Fungus World

Fungus World is the planet the ark ship Gilgamesh finds in the second system of its voyage. It is one of the Old Empire’s terraforming projects, and work on it stopped during the process, leaving a world covered in grey fungus.

Description

The surface is almost uniform grey, and the grey is alive. The images from the ship’s drones show a dense, tangled growth that covers the mountains to their tips and lies as a thick fur on every slope. It feathers out into fronds like ferns that arch over one another, spreading folds shaped like a hand to catch the light. Elsewhere it rises into tall towers, warty with buds and fruiting bodies.

Vitas, the science chief who runs the survey, calls the stuff best thought of as a fungus. One species has colonized the whole planet, pole to pole and at every altitude, and there is no obvious division in it, so it may be a single organism. It seems able to run some form of photosynthesis, at odds with its colour, and the low oxygen level suggests the chemistry is not the kind the survey team knows.

Beneath the growth the ground is ordinary. The drones read sea basins with no seas in them, and river valleys with no rivers. A planet’s worth of water is held inside the organism instead.

The conditions are hard. Gravity is around eighty per cent of Earth’s and one rotation lasts about four hundred hours. The temperature is high, bearable near the poles, survivable in northern latitudes and probably beyond human tolerance towards the equator. Spectrographic readings do show abundant organic chemistry, with all the elements people would need.

No crew member is described visiting the surface. The drones that mapped it began to lose function while they worked, and both stopped altogether. Vitas describes the air as virtually a spore soup, with new colonies ready to sprout on any exposed surface. When someone asks whether the growth could be burned back, she points out that there is too little oxygen for that.

The report

Vitas presents her findings in a shuttle bay, with at least a hundred of the crew packed in to listen. The planet is one of a string of terraforming projects the Empire was running just before its collapse, and the work here stopped in the middle, with the control facility abandoned.

She cannot say what became of the project. The fungus might be an intended part of the terraforming, or the error that drove the engineers away, or something that grew after they left. Either way the growth is there to stay, and she recommends no further investigation: this world is its world now.

Guyen answers from the back of the bay. This place will not be the crew’s home any time soon, he agrees, and he starts to talk about what they can take from the station instead. It is he who calls the planet Fungus World, and the speech goes messianic fast enough that he looks surprised at himself.

Afterwards

The Gilgamesh keeps its orbit for a long time, stripping the abandoned station and fitting what it finds to the ship, including the upload facility and a fusion reactor Vitas reckons is over twice as efficient as the ark ship’s own.

During a shuttle trip to the station, Holsten turns its external cameras towards the planet and imagines towers of fruiting bodies swelling into the upper atmosphere to seize intruders. Lain, arguing with him later, counts the time since they left the grey planet in generations.

By the time the ship closes on Kern’s green world, Vitas still uses this planet as her example of an experiment gone strange. What the drones show may be an aberration of that experiment, she says, just as was the grey planet and its fungal growth.

Name

Fungus World is the name Guyen gives the planet in his speech about what the crew should do instead of settling. Holsten sees it as a fungal grey orb, and the narrative refers to it as the grey planet.

It is not Kern’s World. That name belongs to the green planet the ship reached on its previous stop, the project that was finished and then put under quarantine by a satellite.

Unanswered questions

• Whether the fungus was part of the plan, a mistake that ended it, or a later arrival.
• Whether it really is one organism, and how old it is.
• What the recordings in the abandoned station say about the terraforming work.
• Whether the water bound inside the growth could ever be released.
• Whether the ship’s people ever come back to the system.