The Mycelium

Three felt domes grown together, waist-deep in the ground, with a crawlway in from the south. Inside, eggs of fungal flesh lie on a floor of thread, and the ones that have hatched glow from within. The air in there is more spore than air. Nobody goes in without a filter; the skull on the post did not have one.

The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.

A single hypha as thick as a tree, arched across a fold with two thinner ones wound round it, lit from below. It did not grow across the fold to let anyone over: the fungus reaches across itself, and the thread in the fold is where it is going.

A cluster of thin bent stalks from one felt cushion, each hung with a bell that is lit from inside. The light comes out from under the bells and pools on the felt. They grow where the warped growth is darkest, and the dark here is why.

The stump of a titan that lost its cap long ago, with bracket fungi climbing it in a spiral, each one a step above the last. The brackets are banded like tree rings and glow underneath. The stump is hollow at the top, and the hollow is full of light.

A fruiting body taller than a titan is wide, ribbed like a pipe organ, with a spiral of lit pits up its side. The capsule at the top has split into four and bent open, and the spores go up out of it in a column of light and drift off east. Every nest, every puff and every cap for a day's walk came from here.

The first bell that came down the vent never went back up. Its crew found that deep in the flesh of the Mycelium the hyphae breathe out air, and they dug down around the stalk of the great cap: three levels of burrows. On the first they lived; on the second they fed the fungus their copper and called it Mother; on the third they made her bear fruit, and in the deepest chamber grew a cap that walks. Everything living in the burrows became her spores. The last of them sealed the gate below with a seal that opens only to hyphae, and stayed beneath it.

A weaving shed of scorched plating on heat piers, and under it a loom strung with glowing thread. The cloth on the roller is a third woven and still shines; the shuttle lies on the floor where it was dropped. Whoever came down the vent to weave light left in a hurry, and something that is all threads has moved into the warp.

A mushroom taller than a tower, red cap and white warts, with gills of glowing thread underneath that light the ground for twenty paces. Something has eaten a mouthful out of the cap and left the crumbs below. Its threads run through the soil in every direction: it is not standing on the ground here, it is the ground.

The largest thing that grows here, and the palest: a white cap wider than a house on a stalk you could hollow a room into, and someone has. The skin of the cap has cracked with age and the cracks are full of light. The north half split and fell long ago; the fungus did not notice.

An old titan of the warped growth: the cap has flattened and turned up at the edge like a dish, so the glowing gills show all the way round. A second, younger cap has grown out of its side. Spore gems have set in the skin like dew that never dried.

The skeleton of something longer than a bell is tall, with bones of copper gone green to the marrow. The fungus eats the metal and grows through it: felt on the lower bones, thread through the ribs, ore where the joints were. Nothing with a copper skeleton is in the catalog. The jaw is open and there is a light in it.