Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 5 of 18

Thren spread her four colonies across the greenhouse floor. Tubers in one tray. Beetles in their nest. The spider in its cone. Fresh leaf plates in a stack. Each part worked. None of them touched. She needed one frame to hold them all, so power flowed to the beetles, silk fed the frame, and the whole thing grew as a single hull. She had no way to join them. Four living systems, four separate lives. She tried wire first. She strung copper between the trays and lashed the plates with silk. By morning the copper had corroded green. The silk snapped where it crossed the warm tuber line. Dead metal could not live inside a living ship. She tore it all down and sat in the wreck of it. Sylvana came through the door then, dragging her lower half over the floor. She was half woman, half vine, rooted wherever she paused. Small mushrooms grew along her arms. Thren had met her twice in the wild, both times near the fleshy trees. She never gave advice. She only pointed. "You bind with dead things," Sylvana said. She pressed a green hand to the soil under the tuber tray. "Sporis binds with roots." She peeled a thread of pale fungus from her own wrist and laid it on the dirt. Thren knelt beside her. The fungus was a web of fine white threads, thin as hair, spreading in every direction. She had seen it choke a stump once and thought it a pest. Now she watched it creep toward the tuber roots and grip them. "It carries what plants send," Sylvana said. "Water. Sugar. Signal. Feed it, and it reaches everything it touches." Thren worked through the day. She laid a bed of the fungal web across the whole floor. She planted a young ironwood among it, its branches still soft enough to bend. She shaped the branches into a long curved cage, a spine with ribs, and pinned the tuber roots, the beetle nest, and the spider's anchor into the web beneath it. Then she waited. By the third night the fungus had joined all of it. The tubers pushed charge through the threads. The beetles fed on sugar the web carried up from the roots. The spider spun cable along the ironwood ribs, and the beetles chewed leaf plates onto the frame. The ironwood hardened as it grew, holding the shape she had bent into it. One living frame. One hull, growing. At dawn Thren stood over a swollen orb of pale skin, taller than she was. Inside, a ship's spine took shape, ribbed and pointed. Her hull had a body now. Then she pressed her ear to the orb and heard it. The whole frame pulsed as one. Every colony now shared one bloodstream. If any single part sickened, the fungus would carry that sickness to all the rest.