Champignons
The troubled third century
The champignons grew in the sandhills with the bustle-leaves and the yellow-worts, and Daddy said they all three probably depended on each other in some way no one understood. They were tall as a house, taller, six, eight meters high, with broad heads, deeply cloven. Daddy said that the heads broke away when they seeded, shedding drifting sporelets across the plains, a glittering cloud on the wind. “A colleague of mine saw them do it,” he said. “On the arm of the Upper Plateau by the salt flats.”
“Will these do it soon?” Miranta asked, looking up, up, up.
“Those have,” he said, pointing at several with frayed, blown tops that shook in the endless wind. “Maybe a thousand years ago, if we know how these things grow. This one—”
“Soon?”
He laughed. “Not for a hundred years. We think they have to split all the way through before they start to fruit.”
She was disappointed. “Why so slow?”
“They live a long time. They grow slowly. These are ten thousand years old. My colleague was working in a forest of them, way up where the air is thin, up near the clouds, and there he thinks those champignons are twenty or thirty thousand years old.”
She tried to imagine something that old. “That’s older than—that’s older than you, Daddy.”
“Quite a bit,” he agreed. He touched the trunk gently, and she did, too. It felt like dried driftwood from the lakeside, where the terran trees were planted and sometimes dropped branches to float across to the other side. Smooth, almost soft, but hard as steel.
His assistant was taking lumos of them and measuring their diameter. “When this thing started to grow,” he said, “humans hadn’t even built a village yet, much less a town. That’s how old they are.”
She skipped in a circle. “Always been here,” she said. “Always will.”
The assistant shook his head. “Not if the landowners have their way,” he said.
Daddy took off his hat. “Oh, that’ll all blow over,” he said.
The assistant made notes on his tablet. “Provisional government’s not handling them right,” he said. “There’ll be trouble over it.”
Daddy looked right up at the sky through the champignons, and Miranda wrapped her arms around his legs. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “It’ll all blow over.”