“Cordyceps jacintae,” Larkin said quietly. “The little mushroom that caused the big trouble.”
“I thought you said they grew inside the central nervous system,” Roger remarked.
“They do,” Seiji agreed, “but they’re not obligate myconeural symbionts. The fungus can survive without a myconeural association, but it doesn’t thrive very well. Its long-term genetic stability and survival chances are greatly reduced outside a host. Here we grow them on a medium composed of cloned nerve cells. When we want them to fruit, as these are doing, we drain off the nutrient that the nerve cells need to stay alive. As conditions worsen and the nerve cells die, the Cordyceps spawn sends up these fruiting bodies, from which we collect the spores.”
“In the cave inside the tepui,” Larkin remarked, “I saw them growing from corpses preserved by the cave’s stable environment. An island of the dead in the midst of a shallow lake in the cave’s great room. Fine masses of cottony white threads spread and knit over entire corpses there. Mushrooms jutted like alien phalluses from mouths, ears, eye-sockets, abdomens. Jacinta assured me the spawn only fruited after its host had died, but the sight of it was so grisly it still made me vomit. What we’ve found in the lab seems to bear her out on the death/spawn cycle, though.”
Roger crouched down until the mushrooms were at eye-level.
“So these bring clairvoyance and far-seeing and all those other subtle powers you mentioned, eh?” Roger asked Larkin. “Full brain activity, the high road to enlightenment—”
“Not enlightenment,” Seiji said with a sniff. “What you call ‘subtle powers’ yogins have long called siddhis. But yogins don’t view such powers as enlightening—rather almost as obstacles to be overcome on the path to enlightenment. If you get so obsessed with them that they prevent you from proceeding further along the path, then you never reach enlightenment.”
“But what about that telepathy Paul here told me about?” Roger asked. “Wouldn’t that tend to make people more—I don’t know—compassionate, as they’re always going on about here? More enlightened in that sense?”
Larkin looked down at the cell-masses from which the fungi grew.
“Certainly my sister and the tepui people would agree with you,” he said. “Once the full development of the myconeural symbiosis has taken place—after twelve years, remember—then yes, they claimed that human hosts with full myconeural networks become natural telepaths with each other, experiencing immediate information transfer, mind to mind. I did note myself that, among them, language was for children—’because only children have need of it,’ or so they claimed.”
Larkin touched the tip of one of the fruiting bodies, then shrugged his shoulders and palms upward.
“Who can say? They had so many strange ideas, such a strange mythology. I mean, they claimed their sacred mushroom came from the sky tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. Before we parted company for the last time, Jacinta said the spawn ‘remembered’—or at least allowed its symbionts access to a collective unconsciousness unlike anything Jung could have imagined.”
Roger straightened up. The idea of “remembering” sparked something in him.
“What sort of collective unconscious?”
“One not limited to this planet,” Larkin said, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Their myths spoke of a ‘Great Cooperation,’ a sort of angelic communion and harmony of all myconeuralized creatures throughout the heavens. According to them, we humans were all meant to be telepaths, part of their Great Cooperation, but we went wrong. We developed consciousness and intellect without the fullness of empathy we misname telepathy. For the tepui people, all the wars and brutality of human history were a proof of our ‘wrongness.’ Their myth of the Fall was that it was all a big mistake, that we have a rightful place in the bliss of the Cooperation, but we were accidentally passed over. That’s what my sister and the tepui inhabitants claimed they were up to with all the gear she brought out there. They were trying to re-connect with that galactic harmony or whatever it was supposed to be.”
Roger looked up from the mushroom heads to stare quizzically at Larkin.
“The dish antennas in your video—they were trying to broadcast information to extraterrestrials, then? Or wait for some message out of the long night?”
“Not at all,” Larkin said, shaking his head. “In their mythology, what we would call ‘information’ is everything. The universe is information, gravity is an expression of it, matter and energy are two of its states—but information underlies it all. Jacinta claimed that she and the tepui people were pulling as much information down from the satellites as they could, the tepui indígenas pumping it straight into their wide-open minds, shaping it and casting it from ‘mindtime’ into space-time through what Jacinta called ‘quartz information drivers’ and ‘intelligent crystal technology’.”
Larkin did not miss the wry, disbelieving smile that flickered over Roger’s face.
“I know, I know. I didn’t believe it either. When Jacinta started talking about analogous piezoelectric effects and telling me that crystalline materials of proper lattice configuration and sufficient size could receive and amplify mental energies and translate them into motive forces, I thought she was just plain deluded. When she told me they were going to sing and think critical information densities into the crystal ‘collecting columns’ they’d placed throughout the tepui cave’s big chamber, when she told me those collectors would translate and amplify that information so they could dissociate the tepui from the gravitational bed of local space-time, I thought they were all flat-out insane. What else was I to think?”
“Seems like a logical conclusion to come to,” Roger said with a nod.
“Yes,” Larkin replied distractedly. “But then the tepui took off and disappeared, and then something almost equally strange happened outside Sedona a few years later. Cordyceps jacintae was found to contain KL 235, and ‘gateheads’ developed the same sort of information-devouring propensities as the tepui tribe. The gateheads, though—lacking a full myconeural complex and a cultural mythology of rejoining some Great Cooperative—they didn’t know what use to put all that information to once they had it, I guess, and it has driven quite a few of them truly crazy.”
Seiji stared at Paul Larkin, as if something had just occurred to him, but Roger was already speaking again.
“What if I wanted to try some of these things?” he asked, gesturing at the crop of C. jacintae. “I mean, this space habitat is known for its laissez-faire ‘personal use’ policies, right?”
Larkin and Yamaguchi glanced worriedly at each other.
“We certainly can’t and won’t stop you,” Seiji said after some thought, looking Roger hard in the eye. “You’re an adult, you have free will, you have a right to be wrong so long as that right doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. But my brother had those rights too, Mr. Cortland—even if they weren’t the law on Earth. He became a gatehead and eventually suffered a nervous collapse. As you’re probably aware, ingestion of Cordyceps jacintae was also implicated in Paul’s sister’s strange behavior and eventual disappearance.”
Larkin nodded, then addressed Roger too.
“If you’re just looking for a holiday from your everyday mind,” Larkin speculated, “and you think adaptogenic mushrooms might be your meat, it would probably be safer if you tried one of the more traditional varieties—Psilocybe or Panaeolus, perhaps. Their nature and effects are much better known—and there isn’t such a legacy of madness, disappearance and death associated with them.”
“Interesting,” Roger said with a sly smile. “It almost sounds as if you’re trying to dissuade me. But what if I insist?”
Another of those quick worried glances passed between Larkin and Yamaguchi.
“Then you may remove the fruiting bodies in such numbers as I judge do not constitute a threat to the continuance of the species,” Yamaguchi re
plied. “We will also provide you with as much relevant information about the chemical composition, physicochemical and psychological effects, history, and tepuian mythology of C. jacintae as we can make available to you. What use you make of that information—even whether you peruse it at all—is up to you, of course.”
“All right,” Roger said, plucking convoluted ball-stalk fruiting bodies from the neural mass in which they grew before him. He smiled to himself. He’d always wanted to test the colonists’ policy hypotheses, their loose fabric of “neo-autonomous communitarian” ideas.
When Roger had perhaps a half-dozen of the mushrooms, he tossed them into one of the sacks containing jasmine-flowers and their extract. Yamaguchi and Larkin, meanwhile, were busy scrounging up informational faxes to hand to him on the subject of the vertical fruit of the horizontal tree.
“What the tepui people developed wasn’t just a mythology, really,” old Larkin remarked as he handed Roger a sheaf of faxes. “It was an entire cosmogony centered around the life cycle of their totem mushroom. Even in the little time I spent with Jacinta and the tepui people I was able to see that. Everything for them was spore and spawn and fruiting body—and the void that comes before and after and always is. Kekchi, their old wise one, sang me their Story of the Seven Ages, the history of the universe as seven Great Cycles of spore/spawn/fruiting body, spore/spawn/ fruiting body—”
Glancing at his watch, Larkin abruptly broke off.
“Good heavens! I didn’t realize how late it was. Thanks for your time, Seiji, but we’ve got to go. To my lab, Dr. Cortland—double-time!”
Gathering up their impedimenta, they quickly and quietly made their way out of the underground complex of Mycology laboratories, returning to the surface only briefly as they looked for a bullet cart station. With a flashing of lights and the quiet whoosh of its sudden appearance, a bullet cart arrived and they boarded.
Larkin’s Cryogenetics facility was within easy walking distance of its nearest bullet cart station and in a moment they found themselves walking down another underground corridor, a better-lit twin to the passage they’d walked down in Mycology. Roger thought it could easily have passed for one of the corridors in his own lab—or for a bullet cart tube, but for the many doors lining it.
“You’re fortunate that we have some civets bred up right now,” Larkin said, opening a door onto a room of thick pungent animal smells that reminded Roger of the atmosphere in the Big Cat house of an old-fashioned zoo. “We breed all our species up to sexual maturity now and then—as a test to see how well their genetic material is holding up to cryogenic storage, and as a source of new sperm and egg for in vitro fertilization work.”
Larkin handed Roger four brown-glass vials filled with a liquid of some sort.
“Here you go,” Larkin said. “I’ve already extracted the musk fluid from their anal scent glands for you.”
“That’s it?” Roger asked incredulously, putting the vials in his shirt pocket as Larkin ushered him back out to the hall. “It’s that easy? Thanks! You’ve saved me a lot of work.”
“No problem. Good luck with your perfume experiments,” Larkin said, shaking hands with the younger scientist. The older man’s face grew graver for a moment. “Your psycho-active experiments too, if you know what I mean. And be careful, whatever you decide.”
With a nod and a wave, Roger parted from Larkin and began moving down the corridor with his sacks of plants and their essential extract and his newly acquired civet musk. At least I don’t have to carry one of those little civet-beasties back to my lab, he thought.
Not far along the hallway, though, he stopped, surprised to see Jhana Meniskos sitting behind a desk in one of the lab offices off the corridor, placing slides on a microscope. He put his bags and bundles down and knocked on the doorjamb. Jhana looked up.
“Dr. Cortland! This is a surprise. What brings you here?”
Roger gestured toward the sacks.
“Gathering materials for my perfume, actually. I was here to see Paul Larkin. He’s been such a big help I think I’ll have the first batch brewed up very soon,” Roger said, staring with sudden intensity at Jhana as he withdrew faxes from behind the musk vials in his shirt pocket. “I’d forgotten you worked here, but this will expedite things nicely. I received these faxes of interest and intent from your employer at Tao-Ponto. He requests that you pass on your encryption code to me for any future transactions I might wish to make with the company.”
Jhana took the faxes Cortland handed her. She scanned them, read the request, and nodded. She jotted down a number and handed it back to Roger with his faxes.
Roger stared down at the number 105366 and smiled. Jhana seemed pre-occupied with thoughts of her own.
“One more thing,” Roger said, folding the faxes back into his pocket. “Would you be so kind as to be one of the first women to wear the perfume I’ve created? I’d be honored if you would.”
Jhana glanced up at him.
“All right,” she said quietly, nodding. Just once wouldn’t cause any permanent harm, she supposed.
“Good! Then come visit my lab about two, your time here. I’m looking forward to it.”
Jhana nodded mutely while Roger gathered together his impedimenta. As he left her office and walked down the hall, he was so proud of what he’d already accomplished today that he almost felt like whistling—were it not for that distressing flutter of wings in his peripheral vision once more.
* * * * * * *
As she dressed for the colony meeting Marissa kept half an eye on the last few minutes of a mini-documentary playing on one wallscreen. The program was called Worldchangers and she’d seen a couple of installments since her arrival. They seemed to consist mostly of archival footage and interviews with habitat residents who’d been active in various movements for peace, social justice, and ecological restoration on Earth before they came up to the habitat.
A black woman who looked to be in her late fifties appeared on the screen. The frame froze and a caption appeared on the screen:
CLARA SCHULMAN organized the first of our colony’s Earth Restoration Groups (ERGs), organizations dedicated to transferring to Earth those ideas and practices of ecologically sound living developed here in the space habitat.
As she spoke, her image was replaced by archival footage of what she was talking about.
Transcript of Worldchangers interview with Clara Schulman (excerpt):
I was very young at the time, but I remember very clearly the first time I got arrested for civil disobedience.
I guess you might say I had an epiphany of sorts. Right then and there I decided to go over the fence—to commit what the Department of Energy called ‘illegal trespass’. From a representative of the Western Shoshone National Council I got my permit to enter the Test Site lands—which by treaty were still the Shoshone people’s territory. I trespassed, got arrested and handcuffed by a man in camouflage, then herded into the women’s side of the holding pen, sort of a mini-concentration camp bulldozed out of the desert. Putting us on the same chartered buses that had earlier brought the test site workers out from Vegas, the authorities hauled us off to be booked for our ‘crime.’
I won’t say I haven’t looked back—I have. But never with regret. Eventually all the nuclear test sites everywhere ceased operations, and that was an important step for the protection and restoration of the Earth. But even if the test sites were still operating, even if we’d failed in our larger project, for me my action would still have been right, still worthwhile, for my experience there taught me that the Earth itself—and all time and space—is a test site, a vale of soul-making....
Marissa commanded the screen off, got up, and left her residence. Deep in thought she passed through her garden, wondering about heavens and hells, paradises and test sites. She thought of distances, fences, boundaries, walls. She glanced up at the garden world arching in th
e sheltering sky above her. The space habitat was itself a world walled off both by distance and by metal, a world increasingly free of Earth—yet its settlers paradoxically felt themselves increasingly responsible for Earth and what went on there. For them, the ensphering walls of the space habitat were less a boundary than a sort of semi-permeable membrane through which light and ideas and sustenance might pass in both directions.
Walking to the nearest bulletcart station Marissa thought of how, since her arrival, she’d become more aware of the ERGs and the habitat’s various other missions to Earth. In some ways, this colony was so completely different from every other colony in human history. Undeniably, it did have something of the typical colony/Mother Country relationship: the space colony shipping energy down the well, getting back from the Mother Planet those finished products that couldn’t be manufactured locally. But that was about the extent of the similarity. No indigenous peoples had had to be “civilized”, “displaced” or eliminated here, no wilderness had to be exploited out of existence. Rather this was a place built and peopled for the first time, a seed or spore of the home world, an offspring that had in some ways come to maturity and moved away—but one still concerned for the welfare of its parent.
On the platform waiting for the bullet, Marissa shrugged back her hair and gazed once more toward the distant other side of the sphere, into the shadowed forests and fields and gardens beyond the glittering Line of the axial ridge, past the shimmering dragonflies of aircyclists, the tiny gnat-swarms of free-fall soccer players. Unbidden, the phrase “a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new” rose into her mind, with force enough that she could not ignore it.
Yes, it was all of that—especially new. But would it at last prove only a world like that poet’s vision of nineteenth century Earth, a place having “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”? Would this world of light also be reduced to a darkling plain where ignorant armies once again clashed by night?
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