The Kimota Anthology (13 page)

THE FUNGUS COMMUNION

by Alexander Glass

The gods were coming back.

Carter had seen them everywhere: clinging to the gnarled knuckles of trees, nestling between the cracks in old stone walls, lying naked on the brown earth with their pale faces staring at the sky. When he stopped to rest that morning, by the edge of a dark, stagnant pool, he had caught a glimpse of one of them down in the water. This one was huge, a pale grey disc in the depths, bigger than a man. He drew near to the water’s edge, so that a ripple licked at the toes of his boots, darkening the old leather. The god stayed still, far below, giving no sign that it had seen him, or heard his prayers. Carter sat there, watching, the heels of his hands pressed hard against the rough, stony ground. This had been a roadway, once, before the war. Now it was overgrown, parts of it collapsed, parts of it flooded. A good home for a god. He kept on watching until he saw the god move. One edge of the fleshy disc lifted up, as if it were waving to him, or saluting him. As if it were granting him a benediction. He caught a glimpse of the smooth dark gills beneath, and all at once he felt at peace.

When he reached the place where Sister Constance was waiting, it was late afternoon, and a smoky dusk was settling over the trees. Constance was sitting with her back to a broken wall, at the edge of the clearing. Her arms hung down beside her, lifeless. It was as if someone had picked her up like a doll, and propped her carelessly against the wall. That morning, when he had left the clearing, he had stopped for a moment, and looked back. Sister Constance had been lying in the same spot, her back to the wall – the spot where he had left her. She had glanced up at him and sighed, a tiny, weak breath, and a dust-cloud of spores had poured from between her lips.

She was still breathing, but her eyes were closed. Though Carter made no effort to hide the sound of his footsteps through the undergrowth, she didn’t seem to be aware of him until he was right beside her, until his shadow, wavering in the fading light, fell across her body. Then her lips parted, as if to taste the shadow; and she opened her eyes, and saw him. She smiled; even this now seemed to be an effort.

Carter wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. He hadn’t brought the news he wanted to bring. There was no encampment within easy reach, no-one to help. That was the only news that mattered, the only thing he could have said, and he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Instead he waited, kneeling down beside his teacher, his arms crossed before him, his hands clasped upon his shoulders. After a while Sister Constance understood, and looked away, and Carter looked away also. Constance didn’t seem distressed. There was no expression on her face at all. She closed her eyes again, her head rolling back into place against the stone.

Carter thought she was asleep once more, and was about to move away, to leave her in peace. But her lips were moving; she was trying to give shape to the breaths that passed between them. She was trying to speak. Carter leaned closer, placing his ear by her mouth, straining to catch the words. He caught the smell of divinity as he leaned across her, a dry, musty odour.

“I was wrong,” she whispered, and for a moment Carter heard the sound of his own heart drowning out her words. He thought she was going to renounce the gods, just as they were about to welcome her to their ranks. But she continued: “I was wrong to ask for a doctor. There was no need. Why should we be saved from godhood?”

Carter nodded, relieved. He had too many doubts of his own; he didn’t think his faith would stand the pressure of Constance turning apostate. He had wondered, that morning, whether the motion of the god in the pool had been nothing more than a ripple, a movement of some invisible current. Angrily, he had tried to brush the thought away, but it had stayed with him all day.

“I hope you can join me,” Constance murmured. “This is the greatest state of all, even greater than the holy state of symbiosis. The one leads to the other, Carter. I hope you are stronger than I have been, when you’re given that gift.”

A few hours afterwards her body grew cold, and Carter buried her, as best he could. The gods had left her skin mostly untouched, and so he covered her over with a makeshift cairn, and tossed a handful of pungent earth over that. Her hand protruded through the stones, the fingers curled into a loose fist, like a white flower growing on barren ground. Carter smiled sadly at that thought. He knelt down beside the cairn and gently prised open the five white petals of her fingers. In the centre, sprouting from the palm, was the only sign of godhood that Sister Constance had ever carried. A smooth tendril, with a tiny, soft white cap.

Three days later, Carter found a small village on the edge of the wastelands: an open square with a heavy stone well, and a couple of rings of houses. There seemed to be few people there, and of those, most were passed into apostasy: he had passed a young woman on the road, and seen that she was gathering the gods, presumably to eat. She had selected her gods with care. Perhaps, Carter thought obscurely, some exacted a more bitter vengeance than others.

A small crowd had gathered by the well, and Carter approached them, and murmured a greeting. The old man who seemed to be their leader stared at him for a moment, then turned and spat down into the water. Moments later, a small wet sound echoed up from the well.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” Carter assured him. “I was just passing by your village. I’m travelling west. To the desert.”

The old man nodded shortly, as if he had been expecting as much. But then he demanded: “Why? What’s out there for you?”

Carter hesitated. Then he said: “I’m trying to find the place where I can speak to the gods.”

“Which gods would those be?”

Carter found he couldn’t explain. He didn’t have the right words. So he tipped his head to one side, and pulled down the collar of his shirt. The old man peered inside, and then stepped back hurriedly, with a curse. There was a clang as his bucket hit the ground, and rolled a little way across the square. The crowd leaned forward, straining to see, but Carter had closed his shirt on seeing the old man’s reaction.

“Keep away. Damn it. Keep away.” The old man recovered himself a little and stood there, staring, panting. His face hardened into a scowl. “Why don’t you ever learn? Don’t we make ourselves clear? We don’t want the fungus in our village. We don’t want it anywhere near our village. Do you know how far the spores can carry?” He shook his head. “I promise you, if I catch the fungus, I’ll come after you. I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

“If you catch the fungus,” Carter said mildly, “you’ll be one step closer to godhood.”

The old man nodded, and glanced around at his companions. “I’m sure. Well, for the moment I’m quite happy with my mortality, thank you. Imperfect as I may be. Imperfect as I am. The war’s over, long over. There’s nothing to be gained by worshipping the bomb, or the fungus, or the virus.” He spoke more loudly now, more to the assembled crowd than to the stranger. “There never was. Those were cruel gods, the gods of war. They wouldn’t have spared you then, no matter how you prayed, and they certainly won’t spare you now.”

Carter tried to explain, knowing it was useless. “We don’t want to be spared. We want to unite our souls with the gods.”

“And exposing yourself to the fungus is supposed to help?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. It’s the only way.” Carter shrugged. “In your village you eat lichens, don’t you? I saw someone from the village gathering lichens and fungi. A lichen is a plant in symbiosis with a fungus – with one of the gods. That plant is closer to the gods than you are, my friend.”

The old man shook his head, exasperated. The others seemed either openly hostile, or simply bemused.

“The greatest prophets of the past were symbiotes,” Carter continued, forcing himself to go on although it was obviously no use. “Jesus Christ was a man in holy symbiosis with God.”

“You’d better be careful what you say,” the old man said, in a low voice. “There are people here who might take that amiss.”

“We can attain that symbiosis, if we only take communion from the gods. The fungus communion.” Carter hooked a finger into his collar again, tugging the cloth aside, exposing the crescent fungi that were clustered on his breast. They were thin, almost wafer-thin, each one as white as a cobweb. He had taken communion himself only a few months before, and already he was closer to the gods. So much closer. “Take the god into your body,” he urged. “Let it transform you.”

Carter had become so carried away by his own speech that it took him a moment to realise the man was laughing at him. “I don’t want to be transformed,” the old man snorted. “I don’t want to die any earlier than I have to, no matter how close to your gods I get. I’ll take my chances with whatever’s waiting for me.”

Carter sighed, and turned away.

The old man called after him: “I’d drag you out into the desert myself, if that’s where you want to go. Best place for you. But I can’t. I don’t want to touch you with my hands. Do you understand? Your holy symbiosis has made you an untouchable.” He raised his voice, straining to carry his words to the stranger, as Carter left the square behind. “I might catch your disease. But I’ll never catch your religion.”

There was more, but Carter didn’t stay to listen. He took the broken road out of the village, following the setting sun, until he came to the desert’s edge. As the last light drained from the world, he knelt and prayed. He prayed that the gods would be waiting for him out here, in this friendless place. He prayed for his deliverance into godhood. And he prayed that his doubts might be eased.

That night, he slept on the hard ground.

When he awoke, he knew that something had changed. Divinity always took a greater hold during the night, during the hours of darkness. That was why the gods had begun to return at the ragged end of the war, or so Sister Constance had taught him. Their spores had crossed the darkened land, carried on the wind, sowing divinity wherever they went.

The night after his first communion, he had been unable to sleep. He thought he could feel the spores in his body, in his blood. They raced around his bloodstream like tiny sparks. The next night, the gods themselves began to appear. Under his arms, first. On his groin. On his feet. Then, night by night, they had spread, over his upper arms, over his chest and back – one of his nipples was hidden by a soft, pale god – over his stomach and thighs. Sister Constance had had nothing like this. Her divinity was within her, holy tendrils spreading through her body. Carter had fallen to his knees when the first of the gods appeared, and thanked them. He had attained the holy symbiosis. He was no longer human: he was a new creature, part god, part man.

He stretched, feeling the gods that clung to his body stretch with him. A few of them would have been bruised or broken by his movements, and some were torn open, revealing the clammy flesh inside. But there was no serious harm done. At first, he wasn’t sure what had changed. His divinity had spread a little further, certainly, but he was used to that; he had almost grown to expect it. The wonder of being a vessel for the gods never went away, of course, but his rapture was no longer as intense as it had been on those first few days. He was a day older, and a little more divine. Each day, as Constance had said, each day a little more divine.

Then he realised. This was the day. This was the day he would ascend, to join the gods, to become one of them. He would leave his mortal body behind, and become something purely divine.

He hauled himself up, muttering a prayer, and staggered away into the desert.

He ate nothing that day. He could find nothing to eat in the waste lands. Nothing but the gods, and they were not to be touched. If he had wanted to eat them, he had his own supply. But he found, in any case, that he had no appetite. If there was a temptation, it was to take a second communion, to break one of the gods from his breast, the one that grew just over his heart, perhaps, and eat it. Perhaps that would bring him directly to godhood. Or perhaps it would damn him.

He wandered on until the sun began to sink, painting the desert sky with colour: deep blood-red, bright yellow, purple, green. He felt the gods stirring on his skin, as if they sensed the approach of night.

At last, just as the last drop of red was melting over the horizon, he gave in to temptation. He could hardly help himself. He longed for that sensation, that feeling of perfect understanding, perfect clarity, that he had had when he had taken the fungus communion. He couldn’t believe the gods would punish him for that. So he broke off a thin god from his breast – the one that grew over his heart – and placed it on his tongue.

The god tasted bitter, more so than he remembered. His mouth was watering, his jaws working hard. At last he swallowed the bitter god, and sat waiting for that sense of clarity.

When it came, it froze him still. The clarity was terrible. He understood it all. He knew that the fungi were not gods. He knew that he was no divine creature, but an ordinary man, infested with genetically-enhanced parasites, inside and out. His body was crawling with them. All his doubts settled on him at once; all his doubts were confirmed.

Trembling, he began to tear the fungi from him, casting them away. There were so many. He knew it would do no good. They were deep within him, coursing through his blood. He wouldn’t ascend to godhood that night. He would die, out in the desert, alone, with no-one beside him and no gods to comfort him.

All at once he realised that Sister Constance, too, must have betrayed her vows and taken a second communion. She too had understood. That was why she had asked for a doctor, at the end, when it was already too late.

Carter lay back on the ground, his arms spread wide. He closed his eyes.

Later, his last breath flew past his lips and out into the desert, carrying with it a handful of spores.

[Originally published in Kimota 13, Autumn 2000]