Asking for Trouble

Eris Young

Implications of epiphytic partnership formation on sequestration behaviour in Ganoderma ignoscens

J Haddad, B Tyler and R Udang would like to begin by thanking the EMR and our colleagues in the ecology faculty for providing the rich soil from which this collaboration bore fruit.

The blast tore the opening Address in half, throwing the speaker across the ring of folding chairs like a ragdoll and cutting off the Acknowledgment of the Departed Species.

Screams. The unpracticed, animal shock of people who’d never heard a bang louder than fireworks. The soft, good people of the new century, who were working so hard to leave the last one behind.

Len’s hands gripped their armrests, instincts decades out of date pumping adrenaline into arms no longer strong enough to lift them from the wheelchair. Body-memories rose on the tide of stress hormones, of cracked lips and sandpaper throat, cold mud against their forearms, of forcing trembling empty limbs to move, just move. A memory of fear like a frothing dog at the far end of a dirt road.

Then it was over. At least, the first cascade of noise, the blast and its aftermath, the cries of pain and terror receded, leaving the longhouse and the broken circle of delegates in something that resembled, but could not be, peace.

Tears streaked the dust on Len’s face. A dreadful, implacable certainty opened its jaws. The grinning dog of violence, of war. They had not banished it for good as they had thought. It had only been waiting for them, watching from afar.

G. ignoscens is lignicolous, and omnivorous in its tastes. It will readily grow on dead or dying trees of most broadleaf species. Colonising Ulmus americana, it is particularly good at breaking down PFAs in soil and water. In dry areas impacted by prolonged bombardment, it has been shown to rapidly sequester heavy metals, especially when found on Olea trees.

Len would later associate the mushroom with the sound of moving water. The sound of lifegiving, of transformation. Of the story’s beginning: the encounter that would divert the course of their life.

In the moments preceding that beginning they’d been eight days in deep jungle, the last three without food, half the squadron dead or fallen behind. And the fact of a water conflict had meant, of course, that there remained nothing drinkable anywhere in the region at all. By the time they stumbled upon the plantation it might as likely have been a hallucination.

The tree cover parted, a hand drawing aside a curtain, letting through the first sunlight they’d seen in days. The rich, black earth of the clearing was too free of weeds to be entirely natural, the boundaries too precise for brownfield. The ground was divided by a complex grid of logs, lashed together with twists of vine, and studded, every three feet, with clusters of caps the bright lacquered red of apples. Len’s brain, halfway to encephalitis, thought first of Snow White, and then of Eve.

Everywhere, the benevolent chuckle of managed water. The trickle the squadron had been following down from the highlands fattened here into a series of deep, sluggish locks dug alongside the clearing, in each of which floated a mycelial filter the size of a buoy.

They all fell to their knees at the edge of the nearest trench. It wasn’t a hallucination. Neither was the barrel of the semiautomatic pointing at them, or the diminutive, white-haired old woman behind it, when they finally looked up, face dripping, from the sweet, clean water.

Any one of these qualities would be remarkable. Taken together, the scale of their potential is difficult to understate. In the twenty years since G. ignoscens was introduced globally, demand for food aid in the Mediterranean, southwestern United States, and southern Africa have trended downward. Last year, asylum applications to the EU decreased for the first time in fifty-seven years.

“Talk me through it again, slowly.”

Half an hour after the explosion, the southern half of the room had been roped off, a breeze blowing through the new hole in the wall, carrying the voice of the river below.

Len flagged down a passing staffer who had donned the light-blue tabard of the Community Investigative Reserve, and waited with grim impatience as she told them, in fits and starts, what they already knew.

“We c-can’t entirely rule out . . . f-foul play.”

The young woman was pale, reeling from her first real taste of cortisol. Len’s own guts were sour with it, and the feeling brought back a howling grief they’d once hoped would never visit them again.

The grief had two faces now. It looked forwards as well as backwards in time, at the way people, the way Len, used to live, and at the idea that the people in this room, the trembling young woman who’d volunteered to seek justice if it was to be had, that anyone might have to live that way again.

Swallowing back the taste of mud, Len spoke as loudly as their lungs would allow.

“We need to adjourn. At least until the investigation’s over.”

The room fell silent. Not at Len’s volume, or their eight decades’ lived experience, or the long-ago chain of decisions that led them to be invited to this emergency summit, but because they were the only person in the room who’d lived through anything remotely like this.

Violence bred hierarchy. Fear softened people’s boundaries—had softened Len’s, more than once—made them willing to give up freedoms so long as someone could tell them what to do. It was happening again; Len knew the signs. It gave them a nauseating kind of power.

“It’s not safe.”

A low murmur started up like rain, but fell silent as a new voice, a deep, unassuming Midwestern accent, said, “No.”

Kit Benjamin, chairperson for the Great Lakes Autonomous Region, sat with one arm held gingerly in an emergency cast, a red-specked gauze square taped to their forehead. It was Kit who had been giving the Address, standing in the direct line of the blast. One of their long salt-and-pepper braids had come undone, and as they spoke their large square hands worked unthinkingly to fix it.

“There’s no proof this was deliberate. It could have been electrical or an old gas line fault. Meanwhile, these floods in Manitoba, we’ve got dis-housed people heading our way right now. We have to keep going.”

“That would be asking for trouble,” Len snapped. Kit was in their prime at fifty years old, and broad, 6’2”, 250lbs at least. The violence had picked them up and thrown them as if they were nothing. It could have done worse.

“If it was a bomb,”—the room gasped, as at an obscenity—“then it may not be the only one.”

Kit had inclined their head in apology for interrupting, listened seriously to what Len had to say, but only out of courtesy and respect. Their mind was already made up.

“This is urgent. The weather isn’t going to wait for us to feel safe before it kills and displaces more people. And, meaning no disrespect, gichi-aya’aa, but we don’t have a mushroom we can point at the problem this time.”

“But if someone’s targeting you—”

“Then they fundamentally misunderstand what it is we’re doing here. We all need to be here, if we’re going to reach a solution.”

“You are putting every one of these people in danger if we stay.”

“Maybe so,” Kit said equably. “But I can only put us in danger if everyone agrees to it. Tell you what, though,” they added with a self-deprecating grin. “I do think we should adjourn for lunch.”

The tension broke, tentative laughter welling up. “Let’s vote on it when we get back. Agreed?”

A relieved shuffle as the people went out with the small, achievable task of obtaining food. During the morning’s violence, the mushroom had fallen off its stand in the alcove at the northeast corner of the room. One of the staffers paused on his way out the door to set it reverently back in its place, as if that symbolic gesture would accomplish anything at all.

“Fuck you,” Len thought, looking at it.

The mushroom said nothing in reply.

The authors wish to acknowledge their positionality, as inseparable from the ideas presented in this paper. We recognise the irregularity of this approach.

Haddad was given a ration packet of colonised woodchip by a UNHCR worker. Tyler first encountered a cluster of volunteer fruiting bodies alongside a spring in a clearcut grove near his house, which proved to contain drinkable water. Udang’s family brought several samples with them when the Indonesian government forced them to settle in Jakarta. Until the events that precipitated their more recent, second resettlement, the household had maintained the same colony for fifteen years.

We each began postgraduate studies in remedial ecology at the Brussels campus of the École Mondiale des Réfugiés within the same four-year span, and decided to collaborate after discovering these interconnected threads of our histories. Any contribution to the knowledge this paper makes is the result of personal, experiential interest in the subject matter.

“We have ones like you among our people. In-between ones.”

They sat in the stone-paved courtyard of the elders’ communal house, watched over by a mushroom the size of a banyan tree, distant voices of the jungle all around, semiautomatic rifle propped against the wall just outside the door.

The old woman, who fifty years before had made some breakthrough with the mushroom’s reproductive cycle too complex for Len to understand, spoke in halting English, one gnarled hand on their shoulder. The idea being voted on today by the elders of the village had been hers.

“It is correct that these ones should become hard workers on behalf of the community,” she said. “Because they have the gift of seeing both forwards and backwards at once. And, because of this, they belong to everyone in the community.”

Len, who had never belonged anywhere, never until now thought farther ahead than tomorrow, had never been told anything like this before. The old woman’s words were barely audible over the years of gunfire still ringing in their ears. But she smiled, watching their face, because she knew they had heard her.

Despite all this, it was inevitable at that time that what Len did would be billed as a discovery—Army Private Discovers New Species in Jungle; “Miracle” Water-purifying Fungus Found at Conflicted Southeast-Asian Border—which was fine, because those who had developed the mushroom were not looking for credit. Safer for their name and location not to come into it at all.

And so the pivotal moment of Len’s life was an accident: their arrival at the village the moment its leaders decided an outsider was what they needed; the auspicious fact of their gender. Len was only a messenger, the carrier of a clay jar full of red dust that squeaked between their fingers like cornstarch and smelled like book glue and dead leaves, just a pinch of which went a long, long way.

But it was their face immortalized, the Associated Press image that still dogs them to this day: Len at nineteen in tattered fatigues, standing muddy and broken at the edge of the jungle. In the photo they have only the faintest notion of what the mushroom will do for the world, the part they will play, but they are looking ahead now. In the photo they are cradling the jar of precious spores to their chest, face gaunt and peeling, the cracks in their lips just beginning to heal.

There are phenotypic, genetic and biochemical aspects we do not understand. Foremost among them is what makes G. ignoscens so responsive to the hyperlocal and often contradictory needs of the ecosystems in which it finds itself. Evidence suggests this attentiveness to the state of the organisms around it may be facilitated in a given locale by a network of established fruiting bodies, perhaps similar to the way P. stipticus or C. illinoinensis share information via light or windblown pollen.

This paper is descriptive, and we (that is, Haddad, Tyler and Udang) are comfortable at this stage not knowing the precise underlying mechanisms. Because the data—the fungus—speaks for itself. It is the first author of this work.

The Terence Park mushroom was housed beneath a vine-draped loggia in a beige site further along the riverbank, accessed by a very steep ramp.

Halfway up, within sight of the mushroom, Len juddered to a halt as the motor on their chair crapped out. The whole week had been overcast, and in their hurry to reach the longhouse they’d forgotten their spare battery. They swore, bouncing a fist ineffectually off the armrest, swore again as the chair started to slide backwards. Reaching down, they managed to yank on the manual handbrake, breath coming in sharp gasps.

The river rumbled quietly to itself far below. Len waited alone on the long slope for the handbrake to give out and send them tumbling all the way back to the beginning.

If it all fell apart today, maybe that would be a relief. The escaping sigh of a breath held for 67 years.

Someone stepped up behind them.

“Excuse me, gichi-aya’aa. Can I help you?”

Kit pushed them, one-handed, up the slope and parked their chair next to the bench beneath the loggia.

“Um, miigwech,” Len said, flushing slightly.

“What? Oh.” Grinning tolerantly at Len’s pronunciation. “You’re welcome.”

The mushroom was enormous, hundreds of horizontal caps jutting off the sinuous branching woody stem, all supported by a massive, crumbling concrete planter.

The ground was dusted with cinnamon-coloured spores, and littered with tokens: faded plastic knickknacks, estradiol tablets, shreds of tobacco and weed. A worn copy of a photograph Len pretended not to notice. Inspecting the clutter, Kit gave a rumbling laugh. “I used to leave pills under the one in my neighbourhood too.” A careful pause, as of an indrawn breath. “Please reconsider your motion to adjourn.”

“We need consensus in order to continue. I’m just one vote.” Len said, feeling mulish and ungrateful.

“On the contrary, I think people will take the lead from you.”

“They shouldn’t. I have nothing good to teach any of you.”

Kit gave Len a long look, eyes crinkling at the corners. “It sounds like you think you’ve failed at something.”

“A bomb just went off in the longhouse, Kit. I’d say that’s a pretty big failure.”

“Okay, sure. If that was a bomb then something, somewhere, has gone very, very wrong. But whose failure is it?” They cleared their throat. “Just because you lived through something doesn’t make it yours.”

“I’m a lot older than you. I’ve seen whistleblowers assassinated, union leaders. Good people. Especially good people. I remember how it was, and I’m frightened to see you so careless of your own safety. You are our future. You’re precious.” Clean, Len thought but didn’t say.

“With respect, I’m not an endangered species. I’m just a person. There’s eight billion of us out there.” Kit leaned forward, propping their chin in their uninjured hand. “Every meeting, we begin with the Thanksgiving Address. We do this because the Haudenosaunee gave it to us, and it helps us remember what we’ve gathered to do. We have the mushroom because you helped it disseminate, refused to sell it.”

“That wasn’t—”

“It was all that was needed.”

Len was saved from having to respond by an emergency alert. They were already skimming the text while Kit was still fumbling for their phone.

Len’s vision briefly greyed out at the edges. 

. . . ignition of trapped outgas from improperly cured reclaimed materials . . . no evidence of deliberate violence.

Kit gave a long whistle. Len gave no outward reaction, only opened their hand, which had clenched into a fist.

Kit spoke as if their conversation had not been interrupted. “I’m a civil engineer by training. The GLAR is just a side job for me. I can tell you that certain things feel inevitable, when you build on a substrate of human materials.”

The fear still waited patiently at the corner of Len’s vision. Maybe it always would. Maybe not.

Maybe Len had never been more than a carefully chosen tool, by which farther-sighted people could do what needed to be done without sending one of their children out into the poisoned world. Maybe what they had devoted their life to would never be enough to fix what needed to be fixed.

But the story isn’t about Len. It’s about them, and the people in the village, and Kit and the other young people who have known hardship but not paralyzing fear. It’s about the mushroom in Terence Park, which persists in doing what it needs to even from the stand it has been placed on. Large, beautiful, venerated but not unique, and even now doing the same work as countless others.

It spores generously and metabolises dead matter and cannot be contained by a paywall. It thrives in the poisoned, bombed-out places. It wants to be a part of the world we’ve created. It says, I forgive you. 

This story was a joint commission by the Edinburgh Science Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Eris Young is a queer, transgender writer of speculative fiction and nonfiction. They’re also fiction editor at 2024 British Fantasy Award-winning science fiction magazine Shoreline of Infinity.