Comma event

Extract from

Archaic Dust

Anna Wu

Translated by Christopher MacDonald

 

Sleep, when it finally came, transported him to another realm and another degree of unease. In his dream, he was crossing an endless expanse of darkness on a journey back nearly a hundred years in time. A journey back to Guizhou in autumn 2026, when he was a young researcher on a river expedition amid the region’s fabled landscape of crags, waterfalls, limestone caves, and subterranean channels. There was a cloudburst and then a sudden surge in the water level. The next thing was the team’s boat being swept along into the bowels of a mountain. When the torrent eased, they were in almost complete darkness.

The team of three was headed by Daqi, a biologist, accompanied by biocomputing professor, Ikeda Sachiko, and Lao Zhang himself as the expedition’s new botanist. Their equipment and supplies had been washed away, leaving only the few items that were stashed in Lao Zhang’s waist pack. Despite the seasonal warmth outside, the temperature underground was below -10 °C. The subterranean river and pools were ice cold.

They were all soaked through, and with nightfall coming there was a real risk of hypothermia. They needed to find a way out without delay, but their geolocator was of little use deep below the surface.

Guizhou’s rugged terrain is riddled with underground voids, often containing dense crops of sharp stalagmites. Trails among the subterranean obstructions tend to be sludgy and slimy, and one slip can easily result in serious head injury. Before long, Sachiko’s lips had turned white and she had the shakes in her legs, seemingly from a combination of cold and nerves. At one point, she also banged her forehead. Somewhat reluctantly, Lao Zhang took off his windcheater and wrapped it around her shoulders.

The team’s one remaining torch finally flickered and died, instantly enveloping them in total darkness. It was as if Earth had been swapped for outer space, wrapping each of them in a silence pierced only by the faint hum of nothingness. And then, from nowhere, Sachiko discerned wisps of light in the dark. As their eyes adjusted, they saw a silvery phosphorescence coming from small enoki-like fungi dotted around the cave. Realising they might have stumbled on a new species, Lao Zhang set to work collecting specimens.

Drawn onwards by the light, the team pushed deeper into the cave system, picking up bruises and grazes as they struggled through narrow openings and passageways. At length, they emerged into a vast cathedral of space.

The perils of their predicament were forgotten as they processed the scene before them, and blood returned to their cheeks. The floor of the cavern was blanketed with a silvery mat of glowing fungi. Some were juvenile specimens, slightly translucent and no bigger than a bean, while the more mature fungi, which had thick caps, ranged in scale from the size of an apple to that of a football. At the centre of the subterranean space was a thicket of giant fungi with the tumorous skin of some hideous beast.

As the team looked on, a pulse of luminescence throbbed from the thicket, with the giant fungi pumping a silvery cloud of spores from the gills under their fungal caps. The phosphorescent glow emanating from the heart of the cavern cast ghostly shadows across the faces of the three researchers.