In fact Howard had never seen a shelf fungus like this. The bright scarlet color, the white gill-like sporaphores, the razor-sharp ridges. Another new genus, he realized.
He'd already discovered several dozen unindexed thallophytesbodied fungus. Zoned polyphores, clitopili, tricholomas, rough-stemmed paneoli. The grid-by-grid burning of the forests was making passage to areas virtually unexplored. The collection teams were all going nuts — new insects, new reptiles, new birds, new plants. Everywhere. And lots of new fungi.
Howard unslung his pack and knelt at the ocelot carcass, removing a specimen container. A cellulose gel lined each container to keep the specimen fed. Fungi didn't need sunlight. No chloroplasts. Instead they procured carbohydrates from dead plant matter. And sometimes dead animal matter. Vermilius Moleyus, Howard dubbed it, and with forceps withdrew one of the bright-red bracket scales from the ocelot's hide. But then—
Clara, he thought quite suddenly.
These days not even the distraction of discovery lasted. Even here, where stepping on the tiniest snake could mean death, where a wrong turn could leave you skinned alive by a Urueu-Wau-Wau tribe, all he could think of was Clara. Why hadn't she answered his letters?
He sat on a stump and stared, his knobby knees sticking out. Sweat drenched his khakis. All around him the vegetation teemed — hopping, dripping, crawling with life.
The enormity of the thought astonished him.
I'm sitting in the middle of the Rondonian Rain Forest, walking where no human being has ever walked, seeing things no human being has seen, discovering fungi life we didn't even know existed a week ago, and all I can think of is Clara.
Oh my god I love her so much.
Surely by now she'd forgiven what he'd said in haste and anger that night. How could she not, knowing how much he loved her? Everybody had arguments. Everybody made up again.
Why hadn't she written?
He removed his jungle hat, wiped his brow.
Even this far west of the Guapore Reserve he could smell the smoke.
It seemed sheer madness to destroy all this for grazeland and tin mining. The only wood they took out of the forest was the cherry and mahogany. The rest they burned. It was easier. The World Bank teams were long gone and the FUNAI officials had all been paid off.
No one cared.
They're going to destroy all this, he thought, this treasure trove of life, because it's the easiest way to decongest the cities. Just that. Insane.
He was a mycologist, not an activist. All he could do was what he knew best — isolate and identify any new thallophyte, acquire as much as he could before it was all gone. It was a pity but…
What the…?
He was staring down at the dead ocelot. It occurred to him now that the bright red brackets seemed to surround the animal.
He flipped it over. The big red scales covered the other side too. Which meant…
The implication couldn't be denied.
The ocelot had been carrying the fungus.
These things were growing on the ocelot while it was still alive. There were many types of fungi that lived parasitically on live animals — but only the lower orders. The mildews, yeasts and molds.
An advanced shelf fungus like this had never been known to grow on a live mammal.
Until now.
Oh my god, he thought. Oh my god.
Wait till I tell Clara!
Clara rolled her eyes. After all these letters dripping with lovelorn drivel now this one arrives, full of botanical revelry.
The boy she'd met at the bar last night was gone. The bed still smelled of his sweat. The young ones never last, she theorized. But at least this one had lasted four times.
She lay back naked against the pillows and read.
Dearest Clara,
I've made an unbelievable find. I've discovered a new thallophyte classification that is absolutely remarkable.
At first it appeared to be a typical deuteromycetic shelf fungus, unusual enough, though — and you will appreciate this — in that it possessed a mammalian parasitic propensity. I found it on the carcass of a dead ocelot that had crossed one of the tributaries of the Cautario River which cuts out of the nearly impenetrable Guapore Botanical Reserve. What, you may be thinking, could cause an ocelot to cross water through such a treacherous perimeter? I pondered the same, and fast realized the obvious. Of course! The animal was fleeing the northeast fires, and had no doubt picked up free spores during its trek.
It grows at an incredible rate, Clara, with a strangely fibrous and unusually active mycelic network. And the evidence is clear — the fungus body was growing while the animal was still alive! Absolutely unheard of for a deuteromycetes! It's beautiful, too. Large, blood-red ridge bodies and bright white sporaphores. Gorgeous!
I'm calling it Vermilius Moleyus. The journals will be bending over backward for the story. I'll be famous!
More later. The Team Leader and I are about to autopsy the ocelot. Argh! Please write.
I love you, Howard
She tossed the letter aside, rolled her eyes again.
He discovers some new shelf fungus and acts like it's the Holy Grail.
Why did he even write at all? She'd deliberately answered none of his letters. When was he going to see the light? She was having too much fun now even to think about Howard. Too much fun and too much… God I'm insatiable! she thought.
She reached for the phone. Just about anyone would do now, she realized, flipping through her address book.
Anyone but Howard.
The old professor's face thrust forward. "Do you know what you're saying?"
All at once, then, Howard did.
If it feels good, do it, thought Clara. And this felt incredible.
She'd picked up Barney and David at Kaggie's, one of the more raucous off-campus dance clubs — and now they were playing a delightful game called "Sandwich."
Clara was the cheese.
She felt squeezed in a vise of lust. The bed shimmied; she thought of a truck driving over railroad ties. This definitely scratched her itch, relentless alternating thrusts drawing in and out of her… lower places. Yes, Clara was the cheese, all right…
Her next orgasm went off like subsurface demolition.
They lay there three abreast in bed, lolling on one another as their sweat cooled. Clara's perfect, tanned skin felt shellacked. And these two guys? Meat-rack jocks. Typical 1.9-average campus boneheads whose only genuine endeavor seemed to revolve around the perpetual emptying of their seminal vesicles. It was too bad the university didn't offer a B.A. in intercourse; they'd each put the proverbial blocks to her three times already, and it wasn't even midnight yet. They were, in other words, perfect male specimens as far as Clara was concerned.
"Well," Barney said, "now that we've played Sandwich, how about we play another game?"
"We could play doctor," Clara suggested, fully unabashed in her gleaming nakedness.
"Sounds good to me," David offered, stroking his elephantine penis just as unabashedly. "And it just so happens that Dr. David has a first class proctoscope."