Page 20 of Under Story

“What you wrote,” she said, “right here. It’s the only thing that’s ever made me feel better about death. I didn’t think that was possible.” She looked at Gloria and inhaled. “I know you might be thinking, This girl doesn’t need to be in my lab, she needs to be in therapy”—Gloria laughed, burbling and musical—“but I’m not looking for therapy. I’m looking for purpose.”

Gloria met Laurel’s eyes, and something passed between them, wordless and instinctual.

“We do use quite a lot of glassware,” Gloria said.

—

Previously, mushrooms had occupied little space in Laurel’s mind. She knew that some were poisonous to humans; others, like apple scab, caused disease to plants. Still more were highly coveted: hallucinogenic Psilocybe, or truffles so delicious that pigs were trained to extract them. Now she inspected the bases of trees. She tilted ink caps, revealing gills as thin as the pages of a book. One weekend, the lab went foraging in Governor Dodge State Park. A sophomore stumbled upon craggy, mazelike caps: a small village of morels. Gloria approached with her cane, grinning as the students yelped.

Her lab, built into a slope at the University Arboretum, was called the Rhizotron: rhizo for “root,” tron for “tool.” Above, soil composition, as well as plant and animal life, could be adjusted in individual bays. Inside was a tunnel-like inner sanctum. Sixteen viewing windows, whose panels could be removed during experiments, corresponded to the bays above. Beyond an open workspace was the cold room, a walk-in refrigerator where samples were stored.

“Spooky, huh?” said Tess Torrez, whom Laurel had been assigned to shadow. Tess had cropped hair, a heart-shaped mouth, and a barbell through her left eyebrow. As she threw open the door to the cold room, a fluorescent tube light flickered. “One of the grad students claims he saw a ghost in here.”

From her tone, Tess didn’t mind. She had grown up hearing stories from her grandparents’ hometown, San José del Pacífico, where Indigenous healers used psychedelic mushrooms to cure illness. Her parents owned a shop that sold Mexican folk art. As a child, Tess played with the mushrooms: some made from Tonalá pottery, others hand-painted papier-mâché. That fall, she had returned to campus with an air of intrigue. She’d spent the summer at a commune where women farmed fungi.

Tess studied communication in fungi and plants. She was interested in volatile organic compounds: chemicals whose scents could convey messages to nearby life-forms. These had been discovered in the 1980s, after ecologists reported a curious finding. When willow trees were damaged by herbivores, nearby healthy saplings increased their own defenses. The ecologists thought that the injured trees had emitted a chemical warning.

Other scientists balked. It didn’t make evolutionary sense: hypothetically, such signaling would benefit neighbor trees more than they did the emitters. Since then, the ecologists had been vindicated, and dozens of volatiles had been identified. Some of these signals drew pollinators: bats and butterflies, beetles and bees. Others summoned guardians; the Geocoris insect protected plants by eating herbivores. And if volatiles acted as a language, it was not exclusive to kin. Other species listened, too. An entomologist had just discovered that wild tobacco responded to signals from sagebrush. When Laurel put her nose to a flower, she wondered if she was smelling words.

Volatiles had mainly been studied in plants. Fungi were known to release them, too—this had been proven in the lab—but when signals were detected in the wild, it was difficult to determine which organism had produced them. Tess wanted to improve detection methods. A reporter covered her work for the Wisconsin State Journal. At the end of the article, he asked the university’s leading biologist whether volatiles could constitute intelligence.

“Oh, dear,” said the biologist. “Well, there’s nothing to be said about that. Fungi, like plants, have no intention of their own. A tree can solve problems, yes, but only because of natural selection. It’s all under hormonal control.”

“And we aren’t?” Tess asked. She and Laurel sat on barstools, drinking New Glarus beer and venting. “I mean”—Tess put up a hand to count—“trees sense what’s happening around them. They process those perceptions. And then they decide what to do about them. But they can’t possibly be intelligent. They don’t have heads!”

Winter slid toward spring. Laurel typed reports, washed forceps, poured growth media into petri dishes. At lunch, she pulled a chair up to the Rhizotron’s viewing windows. Roots streaked the soil like lightning. Mother centipedes wrapped around their eggs. Earthworms were the unsung heroes of the lower realm: deaf and blind, they burrowed as deep as fifteen feet, creating passages for rainwater and air. Their castings, rich in nutrients, made flowers bloom bigger and food taste better. Now, when Laurel saw a mauve question mark on the sidewalk, crushed, she felt a pinch of mourning.

She was consumed, opened up, in the way she’d been while reading Silent Spring. Her question was: If plants could learn and make decisions, what might intelligence look like in fungi?

That winter, Laurel carried a stack of scientific journals to Memorial Library. She skimmed issue after issue until one article made her stop cold. In Japan, scientists had created an experiment to see whether slime mold—brainless amoebae—could navigate a maze in search of food. They placed the slime mold inside a tiny labyrinth. Oat flakes waited at the end. There were four possible paths, varied in length.

Scientific articles were not known to be page-turners, but Laurel raced from the abstract to the conclusion. Initially, slime mold filled the entire maze. Hours later, it pruned itself, shrinking back until it formed the most efficient route.

Goose bumps stippled Laurel’s arms. She hugged her cabled cardigan closer. It felt as though the experiment had chosen her.

Slime molds and fungi were closely related. Both lived as single cells as well as cooperative networks: when they grew, their cells divided but did not separate completely. Neither organism had a traditional nervous system. Could fungi learn to negotiate a maze, too? The challenge would not only be to capture it. Laurel would have to make the establishment believe her.

Laurel relives the ANITA report in her mind. She wishes that she could ask Eli—a physicist—about it. It’s the sort of thing they would have mused about on one of their long walks, trading thoughts all the way to Picnic Point.

On Saturday, while drawing, Laurel asks what Charlie made of the presentation.

“I’m not sure,” Charlie says, after a pause. “I haven’t thought about it much.”

“It’s all I think about,” says Laurel.

Charlie smiles. “I can see that.”

Laurel listens to the shh-shh sound of Charlie’s shading. “But you want to know, don’t you? What it is? Why it’s here?”

“Sure. But if I never find out, I’m okay with that, too. My whole career—making websites or brochures—I focused on utility. An image had to say something; it had to be convincing. Maybe the Arc has no meaning, or maybe it’ll disappear before we figure it out. It’s beautiful to see. I think that’s still worth something.”

But Laurel can’t relax her grip. She has a recurring dream of flying in a spaceship. Her emotions always evolve the same way. First is fear, which softens into keen anticipation. There is a thrill of adrenaline as the shuttle begins to move. Then the edge of a great mass appears in the ship’s central window, and her anticipation melts into yearning.

In the morning, she can never remember anything about the object itself—just the sense of a shape rising into her consciousness, mammoth, new. That, and her own desire: how badly she wants to see it.

—

In the Southern Hemisphere, winter begins in March. Before that, one thousand people will leave McMurdo, but Louis, Charlie, Nita, and Laurel have all decided to stay. For Laurel, the decision was simple. She wasn’t ready to return to life in Wisconsin, and the university had granted her an academic year away.