Tales from the Universe
Moral Dilemma: If discovering something beautiful could help the world but exposing it might destroy it, does knowledge belong to everyone simply because you found it?
Tarin found the valley because he got lost.
This irritated him later.
He would have preferred a better story.
A secret map.
An ancient inscription.
Twenty years of scholarship culminating in a brilliant deduction.
Instead, his mule wandered away while Tarin was relieving himself behind a tree.
He followed it.
Then followed the wrong hoofprints.
Then became spectacularly lost.
By sunset, he had discovered something nobody had seen in perhaps a thousand years.
The valley was blue.
Not metaphorically.
Blue flowers covered the ground from one mountain wall to the other.
Millions of them.
Their petals glowed faintly as evening approached.
Tarin stood on the ridge.
Below him, the valley slowly became a field of stars.
He forgot about the mule.
He descended.
The flowers reached his knees.
Each blossom had six translucent petals surrounding a silver center.
Tarin had studied plants for twenty-three years.
He knew every documented alpine species in the western kingdoms.
He had never seen anything remotely similar.
He took out his notebook.
Then stopped.
Something was moving among the flowers.
A deer stepped into view.
Its antlers were covered in blue blossoms.
Not tangled.
Growing.
Tarin whispered:
“Oh.”
The deer looked at him.
Then returned to grazing.
Tarin spent three days in the valley.
He found insects that existed nowhere in his books.
A pale fox.
Trees whose leaves folded underground at night.
A pool containing tiny silver fish that appeared to have no eyes.
And everywhere, the blue flowers.
He collected specimens.
Measured.
Drew.
Recorded.
On the third morning, he noticed his hands no longer hurt.
Tarin had suffered swollen joints for years.
He flexed his fingers.
No pain.
He looked toward the flowers.
He experimented.
Carefully.
A tea made from one petal reduced swelling within an hour.
Two petals reduced fever.
Three caused vomiting.
Five made Tarin unconscious for most of an afternoon.
He wrote everything down.
By the time he left the valley, Tarin knew he had discovered something important.
Perhaps very important.
His first thought was publication.
His name would appear in every botanical academy.
Tarin’s Blue.
Perhaps Tarinia caelestis.
He practiced saying it.
Then felt embarrassed despite being alone.
He imagined lectures.
Awards.
Students.
A permanent position at the Royal Institute.
No more begging wealthy idiots to fund expeditions.
He packed six flowers carefully between sheets of paper.
Then he looked back at the valley.
A thought arrived.
People would come.
Tarin sat on the ridge for a long time.
Scientists would come first.
Then physicians.
Then merchants.
Then whoever merchants brought with them.
Roads.
Buildings.
Harvesters.
Guards.
Someone would discover that the flowers were worth money.
That was usually the moment when a rare thing stopped being rare and started becoming inventory.
Tarin unpacked the specimens.
He almost threw them away.
Instead he kept one.
At the Royal Institute, Tarin lied.
“Nothing?”
Professor Halen stared at him.
“Three months in the mountains and you found nothing?”
“Several mosses.”
“Mosses.”
“Yes.”
Halen rubbed his forehead.
“I convinced the board to fund you.”
“I know.”
“You promised unexplored habitat.”
“I found mostly rocks.”
“Mountains do contain those.”
Tarin apologized.
His funding ended.
For two years, he kept the valley secret.
He returned alone.
He studied.
The flower’s medicinal properties were greater than he’d first understood.
Properly prepared, it reduced certain fevers that killed thousands every year.
It eased joint disease.
It slowed some infections.
Tarin began to feel sick about his silence.
Every time he heard that someone had died of fever, he thought of the valley.
Every time he saw an old woman struggling to close swollen fingers, he thought of the flowers.
Protecting beauty was beginning to look suspiciously like hoarding medicine.
So Tarin told one person.
Doctor Seli.
She listened without interrupting.
Then examined the dried petal he’d brought.
“Where?”
“I won’t tell you yet.”
She looked offended.
“Tarin.”
“I need you to promise something.”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what.”
“I know you’re about to ask a physician to keep a medicine secret.”
He had no response.
Seli leaned closer.
“How many people could this help?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hundreds?”
“Yes.”
“Thousands?”
“Possibly.”
“And you’re protecting flowers?”
“I’m protecting the place that makes them.”
“From whom?”
Tarin looked at her.
“Us.”
Seli went to the valley.
Her opinion changed.
Not immediately.
For the first day she remained practical.
“How quickly do they reproduce?”
“Slowly.”
“Can they be cultivated elsewhere?”
“I’ve tried.”
“Harvest limits?”
“Unknown.”
Then she saw the deer.
Then the silver fish.
Then the flowers glowing after sunset.
On the third morning, Seli said:
“We can’t tell them.”
Tarin laughed.
“What?”
“We can’t tell anyone.”
“I brought you here because you said that was immoral.”
“I hadn’t seen it.”
“That shouldn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“Why?”
Seli looked around.
“Because now I understand what would be lost.”
They tried cultivation.
For seven years.
Seeds planted outside the valley died.
Cuttings failed.
Soil transported from the valley worked briefly, then became ordinary.
Whatever produced the blue flowers depended on the entire place.
Not merely the plant.
That made the medicine finite.
And secrecy harder to justify.
Then Seli’s son became ill.
The fever began on a Tuesday.
By Thursday, ordinary medicine had failed.
Seli came to Tarin’s house.
Neither needed to say anything.
They rode through the night.
Her son recovered.
People noticed.
Physicians asked what Seli had used.
She lied.
The lie spread.
Someone accused her of withholding treatment.
They were correct.
Eventually Professor Halen visited Tarin.
He was old now.
His hands shook.
“Show me.”
Tarin’s stomach dropped.
“Show you what?”
Halen placed Tarin’s original expedition notebook on the table.
The notebook Tarin thought he’d burned.
“You were always terrible at destroying records.”
Tarin said nothing.
Halen tapped one page.
A drawing of the flower.
“You found something.”
“Yes.”
“Important?”
“Yes.”
“Useful?”
Tarin hesitated.
Halen understood.
“You have hidden a useful discovery for nearly a decade.”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand what you’ve done?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
Halen stood.
“Knowledge does not belong to the person who discovers it.”
Tarin looked at him.
“Then who does it belong to?”
“Everyone.”
“And the valley?”
“What valley?”
“The thing that knowledge will destroy.”
Halen stopped.
Tarin took him there.
He wanted Halen to understand.
That was his mistake.
Halen understood perfectly.
He simply reached a different conclusion.
“This could save lives.”
“Yes.”
“Then we use it.”
“And when it’s gone?”
“We learn everything we can before that happens.”
Tarin stared.
“You would destroy it.”
“I would spend it.”
“It’s not yours.”
“Neither is it yours.”
There it was.
The argument neither man could solve.
They made an agreement.
The location would be disclosed to a small medical council.
Harvest would be limited.
No permanent buildings.
No roads.
No commercial sale.
Every removed flower recorded.
Every use documented.
For a while, it worked.
Then a king’s daughter became ill.
Then a wealthy merchant offered money.
Then someone leaked the location.
The first unauthorized harvesters arrived within a year.
Tarin stood on the ridge and watched smoke rise from a camp below.
Seli stood beside him.
“We should have kept it secret.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t believe that?”
Tarin looked at her.
“Your son is alive.”
Seli said nothing.
“So are four hundred and twelve other people.”
They had counted.
That somehow made everything worse.
Below them, guards removed illegal harvesters.
Beyond the guards, the flowers still stretched across the valley.
But not as densely as before.
There were bare patches now.
Small ones.
Growing.
Tarin spent the remainder of his life protecting the valley he had revealed.
He became famous.
He hated that.
The flower was named Tarinia caerula.
He hated that too.
Thousands eventually received medicine derived from it.
He could not hate that.
The valley diminished.
He could not forgive that.
No conclusion arrived to organize these facts.
When Tarin was very old, a student accompanied him to the ridge.
Below them, blue flowers still glowed.
Fewer.
But alive.
The student asked:
“Do you regret discovering it?”
Tarin smiled.
“Discovery wasn’t the choice.”
“Telling people, then.”
“Sometimes.”
“Would you keep it secret if you could do it again?”
“Sometimes.”
The student frowned.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.”
Tarin sat on a stone.
After a while he said:
“When I was young, I thought morality meant finding the choice I wouldn’t regret.”
“And now?”
“Now I think some choices are large enough to leave regret whichever road you take.”
The student looked into the valley.
“So how do you know which one is right?”
Tarin watched the last light gather in the blue petals.
“I don’t.”
He smiled.
“But if you ever become certain that something precious must be sacrificed for the greater good, count carefully who receives the good.”
He pointed toward the flowers.
“And count just as carefully what cannot grow back.”
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