Ecopunk!

by Liz Grzyb

  “It’s construction fungus,” Jack explained for the third time, as if his mother hadn’t heard him the first two. “From North Korea. It makes bricks, and insulation, and we could grow a house . . . ”

  She stood up.

  Uncle Julian was in the kitchen, suddenly taking an inordinate interest in washing the dishes. If Viv were here there might have been more words, but she was off in the fields with Dad, so it was only us.

  Then Eliza Dunfries walked out the door and into the dusk.

  “Mom?” Jack asked. “Mom?” He followed her outside, and I could hear his fading voice, pleading.

  Uncle Julian shot me a look. “She’s pissed Minty. You better make this right before your parents get back in.”

  Jack and Eliza were already diminishing figures in the fallow fields by the time I caught sight of them. Eliza had not walked this path since the raid, although Jack and I had been here frequently, right up to the edge of the poison boundary.

  “You think we don’t have enough fungus?” Eliza said to the empty air.

  Before us, the land was white as if it had been dusted with talcum powder. The white crust was a mycorrhizal sealant, a kind of lichen that bound the soil. It didn’t stop the poison, but held the toxic microbeads within chitin-hard capsules until a clean-up crew might be afforded.

  In the evening light the white thallus blushed as pink as a second-degree burn. The carcasses of rabbits lay in various degrees of rot, having barely made a few bites before the remnant toxin chafed away their gut lining and made them shit out half their bodyweight in blood.

  Eliza didn’t look like she was going to slow down. She stepped out over the dioxin-scald, the boundary.

  Then before I could stop her, Eliza grabbed Jack by the scruff of his shirt and held him out over the crust, while his hands ploughed through empty air.

  “Mom!”

  “Your father died on this farm, your sister, your family. That cow represented everything that was left. Everything.”

  Jake wept snotty apologies. She tossed her son aside until he fell on the ground. I half expected her to walk into the badlands herself, one last fuck-you to all the fates that had turned her from that to this.

  Instead she only tipped out the rhizomes and tossed them into the lichen crust. Took the empty bag and threw it onto the ground, stomped it with her foot. Then turned around and headed back the other way.

  I got a sideways look as she passed. Jack had been punished. But mine was still coming.

  * * *

  It rained that night, a big thunderstorm deluge like they get in the tropics, except it wasn’t the tropics but we got it anyway.

  Eliza Dunfries, angry, angry in her silence. She took my father by the hand and led him to the loft. Smitten, he followed her, oblivious to his family watching him go. Beautiful Eliza Dunfries with her features chosen out of a catalogue ten months before her birth. Educated Eliza, who had read real books once, not instruction manuals or weather almanacs. She was like a dream to Bob, an undiscovered country of beauty and sophistication when everything else was rough and utilitarian and not a thing went to waste.

  Viv watched them climb the loft-ladder, before returning to her knitting, her lined and wrinkled face set in folded stone. She said nothing, but the tortoiseshell needles clattered against each other like an engine firing out of time. The grey wool ball bounced and tangled at her feet. She had come from a matriarchal community that would never have allowed this. But Eden Ridge followed different social protocols. Polygamy was permitted. Bob was a man.

  “T’was bound to happen,” Uncle Julian said, and then said nothing at all. They both wondered in ways, when I did not, what had changed Eliza’s mind.

  I didn’t wonder.

  * * *

  I stayed by the window all night after the others went to bed, listened to the rain, smelled the petrichor rise and fade, only to be replaced by mud . . . and something else. A musty smell on the wind, or whatever was left in the wind. The storm put a strange light in the field, marshgas and foxfire. At some stage I must have slept, for I woke to dawn light through the acetate drapes. It had a curious yellow tinge to it, a dust-storm shade.

  The house was empty and quiet, except for the worried murmur of voices outside. The musty smell of before had settled strongly into the house, the way fabric will mildew on a washing line after several days.

  The voices came and went. Footsteps crunched. Most of the community had made a waymark of our front yard, stepping on the grave of my sisters before heading out across the fallow fields. They’d been working through the storm to protect the algae pans, only to find—in the morning—there’d been other things to worry about.

  I followed them, swept up in their movement. Discovered immediately what it was that made them gather.

  On the ruins of the Dunfries farm a forest had sprouted. From such a distance it looked like the kind of tangle you might hide a sleeping princess and most of her town, with whorls and coils as thick as my arm. Jack was leading the charge, and behind him, Eliza and my father. Even as we watched, we could see it grow in height and heft. The drizzling rain appeared to feed the mat, give it shape and substance.

  Agriculture was my précis. With murmurs of caution, I was instructed to breach the few metres of dioxin-blasted ground and inspect the great forest-mat.

  At close range, what had seemed solid was an illusion. The individual mycelial threads in the structure created hollow cylinders and tubules in the outline of tree-trunks and branches. An almost blood-hot heat radiated from the depths of the forest.

  “It’s the chelating lichen,” I said. “An fungal hyphae can grow a kilometre a day, in the right conditions.” I stepped back. “The mass of this growth is probably much more than the original plant. Lichens are symbiotic organisms,” I explained to the algae farmers, who didn’t know much more than their narrow specialisations. “Algae on the top, two sets of fungus below. There was a lot going on underneath the crust.”

  “Then how the hell did this happen?” demanded my father. “This fucking thing. It’ll bring the Husbands. Biosecurity at the very least.”

  Mr Mycelium’s magical beans had grown us a shadow-jungle. The white algae crust had disappeared with the exponential fungal growth. Maybe the man had targeted Jack on purpose. Everyone knew about the farm, how fertile it was, the mineral wealth in the soil, toxin or not.

  “Jack,” Eliza Dunfries said, “come back here.”

  So busy fussing over what the night had brought, we’d ignored the instigator of this sudden fecundity. He was already up close, brushing his hand through the bulk of the hyphae shadow. The lamellae split and dissolved as if he’d interrupted a sculpture of smoke.

  “Jack, stop!”

  He ignored her. It had not only been me who’d stayed awake listening to Eliza Dunfries cement her position in the Eden Ridge Community. Without warning his arms winnowed, and he slipped into the smoky forest of mycelial threads. Before anyone could rush in and haul him out, the fungus grew back around him like a closing curtain after the ending of a show.

  My father held Eliza as she screamed.

  * * *

  There was nothing that could be done. As well as being hot, the mat soon began to ferment with the stench of ammonia and corpse-meat. Everything horrible and rotting at once. The stink from the shadow-forest drove most people back to the familiar wet-soil waft of pondweed. Eliza’s crisis was soon replaced by a vacant, stumbling daze. Dad called on some men to carry her home.

  In the end, Viv volunteered to stay on guard while the others went back to work. I should have returned as well, but I had apologies to make.

  “What really happened here?” she asked me from her seat at the edge of a ditch.

  I told her everything, from meeting Mr Mycelium in the Roadshow to the infected rhizomes flung onto the poison-chelating lichens, to Eliza’s anger at me not advising Jack properly.

  “This is my fault,” I admitted. “Why Mrs. Dunfries is doing what she
’s doing with Dad. She wanted to punish me for letting Jack sell the cow, buy those rhizomes.”

  “No, she doesn’t hold you responsible, my darling. It’s me she has issues with.” Viv brushed the grey lop of her hair back. Her mind was on other things. “What did he look like, this Mr Mycelium fellow?”

  “An old hippie sort of guy. Drove a Kombi van around, filled with mushroom medium. He wasn’t part of the show though.”

  “An itinerant.”

  “I guess.”

  Something caught my attention. It was the rhizome wrapper. I picked it up and gave it to my mother. “This,” I said. “He gave Jack this.”

  The label on the front had a whole lot of Korean-looking writing, random Greek letters and a barcode I didn’t recognise. Viv spread it out on her knee.

  “Mr Mycelium said it was a Pyongyang construction fungus.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Did he now?” With her rough nurseryhand fingers she folded the bag carefully. “This is not construction fungus. I don’t think he even knew what the contents were, only that he could sell them to a stupid boy.”

  “I should have known this. I’m sorry, Mum.”

  She shrugged. “Biotech was your sisters’ ordinance. You were never meant for such knowledge.”

  She raised her hand as I prepared to leave.

  “Wait for it, Minty. You are about to see some magic.”

  I was about to ask why I needed to linger, when the change began. Like all beautiful and fragile things that have reached the end of growing, entropy took over. The delicate construction of fungal hyphae, all the whorls and fingers and articulated branches that hat made a forest in the air began to disintegrate like a enchanted coach at midnight.

  I snatched Viv off the ground as the entire mess, nearly twenty square kilometres of fungal mat, reduced down to a wet, aerated slurry in a matter of minutes.

  “What the hell just happened?” The stench and moisture drove the resident midgies up and around us in a dotty swarm. The residual heat had a vaseline tinge.

  My question had been rhetorical, and it took me by surprise to have my mother answer.

  “Dendritic microstructure failure,” Viv said casually.

  “You recognise this thing?”

  My mother squirmed in my arms, motioned for me to put her down. Once vertical, she wiped the dirt from her hands and the seat of her dress. “Of course. The fungus fruits as a temporary biologic aerogel. I saw this quorum-sensing reaction before, in the community I grew up in.” She waved at the wide wet mess. “Never on so great a scale, though. You should get the boy now. His rescue will make Eliza happy.”

  “Rescue? The poison will have killed him by . . . ”

  “There’ll be no poison. The chemicals have been rendered inert.” She nodded. “Hamgyong Protest Zone transgenic product’ll do that. Now go get him, in case it’s not all cleaned up.”

  I watched Viv as she turned around and walked back to the house. She was about to relegate herself to a certain position in life, exchange places with another woman. She needed something extra-valuable to trade. That would be Jack’s life.

  * * *

  I found Jack sitting on the ossified corpse of a couch, half-burnt, in a room open to the sky. Even in the heat and decay I could see how the Dunfries had lived a luxurious existence. A melted television panel took up one wall. The remains of a mezzanine level and a de-legged snooker table mocked our single-roomed mud-brick estate with its shared loft. If he had noticed the collapse of Mr Mycelium’s Midnight Forest in the meantime, he didn’t show it. His attention was on a digital photograph screen.

  Broken pixels freckled the images. He cycled through the same three photos, one after another. I could see over his shoulder what they were. Family photos. Him with a younger sister. Him and his Dad, handsome and smiling. Eliza Dunfries with her husband, older than Jack, but Jack-faced. Smooth skinned Mr Dunfries, handsome in the way my father, with his gnarled hands and punched-dough face and patchy blond hair, was not.

  “Poison’s gone,’ I said. “Forest is gone. You can come back now.”

  “Don’t fucking matter.” He tossed the picture frame away. “My family’s dead and my Mom is fucking Farmer Gumbo. There’s no reason to come back.”

  He wouldn’t shift off the couch. Beyond the broken walls, the empty fields had turned into bracken-piles of goop and mush. Within a week the work of decomposition and ion-exchange would be done. The land would be capable enough for a hardy cultivar that didn’t mind salt and metal. Jack would be rich.

  Jack’s maudlin mood in the face of such a success flipped deep switches in me. I shoved the couch and tipped him off.

  “Ow!” he fell onto the floor. “What the hell, Minty?”

  “So what if your family are dead, huh? You’re just gonna sit here and whine about what happened? Get up off your arse and get on with it. The land is good again. You got it back.”

  He gave me an odd look as he stood up. Not angry. Maybe even slightly amused.

  “Didn’t think you had that kind of shit in you.”

  “That kind of what?”

  “Motivational speaking. I thought you guys just did farm analysis.”

  I thought for a bit. “I guess when they made my model they thought farmers might need a bit of encouragement from time to time.”

  “As apart from ‘get off your arse and work’?”

  “There’s more to civilisation than just agriculture. Survival is all about persistence, after all.” I picked my way through the debris to where the Dunfries’ version of me lay like a broken doll alongside a vintage Playstation. A skin of verdigris covered her corroded head. A long time ago somebody—a Dunfries looking for extra processing power to the house mainframe maybe—had plasma-cut open their agricultural unit and mucked around with her internals. Such destruction had shortened her life, made her next to useless. What was that saying? Cutting open the goose that laid the golden egg.

  Jack nodded. “Yeah, you were an unadulterated, high end unit. Mom told me once that she tried to buy you off Viv. Before the raid. But your mother refused to sell you. Must have been the first time anyone ever said no to Eliza Dunfries. She’s nursed that grudge for a long time.”

  “The deal wouldn’t have worked out even if Mum had agreed,” I said. “My cognition is predicated on a family model. As much as I logically know pain and grief are an illusion, I’d have certainly suffered from a family separation. I’d have fallen into a depression.”

  “Like the dogs.”

  “Well, yes.” I wondered if he was being mean. Cruel Jack, then. But if it made him feel better and got him out of here, what did it matter? “C’mon,” I said. “Viv gets bonus points in your mum’s eyes if I return you alive and not screaming.” I touched his head with my hand, shiny as a copper kettle. “If you stay here too long you’ll grow mushrooms in your hair like Mr Mycelium.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Huh.” But he came with me anyway. It felt good, that he did. My social protocols rewarded me my correct deeds and generosities. I would return Jack to Eliza. She would have to be nice to Viv from now on, because she would owe Viv this favour, and because I was Viv’s agricultural unit after all.

  It was only Jack who walked out of the farm that day, walked like a man who owned property, and with a man’s responsibilities. As for me, I lifted my feet and counterweights, and beside him danced.

  * * ** * ** * *

  The Right Side of History

  Jane Rawson

  You’ll need to sign this.”

  The woman pushed a piece of paper across the counter to him. Art looked at his brand new paws, held them up to her in mute confusion.

  “Just use the ink pad,” she said. “It’s legal.” She paused. “You won’t be able to read it, of course, but it summarises what we discussed before the procedure. That you agreed to the Transference of your own free will, that you were offered the option of relocating to the HD Towers and chose Transference instead, that your species was selected
without duress.”

  Art pressed his paw into the ink pad and onto the page.

  “If you’re feeling quite well . . . ” Art indicated he was. “Then take that corridor down to the end, turn left and you’ll be at the loading dock. Serge will see you into the carrier for transport to your new habitat.” She inserted the sheet of paper into a file and closed her laptop. “Thank you for Transferring with HabiNow; we appreciate your patronage,” she said.

  * * *

  The house was all packed, most of what they owned given away or split into its component parts for reuse and recycling. Lally looked over the three boxes remaining. None of the furniture would come with them—the HD Towers were designed on Passivhaus principles and pre-furnished in that cunning, Swedish way, with everything sliding into everything else and all the things you didn’t need vanishing at the touch of a button. The wall garden included a super-tensile hammock, a place to nestle among the ferns and epiphytes, misted in sweet-smelling water, breathing in the aroma of deep forest. Everything else was in the common rooms: a place for guests to stay, a vegetable garden, dining rooms with chef kitchens you could rent by the hour if you were having friends over for dinner, sheds and workshops, a music studio. And the library. All her books were gone now, to other people, other libraries. She’d kept only two, talismans. There was the Tower library and that would be enough for her now. She would learn to share.

  She called Art again. Again Art didn’t answer. Perhaps she could pack the Smart4Two and pick him up from the office on the way.

  She sat on the couch they’d bought on their tenth wedding anniversary, earmarked now for a doctor’s waiting room, and watched the demolition crews working in the next street, dismantling houses and trucking away the reusable materials, landscaping plots and planting native trees and grasses. Theirs was the last cul-de-sac to go, the last street in the suburb to get its Ultimatum.