'If you wish.' She pointed through the window, where one of
the robots manipulated ugly looking inoculation needles as it
transferred some material into Petri dishes. She said, 'By their
gestures I can identify my sams, even in a crowd of others.'
Gonzales said nothing. She went on, 'The pure mushroom
mycelium is used to inoculate sterile grain or sawdust and bran.
The mycelium expands through the sterile medium, and the result is
known as spawn.'
'Too much technical stuff,' she said, and smiled. 'Once we
have spawn, the sams can take their baskets and go through Halo,
placing the spawn into dead grass and wood, into seedling roots
and the spawn will grow and bear fruitmushrooms.' She paused.
'Any questions?' Gonzales shook his head, no. 'Then let's go
next door.'
They left the lab anteroom through the hanging curtain and
turned left. The building next to the lab was a fragile tent-like
structure of metal struts and draped sheets of colorful plastic
red, blue, yellow, and green.
'This way,' she said, from behind him. She said, 'It's
around dinnertime for me. Are you hungry?'
'Not really,' he said. 'What is this place?'
'Home,' she said.
The interior was filled with cheery, diffuse lightthe shaft
of sunlight Gonzales had seen outside here brought in and spread
around. The place seemed almost conventional, with ordinary walls
and ceilings of painted wallboard.
The twins waited in the kitchen, among flowers and bright
yellow plastic work surfaces. They sat at a central table and
chairs of bleached oak.
'Would you two like to eat?' Trish asked.
'Yes,' the Alice twin said. 'And we think that Mister
Gonzales'she giggled'should have the special dinner.'
'I don't think so,' Trish said.
'What is she talking about?' Gonzales asked.
The woman seemed hesitant. She said, 'I supply the
collective with psychotropic mushrooms, varieties of Psilocybe for
the most part.'
'They use them to prepare for interface,' Gonzales said,
guessing.
'Sometimes,' she said. 'At other times, it's not clear what
they're using them for.'
'For inspiration,' the Alice twin said. 'For imagination.'
'Consolation,' the Eurydice twin said. 'When I remember
Orpheus and our trip from the Undergroundthe terrible moment
when he looked back and so lost me foreverthen I am very sad,
and I eat Trish's mushrooms to plumb my sorrow. And when I think
of the day I joined the maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces, I eat
Trish's mushroomswhich are the same as we ate that day, the body
of the godthen I recall the frenzy with which we attacked the
beautiful singer, and I recall my guilt afterward, and my sorrow,
but I take solace from the knowledge that the god was pleased.'
'And I,' the Alice twin said, 'can grow ten feet tall.'
'The mushrooms can serve many purposes,' Trish said.
'You should eat mushrooms,' the Alice twin said. 'You are
both sad and confused. They will help you grow large or small as
the occasion demands.'
'Perhaps I am sad and confused,' Gonzales admitted. 'But I
think they would make me more so.' Around him, the room lights
pulsed ever so slightly, and the shapes at the edge of his vision
flickered.
'Confused into clarity,' the Eurydice twin said. 'If you
cannot come up from Underground, you must go deeper in.'
An absurd idea, but it put barbs into his skin and clung
there. Gonzales asked, 'Do the collective ever take the mushrooms
after interface?' Often enough, he had prepared to go into the
egg by taking psychotropic drugs; why not the reverse, eat the
mushrooms to recover from interface? And he thought, the logic of
Underground, of the Mirror.
Suddenly he felt anxiety grip him so he could hardly breathe.
He tottered a bit, then sat in a chair and looked at the others.
The three women watched as he sat breathing deeply. He said, 'I
want to take the mushrooms.'
'Are you sure?' Trish asked.
'I want to.'
'All right,' she said. 'First I will feed the twins, then I
will prepare your mushrooms.'
Trish went to the refrigerator and took out a plastic bag
filled with a mixture of vegetables and bean sprouts. She pulled
the rubber stopper from an Erlenmeyer flask and poured oil into
the bottom of an unpainted metal wok that was heating over an open
gas ring. She waited until light smoke came out of the wok, then
dumped in the vegetables and sprouts and stirred the mix for a
minute or two. She unplugged the rice cooker, a ceramic-coated
steel canister, bright red, and carried it to where the twins sat.
She put shining aluminum plates and chopsticks in front of
the twins, opened the rice cooker and swept rice onto each plate,
then tilted the wok and poured the steaming mixture inside it onto
the rice. 'There,' she said. 'That's for you two.' She looked
across to where Gonzales sat, now oddly calm, and she said, 'I'll
be back in a minute.'
The twins ate with their eyes fixed on Gonzales.
Trish came back with a small wire basket of mushrooms.
'Psilocybe cubensis,' she said. 'Of a variety cultivated here
that has undergone some changes from the Earth-bound kind.' She
held up an unremarkable mushroom with long white stem and brownish
cap.
'Do you ever make mistakes in identifying the mushrooms?'
Gonzales asked.
'No,' Trish said. She was smiling. 'We do not have to seek
