Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “This is very strange,” Michael said, rocking slowly in the chair. “Still, it’s just possible that their myths may be telling us something. I mean, Caracamuni plateau is shield rock, one point eight billion years old, so it’s certainly old enough to qualify for being around since ‘the time before time.’ A puzzle, though, nonetheless.”

  “What about it, in particular?” Paul asked from the sofa. Susan sat forward in the love seat suddenly, popped a pair of blinks over her eyes, flipped down the throat mike and began fiddling with her handheld PDA. She panned and tilted her head around for the best signal from the nearest wireless connection port.

  “I always thought the dispersal of life-code materials would be essentially random,” Michael said.

  “Unguided at all stages, like evolution itself. If what those four kids put together echoes the truth, then that changes things.”

  “How so?”

  “That thing that looked like some kind of winged viral starship,” Michael said. “What do the kids say it is?”

  “A ‘contact ship from a sixth-age civilization’ is the best I can squeeze out of them,” Paul said. “If Jacinta was right about their cosmogony, I think that’s the stage where what we might call ‘interstellar travel’ first pops up.”

  “So this ship or whatever it is apparently gets into trouble, right? Out beyond the edge of what I’m thinking must be our solar system—out beyond the Oort cloud. Then the crew appear to sacrifice themselves amid what seems to be the Oort cloud. Then again near what I’d be willing to bet are the Kuiper and asteroid belts. Then finally on a world that looks like it might someday harbor intelligent life—one that has me racking my brains trying to remember what Gondwanaland and Pangaea were supposed to look like.

  “The kids’ movie doesn’t suggest anything about what happened to the ship remnants in the belts or the cloud, but it sure seems like a plan for vectoring in something on comets and shooting stars.”

  “That’s way too guided and directed for my taste,” Susan said, continuing to scan through the infosphere on her blinks but not so preoccupied that she’d let that statement go unchallenged.

  “If that’s the reality, though, then I’ll have to change my hypotheses accordingly,” Michael said. “Even if, seeing those winged things, I had to force myself not to think of Tinkerbell or tupilak.”

  “That reminds me,” Paul said. “Do other myths and folklore show any association between meteorites and mushrooms?”

  “Way ahead of you,” Susan said. “I’m connected to an ethnobotanical Web database. Here we are. A few things do pop up. Take a look.”

  She turned the PDA screen toward them and together Paul and Michael crouched over it as Susan called up and blink-scanned them through lists of abstracts. Michael saw some interesting associations involving fungus lore and natural atmospheric and astronomic phenomena. Apparently, for the ancient Greeks and Romans, when a thunderbolt or thunderstone struck the ground, it was believed to cause mushrooms—boleti, puffballs—to arise from it. Both bolt and stone were considered “fiery progenitive spears of God.”

  Susan blinked farther down the site’s linklist. In silence they jump-scanned through synopses of numerous folk stories about shooting stars or meteorites as the putative cause of a yellowish jelly-fungus, Tremella lutescens, popularly called “fairy butter” or “star jelly.” Also listed was the dye-maker’s false puffball, Pisolithus tinctorius—often readily misidentified as a stony-iron meteorite lying on the ground.

  Susan called up other sites and blink-scanned on, until she located another entry she found particularly interesting. According to that source, both lightning strikes and “fiery dragons”—the latter associated with meteors—had been cited in folklore as causes for fairy rings since at least medieval times. In the Austrian Tyrol, the dragon whose fiery tail-coil created the fairy rings was said to appear at Pegasids on August 10 and Martinmas on November 11—dates matching the Perseid and Leonid meteor-shower maxima, for the very time period when that bit of folklore first became popular.

  Susan blinked to a final site, which was short enough that she summarized it for them.

  “Several types of jellylike fungi, slime molds, and the alga Nostoc are traditionally identified as ‘star-slime’ or ‘star-rot.’ Many other, similar folk names, found throughout medieval to early modern Europe, almost always describe this jellylike stuff as the remnants of a fallen shooting star.”

  “All this could just be a coincidence, though,” Michael said. “I mean, European fungus fruit most commonly with rains and cooler weather, right? That means they would most likely pop up from late summer to early winter. Which happens to coincide with the stronger concentrations of meteor showers during the year—for the last couple millennia, anyway.”

  “But that might be more a proof than a refutation,” Susan said, taking off her blinks. “There might just be something to the ‘fireball hits ground, fungus springs up’ connection. Certain mushrooms fruit only in disturbed or burned ground, for instance. A number of others, like morels, fruit most prolifically the spring following a forest fire. Mushrooms are among the first organisms to colonize areas devastated by recent volcanic eruptions, too.”

  “When you wish upon a spore,” Paul half-sung, “then you really know the score?”

  They laughed, but Michael shook his head.

  “I think we may be missing a deeper evolutionary advantage than just fruiting when the competition’s been reduced by fire. Say it’s not about something as complex as mushroom spores coming in on meteorites.

  Say what’s coming in is simpler.”

  “Such as?”

  “Something that can take over the controls of a cell the way a virus does. In most places in the world, the most ubiquitous inhabitants of soil—those more complex than bacteria, anyway—are the mycelial structures of fungi, the underground horizontal ‘trees’ from which the mushroom ‘fruit’ forms.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “If something comes crashing in from the sky, the slightly higher organism it would be most likely to encounter first would be white thready stuff—fungal mycelium. That ‘something simpler’ than a spore might explain what these meteorite thefts are really all about, too.”

  Paul laughed.

  “Now you’ve lost me, too.”

  “Maybe, if you get enough pieces of meteorite, you can put together enough of that simpler material to create a sort of ‘Rosetta keystone.’ One that will work for the purpose of multiplicity reactivation and phoenix phenotype.”

  “Too much jargon,” Paul said, laughing. “Layman’s terms, please.”

  “I’ll do better than that,” Michael said, putting on his own blinks and borrowing Susan’s PDA. He would have just gone blink-to-blink with Susan, but Paul eschewed the AR specs-tech, so Michael proceeded in this more cumbersome way—as Susan had—out of politeness. In a moment he had searched the infosphere and had up on the screen a little computer-animated movie, showing Paul and Susan the very processes he was talking about.

  “Say you take a bunch of double-stranded DNA viruses and destroy them, inactivate them, using ultraviolet irradiation, the way they do here. If you infect a cell with a lot of those inactivated virus particles—infect the cell with a very high multiplicity of disabled virions—you’ll often see reactivation of viral function.”

  “How is that possible, if they’re all dead?” Susan asked.

  “The disabled viruses cooperate in such a way as to literally reassemble the viral genome from spare parts found in a bunch of different viral particles. See? A process called complementation allows the viruses to grow initially, since genes inactivated in one virion may still be active in one of the others.”

  He called up another website at a university medical school, and blinked to another sequence of images.

  “The fascinating part is that the various parts of the genomes can sometimes provide individual genes that act together to resurrect full function without necessarily
reforming a single full or autonomous virus.

  With replication and recombination of genetic elements, even the full function of the wild-type virus can be regenerated.

  “If you have enough of the pieces around, a phoenix phenotype can arise from the ashes of its own previous destruction. If I were trying to come up with a way for a life-code to survive destruction or corruption, I think the ability to regenerate whole function from spare parts would be a handy capability to have. The exotic amino acids and nucleic acid precursors we’ve been seeing in meteorites for years—the very stuff the experts have been dismissing as ‘space-junk DNA’—may turn out to be neither space junk nor junk DNA.”

  “But how is that relevant to the Mawaris’ mushroom?” Paul asked. “Or to the properties Jacinta suggested it gave the people?”

  “Think of the fully functioning pattern as something more even than a potent prebiotic programmer-molecule. Think of it as a ‘metaphage,’ acquiring or binding to information about its environment, analyzing that information, and executing a response that feeds back into what it binds to.

  The metaphage is constantly feeding upon the world and itself and generating new components in an expanding explosion of creation. It changes what it ‘eats’ and ‘eats’ what it changes. A recursive pattern or program that’s lively but not, strictly speaking, alive.”

  “Like viruses?” Paul asked. Michael called up and blinked them to another series of microbial images.

  “Existing like they do in the overlap between biology, biochemistry, and biophysics. Exerting pressures on the course of evolution, not from outside but from within the web of life, like they do. But much more powerfully. Cybernetically, like some sort of quantum DNA computer virus, or a quasiviral supercomputer—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Paul said. “I’ve always had trouble understanding how quantum computers are supposed to work. Can either of you geniuses explain that to me?”

  “Think keys and locks,” Michael said. “A classical computer faced with many billions of possible keys for a lock must try each key in the lock, one after the other. A quantum computer, however, can try all the keys in the lock simultaneously. The physicists of the many-world or multiversalist school see the quantum computer as actually billions of quantum computers, each machine in a separate universe, each trying just one key.”

  “For the many-worlders,” Susan explained, “the answer arises from summing over billions of parallel universes, each with its own machine.”

  “All those parallel worlds sound a lot like what Jacinta calls ‘mindtime’ in her notes on the people of Caracamuni,” Paul said.

  “That I don’t know about,” Michael said, “but I do think a metaphage variant, with a good percentage of the entire pattern, might well have taken up permanent residence in their mushroom, which then took up residence in the Mawari. The culture of those tepui people may well have been a response to that. If we don’t take it literally as some kind of directed evolution, then maybe the ‘accident’ the kids’ little movie showed might be some kind of analogy or metaphor.”

  “For what?” Susan asked.

  “For evolution exploiting the disasters that punctuate its usual slow course. For metaphages encapsulated in metadiamond cages, released by the cataclysm of their fall from heaven. For the pure strain of whatever came down from the sky dying out, over time, nearly everywhere on earth except in a few chambers underground—if we’re to believe their movie, and their memories even if it is a bit of a stretch.”

  “And the metaphage that invades the mushroom that invades the Mawari that makes them want to sing their mountain to the stars, to complete the whole cycle—that isn’t a stretch? Come on!

  Scissors-paper-rock meets animal-vegetable-mineral is way too broad, as an interpretive model for evolution. Mystic woo-woo, again.”

  “Perhaps not,” Larkin said, picking up a disk. “Aubrey—think fast!” he shouted, even as he unaccountably threw the disk across the room, directly at the young girl’s head. As the disk flew through the air, Michael realized that not even a supercoordinated child could catch the thing, and each of these kids was anything but supercoordinated.

  And she didn’t catch it. Just as unaccountable as Larkin’s behavior in throwing the thing, the disk itself came to a hovering stop a foot short of the girl’s head. Aubrey turned in her desk chair, picked the disk out of the air, and put it on her desk as she turned back to her screen.

  “Did she just do what I think she did?” Michael asked. Larkin nodded.

  “Discovered it almost by accident,” he said. “A hunch about some oddly shaped rocks. That it panned out was the reason I called you at your conference.”

  “But how?” Susan asked, incredulous.

  “Jacinta’s notes suggest that the fungus inside the Mawari is a symbiont. Apparently it takes until at least the onset of puberty for it to fully develop, but as it does the nerves and fungal mycelia together create what she calls a ‘myconeural complex.’ Her guess was that the complex allows for consistent high-level brain activity without burnout or any apparent ill effects—and with parapsychological phenomena as an upshot. She didn’t understand the mechanism, but she hypothesized it might be mediated biochemically through what she calls ‘adaptogens.’”

  “Have you discovered the mechanism?” Susan asked. “As an ethnobotanist I’d really like to know how such a thing might be possible—I mean, if it wasn’t just some kind of sleight-of-hand trick we saw. If it really happened.”

  “I’ve run those poor kids through a battery of tests with all the doctors and technicians I think I can trust,” Paul said. “MRIs, NMRs, PET and CAT scans, tracer-dyes, the works. Partly to follow up on what Michael suggested in terms of Asperger’s or high-function autism. Our preliminary results make clear it’s something more than that.”

  “‘Preliminary results’?” Susan asked.

  “What they suggest,” Paul continued, “is that, after someone ingests the fruiting body, the spores germinate and the spawn forms a sheath of fungal tissue around the nerve endings of the central nervous system. Some of the fungal cells penetrate between the nerves of the brain and brain stem, without damaging them. Believe me, I was hard-pressed to keep a couple of our good but worried doctors from dosing the kids with broad-spectrum, systemic antifungals. Anyway, this myconeural complex is involved in the enlargement of the pineal gland in the brain and somehow circumvents or at least alters the activity of the raphe nuclei.”

  “Amazing,” Michael said. Seeing Susan’s questioning look, he explained. “The dorsal and median raphe nuclei in our brains function as a sort of ‘governor’ on the level of brain activity, keeping it down to low percentages of total possible activity. It’s your body’s way of stepping on your mind.”

  “And the pineal gland?”

  “It’s involved in sleep and dreaming, particularly through the processing of tryptamines, the conversion of serotonin to melatonin. It also plays a role in the timing of sexual maturation, via gonadotropin hormones.

  It usually begins to shrink with the onset of puberty—and calcify, with age.”

  “I think I recall reading somewhere that the ‘imaginary friends’ of childhood are related to the child’s very active pineal gland,” Paul said. “Is that right?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Some researchers have claimed that, yes. Oh, and the pineal is light sensitive, even though it’s way inside the brain. The ‘third eye,’ in a lot of spiritual traditions. The ‘eye of the mind’ and ‘seat of the soul.’ The ‘chakra door’ that opens into the astral planes.”

  Susan rolled her two more mundane eyes at mention of that, but said nothing.

  “In her notes on the Mawari,” Paul continued, “Jacinta suggests that the parapsychological phenomena she found among them—clairvoyance, second sight, forays into what the Mawari call ‘mindtime’—might correlate with consistently high levels of brain activity. Almost as if the Mawaris’ bodies weren’t stepping on their minds.”r />
  “You’ve used that word mindtime before,” Michael said. “What’s it supposed to mean, again?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. From her notes I gather it involves a sense of the patterns of possibility backward and forward in space and time—alternate timelines, possible worlds, that sort of thing. Which you now tell me is increasingly accepted science.” Larkin shook his head. “If it’s real, then whoever attacked the Mawari to get at their holiest of holies must have been surprised by the resistance those people were able to put up. They probably had some sense that an attack was coming.”

  “Still, their crystal ball must have been pretty cloudy,” Susan said. “They’re all dead, except for these four.

  The attackers apparently got what they wanted.”

  “We don’t know that for certain,” Michael said. “Or not all of it, at least. Paul, you said Aunt Jacinta’s notes referred to a mushroom stone, right? Do you know of any examples of such a thing?”

  “I looked into it, because of Jacinta’s mention of it. The Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples carved things the anthropologists call mushroom stones, but I don’t see how they might connect to this.”

  “You’re both being too literal,” Susan said. “Think like a botanist, and you’ll realize there’s another term for ‘mushroom stone.’”

  “Oh?”

  “What is it?”

  She called up search terms and blinked them to an appropriately illustrated site.

  “The Latin is sclerotium, from the Greek word sklerotes, meaning ‘hardness.’ A dense, hard mass of branching filaments, called hyphae, found in certain fungi. Sclerotia can remain dormant for long periods.

  If the tepui people’s culture was as centered around their sacred mushroom as your sister claimed, Paul, then it’s likely they were quite familiar with the mushroom stones we call sclerotia.”