Fungi

by Orrin Grey

  By day, as we travelled, all I could see was the mold and, faraway through my spyglass, almost as if purposely keeping a distance, barely discernable seagulls, that to my scientific mind did not look or fly quite like seagulls should. By night, the green, intrusive slime glowed eerily and cast a greenish light on the silent world.

  When everyone else was asleep, I would look through my spyglass, alone and hidden, at the gruesome film that covered the ocean, which, in places, was elevated and more compacted into solid islands of sponge or smaller iceberg-like mounds. As I looked at the fungus in the dark, I could discern in places, either beneath it in the water or, more horribly, of the stuff itself, amorphous shapes that, to my mind, seemed to be following our fast-moving ship. I liked it not.

  Because of this, one day, I said to the captain, “Capitaine, I command you to change course immediately. I believe we are being followed. By changing course, it might confuse our pursuers and cause them, or it, either to lose interest in us or lose track of us. We shall reach our destination from another direction.”

  To which he answered, flushed, “Monsieur le Vicomte! To do so we would have to recalibrate our computational astrolabe and also more than likely extend our journey! This will not sit well with our helmsman in the former, nor with our men in the latter. How sure are you that we are being followed?”

  “I am not sure at all. But I command it.”

  After this brief exchange, he quickly changed to an indirect route, and I am sure that it was because of this caution on my part that the first leg of my journey was saved.

  My second leg began one morning when we arrived near our destination. An officer of the watch spotted a column of black smoke ascending from the horizon of our port side. Cautiously we neared the source of the smoke, the helmsman causing the steam from the aerostat balloon to lower us so we could have a better view, once we realised the site was of no danger.

  Below us were three navy warships, ironclads like our own, still smouldering from a recent tragedy, and all black and burnt and devoid of crew. Their bulks were enmeshed and floating on a great plateau of gruesome jelly. Their aerostats were burnt to ashes. These three ships were the titanic hulls of empires, namely, England’s, Spain’s and Russia’s. No doubt, ours would have made a fourth.

  Later in the day, the captain said to me, “It is certain they did not destroy each other. Their cannons never fired a shot, from what our investigations can tell. Apparently, two ships are old and the Russian ship more recent. It must have fallen or crashed into the other two.”

  Not wishing to put the crew into any more danger, nor finding myself with time to fully delve into this mystery, I decided to disembark.

  The captain asked me if I had any suspicions as to what had happened to the Russian ship.

  I said, with certainty, “Sabotage.”

  And so, the third and last leg of my journey began.

  Call it madness or an egocentric wish to be thought a hero, or perhaps a too-great love for my fellow man, but, that very day, I left, accompanied only by my clockwork man. We left inside a metal machine that I had transported onto the ship, one of my own new experimental inventions, which I called a ‘submarine’.

  The fungus near the ship was compact and solid, so that my submarine, walking and resembling a half-monkey, half-octopus creature, took us on a vast journey atop that pustulous landscape.

  My mecanique man told me where to go. You ask why, perhaps? Because, monsieur, in my skill with automata, I had installed in my man a means by which he could, like a hound, track the source of our predicament. He merely had to fill his head with the vile substance and, instantly, he felt the source, like a beacon. Do not be surprised at this, since you yourself are aware of my prodigious scientific skill with the construction of servile robots.

  Sometime during mid-day, I looked behind me and, through the glass dome atop the submersible, which housed us and the control panels, I saw shadows following us at a far distance. I could not make out their shapes exactly, but something in how they moved made me shiver. I sped up my construct.

  It was not long before my man told me to stop and dive into the mushroom island. I looked up at the hot sun and bade it farewell, before I plunged my ironcast into the flesh of the slime.

  It dug into the substance, shredding the organism’s tissues with its many arms as we travelled, until the submarine broke into clear water below the mass. It swam at top speed, like an octopus, beneath the Atlantic; schools of shiny and lightning-fast fish passing by it. I marvelled.

  Following thick filaments of fungi down, eventually, we reached a hole. Falling into it, after a few hours, we emerged in a cave, hundreds of feet under the ocean.

  I was surprised to find readings which told me there was oxygen here. After a curious exploration of my surroundings, my automaton pointed out our new direction. It was a tunnel, but the tunnel’s entrance was too small to fit our vehicle, so, climbing out of the walking cephalopod, we continued the journey on foot.

  While in the tunnel, we were illumed by the glowing green slime. I despised being so close to the disgusting stuff. We passed, to my shock, a hideously smelling, decomposing corpse, which I quickly surmised was a Yankee — no doubt, I morbidly joked, unaware of his recent triumph over England in his revolutionary war. As I wondered what new surprises were in store for me, we neared the end of the tunnel and, monsieur, surprised I was, indeed, to behold what next I saw.

  Exiting the tunnel, we beheld a monstrously massive cavern, undulating and alive with the slime — at its centre, vibrating horribly, a cyclopean green-wheeled or starfish-shaped mushroom. It was attached to the rest of the fungus and slime, like a many-tentacled thing, and I was sure it was the fruiting source of the green ooze. There it hung, like a pulsing, grotesque spider in its own web. It was the brain of the world-conquering membranous scum. The deity of the hallucinators’ mushroom world, which was our own world! God-like, indeed, it was!

  Suddenly, I felt a powerful blow to my head. I collapsed — weak, bleeding and dizzy — onto the goo. Before I fainted, I saw a thick grey and yeasty slop of a leg step into my line of vision.

  I awoke to a strange chanting directed towards that contamination at the centre of our world. Beside me I saw, lying also, my clockwork man.

  I was, no doubt, in the clutches of the green godling’s insane cult. I was forgotten for the moment as they praised it.

  Never have you seen, monsieur, such a depraved motley of diseased humanity. They stood like stunted sponge things, for “human” I dare not term them, comprised of growths and deformities too hideous to enumerate and covered with green goo of an unclean corruption. They stepped towards the fungoid entity. With each step, their bodies quaked, so much so that I feared their cellular integrity might collapse. Then a marvellous thing happened.

  They began to disintegrate!

  The huge cavern was filled with their moans as they putrefied and turned to slop. The stoutest, I saw turn and try to escape. I knew then this was not part of their plan. The god was incomprehensibly destroying its own worshippers!

  What was happening? Bravely, I stepped toward the malevolent thing. Nothing happened.

  I surmised that the mushroom-mind had evolved consciousness from the parent mindless fungus over years in isolation and had then, instinctively for survival, spread its green slime and tissue, like a cancer, over the parent species and even through it, taking it over, compromising the parent species’ own integrity, transforming the parent’s flesh in places into itself. All this while, it possessed nothing more than a simple, primitive brain, being defensively instinctual and unthinking like an animal and unaware of anything except its own kind.

  Realising this, I picked up my cannongun, which one of the mushroom beings had carried and walked towards the pulsating tumour. Though suspended, it seemed to squat before me like a malicious imp, spokes of fungal rays radiating from it in all directions. I touched its gob-smooth and slippery flesh. It glowed green. In places, a muc
k of impurity dripped unsettlingly from it. Everything about it aroused deep disgust in my being. Surely, this was life antithetical to man. And yet, oh yet, it was an awe-inspiring sight. Here was a baby, a new-born life-form, lush with fecundity, first of its kind, the earth-circling lord of this world. I petted it, imagining its thought processes to be like those of a dog. Then, taking aim for humanity, I blasted it out of the animal kingdom.

  I will not lie, I will not say it wept or screamed or thrashed and hurled about in agony, as it burnt mightily on fire. It merely burnt, soundlessly, pulsing erratically, though once, I think I did detect, for a second, the faintest outline of a distorted, anguished, semi-human face appear and then disappear on its surface. Perhaps it did this for my benefit. Once it was a charred husk, it burst, releasing smoke, and then it flattened out like an airless bag.

  I rejoiced at how easy it was to destroy! Then the cellular deterioration of the fungus around me started.

  My clockwork man and I ran in fear. The fertile, luxuriantly tropical mushroom vibrancy around us was disintegrating, as if the vital life of the fungal body, with the centre no longer there to pump life through its veins, was dying. And, so I learned the dead entity was not only the fungus’ mind, but also its heart.

  I felt as if rich oxygen and warmth, the very humidity of the air, were being sucked out of the cavern.

  When we reached my submersible, I saw it was damaged — no doubt by those cultists who had followed us and who were now dead.

  We managed to make it back to the mushroom island before the machine completely broke down. I saw then how the island was also slowly deteriorating. I noted how thin filaments of fungus, resembling seaweed, and also thin slime, interconnected to other excremental fungal islands. These islands, too, were falling apart. What an immense arterial network the god had a hold of on this earth! And now it was all dying!

  Was I hero or villain?

  As I sat contemplating all this new information, I could hear my clockwork man’s gears beside me, whirring and clattering. Then, for the first time in ages, I heard through the gramophone embedded in his chest, a small artificial laugh, which grew louder and louder.

  “What are you laughing at?” I yelled at him, disgusted.

  He struggled to use speech tubes long in disuse. Slowly, a sentence began to emerge. “Master is blind,” he said.

  I was incensed at his statement and yet, afraid. “How so?” I asked, secretly dreading his answer.

  He spasmed. I could hear his computational box clunking in his chest.

  Then he answered me. “Monsieur has not taken into consideration all the tools available to him from the current sciences. When the fungus first appeared, it rapidly spread and destroyed most of the greenery and trees of the earth, while also becoming an important source of fuel and food, among other things, for your species, which greatly changed your world. Those green plants I previously mentioned, it is thought they originally supplied earth with oxygen, which your species breathes to survive. The conquering fungus mutated and took over this process, for reasons I cannot fathom. By destroying it, you have destroyed yourself, for when the fungus is dead, the earth will be depleted greatly of its oxygen. Master is a good roboticist but a poor mycologist and botanist. He is also a poor strategist.” After saying this, he began to laugh again.

  The reasonableness of my servant’s logic frightened me. I screamed at him, “And how long have you theorised of this possible outcome? Speak!”

  “Since the day we left France.”

  I then picked up my cannongun and struck him hard, until he was nothing but a mess of rolling gears and dented metal.

  Since that day, I have seen this island decrease, I estimate, by nearly six percent of its mass and the process still continues.

  I will send this letter with one of the seagull-beasts I have captured, in hopes that it might reach you, monsieur, since you are accounted France’s greatest mycologist.

  I wonder what the new face of the earth will bring with it in the coming years. What catastrophes will come? Shall we all die or not?

  My hours I spend now, sometimes blaming myself for our predicament, sometimes blaming others.

  One morning, I saw, far in the distance, a great mound of decaying jelly arise out of the ocean. It looked like a volcano. It erupted and threw millions of spore-like things far into the sky. What this could mean I know not.

  Though, that night, I did dream I walked the fungal island at night, alone. As I looked at the sky, I saw a horrendously large and pulsating moon, all green and dripping green slime. I pictured it as an eye looking down at me. With this thought, I covered my eyes.

  July 23, 17_

  THE PEARL IN THE OYSTER AND

  THE OYSTER UNDER GLASS

  By Lisa M. Bradley

  Lisa M. Bradley’s fiction has appeared in Cicada, Brutarian, Escape Pod and other venues. Originally from South Texas, Lisa has now lived in Iowa for almost twenty years. She believes, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” She tells her impure, tangled truths at cafenowhere.livejournal.com and tweets little white lies @cafenowhere.

  ART’S INVISIBLE FUR RUFFLED in the morning breeze. He disguised his shiver as a stretch, meanwhile pulling the cuffs of his hoodie over his knuckles. He was glad he’d worn the extra layer, though it made him feel more conspicuous, like the black spill staining the normally pastel palette of South Padre Island. At six feet tall, Art towered over most people in the Valley and he was one of the few people not unpacking ‘shroom rafts on the oil-slicked beach. Add the black hoodie on a soon-to-be scorching day and he became an easy landmark for the volunteers recruited by the Association of Coastal Wildlife Refuges.

  On breaks from orienting volunteers, Art assessed the beach with birding binoculars. The “smart nocs” couldn’t distinguish between oil smears and natural coloration, so, at first, he thought the birds huddled over a distant trash barrel had oil-matted plumage. Turned out they were just Laughing Gulls (quite the misnomer now), their heads naturally dark over cotton-white breasts, their grey wings tipped with normal black. Art also checked out the Brown Pelican perched atop the idle oil-skimmer. The bird had been holding vigil for about an hour, as if disgusted by humans’ capacity to muck things up.

  Laughter scattered the gulls. Art lowered his ‘nocs to find a group of teenagers slogging through the sand toward his booth, making the usual jokes about “booms!” The Brown Pelican ended its rueful vigil and fled for the jetties.

  Had these kids gotten permission to skip school to save the world? Art didn’t ask, only handed them starter packs, which included water socks, gloves, sunscreen and pamphlets as hastily printed as the Association had been organised.

  “I can’t walk in these things,” a young woman said, trying to hand the socks back.

  “Sorry, can’t participate without them,” Art said. “Trust me; you don’t want to be scraping tar off your feet for the next three weeks. It’s a carcinogen. Now, anybody have mold or mushroom allergies?”

  The flow of volunteers picked up and Art was soon so busy he stopped noticing the breeze through his fur. Half an hour later, when a woman approached his check-in booth from the side, Art had warmed up enough to push his sleeves to his elbows. On auto-pilot, he passed the woman a starter pack without looking, then turned the laminated map on his clipboard in her direction, to show where she was needed.

  “Oh, no,” she said, amused or embarrassed. Art checked her face and immediately understood, though she went on to explain, “I can’t be in the sun. I’m just supposed to help with check-in. I’m Claudia? Ramirez?”

  Art stepped back to let her enter. She was more overdressed than he was: floppy sun hat strapped under her chin; long-sleeved blouse; yoga pants collecting sand in the dragging, curling hems; trek sandals over socks.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, stowing her purse under the folding table. “My son was dawdling this morning. I didn’t think I’d ever get him out the door and over to
school and then there was a rollover on the highway and DPS didn’t want anyone driving through ….”

  “No problem.”

  Art tried to make himself small — story of his life — but Claudia took up more room than most people. It wasn’t that she was a mix-skin. The grafts gave her face and hands a lumpy, quilted appearance, but Art knew she wasn’t contagious or anything. The CDC had squashed the flesh-eating bacteria at Memorial Hospital within days of its outbreak and that had been ten years ago.

  Still, Claudia was daunting. Art guessed she was five-two and maybe a hundred-twenty pounds, but she seemed set to “steamroll” even when standing still. If she were a cloud, like her name implied, she’d be a storm front. Art couldn’t imagine the whole Department of Public Safety stalling her, let alone a child.

  “Let me take care of this couple coming in,” he said, “and then I’ll answer any of your questions.”

  Once he’d sent the volunteers on their way, she held out her hand. “I didn’t catch your name …?”

  “Art,” he said, shaking her hand. There was a fleshy seam under his thumb; he consciously worked not to rub it.

  “Bart?”

  He smiled. That was the name of an Alaskan Kodiak who’d been in movies. He thought about not correcting her. She wasn’t a regular volunteer; he might never see her again. But he felt compelled to say, “No, it’s Art.’ As in, Arturo … Villanueva.”

  She nodded, struck her temple in that self-deprecating gesture that meant, “Mensa!” before asking, “Are those ‘boom’ things really made out of hair?”

  Art nodded. “And other stuff,” he said, squinting at the long tubes bobbing on the water. They formed an artificial reef of sorts. Below the surface, curtains cascaded from the tubes all the way to the sea floor, creating a semipermeable barrier. “Supposedly, hair’s good at absorbing oil and what the booms don’t absorb, they corral so the skimmers can vacuum the oil off the water.”