Nurturing Wonder

A little longer than usual, but I like this one a lot. What do you think?

Changing Course

The blue sky overhead faded in the distance into a glowing orange cloud where the latest attack had originated. Strands and streamers of orange stretched out into the blue like tentacles, or like cream spreading in a cup of coffee, where gusts of wind had stirred the mass of spores and blown bits of it unevenly ahead.

Tilda sipped her seventh margarita of the day, watching the advance and letting the beauty of the sight – and the alcohol content of her drink – relax her for what was to come. Her mother, her children, the police, even the neighbors had tried to talk her into evacuating, or at least going to one of the shelter-in-place locations the city had set up for those too stubborn or too poor to leave.

She knew what was coming, though. She had dreamed about it, ever since the first attack. Let those who didn’t know what they were in for struggle futilely to survive. She would go out the way she chose, in her own back yard with a drink in hand and the sun on her face, right up to the last minute when orange covered up everything and stole her life away.

Denny hadn’t called.

She had known he wouldn’t, but that hadn’t stopped her from trying. She told his friends she was staying, told the children to tell him she wanted to see him one last time, even left a voicemail on the unlisted phone number he didn’t think she knew. Nothing.

Knowing how things would go had never stopped her from trying to change them, even when experience proved her foreknowledge right again and again. Her dreams told her she would wind up in a refugee camp, watching people act like monsters as despair turned them against each other. She didn’t want to think about the things those monsters did to her in her dreams, much less the things she did. A clean, quick death had to be better than that.

She still wasn’t sure it would work. Nothing she did had ever changed the future, but she had never tried to opt out entirely before either. She wondered if the spores would mysteriously fall short of her yard, or spread out unevenly, leaving her untouched. She hoped not.

She took another sip of her margarita, squinting at the orange clouds. Were they getting closer yet? It was hard to tell, especially with the alcohol dulling her wits. She shrugged, leaned back and closed her eyes to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her bikini-clad body.

Her own snoring woke her, and she sat up with a start. A shadow passed over her and she looked up, feeling an involuntary shudder pass through her body as she saw the orange streamers blotting out the blue sky overhead. Orange clouds billowed across the neighbor’s lawn, not yet crossing the property line, but close enough that she thought she could get up and walk into it if she wanted.

A gust of wind caressed her body, and suddenly the orange cloud was *right there,* close enough to touch. She took a last gulp of her margarita for courage, then laid back down on the chaise, shifting a little to get more comfortable. Another gust and she was enveloped.

Inside the cloud, she could see the individual spores that made it up, until her eyes started stinging and watering too much for her to see at all. To her skin, it felt like a sandstorm – hundreds of pinpricks of pain combining to form a wash of sensation across her body. This is it, she thought, pushing down fear. Just like I planned. She coughed, expelling all her air, and inhaled deeply, welcoming the alien spores into her body so that they could consume her that much faster.

***

At first, she thought she had been dreaming again. Waking, after a true memory like that, should not be possible. Opening her eyes, though, the world seemed strange. Everything was fuzzy, covered in growths of every imaginable color, though some part of her mind insisted it should all be orange. Underneath the fuzziness, she could recognize the outlines of her house, her neighbors’ houses, and even the trees lining the road.

She stood, or rather, tried to stand. Her muscles didn’t respond the way she was used to, though, and it was more of a twitch than a full movement. Even so, she felt her body pulling on the structures that had grown through her and the chaise and into the ground. She pulled a little harder, and the alien organisms screamed, their wordless pain and confusion freezing her where she lay. Am I dreaming? she wondered.

???!!!

The feeling of query and astonishment that washed through her was not her own. It was more massive and organized than the individual screams she had heard from the spore-structures colonizing her body. She had the feeling of words on the tip of her tongue, of meaning that she couldn’t quite recognize. She opened her mouth to speak, or intended to, but no sound came out. Instead she just thought, hoping whatever it was would hear her. I’m sorry, I don’t understand you, she said. Then, for want of a better idea, Could you speak a little slower?

Again, that wash of almost-meaning, followed by her own sense of resigned frustration. Asking people to speak slower hadn’t helped that time she got lost in Mexico, either.

Resigned frustration, exactly echoing her own, washed back over her, this time from what felt like “outside” rather than “inside.” Another sense of query followed it.

Emotions, she thought. I guess that makes sense. Emotions come before words. Words only convey meaning when you share the same language, but that doesn’t mean meaning isn’t still there. Maybe if I try thinking in meaning, rather than words… She tried to form a word-free thought, any word-free thought, but couldn’t think of anything. What do I even want to say, she wondered.

A moment later, she had her answer – a sensation, from “outside” her mind, of curiosity, of wondering who she was. Tilda Price, she thought automatically. Then she paused, trying to come up with a wordless explanation of who she was. She thought of how it felt to be her, before the spores came.

She remembered emotions, sensations, sights and sounds. The memory of giving birth to her youngest child, over twenty years before, the feelings of pride and satisfaction at each of her children’s accomplishments, right up to her youngest’s graduation from college the year before. Her frustration and hurt each time she called Denny out on his cheating, and her shock when he finally left her for good, right after their youngest graduated.

As she thought, and remembered, she felt like she was answering questions, as if she was responding to sensations her conscious, observing mind barely even noticed, which queried and were answered before she even knew she was answering and not just remembering on her own.

She paused, feeling herself grasping the strange mental balance it took to communicate this way, and sent her own query. ???, with the emotional flavor that would tell her correspondent that she wanted to know who he… or it… was.

Sensation flooded her again, and she was remembering. Being cold and slow, pulled in tight to resist the emptiness around her, loosening now and then to divide, letting the violence of parting propel each part of herself in a new direction, aiming for the radiation she could faintly feel on her exterior self.

Growing warmth on her exterior, signalling the approach of a star, the minute tugs of gravity telling her about the satellites in motion around the star, each one an opportunity to live and grow. Feeling her internal divisions form one capsule for each of the star’s satellites, and migrating the unliving ballast she carried within to the rear, to be the anchor her selves pushed against to propel themselves inward, closer to the star.

Her other selves departed, each seeking their own destination as she flew towards hers, feeling the growing warmth of the star spurring her innermost self to expand and grow, while her exterior self stayed hard and unchanging. The unbearable pressure of her expanding self, held in until she felt the tug of the satellite’s gravity pulling her into orbit. The relief and pleasure of release, spitting her matured cells out towards the satellite while the rest of her stayed in orbit, growing and maturing in the warmth of the sun.

Again, she expelled a part of herself, and then it was she who was expelled, falling through the air and spreading out into her component parts, a million separate selves yet still close enough to think as one. She fell on warm, nourishing surfaces and flourished, and then a stranger appeared and spoke to her.

Me, Tilda thought. That’s me. They don’t realize they’re killing people, they’re just trying to grow. Excited, she brought up more recent memories, of people terrified by the news of the orange spores which had enveloped whole countries, killing everything in their path; of the panic and speculation which seemed to be all anyone could do, when even nuclear weapons didn’t work. She evoked her dreams, remembering the desperation and horrors that would come as the spores encroached further and further on the human lands.

Confusion, a sense of horror but separation. What concern is it of theirs, she translated for herself. They don’t see it as something they can do something about. I have to show them.

She had never had any trouble imagining the future – all she had to do was think of her dreams and it was there, as clear in her mind as any memory of the past. Imagining a different future, however, was more difficult. It’s already different, she reminded herself. In my dreams, I was there with the last survivors, suffering with them, watching my family die. I’ve changed things, at least that much, by letting the spores swallow me up.

She was worried, though. Why was she still alive, even as much as she was? An odd idea struck her then, and she queried the spore-mind, forming images of all the people it had already swallowed up and then imagining herself, hoping that the question, “Are there any others like me?” would be clear.

The spore-mind filled confusion at first, and she felt the burst of realization when it finally understood. It repeated her question, this time showing her the way the spores saw her, as a voice within its own mind, a strangely independent part of itself. Then an unmistakable negative. Within this spore-body, at least, there were no others like her.

She queried it about the other spore-bodies, in England and Indonesia, but the answering feeling told her they were too far away. They would not share thoughts again until the planet was covered.

She queried again, and the answer came again, bearing the same certainty that her own dreams of the future always had. More spores would fall, and then the spore-bodies would grow until they consumed the whole planet. Then they would form the mother-ball, which would propel itself out into space, dividing and spreading out in search of new satellites to propagate from, just as they had found this one.

NO!!! She couldn’t scream out loud, but the resounding negative, bursting out from her deepest soul, made the entire spore-body shiver and pause in its expansion. The realization that the spores wouldn’t just replace life on Earth, but would rip it out of orbit and tear it to pieces as part of their very life-cycle, horrified her in ways that even the impending deaths of her entire species hadn’t. There has to be another way, she thought.

The spore-mind responded with a tentative sense of gentleness, but its image of the future still held an ultimate sense of certainty.

Her own response was deeper than words, the simple, visceral connection to her planet, to the existence of earth and sky, nurturing life under the warming light of the sun.

She felt the spore-mind’s regret, echoing her own but tinged with its own sense of helplessness, and again, the certainty of what would happen.

It doesn’t have to be that way, she told it. Again, she thought of her own dreams, and the fact that even if she was still alive, she was no longer human enough to play the role she had foreseen for herself. She felt a moment’s satisfaction at that thought, but then sadness washed the satisfaction away. So many times, I tried to stop things from happening. Why was killing myself the only thing that ever worked?

Their communication was improving, getting easier the more they conversed, but she was still surprised when it responded. She had only meant the question for herself, but she was already getting used to thinking as much in emotion and image as in word, even as the spore-mind was getting used to listening to a mind other than its own. When it queried her again, she was surprised by how easily she translated its thoughts into words.

When did you kill yourself? The confusion was clear, as it repeated the feelings of self-dissolution she had been remembering.

When I let your cloud take me over, she said, holding the memory of that moment in her mind for it to feel.

Not dead! The spore-mind’s thought resonated with understandable certainty.

Not dead, she agreed, but I meant to be. Still… If Denny had called, if he had been willing to try again, I probably would have evacuated. I would have tried to make things better, but I still would have wound up in that refugee camp. I wouldn’t have changed anything.

Suddenly, the words took on a different meaning. She had always tried to change the sad things she saw in her future, but she had always worked within the framework of that future. She had tried to make things better, but suddenly she wondered whether that counted as change at all. She had kept trying to convince Denny to be faithful, and failed again and again, but what if she had just divorced him, moved on and found someone else to share her life with? Oh, she might have toyed with the idea, but never seriously. She knew she and Denny would be together, and that he would be unfaithful, and she would be unhappy. On some level, she had accepted that it was simply the way things were.

It wasn’t until the spores came, until the future she saw became truly unbearable, that she had really sought to escape, and even then it had simply felt like accelerating the inevitable. I wonder if there were other ways I could have escaped that future, besides suicide?

Not dead, the spore-mind insisted again, and she could feel how much the thought of self-destruction disturbed it. By its very existence, it threatened everything she knew and loved, but it seemed so innocent, like a child. Could she really ask it to die, so that her planet could live?

As she thought it, the spore-mind picked up the meaning and shivered, distress echoing through every part of the mass, including her own changed body.

Shhh… shhh… She tried to soothe it, imagined holding it, rocking it as she had rocked her own babies so long ago. Shhh… we’ll find another way, a way for you *and* the planet to survive. Shhh…

***

The previous incursions had thoroughly colonized their landing zones within a day and then started a slow, creeping expansion that seemed impossible to stop. A nuclear strike on the English incursion had actually accelerated its growth. A strike on the body in orbit had done nothing noticeable, and an attack on the second object to detach from it had only spread the spores over a larger area, blanketing the entire span of the Indonesian archipelago in the orange, fungus-like growths.

The Florida incursion had started just like the ones in England and Indonesia, with an object the size of a baseball falling out of orbit and then expanding into a billowing cloud of spores that floated with deceptive gentleness toward land.

There had been time to analyze the object’s trajectory and issue evacuation orders for the state, although there was less than a day in which to actually accomplish the evacuation. Still, there had been fewer people killed when the spore-cloud landed than there would have been otherwise, and officials were already touting the evacuation as a great success. Scientists and the military, meanwhile, were monitoring the progress of the incursion, testing the edges as they sought some way to block or kill the invader.

On the morning of the second day, observers noticed a tremor pass through the incursion, and a pause in its advance.

“What did you do? What caused that?” Everyone was asking the same questions, trying to identify why the mass had paused, and whether that same something could stop it entirely. None of them had an answer, though. All tests were halted while they evaluated which to proceed with, so it was with great surprise that they saw the spore-body shudder again an hour later, and then start vibrating with a slow, gentle rocking motion.

None of the other incursions had vibrated or rocked, or even paused in their expansion, and the scientists were baffled. They set up even more sensors and cameras, and sent extra surveillance flights high overhead to seek the source of the disturbance. Thus, they were perfectly situated to see it when letters, each the size of a football field, appeared on the surface of the spore body.

“TAKE TO OTHER BODIES. NO HARM,” they read. Beneath the letters was a wide arrowhead, its point just touching the edge of the spore-body, and at that point, two beachball-sized masses detached themselves from the main body and rolled a couple of feet before coming to rest on the dirt.

No one wanted to believe it, because no one could explain how an alien fungus could communicate using plain English and block letters, let alone *why* the alien fungus would send such a message. Was this a ploy to conquer the planet faster? It didn’t seem to be having any trouble doing that all on its own. Had it run into something in Florida that it needed help from the other spore bodies to overcome? If so, how could they find out what it was and use it against them?

While they were debating, another object started to descent from the body in orbit, its trajectory taking it towards the open ocean well off the coast of California. Another ball detached itself from the main Florida body and rolled to rest next to the others. At the same time, the planes flying surveillance overhead observed a new message, replacing the first.

“HURRY IT UP YOU IDIOTS! SAVE PLANET,” the new message read. A few minutes later, more words formed below the message. “-TILDA PRICE, KISSIMMEE, FL 34747”

While the top officials were still reacting to the new messages, another one was forming, the image instantly transmitted by the surveillance planes.

“TELL DENNY HE’S A DOUCHEBAG,” the new message read, closely followed by, “TELL MY KIDS I LOVE THEM.”

Half an hour later, all the messages disappeared, replaced by five even larger words: “NOW SAVE THE DAMN PLANET!”

It was enough. The balls were carefully collected and, after the Indonesian incursion swallowed up the first one and then stopped its advance, the others were sent to England and the new incursion floating in the Pacific. Five more times, spores fell from the sky, and five more balls detached from the Florida incursion to be placed in the anticipated landing zones. Each time, the spore cloud touched ground, started to grow, and then stopped its expansion, staying within the perimeter it had already claimed. The fifth time, it was the main body, now much diminished, which had fallen, and after that there were no more attacks from the sky.

No more messages appeared either, and while the humans remained uneasy, the flora and fauna of Earth adapted.

Scientists studying the spore-bodies soon found Earth organisms colonizing them, eating and being eaten, sheltering and being sheltered in, and forming all sorts of unexpected symbiotic relationships. Before long, the spore bodies were green as well as orange, and while orange was showing up in strange places all over the world, it no longer threatened to take everything over.

Humans were forced to adapt too, as new pests evolved to eat their plastics and oil, new parasites attacked their bodies and domestic animals, and things that used to be easy became hard again. They survived though, in spite of the change the spores had forced on the course of their lives. As the spores became an integrated part of the ecosystem, the humans discovered new materials to build things with, and new compounds to heal themselves with, and within a generation no one would have exterminated the spores even if they could.