Spiral

Dylan said, “Maybe another new species for the fantastic fungal forager?”

“You never know…,” Maggie replied, throwing an arm around her son. “If so, I’ll be sure to give the dog the credit.”

“Fungus turtulus,” Dylan said, smiling.

As they continued, the path was often obscured by leaves and snow, but Maggie and Dylan had no trouble finding their way. Nearly every morning, before Dylan went to school and Maggie to work at the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, they walked a loop though the forest, tending to their Fungus-Among-Us projects.

It had started almost a year ago, a few weeks before Dylan’s ninth birthday. On one of their off-trail jaunts through the woods, he had excitedly pointed to a patch of brown fungus on a tree, swearing that it looked just like Albert Einstein. Maggie hadn’t seen the resemblance, but it had given her an idea. For his upcoming birthday, she hatched a plan to spell out DYLAN-9! on a log using fungus as living paint.

A week later, she was in the hospital with multiple fractures to her leg, the victim of a horrific crash with a pickup truck. On their way home from a hike, Dylan had been strapped tightly in the backseat when the out-of- control pickup T-boned their Volkswagen. Dylan was shaken up but not hurt, but the Ithaca College senior driving the pickup had been propelled straight through the windshield. He didn’t make it to the hospital.

They talked about it many times afterward, the fragility of life. Dylan was having a hard time with it.

“You could have died, too, Mom,” he’d said.

She hugged him. “I know, sweetie. But I didn’t.”

Fungus-Among-Us proved to be a helpful distraction. Figuring out how to do it turned into quite a project. Ultimately, she’d taken her cue from the waxy coatings that plants use to ward off bugs and fungi, making a stencil in wax paper and attaching it to a log. She’d carefully made the wax paper’s edges flush with the surface of the wood, using candle wax to seal them. Then she’d liberally sprinkled on mold spores and left the whole thing alone for two weeks. The wax held, and the mold had grown on the exposed parts. The final result was striking, as if the woods themselves were wishing her son a happy birthday. Dylan had been giddy with delight, for the first time in too long. He’d started having nightmares a few days after the accident. They didn’t come quite as often these days, but still with some regularity he’d wake screaming in the night, terrified that everyone he loved was dying.

Maggie and son had gone on to develop other approaches. A few brushstrokes of potato broth and sugar on a log would yield a healthy patch of Aspergillus in a couple of days. Sugar water brought the textured black of a sooty mold. With a million species to choose from, the possibilities were endless. They had a wonderful time with their joint project while her leg healed. Dylan still awoke from nightmares, thrashing and sweating, but not quite as often. Maggie had hoped that once the cast was off her leg, the last reminder of the accident, everything might go back to normal.

But then Dylan had his first panic attack.

A short spur trail led them to their major task this morning-the removal of the wax paper from their latest Fungus-Among-Us project. There were now bits of mycological art on trees and stumps all over Ithaca, thanks to the mother-and-son Connor team. They both loved the idea of unsuspecting travelers happening upon their creations, certain that forest sprites had been at work. Today’s project was a triquetra.

It was as large as a pumpkin and chest-high on the trunk of a decaying spruce. The wax paper was still affixed to it. “You do this one,” she said to her son.

“Really?”

“Go for it.”

Dylan scrunched up his face and went to work, delicately tugging at the edges, peeling it bit by bit. Maggie had always loved the design, the interlocking strands. The triquetra was of Celtic origin, and only later was it appropriated by Christians as a symbol of the Holy Trinity. To the Celts, it represented the three phases of the feminine life cycle: the maiden, the mother, and the crone.

The removal step was tricky; sometimes pieces of the fungus would rip off and give the work a flawed, torn- edged look. But this time the wax paper came off perfectly, and the result was stunning. The ancient symbol melded elegantly with its surroundings, life growing out of the dead. She gave her son a squeeze. “It’s beautiful.”

“I don’t know. There’s a little spot at the bottom…”

She mussed his hair. “It’s perfect. Just like you. Now come on.” She looked around. “Turtle?”

They met up with the dog at the top of a small rise. With the leaves half down, you could see the sharp lines of Rivendell in the distance. They started back, but they hadn’t gone more than a few steps before Turtle stopped, cocked his head. Maggie picked it up a second later. Panicked voices.

“Maaaagggiiieeee!!!!!”

“Dylan!!!!!!!”

THEY WERE BREATHLESS BY THE TIME THEY MADE IT BACK.

Cindy was on the back porch, arms wrapped around her chest. Beside her stood the county sheriff, a shiny star of metal on his chest.

Cindy had tears in her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m so, so sorry.”

4

TWO HUNDRED STUDENTS WERE PACKED INTO SCHWARTZ AUDITORIUM for the nine a.m. lecture of Physics 1205, “Physics for Presidents.” Jake Sterling was twenty minutes into the lecture. He’d gotten off to a slow start-the long night before had seen too much honesty, and the subsequent three a.m. end of a four-month relationship-but now he was hitting his stride.

The premise of “Physics for Presidents” was simple: assume your audience was composed of future presidents of the United States. You have them for one semester. What lessons would be of optimal utility? Jake’s answer was simple: he taught them the rules of the world. What could and could not happen. We could build a nuclear submarine but not a nuclear airplane. There was enough sunlight to power the United States by solar, but only if we carpeted a good chunk of Nevada with solar cells. His was an Army man’s approach, a presentation of options. Jake hadn’t worn the uniform for well over a decade, but he still had the no-nonsense attitude of a soldier.

“Isaac Newton was the tipping point-a solitary man standing at the transition between the ancient world and the modern. Before Newton, we were a civilization of superstitious craftsmen. We could make plows and crossbows and trebuchets, but our understanding of the world-and our ability to control it-was something that we learned by experience, by trial and error. Or we were guided by ‘experts’ that had a line to a deeper truth. Religious leaders. Shamans. People who spent their lives waiting for the gods to reveal the mysterious forces at work in the universe. But no more. After Newton, you just sat down with pencil and paper and worked it all out. No magic. No mumbo jumbo. And no special training required, except a decent knowledge of mathematics.”

Jake had taught this course three semesters in a row, a record for him in the eight years he’d been at Cornell. He typically switched teaching assignments as often as he could, preferring to wander the entire curriculum instead of digging deeper and deeper into the same hole. But he loved this course. His colleagues in other departments made noise about how art, politics, or the pen was a hammer to shape the world, but in Jake’s estimation, technology was the biggest hammer out there.

Jake continued. “People wasted little time putting Newton’s laws, and those of Maxwell, Einstein, and Schrodinger, to productive use. And since we had laws for everything, no matter how big or small, they allowed us to move beyond everyday human scales. The first great push was toward the ever bigger: mighty dams, great oceangoing vessels, and-perhaps the high-water mark of the big-venturing to the moon. Now we are in a second revolution. Question: what is it?”

The students looked bored. Their indifference surprised him. The discovery that the natural world was mathematically explicable was, to Jake, the single most significant development in the history of humanity. From this followed the obvious consequence: the world was controllable. The constituents of the world-radio waves, apples, or planets-did what the differential equations told them to do. You learn to perform some formal manipulations of symbols on a page, and the next thing you know, you’re building radios that can communicate