Chapter 10 Anima #3
She locks the bike next to the lab. At the entrance, she stops to steel herself. If she encounters a colleague, she’ll have to be quick on her feet. In Antarctica, Kwame didn’t seem to see through her, but Nita was there to help.
Laurel takes the gold ring out of her tote bag. Three of its keys are full-sized; the fourth is tiny, as if made for a miniature padlock. She skips over this one, as well as the key to the house, and tries the other two. The first key doesn’t move, but the second is a perfect fit.
The layout of the lab hasn’t changed: the same sixteen bays, the open workspace behind them.
The air is cool and slightly moist; as always, it smells like a forest. Laurel sees no other people—only insects, which skitter through mycelia in the viewing windows.
For seconds, she stands still, awash in womb-like comfort.
She sits at the computer. The faculty folder is organized alphabetically. It starts with B, which means that Gloria Albert is missing. This is not completely unexpected—in Laurel’s world, she had retired—but she still feels a rush of disappointment.
Laurel finds her own name easily. Its presence is as unsettling as the absence of Gloria’s.
As she double-clicks the folder, the door to the cold room opens. A blinding circle of light appears. Laurel screams.
Samir turns off a headlamp. “Laurel?”
“Samir.” She gasps her laughter. “You scared me.”
Samir’s compact frame is wiry, his dark hair buzzed and bleached. “How do you think I felt?” he says, faux indignant. “You’re supposed to be off this summer.”
“Fair enough.” She’s glad to see him. In her universe, she took his place as lab tech; in this one, Laurel Two became a professor, and Samir has clearly stayed. “Why are you wearing a headlamp?”
“The light in the cold room is out. I found this in your caving supplies,” he says. “How was the South Pole?”
Laurel has never worked with fungi in caves. She suppresses thoughts of Michigan and Armillaria.
“Mind-boggling,” she says.
“I bet. And now you’re here to see your samples, even though I told you I’d babysit them until May. Oh, drop the act,” he says, mistaking her confusion for theatrics. “You’re in luck. The initial variations are…well, you’ll see.”
He leads her to a series of chambers. Laurel recognizes the first as a mixing chamber, used to combine atmospheric gases. The other cubes are smaller, with clear plexiglass walls.
“I started by mixing gases. Once I had the right proportions for a particular set of conditions, I used an input tube to feed that combination into an individual chamber; then I made additional adjustments for temperature and humidity. Each simulation has a UV light, which I programmed to mimic night and day.”
Laurel doesn’t have to pretend to be impressed. “Incredible work.”
“I try.” Samir points to the simulation chamber farthest left.
“This is our control: current Antarctic conditions. I set temperature at fourteen degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity at seventy-five percent. The rest is the same as it is everywhere on earth: twenty-one percent oxygen, seventy-eight nitrogen, et cetera.”
Samir removes a plate. Fossil pieces sit inert in the center of a sponge. Scattered around them are chopped squares of mycelium.
“They don’t look very happy,” says Laurel.
“No,” Samir agrees. He shows her the second box.
In these plates, the fossilized wood is unchanged, but the fungal squares have morphed into spreading, feathery hyphae.
“They did a little better when I cranked the heat to fifty and increased the CO2. Then I nudged the oxygen to twenty-five percent.”
He guides her to the third chamber. Laurel can’t comprehend what she sees. The fossil pieces have softened, losing their shape. Hyphae have formed concentric circles around them, like the rings inside a tree.
“And the fourth chamber?” she asks.
When Samir speaks, his voice is hushed, as though they’ve entered a church.
“Temperature is fifty-five,” he says. “Humidity is ninety. Oxygen is thirty percent, nitrogen sixty-nine. Tripled carbon dioxide.”
Laurel’s palms become hot. She recognizes the numbers that Laurel Two starred in her notebook. Under these conditions, the fossilized wood has transformed: what were once silver shards have become pulpy and brown. Rising out of that stew is what looks like a half-decomposed twig.
Samir opens the simulation to retrieve a single plate.
“This one has had more time,” he says.
The twig is now undeniable. It stands in the center of the rings that the hyphae traced. The hyphae, meanwhile, have thickened to bolster the base. At the top is a leaf: fragile, but whole and very green.
Laurel wills her brain to work faster. She knows that she is near to a great understanding, one that will forever change her sense of nature and its abilities. It dances just out of her grasp.
“Congratulations,” says Samir. “The first atmospheric recipe for forest composition in Antarctica.”
The dawning knowledge, then, like sunlight over a hill.
Until Laurel left for college, she went to church with her parents on holidays.
Inwardly, though, she was skeptical: God, as He was imagined in religion, seemed unnecessary.
The story of the universe was this: cells splitting, blocks building.
If that counted as intelligence, it had no human face.
Nature, Laurel thought, was not a noun but a verb, an ongoing impulse to create.
It could be mindless. A compulsion. But the way nature plays—with pattern, with shape—reminds her of a scientist or artist. Is it a coincidence that bronchi branch like trees, or that the neural network in the brain is structured like a galaxy?
The pupil of an eye looks like a dying star; and, across the Milky Way, the double helix nebula twists like DNA.
Try it, nature seems to say. Make planets from rock and others from gas.
Try life with one cell, then with many. Try this fish with those fins, that leaf with this spine.
Try it with feet. Give it wings. Split it in half; test it forward and back.
Take the arrow of life. Make it curve. Try it in water, on land, aboveground and below.
Try time as a line, then a circle.
Standing with Samir, Laurel glimpses a glistening web: the cemetery screens, the strength of the signal, the role of the overtaker. All of this is linked to Helen, suspended between threads, and expressed in Beth’s words: the miracle of Mother Earth.
—
Eli sits in his office. Seeing Laurel, he stands. “What’s wrong?”
It seems impossible. But is the process any less far-fetched the other way around? In her world, too, life does not end as it begins: the body, born of another, is one day absorbed by earth.
“In our world, fungi decompose living things,” says Laurel. “But here?”
Even the word “human,” Gloria wrote, comes from “humus”: Latin for soil. Laurel thinks of Beth’s mother. The brown substance under her nails was dirt.
“Here,” she says, “fungi compose them.”
—
Now she Googles. And goes to the library, where she sits beside a stack of heavy books. At home, she tells Eli what she’s learned.
“In our world, a tree starts as a seed. After exposure to water and air, as well as the right temperature, the first root bursts out. The tree grows, it decays, and fungi spread its nutrients through soil.”
Nighttime in mid-August: the windows are finally open, humidity leaching from the air. The crickets hum summer’s white noise.
“Now imagine the reverse. With the help of fungi, a seed composes in soil. It comes out weak and rickety—to our mind, old. The plant and fungi live symbiotically until the plant is fully composed. That can take years, even decades.”
Laurel perches, jittery, on the arm of the couch.
To face her, Eli sits sideways. Laurel can feel his admiration.
Eli has scoured the data from other neutrino detectors, looking for results that mirror ANITA’s findings.
These would imply the presence of high-energy neutrinos—and high-energy neutrinos, he hopes, would point to a portal. He hasn’t found any.
“Slowly, the plant becomes younger,” she continues. “A tree turns into a sapling, then a sprout. Eventually its genetic information is absorbed by other plants of the same species. Those young cells help the others to stay healthy.”
“I’m with you,” Eli says.
“Good,” she says, “because here’s where things get weird. Usually, in our world, matter that was living decomposes—but not always. If decomposition is interrupted, a fossil forms instead.”
“Right.”
“Here, a fossil is like a seed.”
“Now you’ve lost me.”
“Think of it this way. Fossils are out of step with time. Like any seed, they only grow under certain conditions. Scientists know that fossils will compose at some point in the future, but to find out when, they have to date them.”
“Which is what Laurel and Kwame Two were doing?”
“That’s my guess. They knew that Antarctica would be forested one day; they’d found the fossils to prove it. Laurel Two was trying to identify the conditions that enable the fossils to grow. I think that Kwame’s job is to estimate when that climate will come to be.”
Eli’s mouth opens slowly. “If plants compose, does that mean that animals do, too?”
Laurel nods. “A skeleton is a fossil that hasn’t yet been born.”
“Keep going,” says Eli.
Laurel does her best thinking in motion: when Silas was a baby, she walked with him strapped to her chest, dictating notes into an app on her iPhone. Now she paces in front of the fireplace.
“In our universe, decomposition begins when life ends. Blood becomes acidic; cell walls break down; fungi and bacteria chop proteins into pieces. Only bones are left, at least for a century or so; after that, they turn into dust. In this universe, though, bacteria and fungi glue molecules together. Cells form, then tissues, then organs.”
Eager, Eli cuts in. “Because of the laws of entropy.”
“What do you mean?”