Part 2 of the The World Can’t Wait series
UG got back to Founder’s Point to find the kitchen doing rather less well than he’d left it.
The Lightbloom had been an ambitious dusting along one wall a fortnight ago. It was, by any honest reckoning, no longer a dusting. It had worked its way across the ceiling beams, down past the pantry shelves, and into the corner where The Toucan had taken up more or less permanent residence, apparently unbothered by the fact that its perch was now technically alive. UG stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the full scale of it, and felt the particular species of dread that comes from discovering a problem has been getting on perfectly well without you.
Outside, the barrel by the back wall had been leaking for weeks. He’d known this in the vague way he knew most inconvenient things, filed somewhere behind more interesting problems and never quite addressed, until the morning he noticed the grass around it had stopped simply dying and started disappearing altogether, a neat brown circle spreading outward with what struck him as suspicious tidiness for something he’d assumed was pure accident. The irony of it hadn’t quite reached him yet: a stand of pale mushrooms had already crept up one side of the barrel itself, colonising the very thing he’d been counting on to kill them.
It gave him an idea.
He didn’t move the barrel. Moving the barrel felt, even to him, like an unnecessary escalation. Instead he found an old jar, knelt down by the little pool of toxin that had collected in the dirt, and scooped up enough to carry back inside without spilling more than half of it down his own trouser leg. The Lightbloom, when he tipped the jar over the worst-affected patch of ceiling, brightened.
It did not so much resist the toxin as embrace it, thickening exactly where the liquid had landed, leaning toward the source the way a plant leans toward a window. UG watched this happen with the blankness of a man whose experiment has just produced the exact opposite of its intended result, and did what any dedicated scientist would do in his position: he decided he simply hadn’t used enough.
A second jar made things worse. Considerably worse. Whatever had merely been thriving before now seemed actively pleased with itself, and the Toucan, sensing an upgrade to its accommodation, relocated three feet closer to the new growth. UG stood in his own kitchen amid a spreading carpet of pale, healthy fungus and allowed himself, for one honest moment, to consider that the toxic waste theory might not be correct.
The moment passed.
If a little toxin fed it, and rather more toxin fed it rather more, he reasoned, then the answer wasn’t a different approach, it was a bigger dose. More barrels. Proper barrels, not stolen jarfuls dribbled along a ceiling beam. He wrote to Nobbybanks that evening, laying out the results so far with the calm authority of a man who had, by any measure but his own, failed twice in a row. Two applications tested. Two confirmed results. All that remained, he explained, was rather more of the same, purchased with appropriate funding, to complete what he was already calling, in his own head, a rigorous body of scientific work.
More in the The World Can’t Wait series
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