controversy” over his Caracamuni tape had cost him his first career as a broadcast journalist?
Now, the “flying mountaintop” story had cost him a second career, the one he had built laboriously built for himself over the past decade. The old sensational story had reappeared in the media and, in his refusal to disavow it, Paul had completely unraveled his career in Biology—all within the last four months. He didn’t want to think about it, but his mind kept going there, like a tongue to the empty socket of a pulled wisdom tooth.
Paul stared hard again at the spore print. His last card, the strange ace in the hole he had never wanted to play. He had played it, at last, but what good had it done him?
Two months back, desperate at being reduced to the status of “independent researcher,” Paul got in touch with Professor Phil Damon, who had headed his dissertation committee. Damon had been reluctant to help a tainted former student but he had, mercifully enough, listened to the story of the spore print and the bizarre fungus it might grow. Damon agreed to examine the spore print and have some of it plated out and grown.
Taking another smoky sip of the Edradour and examining the spore print now, Paul could see the blank area in the upper left hand corner. Almost six weeks ago, Damon and a mycologist colleague, in a chamber under a ventilation hood, had scraped spores from that corner of the paper, then shaken them onto a series of Petri dishes filled with various growth media, before handing the print back to him.
Three weeks into his testing of the fungus, Damon had called and quite unexpectedly announced that he had set up a meeting between Paul and Athena Griego, a “venture capital agent.” Griego claimed to represent a number of investors and pharmaceutical firms that might be interested in further research on the fungus.
Ms. Griego had turned out to be a very high-powered and intense woman in her early forties, small of frame but with the sort of preternaturally high-riding and large spherical breasts that suggested structural augmentation. During the meeting she had struck Paul as shady somehow, a wheeler-dealer, an operator. Griego had promised to get back to him in a week, but he had heard nothing since. Some sort of response was very much overdue. The agent, for all her signifiers of power and augmentation, had apparently turned out to be much talk and no action.
Yeah, he thought as he re-folded and re-sleeved the spore print, whatever string of good luck I might once have had, I ran it all out a long time ago. Taking up the bottle and getting out of the car, he wondered why: Why had he been so obstinate? Why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut about the tepui and what had happened there—from the very beginning? Why had he thought it so important for the world to know?
Maybe I’m just self-destructive, he thought. Maybe I’m doomed to crash every merry-go-round I make for myself, just as soon as I get it spinning up to speed.
As he staggered away from the car, Paul knew his stubbornness had to be more than just that. To bury the truth of what he’d seen at Caracamuni would be to bury the memory of his sister, to bring her disappearance closer to the death he feared that disappearance had already become. To turn ten years’ absence and “might as well be dead” into quite dead indeed. He didn’t want to bury Jacinta when she—or at least some part of her—might still be alive somewhere.
In his study at home, Paul had a desk drawer filled with memories, all carefully filed away. The specific details of his sister Jacinta’s life and death receded and faded and vanished, yet the emotions surrounding those memories grew always nearer and more powerful. He could not resolve the paradox of that, so he tried to live in it.
Through the sparse brush he staggered his way toward a sandy scarp he had seen while driving into the desert valley earlier in the evening. Looking about him at night and desolation, Paul realized that he had not done very well trying at living in paradox. Instead, he had tried to fill the empty space of Jacinta’s disappearance with work and study and research.
In the drawer at home with his memories of his sister there were also clippings and notes about quartz: fused from silicon and oxygen, the two most common elements to be found in the crust of Earth and Earthlike planets; harder than steel, fashioned into weapons for the past fifty thousand years; beloved by ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, Bedouins and crusaders, Oriental craftsmen, electronics manufacturers, shamans and witches, alchemists and New Age spiritualists. He read the notes and sometimes wondered about the source of humanity’s long romance with that rock.
Though it was certainly not his field, he had for the sake of Jacinta’s memory read with a certain dislocated interest the speculations that the indigenous Tasmanians, extinguished a few hundred years ago, had a Mousterian toolkit—and physiological features too that would later be described in terms of neandertalensis and soloensis.
In memory of Jacinta he also kept any notes and clippings he found about living fossils, the small groups of plants and animals that are the last living representatives of ancient categories of life, time-frozen creatures still resembling relatives that lived tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, even billions of years ago. Such creatures seemed to him undying memories in the mind of Life.
He stared again at the plastic sleeve and the folded paper that contained the spore print. Why had he guarded so closely the existence of this living fossil, if it was that? Why had he been so reluctant to release the spore print to the world, when he’d been so eager to show the videotape of Caracamuni? The spore print, if the ghost people’s mushroom could be grown from it successfully, would present at least the proof of a species never before known to science—although that alone, of course, did not require that anyone believe the whole strange story of the milieu from which the mushroom had come.
What else would the release of that spore print bring, though? He wondered, for the ten thousandth time, what his obsession with the print and the fungus it produced was really all about. Organic alien technology? Or a mask for his own fears of the death and decay of a loved one?
He thought about that. Was Jacinta’s disappearance—the singularity at the heart of the black hole of his obsession—pulling all his research and all his life inescapably down into its deadly gravity? Or was it only his own fear of mortality and meaninglessness, death as event horizon, from whose bourne no further signal escapes?
He tripped on a stone and fell. With drunkard’s luck he somehow managed to avoid landing on anything sharp. He was glad he hadn’t plunged face first into a jumping cholla or something equally nasty.
Looking and feeling about himself in the moonlight, he found he had landed in sand, amid the crisping remains of the ephemerals that had flowered that Spring. He grunted and took another swig of the Edradour, carefully putting the plastic-sleeved spore print sheet into his vest pocket. He felt remarkably clear-headed in his thoughts, despite what the scotch seemed to be doing to his physical coordination.
He pondered that mind-body split, then picked up a seed capsule from one of the blown flowers and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The desert ephemerals had bloomed in great profusion all through the Spring, the result of the long rains. Jacinta had always loved the desert blooms, especially during El Niño years. The past winter’s rains had been the result of the fourth big southern oscillation since she disappeared. The El Niños were coming more frequently and lasting longer, or the climate had gone into a permanent El Niño cycle, as some claimed. Greenhouse warming making the weather more chaotic, extreme, unpredictable. Or something.
Looking at the intricate seed capsule in the light of the rising full moon, it seemed to him that the natural world possessed an old dreaming wisdom, deeper and more subtle than human knowledge. We’re arrogant upstarts, he thought, to believe our few thousand years of technology, our few hundreds of years of science, could be wiser than the wisdom embedded in the systems this planet has dreamed up on its own, over billions of years.
Wilderness is the great unconsciousness where the world dreams, he thought—setting off an inebriated cascade of ideas. Conscious creatures desperately need that. If we don’t dream we don’t learn. Evolution is life’s long unconscious learning. To wipe out species is to end learning. We’ve been burning the classrooms and killing the students for a long time.
Falling back full