Then Vanja came home on a weekend visit, and Britta told her that Lars had been taken away. He was disloyal and had to be contained. Vanja knew where they had taken him. She snuck out of the house and ran out onto the steppe. She walked for what felt like hours before Essre’s lights finally faded behind her. The sky had begun to brighten into gray when she reached the top of a low hill. Ahead of her, the ground sloped down into a flat valley. And there they were, the strange buildings. She approached not completely knowing what she would find.
Now beneath Amatka’s silence, there was the gentle surging of waves lapping against the rocky shore. A gentle breeze brought with it the scent of something wet and somehow bright; it must be what lakes smell like. A little ways to the south along the beach rose an angular and broken silhouette: the first Amatka, the one that was never finished.
Vanja found a large, flat rock by the water’s edge. She dropped her satchel on the ground and took out two blankets; she spread one of them over the rock, then wrapped herself in the other and sat down to watch the fading of the light.
The process was so quick she could see it happen. A whiteness appeared at the water’s edge, and spread like a web across the lake with a crackling noise. The water underneath was dark at first, then grew cloudy as if fogging over. After an hour or so, the ice had cleared into a pure, bottomless black.
Vanja left her blankets and satchel behind and tested the ice with her foot. The surface was uneven and firm. Getting traction was easy; the ice received Vanja’s footsteps with a blunt, scraping sound. The sky above her had darkened, but the glow it reflected from Amatka’s lights reached all the way to the lake. Vanja took a few more steps out onto the ice and looked back over her shoulder. Far away, the plant-house bubbles shone in yellow and white. She turned toward the lake again, Amatka’s light warm against her back. No civilization this way, no human life; just the ice and the tundra and the devouring darkness. For a moment, she thought she saw a flickering reflection from across the lake, so faint it might as well have been one of those flashes the eye creates in darkness.
Vanja rubbed her eyes with her mittens and returned to the beach. The darkness pulled at her back. She packed her blankets into the satchel as quickly as she could and walked, almost ran, toward the warm glow of the plant houses.
SIXDAY
The next morning, not quite as early, it was Ivar who knocked on Vanja’s door. The coffee he’d made was even stronger than yesterday’s. Nina had already left for work. “Have you been to the mushroom chambers before?” Ivar asked as they sat down for breakfast.
“Never.”
“You’ll see,” Ivar said. “I think you might find it interesting.”
The entrance to the mushroom chambers lay to the southwest, in the middle of the third quadrant. The low building aboveground housed a canteen, changing rooms, and offices. Ivar showed Vanja into a room lined with shelves. He picked out overalls, rubber boots, gloves, and hats for both of them.
When they’d changed into their protective clothing, and Ivar had made sure Vanja’s pants and sleeves were properly tucked into her boots and gloves, he opened a door at the other end of the room. A wide, dimly lit set of stairs zigzagged downward.
At the bottom, they stopped in front of a heavy door, which Ivar pulled open. Sconces spread a mild light across the white walls of the corridor beyond. The sharp smell of detergent stung Vanja’s nostrils. When Ivar pushed open the door at the other end of the corridor, a damp chill rushed over them from the gloom beyond the threshold.
The gradual dimming of the light had made it easier to adapt to the semidarkness. The vaulted tunnel stretched as far as Vanja could see; broad shelves ran along both sides of it. Every surface was covered in a layer of soil. Out of the soil sprung white, round mushrooms. “It’s not as dark as this everywhere,” Ivar said behind her. “This is just the section for photosensitive mushrooms.”
Vanja nodded. “I understand,” she added when she realized Ivar might not have been able to see the gesture.
Under the layers of damp, soil, and detergent there was a whiff of something sickly that stuck at the back of Vanja’s throat. “Ugh,” she said. “The smell.”
Ivar came up next to her and prodded at the shelf closest to them. “It’s the fertilizer. The mushrooms are grown in composted feces.”
They moved on along the shelves. Eventually the light grew stronger, and they entered a hall where the mushrooms on the shelves were taller and plumper, with broad caps. Disk-shaped growths covered the walls. A couple of technicians on narrow ladders were busy carefully prying the lumps off a wall. “Polypores?” Vanja asked.
Ivar nodded. “Exactly. Those are pale polypores—they’re ground down for porridge and custard. It’s the same kind of porridge we had this morning.”
“Can you use them for other things, too?”
“Not really. They’re very tough and stringy, so it’s the only way you can make them edible.”
They came to a fork in the tunnel. New fungi appeared on the shelves: brown agarics with low, wide caps; yellow tangled clavaria that grew in tall clusters; and small, black funnel chanterelles. There were also mushrooms she didn’t recognize: thick-stalked mushrooms with tiny caps, mushrooms sheathed in slimy membranes, mushrooms spread flat across a wall. Ivar named each one and described their uses. Enormous polypores covered one of the tunnels from floor to ceiling, the smallest ones the size of dinner plates. Mycopaper base, Ivar explained. “There are other sections,” he said, “for medicinal use. We don’t allow visitors in there, though. Some of the fungi are poisonous.”
“How big is this structure?” Vanja asked.
“About as big as Amatka.”
The next door opened into a large, brightly lit chamber taken up almost completely by the four shiny cylinders in the middle of the room. Ivar pointed. “This is where we grow the mycoprotein.”
He guided Vanja up a small ladder leaning against the side of the cylinder closest to them and opened a small hatch. Through a thick window, Vanja could see a brown mass that covered the inside of the cylinder. “It doesn’t look very tasty right now, does it?” Ivar said. “It gets better once it’s processed.”
They left the chamber through a door on the other side of the chamber and emerged in the part of the tunnel they’d first set out from. Vanja paused to let her eyes readjust to the sudden darkness. The white mushroom clusters slowly reappeared in front of her.
When they came back up to the surface, they went back into the changing room, and Ivar took Vanja’s protective clothing and put it down a hatch together with his own. They washed all parts of themselves that hadn’t been protected by an unbroken stretch of fabric: wrists, ankles, heads, hair.
The canteen served a stew of root vegetables and mycoprotein, ladled into large bowls. The farmers ate like they worked, in slow silence. Vanja and Ivar sat down by one of the long tables. Vanja found herself lowering her voice to a near-whisper.
“What is your situation with hygiene products?”
“Right. That’s the reason why I really wanted you to visit.” Ivar jerked his head toward the other guests in the canteen. “Look at their hands and necks.”
More than half of the farmers had sizable red blotches on their necks and around their wrists. In some cases the rash had developed into full-blown eczema, scaly and wet-looking. “It’s the laundry detergent and the soap,” Ivar said. “We have to kill off any spores and microorganisms so they don’t spread outside the farms. Some of the species are very aggressive. But the fungicides are so strong. People get rashes.”