by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
Ensign Mike spent the rest of the voyage to Chora’ckell being as cooperative as they could figure out how to be. The toadstool gave every impression of truly believing that the Sidiian plan to use them as a disposable tool was actually a good one, and Mike would find it an honorable, fulfilling calling to spend the rest of their life saving lives one at a time, far slower than the Hyphaic stole lives away.
Mike worked with Dr. Eol to learn about the poison that they’d be expected to carefully administer to only the infected parts of victims’ bodies. The toadstool studied carefully, asking all the right questions, making sure to cement the idea that they’d be cooperative. Completely and utterly cooperative.
All the while, Mike’s mind kept working at another level to watch for possible opportunities or ideas that might help them to escape the fate the Sidiians had in mind for them.
None presented themselves to Mike. Not while the toadstool was still aboard the Sidiian spaceship that had kidnapped them. However, when the ship arrived at Chora’ckell and delivered Ensign Mike, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, and Dr. Eol to the research station on the concave side of the geode-shaped asteroid, the toadstool found themself overwhelmed with an absolute certainty of what they needed to do.
Mike needed to reach the convex side. Mike needed to take the elevators across the rocky bulk of the asteroid to the coral gardens.
Mike had never been more certain of anything in their entire life. And even if that life had only been a year long so far, that didn’t diminish the strength of the pull the toadstool felt.
Intellectually, Mike had to admit to themself that they might simply be feeling the pull of the metallic-blue subspace pulses that must overflow and completely saturate the coral gardens. But even so, the toadstool simply felt completely, utterly, unfailingly certain that the best chance for accomplishing their goals involved first making it to the coral gardens. Every possible path forward that Mike could imagine started the same way — seeking out the coral garden.
To be completely honest, Mike didn’t know what any of the following steps were… but right now, no one was keeping Mike honest. Vossie was still unconscious, only being kept on the research station because Mike had insisted on being given a chance to heal him, and the Sidiians had forced Mike to begin experimenting with purposeful deception for the first time in the toadstool’s short life.
Since Dr. Eol had stayed with Mike and Vossie, she was playing the part of expert and discoverer: the gecko doctor was the genius scientist, and Mike was merely her scientific discovery. If Mike still had time to worry about questions of personhood, the situation would definitely have done a number on them. But Mike couldn’t think of much of anything beyond the all-consuming need to get down to the other side of the asteroid.
So, while Dr. Eol basked in the appreciation of her fellow scientists, Mike tried to think of ways to convince them all that visiting the coral gardens would somehow help them to be better at interfacing with and curing victims of the Hyphaic.
Mike couldn’t come up with a way to sell that idea, because it was patently ridiculous and even the subspace-pulse addled mushroom could recognize that fact. However, it turned out there was an advantage to being seen as little more than a scientific instrument — the Sidiians really didn’t care what Mike got up to, as long as it didn’t disturb any of them or seem obviously troublesome. And fortunately, there seemed to be a lot of politics distracting all of the Sidiian scientists when it came to exactly how they were going to proceed with using Mike as their new tool — which patients should be given the risk and privilege of being experimented upon? Which scientists would oversee the early applications of the new procedure directly and which would have to wait until it was over to hear about how it went?
All of it was nonsense, and if Mike had really believed in the Sidiian plan to use their interfacing ability as a cure, then the toadstool would have spoken up and cut through all the nonsense. But right now, the nonsense was serving them, so instead, Mike slipped off, looking for elevators.
The elevators weren’t hard to find — they were carefully labeled with all sorts of danger signs, warning people to stay away, turn back soon, or risk certain infection. The Sidiians had never dealt with anyone who wasn’t frightened away by those signs, so the elevators weren’t blocked off in any more effective way. And, even more importantly, no one had thought to cut the power to the elevators, so once Mike was inside, it was only a matter of figuring out how to break open the elevator panel, infiltrate the wiring with their mycelial beard hairs, and hack past the simple software block that had been put in place to stop the elevator from actually running. It was hardly even a challenge for someone who’d been a computer themself in a previous incarnation. Then the toadstool was on their way to the coral gardens of Chora’ckell, famous throughout the sector for their beauty and also infamous for their danger.
As the elevator descended through the asteroid, the minimal natural gravity first disappeared and then flipped to the other way up. Then the doors slid open, and Mike saw beautiful, vibrant, violet, crenelated coral arranged into careful displays with paths wending between them, heading off into the distance. The starry sky shone above with only the slightest glimmer added by the atmo-bubble shielding holding in the atmosphere.
Contentment and a profound sense of safety flooded Mike’s body. The toadstool knew with absolute certainty in that moment that absolutely everything would turn out okay. Mike didn’t know how, but that didn’t seem important anymore.
The toadstool stepped forward, their gentle steps sending them on long arcing bounds in the light gravity. Between the overflowing feelings and the underwhelming gravity, the toadstool was floating in every way, giddily unbothered by such petty concerns as had troubled them up until now.
Ensign Mike wandered through the coral garden, looking at all the different colors — beyond the violet coral at the entrance were displays of brilliant magenta, orange so bright it practically glowed, and then a glade with more shades of blue than Mike had even known existed.
A small rational corner of Mike’s mind tugged at the rest impatiently, asking how touring a garden was any sort of help right now. Vossie was still drugged unconscious, getting daily sicker, and surrounded by hostile gecko-like Sidiians. The Wanderlust was out of reach. And the full extent of Mike’s plan had been: reach the coral garden.
Well, Mike was here now. What was the toadstool actually going to do?
The toadstool roamed, stopping to examine little placards beside the coral displays, translating the text of the signs with their uni-meter. There was information about which planets each kind of coral had originally come from, how old the various growths were, and tidbits about the preference different strains of coral had when it came to growing conditions. None of it was important or useful, but there was something so soothing and calming, learning stray facts and statistics about a lifeform that called to Mike so deeply.
The toadstool could picture becoming a gardener and working at a place like Chora’ckell back when it was fully functional. Mike could’ve tended to the coral and answered visitors’ questions, knowing everything there was to know about these wonderful creatures — still and steady as statues, but thriving with the life of hundreds of thousands of tiny polyps.
The coral made Mike think of themself — a single toadstool with a single sense of self, but composed of masses of mycelial threads all woven together. Mike was a tapestry of life, and so were these corals. So much alike.
As Mike continued to wander, blissfully happy and content, the toadstool started to imagine that the coral even looked like themself — knotted, tangled, mycelial masses, composed of tiny threads, glowing golden and silvery, superimposed themselves over the bright, rainbow colors of the crenelated, stony coral. It was a beautiful, compelling vision that made Mike feel like there actually was a place in the universe where they belonged, somewhere beyond the colorful coral where all the people were toadstools like them.
Mike began to imagine those people wandering through the garden too. Toadstools strolled in pairs or small groups, stopping by the placards and bending over to look at them, their mushroom cap heads sometimes bumped together. Mike could picture them talking and laughing, living lives of profound normalcy that were entirely foreign and strange to Mike and everything they knew from the encyclopedic knowledge of the Tri-Galactic Union they’d inherited from the Wanderlust’s computer banks, which had served as their incubator before being born.
What would it have been like to have been born, instead, in a world like Mike was imagining? The toadstool could picture it all so clearly as if it were really there, simply existing on a different layer of reality.
And that’s when a word and an idea clicked together in Mike’s mind, as if they were puzzle pieces always waiting to be connected. Subspace. The coral emitted subspace pulses.
And what was subspace if not a different layer of reality?
Mike stared at the phantom toadstool figures strolling through the mycelial gardens and began to wonder if they were losing their mind or if they were finally seeing the true nature of reality for the first time.
Feeling dizzy and overwhelmed, Mike found a nice bench nestled at the intersection between a coral display as richly green as the forests on Earth and another that was a riotous smattering of colors that could rival the work of any impressionist painter.
The subspace pulses were poisoning Mike with their metallic-blue tang. The toadstool couldn’t taste those pulses directly in the air, but based on what Mike had learned from Dr. Eol, they knew the subspace pulses were here. Happening all around them. Mike was drowning in subspace pulses, and it was affecting the toadstool like a drug of some sort. They were hallucinating. They could no longer tell the difference between reality and the merely vividly imagined. Because as Mike sat there on the bench, holding their mushroom cap head in their hands and wriggling the tips of their beard hairs, the toadstool was certain that the phantom figures they’d been imagining began to gather around, watching them, wondering if they were okay.
Mike was imagining another world so strongly that the specifics of the daydream were escaping their control. Literally a runaway imagination.
“Oh, Vossie,” Mike said. “How can I save you, if I’m too dizzy to even stand back up? No one will come for me here… they’d catch the Hyphaic. And if they did come… Those Sidiian scientists would be so furious at how I’d made them risk themselves to rescue me from these cursed gardens that they might punish me… and the only way to do that — the only way that would matter — would be to stop me from saving you.”
Mike closed their row of slit eyes and tried to make the phantoms go away.
And then, Mike felt a gentle touch upon their shoulder.
Continue on to Chapter 20…