— but still her thoughts drifted.
She refused to feel guilty about Howard. He'd been dead for over a week now and their relationship had been dead for over a month. She was sorry he was dead, naturally, but it really had nothing to do with her.
How dumb could a guy be? All those silly, drippy love letters he'd sent her from Brazil. As though she hadn't made herself perfectly clear that night.
The schmuck had gone to his grave thinking they were still in love.
The Rain Forest was burning, its systematic destruction exposing new botanical phyla every day. The government had issued grants to get as many experts down there as possible.
She also considered what else he was, or had been. Kind. Considerate. Generous.
Okay, maybe she had led him on a little, said she loved him once or twice when the subject of marriage happened to come up, maybe even indicated a kind of enthusiasm for the idea.
Hey, there was a lot of money involved. A lot to consider.
And she'd been pretty damn good to him all told, hadn't she? For a while?
She stepped naked into the bedroom. Her eyes went to the little box of letters on the bureau. Like a miniature coffin.
Howard had been cremated. The letters were all that remained of him now. They made her feel suddenly sad.
He was a drunk but he was gorgeous and at least he liked to dance. The more she tried to focus, though, away from Howard, the more precisely she envisioned the skinny, knob-kneed little nerd.
It was happening to her a lot lately. She'd be lying in bed masturbating for god's sake, a kaleidoscope of sweat-sheened studs writhing and panting through her brain, plugging all three orifices at once…when in walks Howard.
She guessed she did feel a little guilty. Poor guy. All alone in the Rain Forest, with his mushrooms and his fungus, his sample bags and his mosquito nets. He'd died loving her…
My god. She was about to start crying.
Over Howard!
The phone rang. She lunged for it.
'Johnny!'
The voice on the other end was loaded to the gills but she was still perfectly glad to hear it.
'Go for a ride, babe? A little dancing maybe, then maybe a little…”
“Get your gorgeous ass over here right now,' she cooed.
Approximately one month previous, Howard Moley, mycologist, botanical scholar, and jilted lover, looked down in dismay at the dead ocelot. Creek scum filmed the animal's fine spotted fur. It had crossed the river just east, which struck Howard as odd.
Ocelots were known to avoid water in all but life-threatening situations. This seemed strange. Stranger still were the dozens of bright and nearly blood-red bracki??? that studded the animal's hide. Most brackets or shelf fungi were saprophytic — they grew on stumps or dead trees. But this one clearly demonstrated a mammalian- capable mycelium, meaning that its food-support could be absorbed from dead animal tissue. This was very rare among stemless mushroom phyla.
In fact Howard had never seen a shelf fungus like this. The bright scarlet color, the white gill-like sporaphores, the razor-sharp ridges. Another new genus, he realized.
He'd already discovered several dozen unindexed thallophytesbodied fungus. Zoned polyphores, clitopili, tricholomas, rough-stemmed paneoli. The grid-by-grid burning of the forests was making passage to areas virtually unexplored. The collection teams were all going nuts — new insects, new reptiles, new birds, new plants. Everywhere. And lots of new fungi.
Howard unslung his pack and knelt at the ocelot carcass, removing a specimen container. A cellulose gel lined each container to keep the specimen fed. Fungi didn't need sunlight. No chloroplasts. Instead they procured carbohydrates from dead plant matter. And sometimes dead animal matter. Vermilius Moleyus, Howard dubbed it, and with forceps withdrew one of the bright-red bracket scales from the ocelot's hide. But then—
These days not even the distraction of discovery lasted. Even here, where stepping on the tiniest snake could mean death, where a wrong turn could leave you skinned alive by a Urueu-Wau-Wau tribe, all he could think of was Clara. Why hadn't she answered his letters?
He sat on a stump and stared, his knobby knees sticking out. Sweat drenched his khakis. All around him the vegetation teemed — hopping, dripping, crawling with life.
The enormity of the thought astonished him.
Surely by now she'd forgiven what he'd said in haste and anger that night. How could she not, knowing how much he loved her? Everybody had arguments. Everybody made up again.
Why hadn't she written?
He removed his jungle hat, wiped his brow.
Even this far west of the Guapore Reserve he could smell the smoke.
It seemed sheer madness to destroy all this for grazeland and tin mining. The only wood they took out of the forest was the cherry and mahogany. The rest they burned. It was easier. The World Bank teams were long gone and the FUNAI officials had all been paid off.
No one cared.
He was a mycologist, not an activist. All he could do was what he knew best — isolate and identify any new thallophyte, acquire as much as he could before it was all gone. It was a pity but…
What the…?
He was staring down at the dead ocelot. It occurred to him now that the bright red brackets seemed to surround the animal.
He flipped it over. The big red scales covered the other side too. Which meant…
The implication couldn't be denied.
The ocelot had been carrying the fungus.
These things were growing on the ocelot while it was still alive. There were many types of fungi that lived parasitically on live animals — but only the lower orders. The mildews, yeasts and molds.
An advanced shelf fungus like this had never been known to grow on a live mammal.
Until now.
Clara rolled her eyes. After all these letters dripping with lovelorn drivel now this one arrives, full of botanical revelry.
The boy she'd met at the bar last night was gone. The bed still smelled of his sweat. The young ones never
