The Bank Under the Beech

The tomato plants were dead, which was the whole point. Maya and Soren had been told to clear the bed before the frost, and clearing meant pulling, and pulling meant Maya had her whole weight on a stalk that would not come.

"It's holding on to something," she said.

"It's dead," said Soren. "Dead things don't hold on."

But it did come, finally, all at once, and the soil came with it in a mat. Hanging off the roots were threads. White ones, fine as hair, going in every direction into the dirt like somebody had spilled a spool of spider silk and then buried it.

Soren crouched. He put his face close. "That's not roots. Roots are fatter. These go the wrong way."

"The wrong way how?"

"Toward the beech." He pointed with his chin at the big tree over the fence, the one that shaded the far end of the allotments. The white threads ran off the tomato roots and kept going, toward the fence, toward the tree, past where any tomato had business being.

Maya sat back on her heels. "So the tomato was plugged into the tree."

"Or the tree was plugged into the tomato."

"Same thing."

"It's not, though," Soren said. He got his notebook out and drew the mat of threads, the way they branched, the direction they ran. "Plugged in which way. That's the whole question. Is stuff going out of the tomato or coming into it."

Mr. Okafor, who ran the allotments and mostly wanted them to stop asking him things so he could fix the water butt, wandered past with a wrench. "That's your mushroom," he said. "Fungus. It rots things down. Leave it, it's good for the soil." And he went to fight the water butt.

Maya watched him go. "He thinks it eats dead stuff."

"It does eat dead stuff."

"Then why is it holding hands with a tree that isn't dead?"

Soren didn't answer. He was pulling gently at a thread, following it, brushing dirt away with one finger. It went from the dead tomato all the way to a living lettuce three plants over, one of the little ones that had barely grown, sitting in the shade.

"Okay," Maya said. "So it's not just rotting. It's connecting. Living things to living things."

"Wires," said Soren. "Under the whole bed."

"Wires that carry what?"

They knelt there a long time, which is a thing they were both good at. The garden had a shape to it once you looked. The lettuces in full sun were fat and dark green. The ones under the beech were pale and small, starved of light, barely photosynthesizing at all.

"If it's wires," Maya said slowly, "and the wires carry food, then the fat sunny ones have loads of food and the shady ones have hardly any."

"Right."

"So which way does it flow? Rich to poor, or poor to rich?"

Soren looked up. "Why are you asking it like that."

"Because that's what it is. There's a bank down there." She flattened her hand on the dirt. "A whole bank, and we can't see the money moving, but somebody is deciding who gets it."

Soren wrote bank in the notebook and then crossed it out and wrote it again. "You can't know which way without watching it move. And we can't watch it move."

"We can watch what it leaves behind." Maya was already up, walking the beds. "If the sunny plants are giving, they'd be a bit less enormous than they should be, because they're paying in. And the shady ones would be a bit less dead than they should be, because they're getting paid."

Soren followed her, checking. It was true and it was strange. The shady lettuces should have been finished. Deep shade under a full beech, going into autumn, no light to make sugar with. They should have been yellow rags. They were small, but they were alive. Something was keeping them alive that the sun was not.

"So the fungus takes from the rich ones and feeds the poor ones," Soren said. "That's kind of it. That's a nice fungus."

"No," Maya said, and stopped. "That's not it. That's the thing I got wrong."

"You didn't get anything wrong yet."

"I did. I said rich and poor like the fungus is being fair. But it's not a charity. It's a fungus. It wants sugar. It eats sugar off the roots." She turned around slowly, taking in the whole garden, the fat plants and the thin ones and the threads under all of it. "So it's not giving to the poor. It's a business. It goes where the sugar is. The plants making the most sugar, in the most sun, they're the best customers. The fungus does the most business with them. Grows fattest around them."

Soren stopped writing. "Then why keep the shady ones alive at all."

"Because a customer that dies stops paying." Maya crouched by the palest lettuce, the one that should have been dead a week ago. "It's keeping them ticking over. Not being nice. Not being cruel. Just, a thing under the ground that can count. That knows this one makes lots of sugar and that one makes hardly any, and it moves food around to keep the whole business running."

Soren looked down at the dirt between his knees. Then he looked at the fence, the beech, the whole street beyond it, all the trees along it, the park past that.

"Maya. If it's under this bed."

"It's under the beech."

"It's under all of them." His voice went quiet and fast. "Every tree on the street. Under the park. It never stops at a fence. There's a thing under the whole city that knows which trees are doing well and moves food to the ones that aren't, and counts, and decides, and none of it has a face and none of it stops."

Maya didn't say anything. She had her hand flat on the ground again, not pressing, just resting, the way you'd rest a hand on the side of something to feel if it was breathing.

Under her palm the dirt was cool and full of threads, and somewhere down there sugar was moving, in the dark, toward the plants that had earned it and the plants that hadn't, and nobody above the ground could feel it go.

A worm turned over in the broken soil and pulled itself down, following one of the white threads out of the light.