Page 82 of Under Story

“They don’t look very happy,” says Laurel.

“No,” Samir agrees. He shows her the second box. In these plates, the fossilized wood is unchanged, but the fungal squares have morphed into spreading, feathery hyphae. “They did a little better when I cranked the heat to fifty and increased the CO2. Then I nudged the oxygen to twenty-five percent.”

He guides her to the third chamber. Laurel can’t comprehend what she sees. The fossil pieces have softened, losing their shape. Hyphae have formed concentric circles around them, like the rings inside a tree.

“And the fourth chamber?” she asks.

When Samir speaks, his voice is hushed, as though they’ve entered a church.

“Temperature is fifty-five,” he says. “Humidity is ninety. Oxygen is thirty percent, nitrogen sixty-nine. Tripled carbon dioxide.”

Laurel’s palms become hot. She recognizes the numbers that Laurel Two starred in her notebook. Under these conditions, the fossilized wood has transformed: what were once silver shards have become pulpy and brown. Rising out of that stew is what looks like a half-decomposed twig.

Samir opens the simulation to retrieve a single plate.

“This one has had more time,” he says.

The twig is now undeniable. It stands in the center of the rings that the hyphae traced. The hyphae, meanwhile, have thickened to bolster the base. At the top is a leaf: fragile, but whole and very green.

Laurel wills her brain to work faster. She knows that she is near to a great understanding, one that will forever change her sense of nature and its abilities. It dances just out of her grasp.

“Congratulations,” says Samir. “The first atmospheric recipe for forest composition in Antarctica.”

The dawning knowledge, then, like sunlight over a hill.

Until Laurel left for college, she went to church with her parents on holidays. Inwardly, though, she was skeptical: God, as He was imagined in religion, seemed unnecessary. The story of the universe was this: cells splitting, blocks building. If that counted as intelligence, it had no human face. Nature, Laurel thought, was not a noun but a verb, an ongoing impulse to create.

It could be mindless. A compulsion. But the way nature plays—with pattern, with shape—reminds her of a scientist or artist. Is it a coincidence that bronchi branch like trees, or that the neural network in the brain is structured like a galaxy? The pupil of an eye looks like a dying star; and, across the Milky Way, the double helix nebula twists like DNA.

Try it, nature seems to say. Make planets from rock and others from gas. Try life with one cell, then with many. Try this fish with those fins, that leaf with this spine. Try it with feet. Give it wings. Split it in half; test it forward and back. Take the arrow of life. Make it curve. Try it in water, on land, aboveground and below.

Try time as a line, then a circle.

Standing with Samir, Laurel glimpses a glistening web: the cemetery screens, the strength of the signal, the role of the overtaker. All of this is linked to Helen, suspended between threads, and expressed in Beth’s words: the miracle of Mother Earth.

—

Eli sits in his office. Seeing Laurel, he stands. “What’s wrong?”

It seems impossible. But is the process any less far-fetched the other way around? In her world, too, life does not end as it begins: the body, born of another, is one day absorbed by earth.

“In our world, fungi decompose living things,” says Laurel. “But here?”

Even the word “human,” Gloria wrote, comes from “humus”: Latin for soil. Laurel thinks of Beth’s mother. The brown substance under her nails was dirt.

“Here,” she says, “fungi compose them.”

—

Now she Googles. And goes to the library, where she sits beside a stack of heavy books. At home, she tells Eli what she’s learned.

“In our world, a tree starts as a seed. After exposure to water and air, as well as the right temperature, the first root bursts out. The tree grows, it decays, and fungi spread its nutrients through soil.”

Nighttime in mid-August: the windows are finally open, humidity leaching from the air. The crickets hum summer’s white noise.

“Now imagine the reverse. With the help of fungi, a seed composes in soil. It comes out weak and rickety—to our mind, old. The plant and fungi live symbiotically until the plant is fully composed. That can take years, even decades.”

Laurel perches, jittery, on the arm of the couch. To face her, Eli sits sideways. Laurel can feel his admiration. Eli has scoured the data from other neutrino detectors, looking for results that mirror ANITA’s findings. These would imply the presence of high-energy neutrinos—and high-energy neutrinos, he hopes, would point to a portal. He hasn’t found any.