Page 27 of Under Story

“I’m sorry,” Laurel said. “I’m not myself tonight. I felt—a headache coming on.”

She was a terrible liar.

“It’s better now,” she added.

A bougainvillea pressed against the window, its night leaves the black-green of a Dutch still life. Eli stepped inside.

“We moved,” he said. “That fall. My parents decided they missed Chicago.”

Laurel told the truth before she could stop herself. “I drove by your house. I wondered why I never saw anyone.”

Eli seemed bolstered to hear it. “Are you presenting this weekend?”

“On Sunday,” she said. “Last slot of the conference.”

“I’d like to come.”

“You don’t have to.”

He smiled. “I know that.”

There was the sound of a glass breaking in another room, a gasp followed by laughter.

“Good omen,” Eli added.

—

He was there, just as he’d said he would be, in a back row by the door. Laurel tried not to look at him while she spoke. P. microcarpus, she argued, had not only shown the potential to learn. By retaining its knowledge of the maze, it might also have exercised memory. Gloria had called Laurel’s findings audacious: her highest compliment.

Afterward, she waited nervously for questions. Audience responses were crucial to the future of the project; Laurel would incorporate feedback and submit a new draft to journals. But the Q&A was also a performance. Scholars peacocked and jousted; hierarchies were established or dismantled. A particularly effective takedown could become academic lore, passed down over years: the victor was crowned, the vanquished humiliated.

The first two questions weren’t softballs, but neither were they castigations. The last came from a woman in the front row. Laurel’s jaw relaxed. She had met the speaker, a heralded young botanist, several years earlier. The woman had been a finalist for a UW–Madison professorship, and after her talk, the department hosted a mixer. Tess and Laurel stayed until the end, when the botanist sat to take off her heels.

“Do you mind?” she said, stretching her toes in nude stockings. “I’ve been in these since eight in the morning. My boyfriend has an interview this week, too, and I’m like, ‘Must be nice to wear pants and loafers.’ ”

Laurel and Tess nodded sympathetically. The UW job went to a male candidate, but the woman had since been hired at Princeton.

Now she stood.

“Well, from a technical standpoint,” the botanist said, “I think we should acknowledge how skillful this work is. I’m not sure how many of you have tried to isolate a fungal culture, but let’s just say that it requires superhuman patience—and that’s when you don’t have to send it through a labyrinth.”

She paused for appreciative chuckling. Laurel exhaled. For a moment, she let herself think of afterward: she could treat herself to an expensive coffee at the café across the street and walk her adrenaline off at the beach. She smiled at the botanist, who had not yet sat back down.

“Which is why I find your conclusion so disappointing,” the woman said.

Several spectators had begun to pack up, but at this battle cry, they settled back into their seats.

“It’s staggering, really—this conflation of cognition and evolutionary programming. When you apply a human lens to other species, the case becomes so anthropomorphized that it loses all credibility. In fact,” the botanist continued, “as a scientific community, I think this work sets us back.”

Laurel felt her neck grow hot. She took a sip of water, which gave her seconds to formulate a counterargument. What would Gloria say?

The botanist leaned back pleasantly. Laurel screwed the cap onto her water bottle.

“Actually,” she said, “I agree with you. For too long, Western science has seen the world through a human lens. Since the time of the Greeks, we’ve assumed that anything sentient must work the way we do. I mean, researchers still don’t agree about whether animals are conscious, as if we aren’t animals ourselves; into the eighties, it wasn’t widely thought that they feel pain. This does a disservice to nonhuman life, yes, but it also does the same to us. Think of what we might know now if we’d taken off those blinders sooner.”

Some attendees glanced at the botanist, to see how she was stomaching this parry. Her posture had stiffened. Laurel looked at the clock; her slot would be over in less than one minute.

“What if evolution produced all kinds of minds? What if the path forked? I’ve suggested that fungi might evince intelligence,” Laurel said. “If it seems to you that I’m using a human lens, then I’d ask why you see intelligence as human.”