The Party Under the Birch

1.

It started, as these things do, with a letting go.

The mushroom stood under the old birch at the edge of the wood, red on top with white flecks, the kind children draw. It had come up in three nights, and now it was open, and on the underside, in the dark between the gills, something was happening that nobody was watching.

It was making spores. It made them the way a cloud makes rain, which is to say not one at a time, and not on purpose exactly, and not with any idea where they would go. Each spore was a speck too small to see, and each one left the gill with a tiny flick of water, a launch so small it would be rude to call it a launch. And then the air had it.

There were about a billion of them that night. The mushroom did not count. A mushroom does not count. Nearly all of them would land on something that was not the right thing: a stone, a leaf, the air again, the back of a beetle who did not need them, a puddle, a boot, a road. Nearly none of them would ever wake. The mushroom knew this, in the way a thing can know without having a head to know it in, and did it anyway, all night, and would do it again tomorrow.

One of the billion is the one this story is about.

We will call it Pip, because a story needs a name to hold onto, and because a spore is small and round and full of a maybe, which is what a pip is. Pip will have to give the name back later. That is fair warning. Hold it loosely.

2.

Pip went up.

That was the first thing, and it was a surprise, because everything about Pip was built for down. Pip was a speck of weight and a thick coat and a single dot of self inside, packed, folded, waiting. But the air under the cap was warmer than the air outside it, and warm air rises, and so did Pip, up past the rim of the cap, up out of the shadow of the mushroom, up into the night where the birch leaves were, and then above them.

Pip did not have eyes and so did not see the stars. But it was among them for a little while, in the sense that everything is.

Then a breath of wind, and Pip went sideways, which is the direction most of life turns out to be.

Pip landed on a leaf. Wrong. The leaf shook and Pip was off again. Pip landed on the shell of a beetle, who was going somewhere with great purpose, and rode along for a distance a spore would call enormous and a beetle would call the length of a stick. The beetle went under a log and Pip stayed on top of it. Rain came, one drop, the size of a lake to Pip, and washed Pip off the beetle and down through the litter, past a leaf, past a leaf, past a curled brown leaf that a springtail was eating, past a hair of root, to a place that was dark and damp and smelled of everything that had ever been alive here, and stopped.

It was, as it happened, about the width of a hand from where the mushroom had stood. Pip had gone up into the sky and across the whole world and come down almost exactly where it started. This is more common than you would think.

3.

Then Pip waited.

This is the part of the story a picture book would skip, and I understand, but it would be dishonest to skip it, because it was most of Pip’s life.

The spore lay in the dark with its thick coat on and did nothing. It did not eat. It did not grow. It did not think, in any way we would recognize, though it was full of the instructions for a great deal of thinking-shaped activity, all of it folded away. Days went past overhead. A worm went past, slowly, ploughing, and the whole world turned over once and Pip was in a slightly different dark.

What Pip was waiting for was a word.

It came through the wet, very faintly: a taste in the water that meant a root was near. A living root, a tree root, pushing through the soil close by, and leaking as it went. Roots leak. It is one of the things roots are for, though the tree would not put it that way. A little sugar, a few odd molecules, a chemical way of saying here I am, I am growing, this is the direction I am going in.

Pip had been made to wake up only when it heard that. A spore that woke up anywhere would use itself up in a day, pushing out into empty soil, and die. A spore that waited for the word could wait a long time. Pip had waited about a month. Some wait for years.

The word came, and Pip took in water and swelled, and the coat cracked, and out of the crack came a thread.

That was it. That was the whole of Pip now: a thread, one cell wide, a hundred times longer than the spore had been across, growing at the tip.

Pip was a line.

4.

Here is the first strange thing, and you can decide for yourself whether it is a sad one.

Pip grew only at the tip. Only the very end of the thread was alive in the busy sense: swelling, pushing, building new wall as fast as it could and then pushing past it. Everything behind the tip became a tube. Still Pip, still alive, but plumbing. Where the tip had been an hour ago was now the middle of something. Where it had been a day ago was hardly a thought.

So Pip had a front, and the front was moving, and there was no back, exactly, and no middle either. There was the tip, and there was the road the tip had been.

If you asked Pip where Pip was, the only honest answer would have been here, at the end, and then a moment later, no, here.

And Pip had no mouth. This is the second strange thing, and it is stranger than the first.

A creature with a mouth eats by taking the world inside itself and dealing with it there. Pip did the opposite. Pip sweated. Out through the wall at the tip went a fine wet cloud of little scissors, and they went to work on the dead leaf Pip was pressing into, cutting it up, softening it to broth, and then Pip drank the broth back in through the same wall. It digested first and ate after. It ate what was outside it, by making the outside a little more like the inside, and drinking.

Which means, if you follow it through, that the edge of Pip was not quite where Pip’s wall was. It was a little further out, in the soup. Pip was already the size of its own weather.

5.

The tip forked.

Nobody decided this. There was a place where the wall got softer on one side, and the pressure inside pushed there too, and now there were two tips going two ways, and both of them were Pip. Then four. Then Pip stopped being a line and became a hand, and then a net, and every thread in the net was a road, and every end of every road was a place where Pip was alive.

The net grew through the leaf and out the other side and into the next leaf. It grew around a grain of sand the size of a house. It grew, fast, toward the taste of the root.

And then something happened that Pip will never be able to explain to anyone, because there is no one it makes sense to.

One of Pip’s threads, wandering, met another of Pip’s threads coming the other way around the grain of sand. Two tips, nose to nose in the dark. And they did not stop, and they did not go around. They touched, and the walls between them opened, and the two roads became one road, and a loop closed.

Pip had met itself, and had not argued.

After that the whole net was a net in earnest. Not a tree of branches going out from a middle, but a mesh, a fabric, a thing with holes in it and roads all round the holes, and whatever was in the water in one road could flow into any other. There was no middle. There had never been a middle. Pip looked, in the way Pip could look, for the place it started from, and the place was still there, and it was a tube like any other.

6.

Pip was not alone down there. Pip had never been alone down there. But now that it was big enough to notice, it noticed.

The soil was a city. Bacteria lived in it in numbers that make a billion look shy, in little nations along every wet surface, and some of them found Pip’s threads and liked them, and walked along them the way you’d walk along a good road, because a wet thread through dry soil is a highway if you are a bacterium, and Pip did not mind. It did not know how to mind. Some of them ate what Pip leaked. Some of them made things Pip could use. There was a lot of that.

A springtail came, a speck of an animal with a spring in its tail, and ate a whole branch of Pip.

Just ate it. Grazed it down like a lawn, chewing, and moved on.

This ought to have been a disaster, and for a creature with a middle it would have been. But Pip had no middle. Pip had roads. When the branch went, the water that had been flowing through it found the next road over, and the tips on the far side of the missing piece kept growing as though nothing had happened, because, for them, nothing had. The place that had been eaten sealed itself off at the nearest wall, quietly, the way a ship shuts a door, and the rest of the ship sailed on.

It is a strange kind of safety, having nowhere to be hit. Pip did not feel safe. Pip did not feel unsafe. Pip grew.

Then Pip met the wall.

It was not a stone. It was dark, and it was thin, and once Pip found it, it was on every side, curving away, and it was made of something like Pip. Another net. An old one. It had been in this ground for years, and it was not Pip’s kind, and it knew that Pip was not its kind, and at the place where the two of them touched it had laid down a line, a dark stain, a border, and on its side of the line it was itself and on Pip’s side it was not.

Pip pushed, in the way a tip pushes. The line held. There was no anger in it and no welcome either. This is simply what happens when two nets of different kinds meet: they draw a line and keep it, sometimes for decades, and if you cut open a log that has been argued over long enough you can see the lines with your own eyes, thin black maps of who would not become whom.

Pip turned along the line and went sideways, which is the direction most of life turns out to be.

7.

The root, when Pip found it, was not what Pip had imagined, because Pip does not imagine, but if it had, it would not have imagined this.

It was enormous. It was pale and soft at the very tip and it was pushing through the soil the same way Pip was, tip first, leaking as it went, and it was, in its own way, a line with a front and no middle, though it belonged to a thing that had a great deal of middle: twenty metres of it going straight up into the light, with leaves at the top.

Pip touched the root, and the root, in its way, noticed.

This is the part I would most like to get right, so I want to be careful. The tree did not grab Pip. Pip did not force its way in. The tree had been leaking that word into the soil for a reason, and now the thing it had been calling for had arrived, and the tree let its outer cells loosen, just slightly, just there, and Pip’s threads went in among them.

Not into the cells. Never into the cells. In between them, a fine net woven through the gaps in the root’s skin, so close that the wall of a tree cell and the wall of Pip touched along their whole length, and things could pass from one to the other without either of them ever opening. Over the outside of the root tip, Pip built a glove, a soft sheath of thread, and the root wore it and kept growing, tip first, and Pip grew with it.

And then the sugar came.

Pip had never tasted anything like it. Pip had been living on the dead, on broth from leaves that had fallen last year, on whatever the bacteria left in the water. This was different. This was sweet, and it was fresh, and it had been made that afternoon, twenty metres up, out of sunlight, by leaves Pip would never touch. The tree had caught light in the sky and turned it into sugar and sent it all the way down through itself to this one soft root tip and out through the wall into Pip.

Pip had never been in the light. Now it was made of light, a little, from the inside.

And Pip gave back. That is the deal, though nobody wrote it down. Out of the soil where the tree’s roots could not reach, out of grains of rock that Pip’s little scissors could work on and the tree’s could not, Pip pulled up phosphorus and water and odd scraps of nitrogen and passed them back across the wall into the tree, and the tree took them up twenty metres and made leaves out of them.

The tree was now partly made of Pip. Pip was now partly made of the tree.

If you were down there with a very small lamp, looking for the edge of the birch, you would not find it. You would find a place where tree becomes fungus in a hundred thousand tiny places at once, and if you were honest you would put the lamp down.

8.

There is one more thing that has to happen, and Pip did not know it needed to happen, and that is the whole joke of it.

Pip had one of something and needed two.

Inside every cell of every thread of Pip was a single dot of self, the one that had come packed in the spore, and it was enough for growing and enough for eating and enough for shaking hands with a tree. But it was not enough for making a mushroom. Pip’s kind cannot fruit alone. To make the thing that stands up in the air with a red cap and lets go of a billion maybes, Pip needed to meet a stranger.

Not any stranger. Not itself; itself would not do, and Pip had already proved that around the grain of sand. Not the dark old net beyond the line; that was too strange. A stranger of exactly the right kind, which for Pip’s people is a great many strangers, thousands of kinds, nearly everyone who is not you. That is how Pip’s people are built. The door is wide, and the only one it is shut to is the one already inside.

Pip did not go looking. Pip does not look. But the net was growing, and one afternoon a tip of it, out at the edge, met a tip of something else, coming the other way.

It was a thread. It was one cell wide. It had come out of a spore that had landed the same night, a little further along, from the same cap or another one, a month ago or two, and it had waited for the same word, and woken, and grown at its tip, and sweated its scissors, and forked, and met itself, and been eaten a little, and found the same tree by a different root.

Two tips, nose to nose in the dark.

They checked. This is real, and it took a while. Chemical questions, chemical answers, back and forth across the small dark gap between them, and the story does not know the words but it knows the shape: are you my kind. are you me. yes. no. then yes.

And the walls opened.

What came through was the other one’s dot of self, and it did not stop at the door. It moved into Pip’s thread, and along it, and into the next, and through the whole net, cell by cell, until every cell of Pip had two dots in it, side by side, one that had been Pip’s and one that had not. And Pip’s went the other way, through the other net, the whole length of it, so that it too was doubled, all the way to its farthest tip.

And then there were not two nets. There was one net, with two of everything, and no seam where the joining had been.

This is where I have to give the name back.

I told you I would. Pip was a spore, and then a thread, and then a net that met itself and did not argue, and all of that was still a thing you could point at and say there. But a net with two selves in every cell, woven through the roots of a tree that is partly made of it, with bacteria walking its roads and a springtail’s bite healed over in one corner, spreading now under the birch and toward the next birch, and the one after that: that is not a Pip. There is nothing there to hang a name on that would not be a lie about where it ended.

So let it go. It is not sad. Nothing was lost. It is only that the word ran out before the thing did.

9.

Under the birch, that autumn, the net that had been Pip and had been the other one did what a net with two of everything does when it has eaten well.

It went to the seedling first.

There was a birch seedling in the shade of the big tree, two years old and a hand high, that could not catch enough light to feed itself, growing in the one place a seedling should not grow, straight under its parent. The net had found its roots that summer, the way it had found the big tree’s, and gloved them, and gone in among the cells. And the sugar that came down from twenty metres up did not all stay in the net. Some of it went along the roads, through the holes and around them, past the healed corner, out to the small roots of the small tree, and in.

The net did not know why. The net does not know why. It had a lot of sugar and the seedling had a lot of need and there was a road between them, and things in a road go where the pressure is lower. That is all it was. The seedling grew a leaf it could not have paid for.

Then the net made a mushroom.

It did not do this the way you would build a thing. It did it the way you would fill a balloon. Threads came together under the litter into a knot, and the knot took in water, and swelled, and every cell in it swelled, and the knot pushed up, and in two nights it had shoved aside a leaf the size of a roof and stood in the air.

Red on top. White flecks. The kind children draw.

And on the underside, in the dark between the gills, something started happening that nobody was watching.

The mushroom was the net. Everything in it had come up through the roads, from the tree’s light and the leaf’s broth and the rock’s phosphorus and the two dots of self in every cell. The mushroom was the whole party under the birch, standing up for a few days to say so. And the mushroom was also nothing much: a wet knot, a balloon, a thing that would be slug food in a week.

That night, in the warm air under the cap, it began to let go.

About a billion. It did not count. Nearly none of them would land on the right thing. It knew this, and did it anyway, all night, and would do it again tomorrow.

One of them, going up into the warm air, and then sideways in the wind, came down on the back of a beetle who was going somewhere with great purpose.

The beetle did not need it. The beetle went under a log.

The story does not know what happened after that. It would be a long wait to find out. And the story has to stop somewhere, though it is honest to say it does not know where, exactly, and has put its lamp down.