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.
The Sidiian doctor watched the toadstool fuse their beard around the rabbit’s head with a mix of intrigue, patience, and skepticism. She didn’t want to interrupt what could be a very delicate procedure, but she also wanted to see results. When the gecko’s patience began to wear thin, she hissed gently with her forked tongue flicking, “What are you finding?”
“Nothing,” Mike said, but then, with horror, the toadstool realized they hadn’t said it using their own, mushy, toadstool mouth. They’d said it with Vossie’s — puppeting the rabbit like a marionette.
Mike hadn’t even known they could do that. But then, the Hyphaic inside of Vossie had been doing that, hadn’t it? Controlling the rabbit like a ventriloquist operating a dummy. That’s what Mike had spoken to in the hallway earlier, and now, Mike was doing their best to fuse with the Hyphaic… So, Mike had become the ventriloquist.
Terrified and disgusted, the mushroom withdrew from the rabbit’s skull as quickly and carefully as they could, drawing back the threads of their mycelial beard, untangling them from the threads of Hyphaic strewn throughout Vossie’s body like cobwebs.
When Mike had finished thoroughly disconnecting from Vossie, the toadstool pushed away again, floating to the far side of the med bay, wanting to put as much space as possible between themself and Vossie.
Mike floated there, trembling like a small, frightened animal. “I didn’t mean to do that,” Mike whispered. “I didn’t know I could.”
Dr. Eol’s eyes narrowed. “Well, we’ve learned something then. Not as much as we’d hoped, but something. Fortunately, we’ll be at Chora’ckell soon, and then we can really put you to work.”
Mike began to wonder how far it would be safe to let this doctor push them before needing to start pushing back again. “I don’t want to interface with any corpses.” The toadstool’s voice shook as they spoke, drawing a single line in the sand. One boundary they didn’t want to cross.
“No,” Dr. Eol hissed. “I agree that’s not the best way to learn more. We have other plans for you.”
Mike didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Will you wake Vossie back up? Maybe he can help us. He’s very smart, you know.” The mushroom didn’t really believe their superior officer — especially in his weakened, sickly state — could make a difference in curing the Hyphaic. But Mike didn’t want to be alone with the geckos who’d kidnapped them.
Mike wanted an ally at their side.
“The captain has asked me to keep him sedated,” Dr. Eol said. “He’s been causing a lot of trouble, and we see no need to revive him before returning him to the Wanderlust.”
For a brief flash, Mike’s hope flared… and then the toadstool realized the cold, harsh truth: just because the Sidiians planned to return Vossie to the Wanderlust didn’t mean they had any plans to return Mike.
“What plans do you have for me?” the toadstool asked bleakly.
The gecko doctor sighed deeply, as if all of the burdens in the room were hers and hers alone to bear. The frightened mushroom and sedated rabbit clearly didn’t understand how much she suffered.
“There is a research station devoted to curing the Hyphaic at Chora’ckell,” Dr. Eol began. It was clear from her tone that she considered a great kindness and huge concession on her part that she was going to the trouble of explaining any of this at all. “Chora’ckell is an asteroid that was smashed and broke into a bowl shape, eons ago. The inhabitants of the nearest planet decided to turn it into a coral garden — with coral growing throughout the concave side and various museums and cultural centers built on the convex side. Visitors could pass between the garden bowl and the hill of museums via elevators through the thick stone shell.”
Mike’s slit eyes blinked in confusion. What the gecko was describing sounded beautiful, but it didn’t explain anything about what would happen to them.
“We’ve known for some time,” Dr. Eol continued, “that visitors to the gardens were at high risk, and repeat visitors almost always got sick. Whereas individuals who worked in the museums who never visited the gardens at all… They stayed safe. This pattern was strange and inexplicable until you told me about the metallic-blue taste of the subspace pulses emitted by the coral. Now we know that the asteroid must shield the far side very effectively from the coral’s subspace pulses. But even before we understood the reason, the pattern was clear — one side of the asteroid is safe; the other dangerous. That made it the perfect location for a research lab, so we shut the gardens and museums down, repurposing everything for research.”
“That explains where we’re going,” Mike said softly. “Not what you’ll do with me when we get there.”
“I won’t do anything,” Dr. Eol hissed in exasperation. “Except turn you over, I suppose.”
“But…”
“Let me finish,” the gecko hissed. “The scientists at Chora’ckell have been working on a poison that seems to destroy the Hyphaic at a cellular level, but they don’t have a good way to administer it to patients without indiscriminately poisoning the patient as well. We need a targeted way to administer it to only targeted, Hyphaic cells, and the way that you interface…”
Mike nodded their mushroom cap head in understanding. “I might be able to eradicate the Hyphaic from individual patients, one patient at a time.”
It wasn’t a good cure. Even if it worked — if they could find a way to shield Mike from poisoning themself while administering it — the process would be slow, arduous, overly intimate work that would keep Mike busy for the rest of their life while only saving a fraction of the Hyphaic’s victims.
The toadstool could picture it: they’d be forced to interface with one patient after another, indefinitely, given as few breaks as possible. The Sidiians would work Mike to death, curing all the individuals deemed most important to save. And then, the Sidiians would begin cloning Mike and raising the clones to live their lives as nothing more than disposable tools.
If Captain Carroway did try to fight to rescue Mike, she’d be facing the entire force of the Sidiian people. The geckos would never give their precious, kidnapped toadstool back.
Mike thought of the childhood Ensign Melbourne and Korvax had been planning for them — the toadstool would never get to find out what had been planned. Mike would never get to have that childhood.
Mike mourned for themself. They didn’t know if anyone else really would.
Even in their despair, Mike knew they weren’t being truly fair to their friends on the Wanderlust. Lys and Korvax would definitely mourn Mike, and probably most of the others as well. But the one Mike cared about most… Mike wasn’t sure if Vossie would really mourn them at all.
But love didn’t have to be reciprocal to be real.
“If the cure works,” Mike said haltingly, “you’ll let me cure Vossie before returning him.” It took a monumental effort of control for the toadstool to keep their voice from turning up at the end, keeping the words a statement instead of a question.
Even so, Dr. Eol responded, “We’ll see.”
And Mike realized: the Sidiians would try to use Vossie as a test case, forcing the toadstool to use an uncertain technology on their closest friend.
That was when Mike knew they’d need to develop a plan of their own. It wouldn’t do to get caught up in the Sidiians’ machinations and allow themself to become a pawn without any agency of their own.
Mike needed to save Vossie. If they succeeded at nothing else, Mike needed to succeed at that.
Continue on to Chapter 19…