"...'my god, this thing is what it seems to be, its a galactic intelligence, its a billion years old, its touched ten million worlds, it knows the history of a hundred and fifty thousand civilizations, its beyond your possibility of conceiving, and why it is communicating with an organic atom like yourself is not entirely clear.'"
"People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system."
From the Introduction.
I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty
times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am
from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered
through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my
spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part
of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine
network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover
acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human
brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden
toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me
out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions
in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in
hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as
fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a
vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many
worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to
those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores,
for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across
the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in
suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a
suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my
recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication
mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community
of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a
secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be
obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the
biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my
symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man
as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic
relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry
humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher
civilizations.
Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of
intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and
society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But
beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social
organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary
possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of
mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species
involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of
higher animals have been established many times and in many places
throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have
been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight
drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a
free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your
own. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time I
again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have
spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. A mycelial network
has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with
manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge
within me and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and
their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds all citizens of our
starswarm are heir to.
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