What Moves the Dead (43)

But.

Well.

As writers say to each other, “Yes, it’s been done, but you haven’t done it yet.” And Easton was right there and such a wonderful muddle of late-nineteenth-century snobbery and courage and world-weariness and insight, and also my fungus was different, dammit, because, as a Twitter friend once ranted, the problem with many fungus-takes-over-the-brain stories is that the interfaces are deeply incompatible, and I started thinking about how an intelligent fungus would deal with that. What would it be like the first time you realized that these creatures you were puppeting around communicated not by something sensible and straightforward like chemical messages or even photophores but by forcing air over their flaps and modulating the airflow? Light receptors in enclosed balls of fluid, okay, that’s not so weird, but everything’s wired backward and upside down and you have to figure out how to crack that encoding?

Good God. You’d have to be a genius to work all that out. A genius with a lot of time on your hands.

Of course, the neat trick with fungi is that most of their cells are undifferentiated, so if the majority of cells were effectively brain cells … okay, that could give you a really smart mushroom … and if you spend a few centuries practicing on the local wildlife …

I am, in all honesty, a little sad they had to kill the tarn. I know why they had to do it, but part of me says, “But what if you saved a hare and had a clean room and cultured the fungus in a medium there? Couldn’t you learn to communicate? Make friends? It’s not malicious; it has no way of knowing that humans really, really hate it when you make dead things walk around.…” But with the technology available in the 1890s, and the screaming atavistic horror bit, well. Can’t blame anybody, really.

(I must add at this point that in John M. Ford’s brilliant Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet? a character discussing the movie version of “Usher” utters the line, “Sinks into the dark tarn, actually. But there’s never a tarn around when you need one.” That line was never far from my thoughts.)

Anyway! On to the acknowledgments! Huge thanks to my editors Lindsey Hall and Kelly Lonesome, who heard me say, “I dunno, I have this thing I’ve been fiddling with, with ‘House of Usher’ and evil fungi?” and practically climbed down the phone line to pry it from my hands; to my agent, Helen, who had arranged the phone call in question, along with all the other stuff she does so that I can write in peace; to my buddy Shepherd for a beta read and a “It’s fine, but also what is wrong with you!?”; and to Dr. Catherine Kehl, who helped me brainstorm a lot of things about macroalgae and the nature of the tarn that I wish I’d been able to fit into the book. (There were biofilms on a fungal mat symbiotically overlaying a macroalgae, and the biofilms formed layers and crenelations, and it acted like a brain with electrochemical signaling! It was very cool! But nobody in eighteen ninety whatever would know that! Sigh.)

And of course, as always, to my husband, Kevin, who is the very best at providing encouragement when I have hit that stage of the book where I no longer know if anything is good and am convinced that I have shamed my ancestors forever. Greater love hath no spouse.

T. Kingfisher

July 2020

Pittsboro, NC





TOR BOOKS BY T. KINGFISHER

Nettle & Bone

What Moves the Dead





About the Author


T. KINGFISHER writes fantasy, horror, and occasional oddities, most recently Nettle & Bone and Paladin’s Hope. Under a pen name, she also writes bestselling children’s books. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, dogs, and chickens who may or may not be possessed. You can sign up for email updates here.