The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  Maisie looked around, her face worried. There was nowhere to go. “What is this? Are you in trouble?”

  “I think we’re all in trouble.”

  The officer smiled at the riverboat passengers and nodded. He was clean-shaven, with a wide face and laugh lines at the corners of his mouth. From the upper deck, Paul could see that he had a small, sunburned bald spot. The man gave the pilot a broad shrug, as if sorry for the inconvenience. He seemed like a reasonable man, a man you’d like to get to know. Until he drew a pistol and shot the pilot in the face.

  It was so sudden, so unexpected, that for a beat nobody moved. A bloody spray erupted from the back of the pilot’s head, and he collapsed to the deck. The shot echoed across the water, startling a flock of birds out of the trees. Then chaos broke out.

  The passengers screamed and scrambled away. On the patrol craft, three men lifted automatic weapons in tandem and began to fire into the riverboat. Paul didn’t think; he just reacted. Maisie was still staring at the patrol craft, frozen in shock. He took her by the shoulders and pushed her over the railing. “Swim for shore,” he shouted after her.

  On the deck below, the other tourists were dying. There was nowhere for them to run. A few of them managed to jump into the water as well, but Paul couldn’t tell if they had been hit or not. It didn’t matter. There was nothing he could do for them. He dove into the water after Maisie. With the riverboat between them and their attackers, they struck out for shore as fast as they could swim.

  It turned out she was the better swimmer. The northern shore didn’t look that far away, but he swam to the point of exhaustion, and it didn’t seem to be getting any closer. They had kicked their shoes off, but their clothes were heavy and soaked through. Maisie stayed with him and helped him, encouraging him to float on his back when he needed to rest. He was young and in good shape, but he never would have made it if not for her.

  When they finally reached the shore, he heaved himself up on the swampy bank, shuddering and coughing, his arms and legs shaking with exhaustion. Still, she urged him forward. “Come on, into the forest,” she said. “We want to be out of sight, in case they come looking.” He dragged himself to his feet and leaned on her as they stumbled in among the trees.

  The light dimmed as they pushed their way through the vine-choked undergrowth. Once they were inside, the foliage thinned out, no longer fueled by the sunlight into riotous growth. The air was moist and the sounds from the outside deadened. They sat on a fallen branch and just breathed for a time, recovering their strength.

  “What are you, some kind of Olympic swimmer?” Paul finally said.

  “I do triathlons,” she said woodenly. They were both shivering from the damp, despite the warm air. Paul felt like his clothes were constricting and trying to smother him. He pulled his phone from his pocket, but it was wet through, and when he pushed the button, nothing happened. “Mine, too,” Maisie said. She produced her phone and shook it, and he could hear the water sloshing around inside the case.

  They were silent again, until Maisie said, “What happened out there?”

  “I don’t know. They weren’t Brazilian Navy, I can tell you that.”

  “How did you know what was going to happen?”

  “I didn’t. But the men in the boat weren’t speaking Portuguese. It wasn’t any language I recognized.”

  “There are indigenous languages spoken around here,” Maisie said. “Couldn’t it have been one of those?”

  Paul shook his head. “Not in the military. Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Do you think the others . . .” she started, but she couldn’t finish the question.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There were some who made it into the water, so they might have escaped.” He tried to sound positive, but privately he thought Maisie’s friends were probably all dead. “How well did you know them?”

  She shrugged. “Hardly at all. We put a group together over the internet, to get a package rate on the trip. I met them all a week ago, when we arrived in Manaus.”

  He touched her arm briefly. “I’m sorry.”

  All the electricity of their flirtation on the boat was gone now, and he felt the gulf between them of strangers stranded together. He didn’t know this woman, didn’t know her background, how she handled things emotionally, or how she would react to this situation.

  Paul stared at his hands, not at all sure how he was handling things himself. His muscles still twitched from the adrenaline of the unexpected attack and the grueling swim. People who just a little while ago had been laughing over photographs and arguing about the price of beer were now dead. His mind raced and spun, unable to think about anything clearly.

  Finally, Maisie broke the silence. “What are we going to do?”

  The question focused him. “We’re going to survive,” he said. “We’re going to make it back to Manaus, tell the police what happened, and go home.”

  She raised her hands, indicating the jungle around them. “We must be fifty miles from Manaus. That’s a long way in the rainforest. We have no food, no packs.” Her voice had an edge of panic.

  “Relax,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he really was. “There are plenty of things in the rainforest to eat, if you know what you’re looking for. And we have the river to navigate by, so we can’t possibly get lost. We’ll be fine.”

  He was wrong about getting lost. The land near the riverbank was a swampy marshland, almost impossible to walk through, forcing them deeper into the interior where they could no longer see it. The higher the ground, the easier it was to negotiate, but the tendency to steer toward drier ground led them farther from the river. The thick canopy blocked the sun, and there were no paths. Paul had left his compass behind with the rest of his pack. They were forced to navigate by dead reckoning, which he knew full well was a good way to get thoroughly lost.

  If they could just keep heading east, they would hug the river and eventually get close enough to Manaus to find a road or other people. The problem was, it would be all too easy to veer north instead, where there was nothing but rainforest for hundreds of miles.

  “Maybe we should just go back to the river and wait for a boat,” he said.

  “No.” She was adamant. “No more boats. If those men were thieves, that means they’re lying in wait for any tourist boat that comes through these waters. I don’t want to give them a second chance at me.”

  Paul didn’t argue. He didn’t think the patrol boat would still be out there, but he also thought it unlikely there would be boats of any other kind, or that they could get a boat’s attention from the shore if there were. It was better to press on, and do what they could.

  As they walked, he kept an eye on the ground, occasionally stopping to examine a mushroom or a fungal shelf growing out of the side of a tree. “What are you looking for?” Maisie asked.

  “Our supper.”

  She made a face. “I’ve never been much of a mushroom fan.”

  “They’ll taste pretty good if you’re hungry enough.”

  “Are they hard to find?”

  “Not very. There’s fungus all over this forest. All through the soil, growing up around or even inside the trees. It’s like a huge network, keeping the forest alive, culling some plants and allowing others to survive.”

  “You make it sound like the fungi are in charge.”

  “Well, they sort of are. Organisms aren’t self-sufficient out here; they need the whole ecosystem. Fungi are like the bloodstream. They transfer the moisture and nutrients to where they’re most needed.” He settled gratefully into the familiar topic. Talking about mycology made it easier to avoid thinking about the blood exploding from the back of the riverboat pilot’s head.

  “How can a fungus know what trees most need nutrients?” Maisie asked, sounding skeptical.

  “You’d be surprised. A fungus has all sorts of senses. It can determine the health of a tree, even detect animals moving around in the forest. Every time yo
u step down”—Paul took an exaggerated step to demonstrate—“you’re stepping on a network of more than eight miles of microscopic mycelia, all intertwined beneath your foot. It can detect the pressure and the weight. When you lift your foot”—again, he demonstrated by lifting his own—“the mycelia immediately move out into the indentation, soaking up the moisture and detritus you left behind. You can’t see them, but they’re there.”

  She shuddered. “Sounds creepy.”

  Eventually, Paul found a nice patch of Favolus tenuiculus growing out of a stump. The white polypore mushrooms were lovely specimens of the type, their caps pocked with dozens of holes like a Swiss cheese. Maisie took one warily. “You’re sure they’re safe?”

  “Quite sure,” he said, taking a bite. “This is what I do for a living. This variety is pretty common in the area. You could probably find it on restaurant menus back in Manaus.”

  She smiled wanly. “I had been hoping you might take me out to dinner tonight.”

  “There,” he said. “Wish granted.” They smiled at each other, but there was no joy in it.

  The mushrooms tasted fine, but they stuck in Paul’s throat, and neither of them ate very much. Their main problem was not food, but water. River water, especially the swampy kind around them, was brackish and swarming with protozoa, bacteria, and viruses—not to mention millions of fungal spores—that could give them a wide array of illnesses. Paul had brought an ultraviolet light water purifier as well as chlorine dioxide tablets, but both were, of course, lost with his pack. They had no way to make a fire. Paul found some waxy leaves with rainwater pooled in them, which they dribbled into their mouths. It wasn’t much, but he hoped that they would make it back to civilization before it became a problem.

  Night came quickly. It was murky under the trees even in the afternoon, but as the sun lowered, the shadows deepened, until they could barely see where they were going. “Let’s stop,” Paul said. “It’s dry here; it’s as good a place as any.”

  The darkness, when it came, was complete. They had both been sleeping outside in the rainforest already, but this was different. Instead of mastering their environment, it felt like they were at its mercy. They leaned their backs together against a large tree, unwilling to put their heads down among the crawling things on the bare ground.

  Paul sat awake, uncomfortable in his damp clothing. He had considered taking them off and hanging them to dry, but he knew from experience how bad the insects could be at night, and he wanted as much of his skin covered as possible, especially since they had no mosquito netting or bug spray. Beside him, Maisie shifted in the dark, as sleepless and uncomfortable as he.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  He listened, thinking she had heard something, but a moment later realized that she was seeing something instead. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw a faint green glow resolve out of the gloom. He knew what it was. Foxfire.

  “What’s foxfire?” she asked when he told her.

  “Bioluminescent fungi. A lot of species excrete an oxidative enzyme that glows at night, attracting insects to help spread their spores. Kind of like bright flowers attracting pollinators. Watch this.” Paul clambered to his feet and felt his way carefully toward the glow. It was still extremely dark. He couldn’t actually see his feet, and he stumbled a few times before he found it. A dead log, about the size of his leg, emitting a faint green light along the cracked seams of its bark.

  He picked it up. “Fungi are the great decomposers of the forest,” he said. “Any kind of dead organic material will be riddled through with mycelial strands within a few hours after death. Soil couldn’t exist without fungi breaking things down. They were the first organisms to colonize the land, a good hundred million years before plants.” He heaved the log into the woods. It struck a tree and exploded apart, sending a shower of green sparks through the air that illuminated them with an eerie green glow. Paul made his way back to her, able to see slightly now in the dim light.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said. “I’m wet, and I’m scared, and I’m so angry I would kill those men right now, every one of them, without a second thought, if I had the chance. What were they doing? We never did anything to them. They just murdered a dozen people, for no reason at all. Why? Who would do something like that?”

  Paul sat down next to her again. “There’s been a lot of nationalist sentiment in Pará and some of the other northern states,” he said. “People saying that Americans are ruining their country, wanting them to stay out, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s stupid,” Maisie said. “Their whole economy is based on tourism.”

  “Maybe a few of them took the sentiment too far.”

  “No. That doesn’t make sense. These people were organized. If they weren’t Navy, then they stole a Navy boat and military uniforms. They had automatic weapons. This wasn’t a few guys with too much to drink taking their emotions out on a few Americans. They were too well outfitted for that.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know who would want to do such a thing.”

  “I just want to be home,” she said. “I want to be back in California, where things make sense.”

  Paul couldn’t help it. He laughed, though he immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just never thought of California as making sense.”

  She didn’t take offense. “More sense than they do here, anyway.”

  The green glow hadn’t diminished. If anything, it had grown brighter, though maybe that was his eyes still adjusting. He could make out the expression on her face now, and see the basic lines of her body next to him. He stood, wanting to see what was left of the rotten log, but instead he saw something strange. Luminescent spots, more of them, stretching out into the distance. He squinted, trying to make sense of them in the darkness. It was hard to get a good idea of how far away they were, but they seemed to be forming two glowing lines. Straight, parallel lines. He shook his head, afraid he was hallucinating, but when he looked again, they were still there.

  “Check this out,” he said.

  Maisie joined him on her feet. The green splotches glowed brightly, and the lines were unmistakable. “It’s a path,” she said.

  It certainly looked like one. But what kind of path would be illuminated by fungi? Paul stepped forward, then bent down and examined the first of the spots, which was on the side of a tree. The tree itself was covered in fungal patches, and a few conks grew from one side, but only this single patch was glowing. He walked to the next patch, this one on the ground, and found the same thing—an area full of fungi, but only this one small patch glowing. What was going on?

  “We should follow it,” Maisie said.

  “What?”

  “It’s got to be man-made, right? Nothing organic goes in straight lines like that. If it’s a human path, then it has to lead somewhere.”

  Paul couldn’t argue with her reasoning, but neither did he know of any way a human could make a path out of selectively triggered bioluminescent fungi. “It is leading in the direction we want to go,” he said, shrugging.

  “And it’s not like we’re getting any sleep. I don’t want to sit here all night feeling sorry for myself and getting sick. I want to get home.”

  “I guess we don’t have anything to lose,” Paul said. He wanted to get up and move just as much as she did. And besides, as a mycologist, he found it hard to leave a mystery like this unexamined.

  They walked side by side, the foxfire providing just enough light to see the path ahead of them, but not enough to see much beyond it. The going was relatively easy, and the double lines curved to avoid swampy areas and other pitfalls. They made better time than they had walking during the day.

  From time to time, Paul stopped to examine the glowing spots, but he learned nothing new. The fungus all appeared to be the same species, one that he didn’t recognize. He wanted to take a sample, but he knew it would be useless to do so. All of his sample bags were still in his abandoned pack, an
d putting samples in his damp pocket would just mean a pocketful of decaying slime by the time he could retrieve them.

  The path continued on for miles, leading them unerringly across easy terrain and around obstacles. They followed it, its twin glowing lines stretching deeper into the dark forest, until the light vanished. Without warning, the luminescence shut off as suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch, plunging them into complete darkness.

  He felt Maisie’s hand groping for his, and he grasped it, holding on tightly.

  “Paul?” she said, her voice tight with fear. “What’s going on?”

  CHAPTER 1

  The day I heard what happened to Paul, I spent the afternoon at my father’s house, listening to the rain patter on the roof of the enclosed porch, and wondering if my dad even knew who I was anymore. Outside, the leaves of the maple tree rustled in the wind, but inside, the house was still, the steady sound of the rain only increasing the sense of quiet. I shuffled the letter tiles in front of me, waiting for him to make his next move. Chill air seeped from the windows, and I thought the rain might turn to snow overnight.

  “Whose turn is it?” my father asked.

  “Yours, Dad.”

  He reached out and, one at a time, placed the tiles T-A-P on the board. Four points. I dutifully recorded the score, and placed my own word, praxis, taking the double word score and using the S to pluralize another word. Forty points.

  My dad chuckled and shook his finger at me. A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows and sent ripples running across Marley Creek. My parents’ property didn’t actually touch the water, but they shared a tiny wedge of waterfront with two other homeowners. My dad’s boat was moored there, though he never used it anymore. The porch smelled faintly of fish.

  Time creaked by. “Whose turn is it?”

  “Yours, Dad.”

  He studied his letters again. “When is Neil coming back from Brazil?” he asked.

  “I’m Neil,” I said. “It’s Paul who’s in Brazil, and he’s supposed to be home the day after tomorrow. I’ll pick him up at the airport after my interview at the NSA.”