A Mushroom Garden • Crypsis Again • Predators and Pests • Tourists • Not the Same as Forever

The room beyond the doorway was long and low and lit by crystals, and that light revealed plots of earth filled with dozens of corpses covered in mushrooms.

I gagged at the fungal stench and shuddered, then looked around for Minna. She’d only been a few steps ahead of me. Where had she gone? I stood on a stone path that went straight up the center of the room, with various side-paths dividing up the space, and the rest of the floor was soft, damp soil – this was a mushroom garden. Most of the bodies were half-submerged in the soil and deeply decayed, only their shapes and the shreds of ragged robes revealing they’d once been human, but a few bodies were fresher, and as a result far more disturbing.

“Minna! Where are you?”

“I got the knife!” She climbed out of a plot deeper in the room, stepping onto one of the side paths and brandishing the glowing blade. “Sorry I lost it, so clumsy, this is a clumsy place, let’s leave.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about the bodies?” I looked around. “What happened here?”

“Maybe just funeral things. The dead return to the soil to feed the next generation, yes?”

I knelt and shook my head, pointing to some of the fresher bodies. “These people were killed; look, you can see the caved-in skulls, the cut throats, the chest wounds. Someone murdered them and put them here.”

“It’s just their culture, I guess, but I don’t like it either, so let’s go.”

A low moan came from the soil bed behind her, and Minna stiffened, hunched her shoulders, then hurried toward me. “We should go, go, go, now, now, now.”

“What is that noise?”

“Something bad, something that should be dead but won’t stay dead, something that–”

Something buried in the soil climbed out and hauled itself onto the path. I stared when I realized it was Minna – another Minna, wearing just her underwear, streaked all over with dirt, expression dazed, with mushrooms growing out of wounds along her neck and chest. “Zax?” she croaked. “Run, Zax!”

The Minna with the knife stopped, turned, looked at her double, then turned back to me. “Yes, let’s run, run to another world.”

Crypsis. Plants that disguised themselves as other things. Why not ambulatory mushrooms that could look like people? Maybe those carvings weren’t pictures of humans harvesting person-sized mushrooms, but people fighting them.

“Give me the knife, Minna, and we’ll kill that… thing.” I held out my hand, but the Minna before me wasn’t fooled. She fell back a step instead, holding the knife out.

“You know.” She sighed. “You know I took her clothes.”

I angled myself so I could block any knife strikes with my left arm – Minna said the living wood was less vulnerable to injury than flesh, and my sensations were still duller in that limb, so being slashed there would hurt less. I still wasn’t eager to experience the sensation. “Why did you attack her?”

“Better question: why didn’t she die? These others die when you stab and stab and stab them.”

“There is life all around me.” My Minna wobbled along the path toward the predator. “I borrowed some of their life to fill the gaps you left in mine. Why did you attack me? Why not talk to me?”

“I couldn’t talk to you until I fed on you, thing.” The creature turned sideways, looking from me to Minna and back again. “I had to taste your thoughts to steal your voice. And in your thoughts I saw worlds full of wet things and soft things and flesh things, and that boy over there is the door. I have been here alone for so long in the dark. I have wandered these caverns and stood and looked at the light above where I cannot go, because the light is poisonous to me. I want to pass through the door of sleep and wake in another world.”

“No one should be trapped alone in the dark,” Minna said. “But why are you alone? Who killed all these people?”

“I did,” the creature said. “I am the last of my kind. The meatlings thought they’d wiped us out, but I crept in and fed on their chief, and took her place, and killed them all while I wore her face.” She pointed the knife at Minna, but looked at me. “Take me through the door of sleep, or I will kill her.”

I held up my hands. “I’ll take you, sure, but you have to fall asleep first.”

“You want to trick me.”

“You tasted my thoughts.” The true Minna was still approaching, slowly but steadily. “You know it is true. When he sleeps, he travels.”

“I saw that you travel in his arms, meat-thing, but I can travel in his arms while I’m awake.”

I shook my head. “One person tried that. I don’t know what she saw – I don’t know what it’s like, the place I go in my sleep, between worlds – but when I woke she was screaming and her mind was broken and she fled.”

The creature spat. “I am not weak like meat.”

“We can try it your way.” I wanted to keep the mushroom-thing’s attention, but she must have seen something in my eyes, because she turned and hissed just as Minna leapt on her. They tumbled off the side of the path and into the soft soil.

I raced forward, watching them roll and thrash. The creature lost some of her human definition, becoming grayish and vegetal in patches as she wrestled with Minna. My friend was valiant, but she wasn’t made for fighting – she was a gardener pit against a predator. The knife came loose, though, and spun away, stuck blade first in the dirt. I snatched it up, plunged it into the back of the creature’s neck, and yanked it out again.

She laughed, shoved my Minna’s face deep into the soil, and then climbed up onto the path. “Stupid fleshrag. Blades do not hurt me–”

“Minna, close your eyes!” I shouted, and pushed the emergency button on the knife.

Even with my eyes closed and my head turned away, the light was searing, and the creature screamed and howled. The glowblade has an emergency signal flare function, a full-spectrum burst as bright as the sunlight this creature shunned.

The brightness vanished – the flare drains the power cells, and now my wonderful glowblade was just a knife – and I opened my eyes. The creature sprawled on her back on the path, arms deforming into tendrils, face a blasted blank. She hissed and began dragging herself toward the nearest patch of dirt.

I grabbed Minna’s arm and pulled her out of the soil bed. She spat out dirt, then followed me to the central chamber and the fountain. The lights of the crystals grew dimmer with every passing second. “Minna, are you all right?”

“I will heal. I bear with me useful spores, too. Thank you for recognizing me, Zax, for knowing me from the predators and pests.”

We hurriedly washed ourselves off in the fountain – Minna just immersed herself completely – and then I showed her the mushrooms the creature had brought me. “These are mostly death and hallucinations or both, Zax, but yes, these little ones, they should make us sleep. Now would be best.” She looked up at the fading crystals on the ceiling, already so dim the carvings around them were invisible. “It will be dark soon.”

She popped a mushroom, chewed it, and leaned against me, peaceful and cool.

I took a mushroom too, and stepped once more through the door of sleep, and into, I hoped, a brighter world.

World 1003: Another desert, but this time we woke near a river delta, and sat on the shore and watched boats made to look like water birds sail on the current, carrying parties of laughing people. Most were human, but about one in ten had the head of an animal – jackals, eagles, crocodiles, cats. There were pyramids, black and gleaming, made of square panels, some of them lit up to reveal apartments inside. Some of the humans were dressed differently – less often bare-chested for one thing, with fewer golden necklaces – and often held small devices in front of their faces, taking photographs or videos, I think.

We walked until we found an open-air market, full of booths with various delicacies and wares, except apparently it was all free. I ate spiced locusts and skewers of meat, while Minna, who didn’t eat flesh, supped on the delicious petals of white flowers.

We sat on a bench and looked up at the night sky, and I saw satellites twinkling. “I think this is an amusement park,” I said. “Though I can’t be sure. I think everything’s free because the guests here bought tickets, and now it’s all paid for. The people with animal heads are robots, maybe. Or maybe not. I did visit a place once where everyone had the head of a dog, and they were all very frightened of me for having the kind of head we do. This place is certainly full of tourists, though.”

“Tourists.” Minna’s world had no such concept, and she tested the word thoughtfully. “Is that what we are? Tourists?”

“We certainly never have time to become residents, so in a way, yes. We’re on the grandest possible grand tour.”

“I am glad you took me with you,” Minna said. “Even though some places are scary, it is better than the Farm, and the scary places make the nice places feel better.”

“I like traveling with you. I hope you stay with me for a while.”

“You have had other friends, yes? Who came with you times and times? Why did they go away?”

I hesitated at the thought of returning to those sad memories, which I shy away from even in this diary. I finally said, “There have been a few, though some only stayed with me for two or three worlds. There was a woman I loved, who got lost and left behind. A scientist who helped me a lot, but who betrayed me in the end, and I had to run away. A little boy I saved from a bad place, and took to a better one – I was glad to find him a home, because it was hard, traveling with someone who needed me to take care of him so much. An android named Winsome – a machine, but they looked like a person, and could think like one – who powered down to sleep and powered up to wake… They were a wonderful companion, but after a couple of weeks we got separated, and I lost consciousness before we could find each other. Right before you, I traveled with a person named Laini for a while, but we didn’t get along that well. She just wanted to find a place where she’d never have to work or feel pain again. She came from a terrible world, so I understood, but I still felt bad about our parting. She didn’t even look back when she sent me on my way without her.”

“I am sorry, Zax.” She put her head on my shoulder. “I want to travel with you for as long as I can see ahead.”

That wasn’t the same as “forever,” but maybe she just knew better than to promise such things. Even with the best of intentions, we might get separated someday, through no decision of our own, and then the river of my life would carry me farther away from her with every sleep.

No use thinking about sad possibilities when there are happy certainties, though. I sat with her in silence for a while, then said, “I smell like the inside of an old boot.”

“I smell like the bottom of a compost pile.”

“I haven’t had a hot shower since I left the Dionysius Society.”

“What’s a hot shower?” she asked.

It was two more worlds before I had a chance to show her, and it’s a shame the experience was so horribly marred by what happened right afterward.