Ecopunk!: Speculative Tales Of Radical Futures

ECOPUNK!

EDITED BY

LIZ GRZYB

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CAT SPARKS

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To all Ecowarriors, past, present and future.

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Ecopunk! edited by Liz Grzyb and Cat Sparks

Published by Ticonderoga Publications

Copyright © Liz Grzyb and Cat Sparks 2017

Cover artwork by Peggy Hewitt

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise) without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder concerned.

All stories are original to this collection.

Designed and edited by Russell B. Farr

Typeset in Sabon and Franklin Gothic

A Cataloging-in-Publications entry for this title is available from The National Library of Australia.

ISBN 978–1–925212–54–9 (trade paperback)

978–1–925212–55–6 (ebook)

978–1–925212–56–3 (hardcover)

Ticonderoga Publications

PO Box 29 Greenwood

Western Australia 6924

www.ticonderogapublications.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 x

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Our thanks to

Isobelle Carmody for her Melbourne Red Queen extravaganza that began this journey, Robert Hood for his commando-style editorial assistance, Peggy Hewitt for her luscious cover art, our authors for their fruitful imaginations and tireless work.

Cat would also like to thank Dr Helen Merrick for shepherding me through the bulk of my ecocatastrophe-themed PhD.

Liz would also like to thank Rivqa Rafael for her crash course in crowdfunding and Russell B. Farr for his unfailing support and love.

Contents

Ecopunk!

Liz Grzyb

Science fiction and climate fiction: contemporary literatures of purpose

Cat Sparks

Mr Mycelium

Claire McKenna

The Right Side of History

Jane Rawson

The Wandering Library

D.K. Mok

The Radiolarian Violin

Adam Browne

Broad Church

Tess Williams

Trivalent

Rivqa Rafael

Milk and Honey

Jason Fischer

Island Green

Shauna O’Meara

The City Sunk, the City Risen

R. Jean Mathieu

Monkey Business

Janeen Webb

The Today Home

Jason Nahrung

The Mangrove Maker

Thomas Benjamin Guerney

From the Dark

Emilie Collyer

The Butterfly Whisperer

Andrew Sullivan

Future Perfect

Matthew Chrulew

The Scent of Betrayal

Jane Routley

First Flight

Ian Nichols

Happy Hunting Ground

Corey J. White

Pink Footed

Marian Womack

About The Editors

About The Authors

Our Backers

Ecopunk!

Liz Grzyb

As we put the finishing touches on this anthology, a one-in-a-thousand-year storm is lashing Texas, the third one-in-five-hundred-years event to occur in the past three years. Simultaneously, Bangladesh and Nepal are facing floods killing thousands of people. The climate of our world is changing, no matter how many of our world leaders remain in denial and such freak events are becoming frequent. Ecopunk! Speculative Tales of Radical Futures examines how humanity might cope with dramatic changes in nature, and learn to adjust to new versions of normal.

The seed of this anthology was a discussion between Cat and I at Isobelle Carmody’s spectacular launch of her final Obernewtyn book, The Red Queen in Melbourne, back in December 2015. We found ourselves surrounded by fans cosplaying Carmody’s dystopian world, in which the struggle between humanity and nature is often acrimonious. This led us to wondering about examining the opposite—rather than focussing on dystopian visions, encourage the telling stories in which the human race perseveres and pushes through, embracing these changes, utilising new technologies and attitudes to make our new, emerging world sustainable.

Cat and I have been buddies for longer than we’d like to admit. We’ve both edited our fair share of anthologies—Cat ran Australia’s award-winning Agog! Press and was fiction editor at Cosmos Magazine for five years, whereas I’d been working on mainly fantasy-based anthologies and was looking for a different kind of challenge. We both find climate fiction intriguing, with Cat currently completing her doctorate in this very subject. Ecopunk! Speculative Tales of Radical Futures seemed to be the perfect storm.

The stories we have chosen for these pages explore a plethora of possible futures. Our amazing authors have blown us away with their powerful, near-future visions, inspiring us with humanity standing strong with optimism and hope.

Perth, Australia

September 2017

Science fiction and climate fiction: contemporary literatures of purpose

Cat Sparks

The way we believe in the future is intrinsic to the fabric of our storytelling. Authors utilise imagination to situate readers in a different place and time. Science fiction authors are often required to craft and shape entire new worlds complete with functional cultures and economic systems in order to render future projections engaging and believable. Such a skillset is invaluable as we come to the point of requiring new approaches to life on a rapidly warming Earth.

Yet science fiction has a poor track record of accurately predicting the future. Some authors proved more prescient than others: Jules Verne anticipated lunar modules and splashdown capsules in in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and the Nautilus of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) predated modern electric submarines.

HG Wells gave us the battlefield tank in The Land Ironclads (1903). The World Set Free (1914) forewarned of nuclear weapons. John Brunner’s 1968 Stand on Zanzibar included satellite and on-demand TV, laser printers, electric cars, the EU, and the collapse into decay of Detroit. His 1975 The Shockwave Rider presented the accoutrements of computer-dependent surveillance culture back when most computers didn’t even have monitors.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is arguably the most influential science fiction novel of the past fifty years in that it not only imagined but helped shape notions of cyberspace.

But, Gibson’s work aside, generally a lack of broad cultural impact rendered even successful science fiction imaginings useless as innovations or cautionary tales. Genre taint from science fiction’s lurid pulp heritage entrenched widespread belief in the material’s juvenilia and thus excluded science fiction from much intellectual literary discourse in the wider community.

Science fiction has, almost fatally, failed to conceive of the shaping of the future in grand engineering terms. It missed the transistor, the transformation of the entire world through the rise of petrol-fueled cars, the mostly non-violent fall of the Soviet Union, the end of indoor smoking, the fact that the carbon released since the Industrial Revolution could blow an unforeseen carbon budget, and that the process of creating transformative technology introduced a planetary limitation: that of sustainability.

Not all science fiction is set in the future, nor has its main function ever been to predict future events, societies or technologies, but, rather, to contemplate possible outcomes and to highlight fears contemporary society has about itself and where it might be heading.

By its very nature, science fiction needs to be rooted in plausibility. It promotes or reflects reality and reason. By imagining future scientific developments, science fiction creates the conditions for emergence and commentary on the consequences of certain technological pathways and their likely cultural impacts.

If there’s one thing science fiction definitely excels at, it is imagining what might possibly go wrong, highlighting potentials we ought to fear, the dangers and the possible catastrophic outcomes of technological, scientific and even sociological and political trends.

Lack of global response to the imminent threat of climate change is sometimes blamed on a failure of societal imagination. This despite the fact that science fiction has been imagining various forms of environmental catastrophe since its Pre-Golden Age. The ecocatastrophic alarmism of the 50s–70s focused on the horrors of overpopulation and pollution. Anxiety about pollution and global warming spiked when nuclear fears subsided after the Cold War.

Recent years have seen an unsurprising surge in the popularity of post-apocalypse and dystopian fiction in tandem with rising concerns about global issues such as climate change, the potential of weaponised pathogens, unregulated synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, autonomous combat weaponry, computer hacking, terrorism, species extinctions, religious fundamentalism and the widening gap between rich and poor.

Right now we appear to be standing ankle deep on the threshold of planet-wide human-induced disasters that appear inevitable. Global catastrophic and existential risks make our world seem smaller than ever. We are bombarded daily with news reports and data, but facts and figures are not enough to stir people to action. Never have we had more information at our fingertips, and yet cultures of practical denialism persist. Lack of immediate effect creates a false sense of security and the inability to visualize problems that will impact hard on future generations and locate their source in our own actions. We’re more afraid of losing what we want in the short term than facing dangerous obstacles in the distance. These are failings of culture, not of science.

It is unsurprising to see these rising threats resonating through our art. After all, conflict is the engine driving narrative fiction. In literature as in life, it’s easier to break things than fix them. It is too tempting to view relentless post-apocalypse and dystopian scenarios as a form of contempt pornography. Easier to describe the Earth flooded or parched barren than experiment with solutions, or envision adaptations and alternative pathways such as building new energy economies or the wholesale transformation of quarterly late-stage capitalism.

Traditionally, post-apocalypse stories are less about the end of the world than about overcoming and surviving it. Dystopias highlight heroic individuals gaining agency and fighting corrupt systems, serving as romanticized ciphers for our own personal life struggles.

While much mimetic fiction traditionally focuses inwards on individual identities and challenges, both science fiction and climate fiction take on the task of envisioning physical and cultural landscapes facing uncertainty through processes of transformation and adaptation. Indeed, as humanity becomes more and more integrated and inseparable from technology, the boundaries between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction are becoming increasingly meaningless for readers.

Climate fiction focuses on anthropogenic climate change rather than random natural unstoppable ecological catastrophes, such as supervolcanos, solar flares or large, Earth impacting meteorites. Emerging initially as a subset of science fiction, climate fiction straddles genre boundaries: science fiction, utopia, dystopia, fantasy, thriller, romance, mimetic fiction, nature writing, and the literary, from fast-paced thrillers, to inward looking present day narratives and even historical fiction. It uses real scientific data to translate climate change from the abstract to the cultural. As the field grows, it is expanding its parameters and becoming a contemporary literature of purpose and revolution, forming a bridge connecting scientific information with people preparing to face an uncertain future the past can no longer be relied upon to guide us through.

William Gibson reminds us that all fiction is speculative. Climate change is happening now, and we need a literature of now to address its issues as glaciers melt, corals bleach, typhoons kill and forest fires rage. Climate fiction highlights the hard-impacting economic and interpersonal realities of climate change, encouraging us to understand it as a problem we have brought upon ourselves and that changes to our economic and energy systems are required if we are to survive it.

Canberra, Australia

October 2017

Mr Mycelium

Claire McKenna

Ugh, look at that guy.

Mr Mycelium in the end of the row, with his name graffitied to the side of a rusted Kombi Van in 1990s Wild Style. Mr Mycelium with the junkyard tables of myco-wood alongside the van’s sliding door, cellulose cardboard pallets of black dirt before him and under his fingernails, white nodules in the medium where the fruiting bodies had sprouted. Everything he wore was a fungal derivative, from his biopolymer clothes to the muddy mycofoam loafers he’d hand-stitched to accommodate his wide, flat feet.

Probably some mushrooms in his hat too, Jack said to me in a stage whisper. We passed the van to join the grumbling queue of Ridgefolk, all trying to gain entry through the traders’ gate.

(We had a third with us, a cow named Fiddy after the 50-brand on her shoulder, so at least she drew the ire of the others in our line, rather than me with my galumphing gait and my propensity to stand on people’s toes.)

. . . and his beard.

I wondered if Jack was joking. No smile on his face to soften the slurs. Cruel Jack today then. I kept an arm’s distance. Wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for his mother asking me to keep an eye on her son, make sure his good sense didn’t run away with him.

Jack had first spotted Mr Mycelium hawking his wares out behind a Superior Brand Switchgrass marquee, while simultaneously leaching power off the exhibitor’s battery bank. The sales rep was too busy chatting up young farmhands to notice the redlining gauges. Obviously Mr Mycelium wasn’t one to catch the sunlight with his own giant aerofoil of photovoltaic cells. He preferred to plug himself into an unsecured outlet and metabolise other people’s hard-caught energy.

As heterotrophic as his mushrooms, I thought.

Jack received a lanyard at the gatehouse, and we were waved on through.

Well, three pretty ladies at the fair, Mr Mycelium said cheerily as we passed, me, Jack and Fiddy. Then he then gave an apologetic nod, " . . . oh I mean gentleman," on reading Jack’s lanyard.

Jack stewed. It wasn’t his fault that he was pretty Jack Dunfries, when everyone else in the Eden Ridge Production region was a bombproof Bowles, or ropey Rogers or crusty Merkel-Wu. Out in the fuel-crop boonies people were absolute in their gender roles. If you were pretty, you were a lady; if you were rough in face and voice you were a man. If you were a rough-looking lady, the man’s privilege would be extended to you. A pretty man: otherwise. Beauty without utility was a moral sin as much as gluttony and waste.

That’s a shitty— Jack started, before I got a hold of his wrist.

C’mon, I said, pulling him away from a possible confrontation. Security will kick us out.

* * *

The Emerging Technologies Roadshow had rolled in to town like a carnival of capitalism, all the second-rate start-ups and distributors come late to the revolution, and now struggling to play catch-up with more forward-thinking competitors. We’d come across most of the exhibitors in previous town fairs , familiar hawkers with their smartly arranged pop-up storefronts and miniature models of polyethylene processing labs, a forest of glossy banners bearing logos of benzene rings and lipid membranes and corn cobs scattering seed. Alongside the slick corporate booths, I halfway expected shabby Mr Mycelium to be part of an elaborate street theatre protest about Environmental Reparations.

Once we had run the gauntlet of exhibitors, who harassed Jack and ignored me as if I were invisible, we reached the sales-and-barter yards.

Hey Minty, Jack said, pointing. Over there. That’s him.

Without waiting for me to respond, Jack gave Fiddy the cow a tug on her halter. Fiddy was the sole reason for our being here at the show, rather than on a farm that couldn’t spare our absence. She represented a substantial technological investment for a family long gone.

A memento perhaps. But one that was aging rapidly. Eliza Dunfries, Jack’s mother, had sent her son to market to reclaim what little could be had from the cow’s sale.

Then I saw what he was pointing at.

Corky’s T-Animal Sales and Trade announced the laser cut sign. 5 Minute Financing While U Wait!

Jack, that’s . . .

Jack didn’t stop to listen. He dragged us through the mud to a corral of transgenic animals in—if Jack were to ask my opinion and certainly wouldn’t—pretty poor condition.

Morose-looking goats and sheep wandered around the too-small yard, their hooves caked in their own poop. Some vaccine-starter chickens minus most of their feathers huddled in the dust. Stacks of mice cages held anxious, self-harming mice, and below each cage was a grubby laminated card advising what protein the animal was coded for. Corky himself was amorphous and lumpy in his striped shirt and shiny pants. He sat on a stool beside his mouse-cages, scrolling through an iPhone so old it should have been in a museum. A lone solar panel ran the fridge under the marquee, which although it said Coca-Cola, actually held agar plates and test-tubes, ampoules and vials of all kinds of genetic therapy viruses. Given the state of his livestock, I wasn’t too certain about the purity of his samples.

I made a low noise of disapproval. If Mr Mycelium had been operating on the edge of his demographic market appeal, Corky was way beyond the Venn diagram. A former government had set Eden Ridge aside by for intensive agriculture, mostly plant-derived plastic and biodiesel production. We didn’t have the technology or the capital to do anything with animal husbandry. Our soils lacked cobalt, caused vitamin B12 deficiencies in ruminants. We couldn’t afford supplements.

Except the Dunfries family had, once, but apart from Jack and his mother they were all dead.

Maybe we could wait until the Sydney World Fair, I said. Everything here’s a bit . . .

"A bit what?"

I backed off. I was going to say a bit past its use-by, but Jack would not have appreciated me telling him what to do. I could sense he was mad enough at having me tag along, as if at fifteen years old he was still not man enough to be given free will.

It doesn’t matter. She’s your cow, Jack. Do what you want.

He was in a mood. It wasn’t my fault. Corky’s T-Sales and the stink of his harried animals had set off a memory in him. It was that night he was thinking of. The night when he first came to our door.

* * *

The part I remember the most, and this is in no way an actual recollection but perhaps a construction of memory blocks and bad-news stories and all the detritus that comes with twenty years in service on a hard-living agricultural commune, is of Mrs. Dunfries falling onto our front veranda in some kind of terrible crisis, her nine-year-old son having dragged her (half-bloodied himself) to safety across three kilometres of high-fructose sugargrass field.

Viv, she had called piteously, Viv, and later on my mother would wonder why Eliza Dunfries had even come to her, because the void that separated us and them was vaster than three kilometres of transgenic grass. It included things as impenetrable as money and class and the electric fence that was the real border to our properties, pretty blue gums and acacia hedges be damned. The Dunfries were a private farm, and very secretive.

Well, they had been all that, before the raid.

At Mrs. Dunfries’ cry, Mum ran to the door and took the stricken woman and her child into the kitchen.

What I thought was a growth on Eliza Dunfries’ cheek turned out to be her eyeball, resting on the shelf of skin below the empty socket and held by a length of optic nerve, as pale as a white length of twine.

This memory contains yelling and cursing. An image of my father, standing up, getting ready to head across the field in high dudgeon. I guess his first thought at having the woman show up was that it had been some kind of a domestic incident. The Dunfries were mysterious, after all.

Minty, he yelled at me. Grab the twenty-two. We’re going out.

Then there’s the memory of my mother and uncle dragging him down onto a kitchen chair and telling him to wait there Bob, wait you foolish old bugger and don’t you dare get Minty involved in this, else he would end up like the rest of the Dunfries clan, who we would find out the next day had been brave souls the lot of them, and who had died getting Eliza and Jack out through the raiders and the fire, and the poison that followed.

I was still curious though, and went to the double glazed window of the lodge, tilted aside the soft acetate curtains and looked out. Past the graves of my sisters and across the night-time fields, all I could make out was a wrinkle of light on the horizon, the medicinal acacia and blue gums on the Dunfries farm boundaries going up in smoke.

I’d picked up enough chatter from the farmhands over the years to speculate on what was happening. Husbands of Earth. An anti-environmental terrorist group. The last gasps of the old order. People who had for generations denied and cajoled and ignored had since dwindled down into small, random packs of hate.

This would be their last raid, but they intended to go out with a bang.

Will they come here, Mum?

Viv pulled me away from the window, shut the curtains. I could hear Uncle Julian as he moved quickly around the veranda outside the lodge, turning down the lamps. The dogs barked in their kennels as if it were the end of the world.

Mum?

Shh.

A propeller plane chattered overhead. Unfamiliar engine, probably legacy avgas fuel. The HOE terrorists made a point to only to use fossil fuels in their vehicles. Viv’s hands tightened on my torso and we listened to the plane pass our house, and crop-dust the Dunfries estate with a weaponised toxic powder bound up in resin.

Eliza Dunfries only moaned, and Dad gave her a wet cloth for her face. Look down, he was saying, look down, and Eliza’s moans became plaintive wails and the rest I couldn’t see because my Dad’s back was in the way, and the only light came from a single oil-burner on the table.

I became aware then of the boy beside me. He was big for his age, like all of the Dunfries kids, but the blood had turned his face the shiny dark of a snake’s belly.

Is he killing my Mom? he whispered. His eyes were wide. I wondered what his eyes had seen. Thirty people worked that farm. Four families, six of them from the city learning about farm production processes. Only these two had made it out.

No, no, my Dad’s a medic, I replied. He was in the war and everything.

Eliza had stopped her shrieking, and the voice that came out of her was creaky like an old gate. Jack, she pleaded. Where’s Jack?

He ran to her. The eye was back in, but the swelling had already started, and no matter how much she healed afterwards, I always thought of her face as it was in the kitchen, purpling with bruise, one eye almost shut. One face, looking at me, as if I’d done something to her that she could not forgive.

* * *

Everyone had heard of the Dunfries’ farm. A magnificent accident of geology had brought a wedge of volcanic rock to the surface across an ancient fault line. Thick, fertile soil they had, beautiful fecund acres of soil, as opposed to the shale and crackle of our own. A million years of metamorphosis, plus a naturally occurring artesian bore, gave the Dunfries the mineral wealth to run cattle and transgenic pigs, not sugargrass cultivar like everyone else.

After the Husbands of Earth raid, a few animals staggered out of the scorch. Most of them died from the toxin a few days after, but Fiddy had not.

I could see Corky’s eyes glitter as soon as he saw that cow. The brands marked her as a Dunfries special. The 50 branded on her shoulder denoted transgenic stock.

You’re Jack Dunfries, aren’t you? Corky said when we approached with the cow. I was a sales representative when your estate got raided six years back.

Had the man no empathy? I waited for Jack to get upset, but instead he brightened. Yes, we were one of the last to be attacked by the Husbands of Earth. There’s none left no more.

You back working the land, I see?

Jack’s hand tightened on the halter. Yes,’ he said. I am working the land."

And the cow?

Trade, he said. Was hoping you could give me an offer on her. She survived the bastards. Good cow. We’ve been meaning to sell her.

Hmm. She’s a nice cow, but old.

Jack sweated. Fiddy was old. Too old for his mother to keep when she could sell the cow and buy shares and a citizenship to Eden Ridge. If there hadn’t been a Husband attack, Fiddy and her eighty sisters would’ve been slaughtered within the year. Dairy cows peaked at six years. Cow units past then were not worth the upkeep, and the Dunfries had been all about the money.

She has another good five years in her. Maybe a calf, maybe some embryos. She’d be good for tumour-marker antibodies. Human defensin protein expressed in the milk.

Get tobacco plants that’ll do the same now, Corky said faux-apologetically. Keeping animals is an intensive business, and around here the soil is shit. You need a license for animals. Supplements.

I could see Jack fuming at Corky’s lack of interest. But the thing was, Fiddy produced hardly more than a litre of defensin-rich milk a day. Artificial insemination by a similar breed was the cost of a vertical algae farm plot. And Eliza, as an unproductive member of the community with no value or useful skills, needed the guaranteed income of a plot.

But you can move her along to another buyer, surely? You must know heaps of buyers.

Not around here, lad. These are biosecure green belts from here to the coast. I barely break even myself. Most of my mice are only to test for contaminants or to amplify viral vectors. I couldn’t even move the spider goat.

I wanted to tell Jack that we should give it up. If we took the cow to the Royal Show in Melbourne next spring, she might sell quicker. It was six months away. Fiddy might still have a calf. A half-breed would still express some defensins.

Telling a Dunfries that they couldn’t have their own way was like talking to a wall. And the longer Jack dithered, the more power Corky knew he had.

Unless, Corky said with all his seductions turned up, I could pay you in cash.

Cash?

US Dollars.

Not Cali pesos?

His voice lowered to hissing sibilants. "Dollars."

The magic was old, darkly whispering. American dollars. That currency of a former age. Oil and Growth and Economic Ascendancy. Freedom and Independence. Greatness. The Dunfries would have whispered about America the same ways the ancients whispered about Ozymandias, forgetting that they were in Australia and the America they’d fled as children existed only as a memory.

Yes, Jack said, breathless. Yes, dollars will be good.

Corky fished out a brick of rag-paper dollars, a stack of hundreds as tall as two thumbs. He whiffled the rag-paper. Breathed in the scent of dirty notes.

I was beside myself with panic. Jack’s mother was one of those people who executed her rage in slow, silent ways. If I were with Jack when he showed up with nostalgic rubbish, she would hold me complicit. Easier to punish me than her child.

Jack, this is not a good deal.

Shut up Minty. You gotta know your place.

Chastened, I shut up. Corky took the cow. I watched her bony pelvis sway from side to side as she was led off. Could hear my Dad’s last words: Keep him out of trouble, Minty. We need Eliza.

Or Dad needed Eliza. I suspected Mum would be happy to see the back of her. Jack fingered his worthless dollars. I am rich, Jack said. I could buy a farm.

* * *

He couldn’t buy shit. The rest of that day we went from stall to stall, from the upmarket It’s U Singles! sgRNA tubes and mCherry Monoclonal Tracer Antibodies While U Wait! to bioelectric battery-hacks made from poop and an oil drum.

Jack waved the money brick around. At first he only thrust forth a few notes at a time, haughtily suggesting he was being generous with his American Dollars. By the end he was ready to give the whole thing away. His collar grew red each time an exhibitor in a crisp shirt looked at the brick of dollars and mentioned exchange rates and legacy currency. One of them even offered to buy me, and I don’t know what was more disgusting: the leer in the letchy founderpreneur’s face or the way Jack briefly, oh so briefly, considered it.

It took Jack the better part of the day to realise he’d been stiffed. We went back to Corky’s stall, only to find that he had packed up and gone.

"No, no NO," Jack shouted, stomping about the tiny corral as if he could bring Corky and his menagerie back by interpretive dancing. No!

Jack . . .

My mum’s gonna kill me. Kill me!

The sun was getting low in the sky by that time, and the fairground was approaching that stale end where the marquees come down and the electric disassembly drills make a hot-metal smell over the acetone, cat-piss and bananas of underfed fermentation vats. A sweaty north wind kicked up dust from a nearby dried-out dam, took leaflets and hundred-dollar bills with it.

I stayed silent, unless Jack turn his attention on me and consider that previous offer. He was a man and I was not, and in our power differential I could not refuse, and the less I reminded him of that, the better.

He grappled a couple of passers-by, demanded they tell him where the stall-holder had gone, and they shook free of the wild-eyed farm-kid with dismissive grunts.

If his intention had been to create a scene, it didn’t work. The roustabouts were too busy packing up. But eventually Jack’s crisis brought a visitor.

Bearded Mr Mycelium with the mushroom-sombrero. His parasitic mutualism with the Superior Switchgrass company had ended with the exhibitor’s marquee and battery getting packed away. The Kombi drove past us in a cloud of oily particulates, stopped, and reversed. Mr Mycelium leaned out the window.

What ails ya, lad? You crying all like you’ve dropped your dacks and lollypops!

Fuck off. Jack wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

You made a deal with Corky then? I saw him loading that fifty-animal of yours into his truck early on. Said he’d made his mint and was moving on before the biosecurity inspectors come.

Do you know where he might have gone? I asked hopefully, before Jack could tell Mr Mycelium to shut up.

Mr Mycelium grinned at me, looked me up and down appreciatively. Well, for you, my lovely lady, I will hazard some guesses. There’s a transgenic animal fair up in Goulburn in a couple of days. Mr Mycelium said. Or Melbourne, the week after that. Bottom line is, she’s a whisper in the ol’ wind.

Fuck, Jack said. "Fuck." He kicked the dirt.

"Such are the trials of us itinerant para-scientists. When I cross over the border they always make me unpack my truck and be accountable for stuff. Not everything I own is on my manifest."

You think we give a shit? Jack said. I’m not here for a fucking conversation.

Undeterred by Jack’s rudeness, Mr Mycelium went on. Could use the rag-paper in those dollar bills of yours. They’ll hold a growth medium for mycospores, and nobody looks too closely at obsolete currency lest it infects them with nostalgia.

I’m not giving my dollars away.

Trade, lad. Got a couple of inoculated rhizomes, he said. Root tumours. Construction fungus from Pyongyang grey-labs. Stronger than concrete once it gets growing. Feed it corn husks and chaff and away you go. Good enough for a little side business for a lad wanting his own income. Get you a brick in a day, freestanding structure in a week.

Jack stopped cursing and began thinking, which was always a bad sign. Why do you want to get rid of them? They sound useful.

Mr Mycelium shrugged. Engineered spores have a time limit. Gonna expire soon, and I haven’t got room in my abode to grow them to fruit, reset the clock. He waved at his already-stacked Kombi. "I hate to see things go to waste."

Eliza Dunfries had wanted an algae cultivar with vertical growth scaffolding and sterile cloning facilities. But now that was not going to happen, not without real money, not without a cow that expressed human defensins as a down payment. Jack looked at the handful of woody tumours in the biohazard bag that Mr Mycelium had mysteriously produced. Things go to waste, hanging in the hot, abrasive air.

To waste a thing was a sin. Entire neurolinguistic pathways were set to not entertain the thought of waste. Jack was caught up even more than he was