by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
Everything turned upside down when Mike allowed their consciousness to flow through the thinned veil between normal space and subspace. In normal space, Mike was an aberration, struggling to fit into a world that hadn’t been made for them.
In subspace, Mike was a single fruiting body of a massively interconnected mycelial network that stretched across much of the Tetra Galaxy. The Hyphaic wasn’t a plague; it was a civilization, reaching up from subspace and trying to make itself felt in normal space wherever the coral’s metallic-blue pulses called to it.
Why was the Hyphaic reaching into normal space and taking control of living bodies, growing mycelial webbing throughout their biological tissue, and clumsily working them like puppets? Trying to grab control of the Sidiians or whoever else it could manage to get a hold of? Well, the Hyphaic wasn’t a plague, but it had been suffering from a plague of its own, making its fruiting bodies sick and corroding away its mycelial interlacing.
The Sidiians and other aliens in the normal space of the Tetra Galaxy had different technologies than the Hyphaic had in subspace, and out of desperation, the grand mycelial civilization had begun trying to use the gecko-like aliens and various salamander-, chameleon-, and other options as puppets who could work those technologies, trying to research for cures in every way possible.
But the Sidiians were hard to control and generally grew too sickly, much too fast, always dying before the Hyphaic could figure out how to gain complete control of them. But it kept trying. Decades were a minimal investment to such a grand creature. There was no living being in normal space that compared in the slightest to the awe-inspiring scale of the far-reaching, interwoven complexity of the Hyphaic’s mycelial network.
Even so, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie had been an intriguing revelation to the Hyphaic, because the Morphican’s rabbit-like physiology had proved much more resistant to the damage that its puppetry caused than any of the various lizards and amphibians.
The Hyphaic had had truly high hopes for what it could accomplish with Vossie. However, when Dr. Eol had turned off the subspace pulses released by the Morphican’s hand-me-down neural transmitter, the Hyphaic had found itself suddenly cut off from its favorite new puppet. The veil between space and subspace was too thick for the Hyphaic to permeate without the coral’s metallic-blue pulses, and so its mycelial flesh lay dormant in the rabbit’s body — puppet strings without a puppet master controlling them anymore.
That was why Mike hadn’t managed to connect to the Hyphaic when Vossie had been drugged. It wasn’t the drugs that had interfered, but the lack of subspace pulses to thin the veil.
Even so, the Hyphaic had learned something truly invaluable while doing its best to puppet Vossie, before being disconnected. It had learned that Mike was one of its own fruiting bodies, harvested from a comet that had been traveling through the deep darkness between galaxies for so long that Mike’s DNA wouldn’t yet carry the infection that plagued the rest of the Hyphaic.
Mike could be the cure. Mike could be the salvation of an entire civilization. Mike’s own civilization.
It’s a strange thing being an individual and also being a part of a civilization, and it’s even stranger when the lines between those two things are blurred by the kind of melting, melding, merging interconnectedness of mycelial threads.
Mike remembered being an individual, traveling on the Wanderlust and caring more about what a rabbit thought of them than anything else, but also, sometimes, they forgot, because there were just so many other things to know and remember and experience and think about and be.
Or perhaps, more accurately, the Hyphaic remembered being Mike — an individual traveling on the Wanderlust who cared more about what a rabbit thought of them than anything else. But it was such a small part of all the things that the Hyphaic remembered — such a tiny sliver of an entire civilization’s experiences — and there were so many more urgent things to attend to.
Toadstools living on the subspace side of Chora’ckell found a way to pull samples of Mike’s original mycelial flesh, complete with the fresh DNA, through to their side of the veil. They worked with Mike’s new fruiting body to analyze those samples, extract the key sequences of genetic code, and use them to synthesize — finally! — a cure for the Hyphaic’s own plague.
With its own plague cured, the Hyphaic had no more need for puppeting Sidiians and other aliens from the Tetra Galaxy against their will. In normal space, the Hyphaic disappeared overnight.
Sidiians stopped getting sick. With trepidation, the coral gardens of Chora’ckell were reopened, and Mike’s original fruiting body — now abandoned — was discovered, desiccated and dead.
Mike’s new fruiting body — connected into an entire civilization on the subspace side — had been too busy to care about maintaining the original fruiting body they’d left behind. The one with Vossie’s original neural implant embedded in it like the grain of sand at the heart of a pearl.
The Sidiians returned Vossie along with Mike’s old body to the Wanderlust, complete with many apologies to the furiously angry Norwegian Forest cat captain for having abducted them in the first place.
No one aboard the Wanderlust was comforted by the crocodile tears of the backstabbing geckos, but they were glad to finally have Vossie home.
Continue on to Chapter 22…