The Fungus Was Deciding

The logs at the old mill were stacked by kind, or had been once, before the labels rotted off. Now they were just a long gray graveyard of trees, and fungus grew on all of them.

"This one's soft," Maya said, pressing a thumb into a pale log. Her thumb went in like it was pushing bread. "This one's not." She moved down the row to a reddish log and pushed. Nothing. Her thumb stopped.

Soren was scraping a shelf of fungus off the soft log with a butter knife they weren't supposed to have taken. "Same fungus, though," he said. "Look. The little brackets are the same shape on both logs. Same color underneath."

"Same fungus, different speed," Maya said. "Why is it eating one faster?"

"Softer wood?"

"You don't know it was softer before the fungus got it." She crouched. She had that flat look she got when something wasn't adding up. "Maybe the fungus made it soft."

Soren stopped scraping. "Okay. But then why is the red one still hard? Same fungus."

They looked at the two logs. The pale one was pine, Soren thought, from the smell. The red one had a tighter grain. Maple, maybe. He wrote both guesses in the corner of his notebook page and drew an arrow between them, though he didn't know yet what the arrow was for.

"Try a third," Maya said.

There was an oak log at the end, huge, cracked down the middle. The same little brackets grew along the crack. Maya pushed her thumb in. It went a little way and stopped, somewhere between the pine and the maple.

"Three logs," she said. "Three hardnesses. One fungus."

"So the wood's different, not the fungus."

"But the fungus is the one doing the eating." She stood up. "So the fungus is doing something different on each one. It has to be. It's the only thing that's alive here."

Soren turned that over. He didn't like it and he couldn't say why, and not liking it was usually the start of something. "A fungus doesn't have a brain," he said slowly. "It can't look at a log and go, oh, oak, better bring the oak tools."

"But that's what it's doing."

"It can't decide."

"Soren. Look at the logs. Something decided."

He scraped a little of the pale fungus into a jar. Then he walked to the maple and scraped fungus from there into a second jar. Same fungus, both jars. Same cream color. He held them up side by side in the gray light and they looked identical.

"They look the same," he said.

"They look the same," Maya agreed. "But one of them is turning pine to mush and the other one is barely scratching maple. So they're not doing the same thing. They just look the same."

"So the difference isn't in the shape."

"The difference is in what they're squirting out," Maya said. "Whatever the digesting juice is. It's a different juice on each log."

Soren felt the back of his neck go cold, the good kind of cold. "Enzymes," he said. "That's what breaks the wood down. Different enzymes for different stuff. Wood's not one thing, it's like three things glued together." He'd read that. Cellulose and lignin and one more he could never keep straight. "Pine glue and oak glue are different. So the fungus needs different scissors for each."

"And it brings the right scissors." Maya's voice had gone quiet and fast. "Without looking. Without a brain. It sits down on a log and somehow knows, this is oak, and it starts making oak scissors."

"Maybe it just makes all of them all the time."

Maya shook her head before he finished. "Then the maple would be mush too. It's not making all of them. It's making the right ones. It's choosing."

They stood there with the two identical jars.

"Okay, but how," Soren said. "How does it know? It can't see. It can't taste, it doesn't have a tongue. There's nothing in it to think with."

"It touches the wood."

"Everything touches the wood."

"No, I mean the fungus is inside the wood. The threads go in. Millions of them." Maya pulled a strand of the pale log apart and there it was, a faint white webbing running through the fibers, so fine it was almost not there. "It's not sitting on the log. It's laced through it. Every thread is touching the wood at a million points and each point is doing chemistry."

Soren looked at the white threads. He thought about a million tiny points all tasting the wood at once, all reporting back with chemistry instead of words, and the whole web adding it up somehow into one answer: oak, bring the oak scissors.

"There's no one in there deciding," he said. "And it's still deciding."

"Yeah."

"That's worse than if there was someone."

"Way worse," Maya said, and she was grinning now "It's smart and it's nobody. There's nobody home and the lights are still doing math."

Soren looked back down the row of logs. Pine soft, oak medium, maple hard, and the same blank cream fungus on every one, wearing the same face, making a different decision on each without a single thought in it. He tried to imagine what it would be like to solve a problem you didn't know you had, with a body that was also your brain, spread out through a dead tree in the dark.

He couldn't. But it was happening six inches from his hand, and it had been happening for years before anyone came to look.

Maya screwed the lids onto both jars and held them up again, one from the pine, one from the maple, twins that were secretly nothing alike.

"We can't tell them apart," she said.

"No."

"They can tell the logs apart, though." She tucked a jar into each coat pocket. "They're better at wood than we are."

The white threads in the split log stirred faintly in the wind, thousands of them, tasting the oak, and not one of them stopped to wonder how.