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.
Captain Carroway tracked down a Sidiian ship with a doctor who specialized in neural implants, and with some persuasion, the Norwegian Forest cat convinced the ship to rendezvous with the Wanderlust at an upcoming star system along their planned route. So, the Wanderlust wouldn’t have to backtrack or even necessarily lose any time, as long as Ensign Mike could figure out what was plaguing Lt. Cmdr. Vossie while the rest of the crew was busy catching bugs and taking plant cuttings for Lys to cultivate on Sojourner’s back.
To Mike’s frustration — although, the toadstool did understand the rabbit’s choice — Vossie chose to keep the nature of the “project” that required meeting up with the Sidiian vessel private from the rest of the crew. So, while the mushroom had a great deal of anxiety and also all sorts of other complicated feelings swirling around inside their mycelial self about Vossie’s condition, Mike couldn’t talk to anyone about those feelings.
Well, technically, Mike could have talked to Captain Carroway or Lt. Cmdr. Vossie. But that wasn’t helpful. So, instead, the mushroom had to settle for sympathetic glances from Lys for a sense of understanding and comfort. The mushroom was convinced that the caterpillar knew more about what was going on than she wanted to reveal, given how uncomfortable most of the crew was with her telepathy.
Ensign Melbourne and Korvax enlisted all the other members of the Wanderlust crew in brainstorming ideas for how to give Mike a childhood of their very own. However, at Mike’s insistence, the cat and hedgehog agreed to forestall enacting any of their plans until the secret Sidiian project was settled.
Mike couldn’t face the idea of dealing with some self-indulgent parody of childhood while worrying that Lt. Cmdr. Vossie might be dying.
Mike couldn’t face much of anything while worrying about Vossie.
Fortunately, the Wanderlust flew fast, and soon enough, they were in orbit of a binary star system with several habitable planets that Lys wanted to search for flora and fauna to install on Sojourner. The baby world turtle hid in an asteroid belt while the Wanderlust rendezvoused with the Sidiian vessel.
Ensign Mike and Lt. Cmdr. Vossie teleported aboard the Sidiian vessel and discovered the answer to a riddle that they’d puzzled over back on Spindle Reef: apparently, the arachnids who’d run that space station weren’t the only ones in this region who thought artificial gravity was an unnecessary extravagance. The gecko-like Sidiians hadn’t supplied their ship with artificial gravity either.
The toadstool and rabbit floated in the middle of what they’d been informed would be the Sidiian ship’s med bay, looking at the hammocks stretched out in every direction with medical scanners around them. Hammocks instead of beds for housing the sick.
Mike wondered what kind of health benefits and detriments might be caused by the lack of gravity, as they craned their mushroom-cap head around to look in every direction. This was a very well-outfitted med bay — a significant improvement over the Wanderlust’s complete lack of devoted medical facilities. All it needed now was the doctor who they’d come to consult with.
“Hello?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie called out, feeling less patient than Mike. Or perhaps just less intimidated by new, unfamiliar surroundings. The rabbit had a great deal more experience with new environments than the toadstool who had essentially lived aboard the Wanderlust for their entire short life so far.
Technically, Mike had an encyclopedic memory of all sorts of locations, but there’s a difference between computerized information logs and the actual experience of visiting a new place, feeling it all around your body. This ship might be less overwhelming than Spindle Reef had been with all its different species and busy goings-on. But in some ways, that made it more intimidating — Spindle Reef was supposed to be overwhelming. Mike felt vaguely self-conscious about reacting to this quiet Sidiian med bay as if it were several strides outside of their comfort zone.
“Ah, yes, hello,” a raspy voice hissed.
Both mushroom and rabbit awkwardly turned around, using whatever was within reach for the leverage necessary to turn without the assistance of gravity and a floor beneath their feet. Finally, Mike saw the gecko-like alien who’d answered Vossie’s call.
The gecko had green, yellow, and blue scales, giving her a complicated mottled coloring, and she wore a uniform with a similar splotchy pattern to match. Her eyes were wide, and she blinked owlishly at the pair of visitors from the Wanderlust, revealing that she did have eyelids — unlike the salamander-like aliens from Spindle Reef. Mike was glad of that.
“You must be Doctor Iasara Eol,” the toadstool said.
“You don’t have a neural implant,” the rabbit blurted out, sounding terribly surprised and troubled. “You’re an expert on them, aren’t you? That’s why we’re here. So, why don’t you have one yourself?”
Vossie was facing what was essentially a death sentence, if Mike and this Sidiian doctor couldn’t figure out what was happening to him, so it wasn’t surprising that he’d lose his composure. The rabbit’s symptoms had been worsening, partly due to a natural progression and partly because he’d stopped trying to brush them aside and pretend they weren’t happening to him. Even so, the neural implant had given Vossie an almost preternatural level of chill, like he’d had before losing his original implant. So, it was disconcerting for Mike to see him sliding back into the frazzled irritability that had characterized much of his time without an implant.
For all that Werik swore by meditation and natural calming techniques for himself, they’d never worked very well for Vossie. Mike didn’t know if that was because Vossie refused to take them as seriously as was needed or if the two Morphicans simply had very different neural needs. Possibly, Werik would never have needed much intervention from a neural implant, even if he’d been raised in a Morphican sect that believed in them.
The Sidiian sighed deeply, allowing a forked tongue to flick forth from her spade-shaped mouth sibilantly. Afterward, Dr. Eol said, pointedly addressing Ensign Mike, “I assume from the implant on his brow that this mammal is our patient?”
Vossie’s long ears splayed wildly in the zero gravity, and his face turned stony, while the little lights on his implant twinkled brightly in a whole rainbow of colors. The rabbit was clearly fuming, but he knew better than to say anything more that might upset this doctor who he hoped could help him.
Ensign Mike gave Dr. Eol a rundown of Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s medical history and symptoms, while the gecko helped the rabbit into one of the medical hammocks and strapped him in place. She navigated the zero gravity space quite effectively, using the stickiness of her toes and the prehensile quality of her tail.
The gecko scanned Vossie thoroughly with several different devices — some handheld and some built into the structures around the hammock he was strapped into. As she worked, Mike watched closely, asking occasional questions. Dr. Eol was brusque any time that Vossie tried to ask her questions, but she treated Mike with a professional politeness.
The toadstool found themself wondering if this gecko alien had trouble seeing a mammal as a full person. Sentient mammals didn’t seem to be common in this sector of the Tetra Galaxy, so perhaps she’d only encountered sub-sentient mammals before.
“So what do you think?” Ensign Mike asked, when the gecko seemed to have finished her examination of the rabbit and his hand-me-down implant.
“The Hyphaic,” Dr. Eol pronounced without hesitation.
Mike blinked with all their slit eyes, and the lights on Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s implant began twinkling furiously yellow and orange.
“How is that possible?” Mike asked. “We’ve carefully avoided any contact with areas that have outbreaks of the Hyphaic.”
“Your friend is wearing a neural implant that belonged to someone who died from the Hyphaic,” Dr. Eol intoned drily.
“What if I take it off?” Vossie asked, nervously touching a paw to his implant, blocking off the twinkling colors it showed. “Would the symptoms stop progressing? Or possibly reverse eventually?”
“Yours would be the first case of improvement after initial diagnosis,” the gecko said tightly. “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To help me figure out and finally cure the Hyphaic.”
Mike’s row of slit eyes widened. “That’s a big task, isn’t it? Curing a plague that’s been ravaging an entire arm of a galaxy?”
“The alternative would be letting your friend die,” Dr. Eol hissed. “So, it’s up to you.”
“You don’t seem surprised by my diagnosis,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie observed. “And yet you haven’t isolated me or acted at all concerned about catching the Hyphaic from me.”
“Ah, now these are the right questions,” the gecko said, even though the rabbit hadn’t actually asked any questions.
Dr. Eol twisted herself around and moved through the med bay to a computer station. Once she had settled by twisting her tail around a conveniently placed grip to keep herself floating in the right place, she gestured for the others to come over and look at the computer screen too.
Mike first helped Vossie out of the hammock, unfastening all of his restraints. Then the two of them floated over to look at the screen. Predictably, it was covered with stats and statistics in a language neither the rabbit nor the mushroom could read. Their comm-pins could offer verbal translations of everything Dr. Eol said, but in order to read written words in the Sidiian language, they’d need to use a different technology.
Or in Mike’s case, the mushroom would simply need more exposure to the language. Mike could pick up languages extremely fast and had already begun finding the comm-pin’s translations somewhat redundant with their own ability to understand Dr. Eol.
However, for now, the mushroom pulled out a uni-meter that had been holstered at their waist — or rather, the part of their anatomy that most closely resembled a waist — and used it as a secondary screen that could provide visual translations.
When the toadstool offered to hold the uni-meter where the rabbit could easily see it as well, Vossie shook his head in refusal and said, “My neural implant knows Sidiian. It’s translating for me directly.”
“Good,” Dr. Eol said. “So you can both read now? Because we have a lot of information to work our way through.”
The gecko wasn’t exaggerating.
Over the next few hours, Dr. Eol gave Ensign Mike and Lt. Cmdr. Vossie a crash course in the current state of Sidiian research regarding the Hyphaic. It was intense, data-heavy, and overwhelming, but it answered a lot of questions.
The Hyphaic was a mycelial-like infestation that took over an individual’s body, slowly interfering in the natural processes as it grew, until eventually it choked out the original being entirely, essentially leaving an inert mycelial mass shaped like the original person. Usually, infected individuals died long before that point. Often, dying caused the mycelial infestation to stop growing, but not always. Sometimes, the invading mycelial filaments kept growing inside a person’s corpse until they’d eaten and replaced everything of the original person.
Infected individuals behaved strangely, often sleep-walking, speaking incoherently, and sometimes engaging in complex actions that they couldn’t explain later.
Transmission of the Hyphaic rarely occurred between individuals but instead seemed to be largely environmental, happening frequently in some regions of space and rarely in others. Whole planets had been lost to the Hyphaic, or sometimes, just whole continents on a planet. And certain kinds of neural implants seemed to cause it too.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie was using one of those kinds of implants.
“How did you get the implant?” Dr. Eol asked archly. The gecko was clearly planning on judging both the rabbit and the mushroom based on their answer to this question.
“A plant-like alien with a lot of leaves gave it to us,” Ensign Mike said mushily. “They said it had belonged to their friend… who had gotten sick and died.”
The gecko’s spade-shaped face, covered in scales, wasn’t exactly built for expressing emotion in a way that either the mushroom or the rabbit would find recognizable, but the way Dr. Eol simply stared at them both spoke volumes.
Finally, the gecko looked away and said, “Either this alien didn’t know about the recall on this generation of implant, had decided that it hated you and wanted you to suffer, or somehow judged you as outsiders likely to help cure the Hyphaic, if you could be persuaded to care about it.”
“That seems like a long shot,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie said bitterly.
But Mike thought back to that afternoon, gambling on the ship just outside of Spindle Reef, and the mushroom wondered.
“Seriously,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie continued irritably. “Why in the names of every one of my ancestors would anyone take a look at us and think, I bet these lost souls can cure a plague we’ve been struggling with for decades!”
Mike’s voice got very quiet, like a drop of dew finally evaporating under the blistering heat of midmorning sunlight, and they said, “Because I’m the only sentient mycelial being that they’d ever seen before, and this illness centers on a mycelial infection.”
“That’s ridiculous,” the rabbit spat angrily. “And even if that weren’t the basest kind of prejudice, you’re from an entirely different galaxy.”
“Usually,” Mike said blankly, “I’d agree and appreciate your support. I really do, you know–” The mushroom looked at the rabbit with so much love in their row of slit eyes that it almost made their vision go fuzzy like a lens filter in an ancient Earth movie trying to show that when two characters were deeply in love, the rest of the world fell entirely away. “–I appreciate you defending me so much. But… in this case… it may have been less prejudice and more… prescience.”
“Prescience?” both the rabbit and gecko echoed with very different intonations. Lt. Cmdr. Vossie sounded scornful, but Dr. Eol sounded hopeful and intrigued.
Ensign Mike simply felt vulnerable and overexposed.
Continue on to Chapter 15…