Fungi Read online

  Morel swallows hard and steps over the prone figure on the floor.

  The membrane portal in the engineering room is larger than the one Morel has been haunting at the rear of the vessel. This portal, too, is clouding, a milky blue tinting the corners, spreading inward as hoarfrost on a winter morning spreads over the windowpanes of Morel’s modest flat above the bakery. But the centre is still clear enough to see the edge of a massive fin as it swivels by.

  Swallowing hard again, Morel looks deliberately away from the window. He kneels by Crimini’s bloated body and, with swift, silent apology, thrusts his hand into the Doctor’s waistcoat pocket.

  Doctor Crimini, in life, was inseparable from his tiny notebook. In death, it’s not so very hard to tug the thing free from its owner. Morel retreats to an only minutely less unpleasant distance from the corpse. An enormous shadow swishes past the big engineering portal again, and again, Morel averts his eyes. The giant fish has stopped rending the thick exterior of the puffball, but clearly has not lost interest. Morel curses himself for his morose inactivity these past days, blaming despair and that bizarre combination of hopefulness for an unlikely rescue and hopelessness that he’d tried everything he could think of to take them to the water’s surface.

  The Doctor’s little notebook is difficult to read by the dull phosphor light coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The tethered globes outside are brighter, but not by much. Page after page of the notebook is crammed with tiny arcane symbols, mathematical calculations, and botanical recipes and formulae. Everything is written in a cramped, undecipherable shorthand. Morel stares at the lettering, trying to make sense of the scrawls and scribbles, the dashes and dots and twisting helices of the Doctor’s sums and diagrams.

  As Morel stares, peering at each page he flips as though hard scrutiny can force the jumbled lines and ill-formed notes into some comprehensible whole, the sketches and patterns and lines do begin to impart meaning. Flipping, flipping the death-damp pages, he finds drawings less linear than the others, less formulaic and more descriptive.

  The puffball shudders, rebounding from another bite torn from its smooth, round hide. Morel braces himself with a hand on the wall near the viewing portal, then quickly withdraws that hand when it sinks into the fungus’s softening flesh. This time, the resounding bounce is upward, the recoil of tearing free sending them away from their attacker, toward the surface. Morel feels the upward motion in the pit of his stomach, a brief lurching rise, before they slowly drift down again.

  Looking back at the notebook, something Morel scarcely dares recognise as hope quickens in his chest under the daguerreotype in its pocket. Though the shorthand labels on the Doctor’s diagrams are no more readable than before, the lines sort themselves into recognisable drawings: Here is the gillwork filtration system which regulates the air of the vessel’s upper chambers; here is the gillwork which manipulates water through the lower chambers, designed to be directed from the very room in which Morel stands and in which the notebook’s author expired; and here, here is the spore-bearing tissue of the gigantic puff-ball, vastly modified, far larger and more powerful than anything before documented in Nature’s fungal flora.

  Modified, yes, and a ballistospore rather than the typical puffball statismospore. And enormous: as enormous compared to other fruiting bodies as the leviathan outside is compared to the common trout. But it still has trillions of spores waiting to discharge as they mature, waiting to be expelled from the hybrid craft in a process Morel never cared to study, thinking he’d be back safe on dry land by then, thinking it a mere biological process of interest only to Naturalists and other enthusiasts of the life cycle of Agaricus bisporus and its copious cousins.

  Trillions of spores. Trillions upon trillions, waiting for dispersal. Waiting in the lower chambers of the vessel Morel helped become a reality, waiting to be shot off like the Great Imperial Emperor’s fireworks under his chair.

  Clutching Crimini’s notebook, Morel pounds through the decaying passageways back to the chamber where Mr. Shiitake sits slumped against the wall. The man’s breathing is shallow and rapid, his eyes closed. Sweat drenches his grimy cuffs and collar. Morel drops to the spongy floor. After a final glance at the diagram, he shoves the notebook into his hip pocket. He draws the daguerreotype from his vest and, after a kiss to its surface, uses its sharp corner to slice a deep diagonal cut into the chamber floor. The puffball shudders, but Morel knows the motion is the vessel’s nonsentient rebound from the jaws of the giant fish outside, not a reaction to his violation of its skin.

  When the slit is big enough, Morel grips the edges and tears with all his strength. Even a day ago, the skin of the vessel would’ve been too resilient for such an act, too tough and too strong. But now the compromised flesh tears easily in his hands, almost willingly peeling back to allow him access to its lower chambers more bell-shaped than spherical. By the soft phosphor light of the walls, Morel sees the water less than an arm’s length from where he kneels, hears its lapping echoes against the now motionless gills. Carefully he slides the lovely Amanita’s image back into his vest pocket and, casting a fleeting look at the insensible Shiitake, plunges headfirst into the ocean-filled lower chamber.

  The cold is a shock. Morel surfaces and gulps air, ignoring the iced agony flooding his every pore. Knowing he must work fast, he plunges again and, with eyes wide open, grabs the nearest gill with its countless, corrugated basidia. He shakes the gills, pounds them, kicks the nearest basidium repeatedly, hoping beyond hope it will trigger a reaction, and another and another, until all the trillions of spores shoot off in a glorious eruption that will propel the hollow submersible all the way to the surface.

  The last strength is leaching from Morel’s limbs into freezing water. He kicks again, thinking he sees a quiver of the gills that is neither a reaction to the fish’s nosing from outside the vessel, nor Morel’s kicking from within. He gives a final kick with his angled foot, knowing it for his last if he wants enough strength to pull himself up out of the water into the chamber above. In response the basidium erupts, its gigantic spores shooting off in all directions, careening into other basidia with other spores, the chain reaction Morel hoped for making the puffball shudder and the water roil. Even as Morel hoists himself up through the jagged hole with shaking arms, he feels the puffball rise. He anticipates the twisting in his stomach that will come from rapid ascent, senses the first tiny stirrings in his blood he imagines are its gases boiling.

  He staggers to Shiitake’s side, grips him under the arms and hoists him to his feet. The man’s skin burns where Morel’s icy fingers clamp to it, shimmers where coated with sweat and tears and muscarine mucous. With the release of its spores, the puffball is collapsing. Small rends appear in the walls as Morel watches, the ocean trickling, then gushing through the widening rifts. But they are moving upward: Morel feels it in his lurching guts, imagines the surprised monster below staring blindly after the rapidly ascending undercarriage of the departing vessel, thousands of spores swirling in the agitated waters of its wake.

  When the water in their chamber is chest-level, Shiitake stirs from his senseless state. “Mr. Morel?” he says, hands flapping feebly at the rising water.

  “Never fear, Mr. Shiitake,” says Morel, optimism flooding him like ecstatic delirium. “Merely a minor hiccough. It’ll all be better soon, when we reach the surface. Fresh air will do you good.”

  Shiitake nods gratefully before his eyes flutter shut again and his chin slumps to his chest. Morel lifts the unconscious man’s head to keep it from the water, paddling with his other arm as their feet leave the chamber floor. The agony coursing through his veins and innards has been replaced with a buoyant lightheadedness, not at all unpleasant after the days of gloom and despair. When the rapidly filling chamber takes them close to the ceiling, Morel uses the arm not keeping Shiitake afloat to punch through the soft material of the collapsing vessel. He imagines the giant puffball deflating like an enormous bladder emptying of
air. When his fist breaks through, quickly and more easily even than he’d hoped it might, water and their swift upward momentum does the rest, tearing the puffball asunder like the skin sloughing from an overripe melon, so it splits open, releasing its travelers inside as though they, too, number among its seemingly infinite spores.

  The water nearest the sunlight is a beautiful turquoise azure, reminding Morel of his Amanita’s fine flashing eyes. They are so close to the surface he can even see the sun: a brilliant ball of light-green fire shimmering in the few hands-breadths between Morel and the flat top of the ocean. Lugging the inert Shiitake with him, Morel beats at the water, beats and beats and kicks. As the fiery green ball grows dimmer, Morel grows stiller. Beneath him, the white spheroid remnant of the puffball, compromised beyond buoyancy, beyond redemption, sinks into darkness. All around, the water shimmers with the trillions of spores. Trillions and trillions, glinting in the so-close sunshine like the myriad fishes which appear to feast on the sudden bounty. Light glints off the bright silver schools of fish, and off the multitudinous spores, and off the daguerreotype Morel fumbles with numb fingers from his vest pocket as he sinks, gripping the motionless Shiitake with his other arm, gazing into the rapidly dimming face of his beautiful Amanita.

  LAST BLOOM ON THE SAGE

  By Andrew Penn Romine

  Andrew Penn Romine lives in Los Angeles where he works in the visual effects and animation industry. A graduate of the 2010 Clarion West workshop, his fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine and Crossed Genres as well as in the anthologies Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring 20s and Rigor Amortis. He’s also contributed articles to Lightspeed Magazine and Fantasy Magazine and blogs at Inkpunks and at Functional Nerds (as the Booze Nerd). You can also find him online at andrewpennromine.com

  DUKE WINCHESTER PEERED THROUGH the sight of his rifle to confirm what his ears had already told him — a plume of luminescent smoke snaked its way through the San Padrós Pass, tangling on the spiky fungal growths that enveloped the pines. A long, lonely whistle echoed off the toadstool-dotted hills of the Colorado backcountry.

  The L&W 445 out of Zohar City roared out of the tunnel, spot on schedule. It had taken Duke two bottles of Black Goat Whiskey and a quarter-brick of Aztec Manna to bribe a Lemuria & Western Railroad butch and obtain the timetable. Expensive, yes, but as the buzz of the great iron beast’s aetheric carriages reached his eardrums, Duke congratulated himself on a shrewd bargain.

  Legs McGraw, his partner, squirmed next to him, tentacles squidging trails of slime across the lichen carpet of their hilltop lookout. The pungent tang of rotting mushrooms came not from the landscape, but from Legs. He was upset, Duke knew; the beyonder’s emotions wafted on the breeze in an odiferous equivalent of a scowl.

  “What’s spookin’ you, friend?”

  L&W had kidnapped the best mind in mycotic science, so Duke expected a heap of trouble. According to his man, the L&W guards were well-armed with hellfire shot and rifles that spat green lightning like a Texas space-time twister. The professors from Zohar City were paying Duke well, but he still had a few doubts about fooling with all that scientifical business. The West had surely changed since he’d come up in shortpants.

  Professor Karlowe. Legs’ mind-voice tickled Duke’s thoughts, something between hay and grass: there one moment but not quite there the next. Legs had lived at least one hundred of Duke’s lifetimes in the sunken cities of the South Pacific, and so possessed a preternatural sturdiness in most things. The beyonder had been twitchy all the way from Zohar City, though, and that worried Duke.

  What if the Professor planned his own kidnapping?

  Duke sighted the metal-clad car through the divination crystal in his rifle. The thing looked more akin to some sea-going vessel than a train car, with its rounded hull and discharge fins. The image was blurry, revealing a chromatic smear of wardings and counterspells. The eyepiece had cost Duke a fortune in gold dust, but it couldn’t disprove what he already felt in his gut: Legs was right.

  “Well that changes the plan a mite.” Duke searched the swirling folds of shadow and slime of his friend’s face, careful not to look into his compound eyes. Legs couldn’t help it if his gaze drove Duke mad for an hour or two.

  Karlowe has a devious mind. Plus, they’ve got Van Schjin’s eldritch weave in that hull. I can’t touch it.

  Legs’ hesitation was a country for which Duke had no reckoning.

  “So, you worry about the gunmen, then. I’ll get that car open. There’s gotta be a safety switch in the locomotive. You draw their fire and I’ll converse with the engineer about springing the lock.” Duke patted the handles of his Colt Hexmakers to show Legs what sort of talking he figured to do.

  It was easy banter, but the beyonder still roiled with his hidden thoughts, tendrils of shadow flickering at the edges of Duke’s vision. His polecat stench sharpened into something like vinegar before mellowing to burnt, buttered corn.

  Perhaps we shouldn’t have taken this job.

  “Don’t be such a croaker, Legs,” Duke chuckled. “How long we been doin’ this now?” He strapped his rifle loosely across his saddlebags, trying not to count the years. His horse, Shiloh, whickered softly, flames dancing from his hooves, just as eager to get on with the affair as Duke.

  Since Adam got his apple, Legs replied with the old refrain.

  “Then get yer wiggle on, McGraw. We got us a train to rob.”

  The air thickened with the reek of the slaughterhouse as Legs rose up on a column of sea slime. Duke watched his partner race down the hillside, trying to shake the feeling there was something else the beyonder wasn’t telling him.

  Maribel de Miedo watched the bleak shadows of the Colorado mold country through the slits of the Van Schijn car, suppressing another coughing fit. The ache in her lungs receded with a nip from her silver flask. Feeding the worms.

  The city doctors called it “Pacific Pneumonia”, though most folks knew it as “fog-lung” for the crawling miasmas that swirled out of the ocean and blanketed coastal cities for days at a time in impenetrable olive shrouds. Breathing that air sometimes caused little black worms to grow in your lungs. They ate the rest of your insides, eventually. Maribel’s flask of tequila and laudanum helped with the slow dying.

  She could ill-afford to have another episode now. The train was coming out of the hills into a wide valley scattered with anchorite death-caps, just as night was falling. The tall, scraggly toadstools made good cover — and the best place for a bushwack. She felt helpless, trapped in the armoured car with no room to wiggle.

  Maribel wasn’t completely alone, though. The Van Schijn car stank of zombi — four trigger-happy Deadbeats in ill-fitting L&W uniforms sat cradling their aetheric long-rifles. Overconfident but loyal to the railroad, they were convinced in their fungus-colonised brains that their scientifical armaments and chitin-reinforced flesh would substitute for real experience in a firefight. Maribel knew better.

  She didn’t like their passenger much, either.

  But if they delivered Professor Karlowe safely to Fort Derleth, all would be well. The zombis would likely burn their pay on Aztec Manna habits, but, in addition to a very large bonus, Maribel planned to collect on L&W’s promise of a cure for her fog-lung.

  “Hey, Calico, you’re looking peaked.”

  Marsh, the zombi sergeant, lurched over and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. He wasn’t a half-bad shot, the only one of the Deadbeats really worth his pay, but he was terrible in the sack.

  “Stop calling me that,” she snapped, shrugging him off — and more quietly, “Not here.”

  “Hey, Señora de Miedo, don’t take me on so,” he grinned, his voice thick as wet leaves in a gutter.

  “Night’s falling and we’re in hard country, Marsh. Keep your eyes skinned.” She glared into his fuzzy, spore-soft eyeballs, daring him to get riled at her joke. She wished she hadn’t fucked him back in Zohar City.

  Marsh just grinned and shrugged his sh
oulders until the bones poked up from his uniform, flaking spores and bits of flesh. So, Maribel started giving orders to him and a pair of zombis.

  “Watch the north side of the car. Shoot anything that gets close. I’ll take the south port-holes.”

  Maribel pointed at the fourth zombi, the one with eyes leached white by colonisation. “You look after the Professor. Make sure everything stays put if there’s a fracas.”

  The zombi gulped, glancing at their cargo. Covered with a heavy velvet drape stitched with orichalcum runes, Professor Karlowe was secured against the jostling of the train by cords of India rubber. Under that drape, in a thick glass jar the size of a barrel, Karlowe’s brain dozed, throbbing with mycotic pustules and psychic fruiting bodies. It was all that remained of him after his experiments, the kernel of a grasping and fiendish mind. As long as the warding cloth stayed in place, the Professor would remain asleep.

  And if he didn’t, well, then, Maribel reckoned fog-lung would be the least of her worries.

  Duke rode down from the hills and parallel to the tracks a good quarter-mile distance from the train, eyeing the sparks that flew from the carriage beneath the locomotive. All that fuss blazed down the length of the train: locomotive, two crew cars, then the Van Schijnn car, 12 more freight cars and a caboose. There were no lights on the train besides the electric sparks. Zombis didn’t need much light, but something about the empty windows gave Duke pause. It was as if the train was driving itself.

  Maybe it was. Duke had seen a lot of strange things working for the professors in Zohar City. “Inventors of the Age,” the papers called them, as they adapted beyonder ways to cope with the spore-changed West. Rivals like L&W, desperate to profit in this new world, weren’t above stealing secrets. With the competition, though, a new era was dawning that Duke barely recognised. He couldn’t keep up, not even on a nightmare steed.