Page 72 of Under Story

“Yeah,” says Laurel, wryly. “I catered the briefing.”

She tells him about meeting Kwame Two. Eli listens closely. The force of his attention is flattering. She can see why his colleagues love him, why graduate students vie to be his advisees. Years ago, Laurel might have resented this glimpse of the person on campus. Now she simply feels relieved that they’re able to work together. If this is their relationship’s afterlife, it’s better than the one they had before.

“So both Kwames are geologists,” Eli says. “And they both study fossil forests.”

“Right,” Laurel says, “but here’s where things diverge. In our world, I wondered whether anyone had sampled the forest for spores. I wanted to ask Kwame, but I had to clean up. In this world, I think that the mycologist who sampled them was Laurel.”

Inside the Get a Shroom tote bag, there was a cherry ChapStick, a gold ring with four keys, and a Mead notebook. Except for a subtle slant, the handwriting was identical to hers.

Laurel shows Eli the pie chart on the first page. “These are earth’s atmospheric conditions. Seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen. Up to two percent is water vapor; the rest—less than one percent—is made up of chemicals like argon and carbon dioxide.”

The pie chart is followed by long lists of sample conditions, with varying levels of each element. Certain values have been starred: 30 percent oxygen, 69 percent nitrogen, and three times the planet’s current carbon dioxide.

“I think she wanted to test the plates in all of these conditions. The starred values are probably the ones that she thought were most promising. She combined those in a new pie chart.”

Below it, a note has been scratched:

55F

humidity 90%

Eli hums, a thinking sound. “Could she do these tests here, at the lab?”

“Not with any precision. McMurdo doesn’t have an atmospheric chamber. But guess what does?”

“The Rhizotron?”

Laurel nods. “I’m guessing that’s where she mailed the samples. Even so, each set of conditions should undergo three trials, and each trial would take about a month. If you multiply all of those variations, you wind up with over three thousand. Even if you narrow it down to one thousand, the process would take over a year.”

“And why did she mix fungi and fossils to begin with?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. They had even been watered, as if she thought the fossils might…sprout.”

At her tone, Eli laughs. “Let it go for now. You’ve absorbed a lot today.”

“Probably so.” Laurel turns her attention to the book on Eli’s desk. “What’s that?”

He hands it to her. The title reads, Ghost Particle: The Search for a Left-Handed Neutrino.

“No way,” Laurel says.

On the cover is a picture of a curved, darkened observatory. The walls are lined with gold bulbs.

“Super-Kamiokande,” explains Eli. “It’s a neutrino detector in Japan—the most powerful one in the world.”

Laurel turns the book over. The other Eli gazes back from an author photo. The rest of the back cover is taken up by a Duoverse diagram. This one, though, is different from the version Eli drew in San Francisco: the antiuniverse is on the top, instead of the bottom, and the arrows move counterclockwise.

“You and he could be the same person,” she says. “So could the Kwames. And both Nitas are marine biologists.”

“You and Laurel Two are both mycologists.”

“At this point, I’m barely a mycologist. And even if I were still doing research, I studied electricity, not fossils.”

She feels oddly hollow. The alignment between Eli and his double only highlights the divergence of the Laurels. In that light, the decisions that led to Silas’s death—her decisions—seem even more misguided, proof that she took the wrong fork.

—

Friday morning dawns clear. From the window, Laurel can see a tangle of downed power lines, but the air is calm.