Page 21 of Under Story

On New Year’s Day, Laurel and Nita walk to Discovery Hut, an expedition base built in 1902. Inside, tools lie abandoned: shovel, teakettle, skillet, everything rusted to the same reddish-brown. Laurel can still smell the fat on the seal-blubber stove. She has read about the grim details of these early missions: the ships crushed by ice; the dogs used for transportation, then meat; the story of Captain Lawrence Oates, a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s five-man party, who sacrificed himself so that the others might survive (“I am just going outside,” he said, while leaving his tent, “and may be some time”). As the remaining members struggled toward the Ross Ice Shelf, caught in an unseasonable blizzard, they must have suspected that they were doomed. They abandoned sledges and supplies, but they never left their scientific samples: the fossils of Gondwanaland were found beside their bodies.

Laurel doesn’t doubt their bravery, though she’s sure that they had other motives, too. They were all men, Western Europeans competing for the ultimate prize: the claim to be first. Never mind that Indigenous people of the Arctic—hired as expert guides, hunters, and herders—were crucial to polar expeditions, or that Black explorer Matthew Henson was the first to stand on the North Pole.

Laurel and Nita return to the rocks and watch seals dive for food. Nita says that Weddells can stay underwater for over an hour; to resurface, they have to gnaw through the ice with their teeth.

“No wonder they love our dive holes,” she adds.

“How do you get them out?” asks Laurel.

“Usually, they leave when they see our bubbles. If they don’t, that means they really need air, so we get in line.”

Laurel takes out her knitting. One Saturday, when it was too windy to draw, she and Charlie went to Skua instead. Laurel found knitting needles and two balls of undyed yarn that made her think of her childhood. She started a shawl in a simple crescent shape. She often has to reverse, fixing mistakes, but it’s comforting to feel the rhythm come back to her hands.

While Laurel knits, Nita describes what happened on her most recent dive: she made contact with the octopus whose den she’s been watching for months. The octopus extended an arm to inspect her. It seemed to dance with her hands. Eventually three more arms floated forward; the other four held on to the rock, as if in a tug-of-war.

“Octopuses have brains,” Nita says, “but most of their neurons are in the arms. Without joints, they can move in any number of ways; we say that they have infinite degrees of freedom. Each of the arms can sense on its own. Sometimes, they even disagree. I like to say that they think with their bodies.”

Laurel can feel the old excitement wake and stretch inside her. Until now, she hasn’t shared much about her work; to leave it behind was a relief. But Nita feels like a link to the person she used to be. Laurel tells her about mycelium, which stitches roots to soil and tree to tree. She talks about her father’s death, about beginning in botany and finding Gloria. She mentions the Rhizotron, too—and the decision to go to graduate school with Gloria as her advisor. When it came time to develop her thesis, she returned to the slime mold experiment.

“Like an octopus,” Laurel explains, “fungi coordinate—and communicate—throughout this large, decentralized body. If slime mold could navigate a maze to find food, I wanted to know if mycorrhizae could find plant roots.”

Nita looks at Laurel with her chin in one hand. “Well,” she says, “could they?”

First, Laurel collected the fruiting body of Pisolithus microcarpus, ruddy club-shaped mushrooms strong enough to push through sidewalk. She removed a piece of tissue and placed it in agar, a nutritious gelatin. After a colony grew, she prepared the mazes, putting fungi at the entrance and eucalyptus in the center. Before campus closed for winter break, she positioned a video camera over the plates.

Laurel floated through the holidays. It wasn’t like her to be overconfident, but she felt certain that she would return to an exciting development—that the fungi would surprise her, just as the slime mold had impressed the Japanese scientists.

When the new semester began, she entered the lab in a state of suspense. Her hypothesis was that her samples would mirror those results: exploring first, then shrinking back into the most efficient route. Laurel’s stomach dropped as soon as she saw the plates. Mycelium covered the mazes indiscriminately.

To understand what had happened, she pulled up the video footage. Like the slime mold, Pisolithus microcarpus did begin with exploration. Where the maze branched, the fungi made not one decision but two. It took every path, probed each dead end, but it never shrank back.

Laurel pushed away from the desk in her swivel chair. The results didn’t make sense. P. microcarpus had reached the eucalyptus eventually, but the process seemed random. She hung her head back as the chair revolved on its wheels. When she felt sufficiently sorry for herself, she rolled back to record the data. After all, the experiment had worked, even if the outcome was not what she’d wanted. Yet there was so much at stake: not only her career, but the trust she had finally placed in her instincts. As she left, Laurel cast the plates a glance of parental disappointment.

“I know you’re smarter than that,” she said.

The next day, she scraped the fungi into a biosafety bin. She saved just one plate; to confirm her results, Laurel would have to repeat the experiment, and she could save money by reusing a piece of the fungi she already had. She dispersed smaller pieces in new mazes and reset the video camera.

It had taken almost a month for mycelium to fill the plates before. Laurel didn’t hover: she was afraid to be hopeful, and coursework kept her busy.

She returned on a slushy day in February. The mazes sat in a row beneath the video camera, just as she’d left them. In each, a feathery branch of hyphae traced a single path: the shortest route to the eucalyptus.

Had mycelium grown throughout the plate before shrinking, like the slime mold, there would be visual evidence. The pruned fungi would still be there, dried and shriveled. If Laurel understood what she was seeing, that had not happened here.

She double-clicked the camera footage to be sure. Her pointer finger shook on the mouse. She felt as though she were learning a secret, spying on what the fungi did when left to its own devices. On screen, grainy threads of hyphae moved as if they knew just where they were going. P. microcarpus had navigated the maze with the confidence of someone—or something—that had done so before.

Laurel ordered new fungal samples immediately, cost be damned, and ran the experiment again. At first, fungi filled the maze, as she now expected. She transferred pieces of that sample into empty mazes. In the second round, the experienced fungi found the shortest path again, as though it had learned—as though it remembered.

—

One year later, in February of 2004, Laurel rang Gloria’s doorbell. Science Hall was accessible only by stairs, so when Gloria’s arthritis worsened, they met at her home instead. It was an old Arts and Crafts house on Prospect Avenue, dark wood, with purple roses in the garden and ivy trailing over windows. Inside was enchantment: half-melted candles, cabinets of oddities, a Maine coon cat the color of moonlight. Old photographs—relatives, Laurel assumed—lined the hallway. A door with a stained glass inlay led to the guest wing where Gloria now slept, having moved down from the second floor. Once, Laurel saw through to a Richard Avedon portrait of a nude woman and a snake.

Gloria dressed in practical clothing while foraging. Otherwise, she favored vivid tunics and robes in fabric that draped or wafted in air. On a gnarled coat tree hung the patchwork coat she had worn on the day of Laurel’s first lecture. Irregular pieces of fabric had been stitched with gold thread. Here and there were velvet butterflies; near the chest, a black one clung by thick embroidered edges.

Laurel and Gloria liked to sit in the living room, where unmatched chairs canted toward the hearth. Above the mantel was a painting of Amanita muscaria, toadstool of fairy tales and hallucinations, its red cap peeking coyly out of shadow. These were used in religious ceremonies by Siberian shamans, who dried them by a fire to reduce their toxicity. (Reindeer, Gloria had said, could snack on A. muscaria without issue, aside from a bit of drunken prancing.)

While Gloria arranged the tray of nuts and cheese she always served on such occasions, Laurel liked to peruse her bookshelves. Today, she discovered a rare copy of Rust, Smut, Mildew, and Mold, an 1870 text by Mordecai Cubitt Cooke. A silver frame sat nearby; inside was a handwritten note.

“Few mushrooms are good to be eaten and most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater. Therefore, I give my advice unto those that love such strange and new fangled meates to beware of licking honey among thorns lest the sweetness of the one do countervaile the sharpness and pricking of the other.”