Fungi

by Orrin Grey

  GLJIVA (NO SECOND NAME)

  Minor human historian in the SECOND ONDDO EMPIRE period. HONEY FUNGUS addict. Disappeared on a voyage of discovery to the northern continent of FONG. Presumed dead.

  LANGERMANIA GIGANTEA — GIANT PUFFBALLS

  Non-sentient fungus native to the island of CENDAWAN. The Giant Puffball is an airborne spore the size of several humans. They are not to be confused with the LEPIOTA PROCERA, or PARASOL MUSHROOM.

  It is a tradition — begun with the 372 AF FESTIVAL OF RISING — to hook one’s self onto the stalk of the Giant Puffball during its sporal release period, which occurs annually. The passengers, usually younger children, are borne away to the skies with the rising spores. Some descend early; some are lost at sea; and some find themselves, by the luck of winds, arriving, like the fungus itself, on new lands, new worlds to explore.

  A poem from the HUMAN-FUNGI ACCORD PERIOD describes the phenomenon:

  Taking flight

  Spores

  Rise

  Children

  Rise

  Wind

  Calls

  To wind.

  Beyond, beyond

  New horizons

  Beckon.

  TREMELLA MESENTERICA — YELLOW-BRAIN FUNGUS

  Species of intelligent fungi from the northern continent of FONG. Destroyed DEATH CAP CIVILISATION/SECOND ONDDO EMPIRE by 2015 AF. Disappeared in 2113 AF, at the same time as the sinking of the island of KULAT.

  FONG

  Northern fungal continent. Became inaccessible in or around 2113 AF. It is now surrounded by a repellent force that prohibits both maritime and airborne passage.

  LACCARIA LACCATA — DECEIVERS

  Fungal-based cult, but popular amongst both humans and fungi. Most active during SECOND ONDDO EMPIRE, where it was practiced by rebel forces. Believed to have originated on the floating pirate island of PLAT UITZETTEN centuries before.

  XYLARIA HYPOXYLON — CANDLE-SNUFF FUNGUS

  A tiny mushroom rising out of the bark of a tree, a black sleeve followed by a white hand, reaching out, as though waving. It is the traditional symbol of the DECEIVERS CULT (See LACCARIA LACCATA) as well as the final mark of a sentence in the hieroglyphic-based alphabet of the YELLOW-BRAINS CIVILIZATION. A children’s ditty, recorded by the historian GLJIVA on the island of CHANTERELLE, goes:

  Look at the white hands

  Waving to you from the shore.

  Goodbye, goodbye, they’re saying

  We shall see you and yours no more.

  HIS SWEET TRUFFLE OF A GIRL

  By Camille Alexa

  Camille Alexa is a dual Canadian /American author living near a Pacific Northwest volcano in an Edwardian home filled with fossils, broken shells, dried branches, and other very pretty dead things. Her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling and the Dwarf Star awards, while her short fiction collection Push of the Sky earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was an Endeavour Award finalist. Complete bibliography and contact info at camillealexa.com.

  MOREL LOOKS AWAY FROM the thin membranous portal in the giant puffball’s exterior and studies again the daguerreotype cradled in his hands. The image is of a young woman, a tomboy really, uncomfortable sitting still for the photographer in her starched white ruffles and careful curls. He prefers to remember her pale limbs as always in motion, playing tennis with him on the lawn of her father’s estate, or gamboling with the newborn whippet puppies in the barn while sunlight glinting off stray bits of straw clinging to her white, white cap. Closing his eyes, he can practically hear her soft moans as he takes her in his arms, presses her against him, her aromatic oils and delicate juices filling his mouth as he latches it hungrily to hers.

  Yes, Amanita is a sweet truffle of a girl. He misses her sorely.

  A wail echoes down the rubbery passageways of the underwater vessel, bouncing dully off the puffball’s spongy interior surfaces as it makes its way to him. Morel slides the beautiful Miss Virosa’s likeness into his vest pocket and, ignoring the cramping of his empty stomach, makes his way from the chamber to see if he might ease his colleague’s agony.

  Mr. Shiitake is as Morel left him, lying hunched and miserable against an interior chamber wall. The man’s hands are red and raw where he’s been chewing on them. The soft yellow meat of the puffball is turning a necrotic brown where Mr. Shiitake has been gouging fistfuls of its rotting flesh, shoving them in his mouth. His lips beneath his thin black moustache are blue, almost as rubbery as the flesh of the organic submersible in which they drift along the sandy bottom of the sea.

  Morel kneels by the man’s side, rolls him into a more comfortable position and uses a less-than-clean handkerchief to dab at the profuse sweat dotting the man’s face, past the unpleasant effluvia leaking from the corners of his colleague’s ragged mouth. “Is that better, Mr. Shiitake?” he asks.

  “Oh yes, Mr. Morel. Thank you.” Shiitake’s hands shake where he grips Morel’s lapel. “Sorry to be such a bother.”

  For the hundredth time, Morel wishes Dr. Crimini had not already succumbed. It surprises him that a doctor wouldn’t know better than to consume the decaying flesh of the modified Calvatia gigantea, no matter how hungry he became, particularly as he’d incorporated no small amount of the highly toxic Clitocybe rivulosa into its making. “For the gills, don’t you know,” the Doctor had been fond of telling Morel. “For the enormous gills.”

  But it was madness that made him do it, of course: the madness that comes of being trapped leagues under the sea in a deteriorating hollow gasterothecium the size of a house. No propulsion, no food, no light other than the eerie phosphorescence emitted by the foreign fruiting bodies grafted to the puffball’s exterior, anchored by stringy stalk tethers to dimly illuminate the black ink of deep ocean several meters in every direction, orbiting their giant puffball with slow underwater undulations like glowing globular planets orbiting a drowned moon.

  It’s enough to drive any rational man to irrational measures.

  Morel’s portal window is beginning to cloud. He presses his face against the once-clear membrane, peering into the stygian deep. Between the dangling, floating globes of luminescent phosphor fungi swim fantastical creatures. Once, Morel would have eagerly run to fetch his sketchbook. He would’ve tried, with quick light strokes of charcoal, to capture the weird unearthly flutterings of the animals’ gills, the huge round marbles where eyes would once have been when such creatures had lived closer to the surface, closer to things Morel can barely remember, like fresh air and sunlight. The air he pulls into his lungs now is thousand-times-recycled stuff, run through the abundant added gills of the giant puffball — a biological invention of the late Dr. Crimini — and filtered back out for another breath. How many times, Morel wonders, has he drawn these same particles into his body, only to expel them again and to draw them back? He can taste the staleness of the air on his tongue like a solid thing. It makes his mind feel foggy, stuffed with spores and cotton.

  And sunlight may as well be something he imagined ever having existed, rather than something which last struck the surface of his skin with such unappreciated familiarity just a few days earlier. Can it really only have been a week since he entered Mr. Virosa’s study, announced his intention to the Captain of Industry regarding the man’s only daughter? I will make my fortune, Sir, he had said. I will make my fortune and then I will make her happy, forever.

  It is for her he put together this small expedition. Only a trial, it was to be, and yet it would have paved his way to a fortune with Her Majesty’s Navy. A subsea vessel, cultivated and equipped on shore in record time and rolled into shallow inlets when fully grown. Shortlived, yes, but an endlessly renewable resource which, with practice, could be adapted to land use — even to air! Dr. Crimini had used Morel’s sketches of flying puffballs — enormous hollow caps filled from beneath with heated gases and equipped with gondolas and ballast — to shape his experiments with fungi growth in his laboratories on the continent. Morel would g
et the credit, of course: He was the visioneer.

  But the visioneer needed the engineer and the engineer needed the financier: Morel, Dr. Crimini, Mr. Shiitake. Together, the three of them would’ve revolutionised travel in all its modes, turned the course of history irrevocably and made their fortunes in the process. And in the middle of it all, her white dress belling from her pale perfect form like an angel’s spreading wings, would be his darling, his beautiful Amanita Virosa.

  The looming shape again catches the edge of Morel’s vision and he in vain wipes at the membrane sheath separating him from all the waters of the world. Just beyond the perimeter lit by the illuminated sporocarps at the ends of their stalks, something large waits. Morel can feel it waiting, has felt it for the last couple of days, though day has less and less meaning as time passes in the depths. If only they hadn’t rushed to test the project. If only they’d prepared for a possible failure of the propulsion system, that ingenious organic innovation of Dr. Crimini’s design that equipped the giant puffball with gill-powered expulsion, whereby water was drawn and expelled from the fruiting body’s lower chambers, much as air was drawn and expelled and redrawn within its upper. Installing backup locomotion methods had seemed too costly at the time, though Mr. Shiitake will almost certainly have regretted his veto of such planning a thousand times by now, a million; must’ve heaped upon himself all the recriminations Morel could’ve thought to heap, though Morel himself had been most responsible for pushing the undertaking forward more hastily than it should’ve been. He’d simply wanted Amanita with an impatient ardour borne more of passion than of sense. He sees that now.

  A change in the shape of the watery darkness outside Morel’s portal makes him gasp. In the eerie, blue-tinted light of the long-stemmed drifting globes, Morel catches a simultaneous glimpse of all the massive creature’s elements at once: stumpy fanning tail and fins, not graceful at all; rough, warty hide, looking like some diseased, waterlogged, leathery thing destined never to touch the sun; bulging, round, milky globes of eyes, their cataract blindness the colour of curdled milk gone sour in the bottom of a petri dish … and the teeth. Heavens help him, he’d not bargained for such teeth from a thing best classified as a mere fish. The teeth are needled, straight and sharp, each the length of Morel’s forearm where they flash past his membrane window.

  Morel is jolted from sleep with that sensation of falling off a cliff that makes one’s legs jerk like a puppet’s on its strings. His head snaps up, hunger-fogged brain trying to focus, pressure-clogged ears and phosphor-numbed eyes trying to make sense of the momentarily unrecognisable rubbery chamber in which he lies curled. He pushes off the pliant fungal floor and stands on shaky legs. He can feel creases in his face where it rested in sleep against the daguerreotype of his lady fair, clutched in his hand.

  After waking to the sensation of falling, Morel is left with the vague notion of motion, as though something large had bumped or rocked the submersible. He shakes it off, returning Amanita’s likeness to his vest pocket and rubbing his head to clear it. When the second jolt comes, it is an abrupt, noiseless quake that leaves the entire vessel quivering, leaves the motion of impact reverberating up from the living floor into the meat of Morel’s legs, the jelly of his kneecaps and the hollow of his empty stomach.

  He runs to the portal, wipes uselessly with his sleeve, makes out the shapes of teeth as the enormous creature of the depths outside takes another bite, drags at the vessel’s lower basidiocarp propulsion chambers with horrible elastic slowness, until the flesh gives, the tear sending another shockwave through the subsea craft.

  “No!” shouts Morel, face pressed to the cataracted portal. “Off with you! Be gone!” He pounds dully with both fists against the wall. The surface is considerably less elastic than it had been, not springing back into shape after he lets his hands drop to his sides. He stares with horror at the new dents in the wall of his underwater vessel, hard, crescent-moon depressions with delicate crenulations the exact size and shape of his knuckles.

  The monster outside tears another bite off the thick exterior shell and the entire submersible lurches hard to Morel’s left as it rebounds from the attack. A keening wail wafts from the passageway to the other upper chambers and Mr. Shiitake’s voice, thin and high and frightened, calls: “Mr. Morel! Mr. Morel!”

  Morel pounds through the empty gasterothecium passages, averting his face from the doorless study where Dr. Crimini lies, bloated and blue. Entering Shiitake’s chamber, he makes his way quickly to the man’s side. Ignoring the odours of vomit and other, even more unpleasant matter, Morel kneels, supports his investor’s shoulders as another shudder shakes the giant puffball from without, another mouthful of the fruiting body’s flesh torn free in the terrible jaws of the leviathan.

  “What’s happening?” asks the financier, his thin moustache practically disappearing between the swollen, runny mucous membranes of mouth and nose. With a glance at the chamber wall, Morel notes that at least the man has stopped eating the poisonous flesh of their vessel. He quickly suppresses a second thought following hard on the heels of the first: that it might be better if he hadn’t.

  “A bit of a hiccough, I’m afraid,” says Morel, feeling inane. What of this trip from the moment their propulsion failed and they sank stonelike to the depths has not been a bit of a hiccough? It’s his habit to soothe investors, his method to always present the possibilities, the upsides of a project rather than its pitfalls. Soon, the giant fish will eat its way into the soft fleshy interior of the puffball and then it will eat Morel and Shiitake, though they won’t notice, having already drowned. Might such a fate not at least be seen as better than starvation? No, that probably isn’t the spin he wishes to put on the event of their impending doom.

  Another reverberation shakes the submersible, like the ringing of an enormous silent gong embedded in its springy walls. The puffball lurches sharply again. Mr. Shiitake groans and buries his sweaty face in shaking hands. “Do something, Morel. For the love of Jupiter, do something.”

  And it is Morel’s job. He is the visioneer. The first day after the Doctor’s demise — Crimini having been their pilot as well as their engineer, the only man alive with intimate knowledge of the unique vessel’s workings, inside and out, from the minutest level to the grandest — Morel had worn himself to a frazzle tugging every lever-shaped protrusion in the engineer’s room, twanging every elastic organic band and depressing every knobby outgrowth where they studded the wall like common toadstools on a rotten log … but all to no avail. Dr. Crimini himself had not tried harder when the propulsions abruptly halted and they’d sunk lower, ever lower. The man had panicked far more quickly than Morel would’ve imagined he would, though the mettle of one’s fellows is often tested only in crisis, too late, too late.

  But if Morel could make the subsea puffball a reality, find a way to bring together all the circumstances which, when combined, allowed them to traverse the ocean in such an unlikely vessel, then by Jupiter, he should certainly be able to bring about the circumstances of their escape from a watery grave. Before, he’d simply mimicked the poor Doctor’s final efforts at the helm, not understanding what else he could do, hoping in some small part of his characteristically optimistic brain that they’d find themselves buoyed to the surface despite their increasing heaviness as the craft’s spongy tissues absorbed water and moved closer to the sporing phase, growing increasingly sluggish and dull. Once upon the surface of the water, reasoned Morel, they’d be spotted by a passing liner and towed ashore, and rescued, and reunited with their lady loves.

  Through the fine fabric of his shirt, he feels in his vest pocket the firm edge of the daguerreotype, pressing into his chest near his heart. Easing the shaking Shiitake to the floor, he says, “Do something. Yes. I will.”

  Striding down the passageway toward Dr. Crimini’s room, Morel tries to assimilate the brief bits and bobs of the Doctor’s endless explanations of spores, of gills, of splicing one species of sporocarp to another at
the microscopic level. Words tumble through his brain, some with half-remembered explanations attached, others with just the sounds of the syllables rolling around inside his skull like pebbles in a tin cup: basidium, gleba, statismospore, ballistospore. He thinks he remembers that Calvatia gigantea can easily contain several trillion spores, and he thinks he remembers the Doctor telling him the modified lower rivulosa gill propulsion systems gave rise to a new, hybrid spore expulsion apparatus.

  Morel had never paid much attention to such information; He’d expected a short trip from the shore after rolling into the ocean. He’d envisioned a few hours jetting through the shallow waters of the channel and then Mr. Virosa’s hearty congratulations when he returned to the man’s estate with news of his success. And finally, ultimately, he’d envisioned the slender pale limbs of Amanita entwined with his, silver in the moonlight as he kissed her sweetness. What he’d not envisioned was that their buoyant vessel would sink so rapidly to the depth it had, nor that it would be caught in swift channel currents and carried deep beneath the surface of the water quickly out to sea. His visions of success had had no room for the Doctor’s panicky ingestion of his own creation’s interior walls before the third day was out, nor the man’s immediate and fatal seizure in the muscles of his heart. He’d not imagined the wails of his financier in the throes of a similar poisoning and he’d certainly never made any contingency plan for a hostile mammoth of the deep rending the rubbery flesh of his vessel bite by tooth-studded bite until the puffball’s shell ruptured and saltwater flooded in to replace the air trapped in its upper chambers, the air Morel and Shiitake needed to remain alive.

  Entering the engineering room rocks Morel back on his heels. Though the Doctor didn’t suffer the physical indignities Mr. Shiitake endures, he has been dead now for days. The stench hits one like a solid thing, not improved by the already-stale air.