomes with their traditional characteristic depth of scent. Elena had been wearing her orris-root vial for more than a decade. It was ubiquitous to her, as expected as a uniform.
She’d worn it to the airport, just this morning. Walked right through the security scanners, shoeless and sunglasses-less, squinting unhappily against the fluorescent lights. The airport made her miserable, even if her reasons for spending a flight credit were as legitimate as spending flight credits for anything less than family medical emergencies could be: she hadn’t taken a vacation in six years. She’d saved up. She was on her way to the high canyons and the orchards of lower Colorado and northern New Mexico, to go – oh, hiking. Sightseeing. A place she had never been, she’d told her boss when she’d applied for the time off. Somewhere alien and new.
The airport was all noise and light, announcements over the loudspeaker. She’d put her sunglasses back on straight after security and decided not to care that she looked like someone who was hiding an unfortunate hangover or a more-unfortunate black eye. It didn’t help enough. Most of the light and all of the noise still came right through. Her flight was boarding in 38 minutes. Airports smelled of ozone and sweat. People and high-potency aerosol disinfectants. Elena wished profoundly that she could be a voice giving a lecture, the same lecture over again, safe in her own dark apartment with nothing moving aside from the unfolding patterns of perfume.
She could turn around now. It would be understandable. The people on the other side of the flight wouldn’t be any worse off than they were already.
She was grinding her teeth, slow pressure in her jaw. Deliberately, like she had practiced under the tutelage of two therapists and a dentist, she relaxed it.
#
A perfume can be created in a lab, entirely synthetic. Perfume chemistry is not the best-paid use of an organic chemistry degree, but it is a prestigious one: complex, a skill with its own profundity. Some of the best historical perfumes have been based in synthetics: Shalimar was built around vanillin, Chanel No. 5 around a series of synthetic aldehydes. Ambroxan is the secret heart of Dior’s Bois d’Argent.
Most of the perfumes Elena had ever built were entirely synthetic. The plant and animal-derived versions of their components were either vanishingly rare, protected from harvest by international law, cost-ineffective at scale, or – like the orris root butter she wore around her neck – born from a terroir that has been transformed beyond its previous capabilities to imbue a particular scent. Heat changes the chemical composition of anything, not only olfactory molecules. Heat, and drought, change the chemical composition of soils.
Inside that vial, enrobed and invisible inside the pale beige wax of the orris root butter, were nine arils: the seeds of a bearded iris grown before that change in climate and season had made its permanent alteration.
#
Elena found the airplane itself comforting after the chaos of the airport. She had tucked herself against the window in her seat two-thirds of the way back towards the galleys, well behind the wings, and was fully prepared not to move at all until they had landed again. Nothing would happen; the worst alteration in her circumstances would be clear-air turbulence. She liked it. The country unrolling under her was grey-green with early spring.
She didn’t consider herself a thief. The iris arils were a curiosity, not a monetisable product belonging all proprietary to her company. She had never used orris in a productivity mix in her entire term of employment – and she’d never used it when she’d worked on the sleep-and-relaxation side of the shop either. It was too expensive. In the 20th century and the early 21st, the butter had still been the best fixative base for wearable perfume, no matter the price – but it wasn’t the early part of the 21st century by two decades. Two decades if a person was being generous. Nine original-terroir arils – not even the rhizome! Only the thing that could become a rhizome, in half a decade! – were like coins lost in couch cushions.
She was very aware that she was lying to herself.
#
It had started with a series of peer-reviewed soil science studies, emailed to her work account anonymously. Elena had deleted them, and relegated the sending IP to junk. They kept appearing anyway; the same few at first, mostly in pre-print, and then confirmations of the findings a few months later, under the auspices of more reputable journals.
(Of course she’d read them, before she deleted them. She’d been fascinated. Someone was trying to communicate with her, however surreptitiously and sideways, and they had data. She’d put the charts and data sets from the soil studies up in a private VR environment, sensibly isolated from the rest of her system, and let them spin around her like a cacophony of stars.)
The initial set described the ill effects of soil aridification on perfume components, specifically orris, particularly in the north of Italy, alternately scorched by heat and parched by unusual drought. The set that followed were more theoretical. They hinted at rewilding, at alt-wilding, a practice of locating climate-alikes, sibling locations disparate in time and geography – and introducing the extirpated or near-extirpated natives of the one to the other. Elena knew alt-wilding: it was an activist dream, the sort of project uninformed kids or aged-out wellness influencers trying to go climate-legit went for. It was harder to do than it looked. It wasn’t realistic.
It wasn’t realistic, except when it worked. The people in the climate-alike had to know the ground. Had to know the earth and water and cyclical movement of it. Tenth-generation agriculturalists, or agrovoltaic herders, or Indigenous groups, or the saner descendants of prepper enclaves – two or more of the above were better, if you were betting –
The last set of papers came to her personal email. Elena had always thought she had decent cybersecurity protocols. Her personal email was a throwaway, and she changed it every couple of months. Until the last set of papers came in, as jarring as a static shock, it had been entirely inviolate to everyone she knew through work. She’d believed that what she did on God’s own internet was her own business, and the business of ad trackers who were interested in whatever it was that she made her business; what she did while she was a corporate nose was another thing entirely, and the two ought never to have collided. And yet. Whoever wanted her to be thinking about alt-wilding, thinking about possibilities, whoever had been stalking her with research papers and the sketches of ideas, like the skeletal base notes of a new perfume: they were here, they were so very close, and she (in the safety and dark of her own room), looking at the inbox she used for social media and early-access film festival reviews and missives from her therapist and her university best friends –
And yet.
There they were: two meticulous research articles, insinuating that the terroir of the Upper Pecos and lower Colorado displayed – now, not as it would have been a century ago, but now – the same soil characteristics that had grown the rhizome outside Florence, before it had become only a host for flowers and not a host for scents. Two research articles, and an unsigned email from a burner address.
It only had one line. That line was: you know how many iris seeds your lab has?
She’d stared at it for three days before she answered.
Yes.
#
If she wanted, she could simply not leave the airport. The ticketing desks were only a floor above the baggage claim, and it wasn’t like she didn’t have money, and even after handing over one round-trip flight credit she still had the other five years of flight credits from not travelling – she never travelled! – to burn. She could buy a ticket to anywhere. Including her own city, with her own apartment, and all its quiet, dark rooms where nothing ever happened and she hadn’t ever (plausible deniability, Elena) done anything illegal that was 100 per cent her own fault.
She could turn around and no one would ever have any reason to suspect her because she wouldn’t have done anything to suspect. She could even return the arils, though it wasn’t really worth the risk: there were at least 60 more of them in the seedbank vault, and no one was going to use them for something so prohibitively expensive as growing iris rhizome anyway. It might be years before they got counted. Decades.
She was stalling.
She hadn’t come halfway across the country to be a coward.
She’d like to be a coward. The strap of her carry-on bag dug into the side of her shoulder and felt like it weighed 1000 pounds. There were loud kids goofing off on the baggage carousel, and louder high-pitched buzzes from the carousel itself whenever its motion sensors noticed they were goofing off on it. Outside there was a man – probably a man, the name had been a little ambiguous and he hadn’t included pronouns in his signature block in any of the emails they’d exchanged – holding a sign with her name on it, and he was going to drive her up to an orchard farmstead on roads she’d never seen and when she got there she was going to commit industrial espionage.
For the sake of a possibility. For the sake of – if it worked –
Elena walked out of the baggage claim into the dry-sweet mountain air (piñon juniper, sagebrush, a thinness she thought of as oxygen and was in fact the absence thereof – ), and looked for her name.
#
Yes, Elena had written, and two weeks later she had seen holophotos of the orchard. Her decrypter spat out a pair of them and spun her a VRscape to look them over in detail. The first: the orchard as it had been when the iris fields outside Florence were full of nodding, bearded flowers, extravagantly purple – it had been apples, then, and the occasional peach when there was enough water for a decent crop. And the second: the orchard now, the sandy semi-arid soil, the pH readings, the average temperature and rainfall. The fruit: apricots. Grapes.
Help us prove it, her contact wrote. Not everything lost is lost always.
Elena had never, not once in her professional life, built a perfume out of a root that came out of the earth. That was made of the memory and breath of a place.
It wasn’t that the synthetics were worse. The synthetics were art. Even when she made performance-enhancers and productivity scents, the synthetics in her lab were art and she was going to go home when this was over and make more of them, for as long as anyone would let her.
It was that she wanted to know what she’d lost before she’d ever had a chance to know she was losing it.
Halfway up the winding mountain road, staring unabashed at the geology unfolding out the window of the electric pickup, Elena unlooped her vial of orris butter from her neck and held it tight in her palm. Heating it. Altering it with her own warmth.
Getting ready to break it open on the earth.
Arkady Martine is the author of the Hugo-winning Teixcalaan series, the novella Rose/House, a multitude of short stories and various other sci-fi, fantasy and horror works. She is also AnnaLinden Weller, a Byzantinist, climate and energy policy analyst and city planner. She isn’t bored.
