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.
Mike looked up to see another toadstool looking down at them, one of its many hands rested near their shoulder — partly touching it, and partly overlapping with it. The other toadstool looked a great deal like Mike — the underside of its mushroom cap head was lined with a row of slit eyes alternated with gills, and it stood nearly bipedal. But instead of a pair of arms and legs like a mammalian biped and a bushy mycelial beard, this toadstool simply had a tangled cloud of limbs of various inconsistent widths that served the purpose of both Mike’s beard and arms at once.
It was beautiful. So freely efficient, able to simply be itself without conforming to the aesthetic standards of an entirely different branch of life.
“Are you real?” Mike asked.
“Are you?” the other toadstool echoed. It said more words after that, but none of them were familiar or intelligible to Mike.
Mike looked down at the comm-pin on their own breast and thought, “This is it. This is proof I’ve lost my mind. Because if this other toadstool were really speaking, then my comm-pin would translate its words for me.”
But the golden emblem stayed silent.
And yet, the vision of the other toadstools remained. Visually persistent hallucinations. Mike couldn’t shake the vision of the other toadstools from their eyes, no matter how much they blinked.
And the touch…
The touch felt real.
The other toadstool stopped talking its gibberish and instead reached with another one of its plethora of hands for one of Mike’s hands. The other toadstool’s touch was insubstantial — like a tingling numbness that could be shaken away. But even so, Mike felt so lost in this immersive unreality that they allowed themself to be guided by the imaginary mushroom over to one of the coral growths.
In reality, the coral growth was a beautifully vivid, dimpled green — like living malachite. In unreality, it was a looping tangle of rose gold filaments — like a sculpture made from jewelry-grade wire. Equally beautiful and filling the exact same space — but so entirely different.
When Mike’s hand touched the coral, it felt rough and hard like it should, but it also felt yielding and hungry, like it was pulling the very essence out of them. Mike felt like they were melting into the tangled loops of rose gold, and the loops lit up, glowing, as they did so.
The rose gold tangles were alive, and Mike realized they could control those tangles, move them as if the rose gold were as much a part of their body as their own mycelial beard.
Suddenly, Mike’s earlier giddiness came bubbling back up. This was all so strange and silly — Mike moved the tangles of rose gold, twisting them together into a thick strand that reached back at their normal toadstool self like a disembodied arm that Mike could control as a puppet. The toadstool shook their own hand — one made from their usual mycelial flesh and the other glowing rose gold.
Mike laughed, and then they heard laughter echoing all around. The toadstool looked around them and saw other toadstools laughing and smiling back.
“Can you understand now?” one of the toadstools asked. Mike thought it was the same one who’d spoken and touched them on the shoulder earlier.
“Yes,” Mike said, and as they spoke, they realized the words weren’t in a language that would be recognized by any Tri-Galactic Union computer. It wasn’t a language Mike themself had known a few moments ago. “What is happening to me? I feel like I’m losing my mind. Is this all an hallucination?”
If it were an hallucination, would the imaginary toadstools tell Mike so?
“Finish building your real body,” the closest toadstool answered. “You need to come all the way through the veil between normal space and subspace.”
“Which one is normal space and which one is subspace?” Mike asked.
But instead of answering, the other toadstool merely pointed at the arm Mike had formed from the rose gold filaments coiled in the same superimposed space as the malachite coral.
When an hallucination is too powerful, you don’t question it. You go along. So, Mike put their mind to twisting more of the filaments about, fusing them into thicker appendages, tangling them together and molding the new mass like clay into a second body for themself.
When it was done, Mike stood and stared in slack-jawed wonder — as much as a toadstool’s mouth can claim to have a jaw — at their mirror image. And the mirror image stared back with as much wonder. In fact, the exact same, identical wonder. For Mike filled both of the bodies at the same time, and each of them belonged equally to the same mind, even though Mike could seemingly move them independently.
“This is dizzying,” Mike said.
“Your second fruiting body always is,” one of the other toadstools said. Except, it wasn’t an entirely separate toadstool, was it? Mike realized that they could feel the other toadstools’ minds, bumping up against their own, meshing and melding together, and as it happened, so much more knowledge and wisdom became available to Mike than they’d ever known before.
Continue on to Chapter 21…