The hallway was narrow and dark, windowless, barely wide enough for two to walk abreast. On the walls hung rows of flaking canvases and flickering holofiles, more of the crude artwork that I had seen last night in the main hallway. Each one depicted some theme of cruelty, to humans or geneslaves: energumens howling at the touch of a sonic probe, men chained to the deck of a wooden ship, gaunt women huddled in the shadow of a vast shining aircraft. As I passed, the ’files whispered their titles to me: The Last of Home, Captivity, Bound for Stemville, Luther Burdock’s Children. I wanted to avert my eyes but could not. Vulgar as they were, the images were compelling, pathetic monsters and cruel masters doomed to play out their terrible drama in this forgotten place.
“Underground Railway,” Trevor said, his soft drawl magnified in the long hallway. “My family has been part of it for six hundred years.”
Underground Railway? I shook my head, but of course he couldn’t see me in the dark. Before I could ask him to explain, he halted. He fiddled with a catch in the wall, and a door sagged open.
“Careful. It’s steep down here—”
There was no handrail. I walked with both hands outstretched to touch the walls, afraid I’d fall on top of him. No lamps hung here, but an eerie violet glow poured through the darkness below. At the bottom Trevor waited for me.
“This is where we do most of our farming,” he said, ducking to avoid a beam.
I followed him into a cavernous space, chilly and dank and smelling of earth and soft rot. Walls formed of immense flagstones rose about us. In the center of the basement a huge double archway of brick supported the ceiling.
“Central fireplace.” Trevor slapped it, his hand leaving a damp mark on the masonry. “Mid-eighteenth century. Some of the same masons who did Monticello did this. Hasn’t moved an inch in six centuries.”
The room felt older far than that. I could imagine it being built a thousand years before, the stonemasons slipping on the clayey ground as they dragged their stone and bricks in, hod after hod. Beneath my feet the earth was smooth but uneven, as though carved of ice. Along the walls makeshift shelves held stacks of greenglass bottles, winking in the dimness like spiders’ eyes.
“It’s a little slick here, so be careful,” warned Trevor. He moved easily, walking between the brick arches to where the lavender glow deepened. Following him, I blinked, stopped once to rub my eyes. The light had a peculiar fuzzy quality; the edges of things disappeared, so that I bumped into one end of the archway and grazed my knuckles.
“Here—” Trevor reached back and took my hand, pulled me gently after him. “It’s hard, until you get used to it.”
We stood in a vast open area behind the second arch. From the ceiling hung lamps of all shapes and sizes, a jumble of lights that made my head ache. Ultraviolet tubes, deep purple growthlights, aquamarine diatom lanterns, kerosene lamps giving off a foul smell. Beneath them stretched row after row of narrow tables, piled high with what looked like rubbish. Twisted piles of sticks, rotting logs, shallow trays gleaming as though they held stagnant water. The stench of rot was heavier here, but as we approached the tables, another smell masked it. A thick earthy odor, sweetish and not unpleasant, but containing a range of other smells—vanilla, spoiled meat, the rich scent of bittersweet chocolate.
“This is our little farm,” Trevor said proudly. He stopped in front of a table, bent, and picked up a half-sprung willow basket from the floor beneath it. “Some of them need strong light, others don’t. And you can see how many different growth mediums we use.”
That was what the rubbish was: fodder for thousands of mushrooms growing in the dark. I stepped after him, blinking as the light eased from blinding ultraviolet to soft green. There were tables stacked with decaying logs, sorted by type—oak here, birch there, a thicket of slender alder wands heaped on a rusted water-filled tray. From every pile sprang mushrooms, like villages built upon the ruins of ancient capitals. Fungi like frail coral, deep scarlet and palest yellow; common white toadstools; puffballs the size of a man’s head. Trevor gathered some of these, his basket filled after he had pulled only four from their soft humus bed. He paused to pluck tiny red buttons from a grassy heap, tasting them thoughtfully before turning to a row of metal trays filled with what looked like fresh manure, smelling strongly of warm grass and sun.
“Psilocybin,” he explained, holding up a little brown cap flecked with dull green. Its gills had turned bright blue where he had bruised them. “You’d be surprised what the Ascendants trade for these.”
We wandered through the maze of tables, Trevor filling baskets only to leave them, seemingly forgotten, on the ground. At first the basement had appeared endless, but now I could see that we were approaching its far wall. The lights were dimmer here, mostly ultraviolet tubes that set the mushrooms and other fungus aglow with radiant colors beneath them. I hugged my arms to my chest, feeling the clammy air like a damp hand sliding beneath my sweater.
“ Now. ”
Trevor’s voice came softly in my ear. I started, turned to see him walking past me, past the last glowing fresco of deep violet and blue and orange beds. At the end of the basement stood an enormous glittering table that stretched from wall to wall. As I drew nearer, I saw it was made of steel, like those surgical stages used at HEL. Something was laid across it. More piles of logs, I thought at first—birch, probably, because they were so pale, and striated with darker markings. A very faint radiance hung above them, a silvery phosphorescence that shimmered slightly when Trevor bent his head over what lay there. I crept up behind him and stopped.
Fungus delicate as grasses sprouted from the logs, giving off a pale-green glow like mist. Some had minute fronds, covered with tiny projecting spines so that they resembled velvety ferns. Others swelled to club-shaped bulbs shining with some viscous substance, their bulbous protuberances a deep red. As Trevor moved above them, white threads like smoke streaked the air. A sharp lemony smell mingled with the scent of damp earth and decay.
“ Amanita cerebrimus, ” he murmured. And as he dipped his head to examine one of the growths, I saw for the first time exactly what lay upon the tables.
Corpses. Lined up head to toe, their arms stretched at their sides with palms opening upward as though to catch some lost rays of sunlight. Their chest cavities had been opened, their ribs neatly spread to show where their inner organs had been. Hearts, lungs, spleen; all traces of veins or musculature had been covered with the feathery mushrooms climbing over the smooth white bone like moss. I drew back horrified, but Trevor pulled me toward him, gently but with irresistible strength.
“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered. The orbs beneath his enhancer sent twin shafts of cobalt lancing through the emerald mist. “We didn’t kill them, Wendy. They have been here for a very long time—years and years and years, some of them. The fungus preserves them. And the cold, of course.”
He frowned and bent over one, prodding it with a long finger. “Ah, yes, Catharine Fong. We worked together for many years, before she died during a bombing by the Commonwealth. A wound in the chest, very clean, no damage to the brain whatsoever. It hardly even bled.”
I tried to run, but Trevor was too strong. He pulled me closer, until I stood above the cadaver’s head. The flesh had been eaten away until only a bare skull remained, pure white and innocent as an egg. As I watched, Trevor bent and moved a flap of bone above the eyes, like a tiny trapdoor, then opened the entire skull as though peeling an orange.
Her brain was still inside. Crinkled and pale gray, and nearly white in spots, like beech bark. Hundreds of tiny star-shaped protrusions covered it, yellow and pale ivory, ranging from the size of a teardrop to some bigger than an egg. Trevor picked one and rolled it between his fingers, releasing a sharp, almost oily smell. Lemons, and the scent of fresh earth.
“I spent fifty years working on this project,” he said dreamily. He pinched the mushroom between his fingers and brought it to his mouth, biting it crisply in two. “We started in Rochester,
and when they burned Rochester, we started all over again in Warrenton. Fifty years, and that was just the beginning…”
He held out the other half of the mushroom to me. I shook my head, clutching the edge of the steel table—anything to keep from crying out and turning to run. Trevor tilted his head, surprised at my refusal, and went on.
“It was a fluke. As a boy I had been intrigued by reading about the early research of Burdock and then Oona Wang, primitive compared to what they did later but quite fascinating in its way, a shame it’s been overshadowed by Burdock’s more sensational work. I was trying to find some way of splicing ovarian tissue with Mitrula abietis, something that would allow us to regenerate human cells using water and algae as a medium. Then that laboratory was gassed. When I returned several months later, I found the first strains growing there—one of the technicians hadn’t escaped, and the spores found their way to his corpse. The citrusy smell made me curious—usually those things smell awful, as I’m sure you’ve noticed—and when I examined more closely, I couldn’t believe what I saw.”
His eyebrows arched above the enhancer as he popped the rest of the mushroom into his mouth. “It took forever. Decades. By then I was supposed to be working on other projects—the Ascendants have never understood how painstaking the true scientific process is—and so I had to continue my own work privately. And, of course, I couldn’t just kill people to have a steady supply of corpses. Although that’s how they would have done it,” he added, shaking his head.
“Gradually I isolated the one strain, the cerebrimus, and found the ideal mating of spores and medium. And after some more time, the decaying process of the corpses themselves slowed. If you look, you’ll see that some of them are remarkably preserved.”
I looked where he gestured at the last cadaver, lying with the soles of its feet pressed against the slick stone walls. Its flesh was pale but with a rosy flush, not puckered or mottled as some of the others were.
I reached out to touch it, then snatched my hand away. “But—how did you—”
Trevor shrugged, as though the answer were obvious. “DNA,” he said in his honeyed drawl. “The spores produce molecules that imitate those in human DNA, so successfully that they can fuse with them, and producing the same bends and cricks that cause human genes to mature. They repeated this process, over thousands and thousands of generations as I refined them.
“Human DNA is programmed to decay after a certain number of years. But these fungi cause mutations in the strands: when you eat one, it produces a sort of chemical explosion in your brain; and after the smoke clears, your DNA has basically reset itself. It’s no longer programmed to die. This is no instant immortality, nothing as banal as that; but the rate of aging is slowed considerably. The really miraculous aspect of all this is that the brain cells themselves actually regenerate; and that of course is an effect the Ascendants have been looking for all along, with their geneslaves and other horrors.”
He paused, staring raptly into the dimness, then added, “And of course, it has had some very interesting applications for some of the geneslaves. The energumens, for one. They have been engineered to have such fleeting life spans; but these could change all that.”
Turning, he swept one arm out toward the banks of rotting logs piled high with their soft and luminous fruits. “I have made other discoveries as well,” he said proudly. “All here, all by myself. Mushrooms that look like psilocybin and have the same initial reactions; but which cause a slow, debilitating madness, and ultimately death. And my Amanita dacryion, my little cups of tears—they taste heavenly, but after a meal you are filled with such sorrow that all hope flees, and all desire to live.”
“But why?” I said, a little desperately. “Why all these—these things ?”
Trevor’s hand dropped to his side. “Because we have enemies, Wendy. Very powerful enemies. We have learned to fight with whatever weapons we can.”
And then another thought came to me. I shivered, recalling his words earlier, and asked in a low voice, “How long has it been?”
He looked puzzled. “How long?”
I pointed at the corpses. “You said they’ve been here a very long time— how long?”
Trevor tapped a finger to his lips, leaning against the table so that his shadow cut through the green mist. “Oh—let’s see—ninety years for Antonin, I think. A little more than that for Catharine.”
“And upstairs—on the mantel, those skulls—”
He brightened, as though suddenly seeing the logic behind my questions. “Oh, those were some of the first ones. I brought them here with me—misplaced sentiment, I suppose. Giles finds them morbid.”
“And you,” I whispered. “How old are you?”
He smiled and plucked another of the star-shaped growths from the table. “I’ll give you a hint. I was born in the Free State of Virginia, three years before the Third Shining.”
The Third Shining. Nearly two hundred years before.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still facing me, chewing calmly, his enhancer a silver crescent across his face. “Why are you telling me this?”
He shrugged, still smiling. “Because you and your friends will be with us for several months—at least until March, when the roads will be more easily traveled. And because I have learned from experience that guests here become curious, over time, and it is more expedient to explain certain things truthfully to those who can bear the knowledge—to those who might perhaps benefit from learning new things. And because I think that we share a common enemy, you and I. You know what it is like to have been enslaved, to have been a pawn in the hands of the Ascendants. Someone with your history, with your powers—you might well benefit from what we have learned—”
I shook my head fiercely. “I have no enemies—”
Again that raised eyebrow. “No? And what of Margalis Tast’annin?”
“He was a madman—I knew nothing of him before we were captured—and besides, he’s dead now.”
Trevor’s voice rang out eerily in the dimness. “But what he stands for is not dead! The strength and horror of NASNA and the Ascendant Autocracy are not dead! They still breed geneslaves in their laboratories and cells. Everywhere on Earth humanity has become a tyrant, bending animals and children and heteroclites to their will. And not only within the Ascendant Autocracy: the Balkhash Commonwealth is no better, and some believe that the Habilis Emirate is worse.”
I shivered. I had never had any interest in talk of this sort. At HEL, Dr. Harrow had tried in vain to educate her empaths in politics. I retained only a vague memory of multicolored images on glowing mapscreens, their borders swelling and retreating, amoebalike, as each day brought subtle and evanescent political changes to the continents depicted there. “I know nothing of this,” I insisted.
“You should learn, then!” Trevor’s hand slapped down upon the edge of a table. “Six hundred years ago there was a war here—a different kind of war, a ground war. They fought because men enslaved other men, bartered and sold them like animals. It was an abomination to man and nature, and the world never recovered from it. Even a hundred fifty years later it was still reeling from the horrors of slavery—and then the First Shining came and they were all wiped away.”
I looked away from the glare of his enhancer. “But there are no slaves now.”
“Aren’t there?” Trevor whipped the enhancer from his face, so that the piercing light from his optics lit our corner of the room. “What were you at HEL, Wendy? What was Fossa? What was Miss Scarlet? And these are only the geneslaves! What of the moujik peasants from the Commonwealth, and the child farms on Kalimantan?”
I shook my head stubbornly. “I know nothing of this, nothing! And my friends know less—in the City they live simply, for pleasure only, or for knowledge—”
“In the City they live for nothing now!” cried Trevor. “Ascendant janissaries from Araboth and Vancouver have occupied it. If any of your friends survived the in
itial attacks, they are prisoners—slaves or worse. Your lover was one of the fortunate ones, to have died before they arrived. You of all people should know what happens when the Ascendants seize control.” I said nothing, only stared numbly into the misty phosphorescence swirling about him.
He was right: in the days following Dr. Harrow’s suicide, Ascendant personnel had swarmed into the Human Engineering Laboratory. They had murdered many of the other empaths and surely would have killed me as well, after subjecting me to more of their “research.” I thought of the paintings and ’files hanging in the corridors upstairs; of the scars upon Miss Scarlet’s throat; of Fossa, and the other aardmen who had given obeisance to the Aviator in the Cathedral. I thought of Justice dead; of countless others in the City of Trees, bound to steel gurneys with their heads shaved as mine had been, screaming as their minds were taken from them.
At last I said slowly, “I think I understand what you are telling me. But if you’re part of some—some rebellion, some resistance movement—there’s nothing I can do to help you. My usefulness as an empath has ended. My friends are as you see them: an educated geneslave who performs as an actress and a girl who’s good with animals. That’s all.”
“Ah, but your powers might come back,” Trevor said, an edge of excitement in his voice. “I know a great deal about these things—the proper stimulation, with drugs and psychotropic chemicals; even natural adrenaline could do it….”
“No!” My shout sent a lantern swinging above us. “I am not going to be used like that again, not for anything—especially not for some fucking geneslave riot —”
Trevor dipped his head so that the light from his optics swept across the floor. His mouth was tight, his voice cold.
“This is not a riot, Wendy. Nor is it some hastily planned rebellion. Some of us have been working toward this for our entire lives—a means of undoing the wrongs wrought over the centuries by the tyrants, a union of mankind and geneslaves—
“An Alliance. ”
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