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print to the world, when he’d been so eager to show the videotape of Caracamuni? The spore print, if the ghost people’s mushroom could be grown from it successfully, would present at least the proof of a species never before known to science—although that alone, of course, did not require that anyone believe the whole strange story of the milieu from which the mushroom had come.
    What else would the release of that spore print bring, though? He wondered, for the ten thousandth time, what his obsession with the print and the fungus it produced was really all about. Organic alien technology? Or a mask for his own fears of the death and decay of a loved one?
    He thought about that. Was Jacinta’s disappearance—the singularity at the heart of the black hole of his obsession—pulling all his research and all his life inescapably down into its deadly gravity? Or was it only his own fear of mortality and meaninglessness, death as event horizon, from whose bourne no further signal escapes?
    He tripped on a stone and fell. With drunkard’s luck he somehow managed to avoid landing on anything sharp. He was glad he hadn’t plunged face first into a jumping cholla or something equally nasty.
    Looking and feeling about himself in the moonlight, he found he had landed in sand, amid the crisping remains of the ephemerals that had flowered that Spring. He grunted and took another swig of the Edradour, carefully putting the plastic-sleeved spore print sheet into his vest pocket. He felt remarkably clear-headed in his thoughts, despite what the scotch seemed to be doing to his physical coordination.
    He pondered that mind-body split, then picked up a seed capsule from one of the blown flowers and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The desert ephemerals had bloomed in great profusion all through the Spring, the result of the long rains. Jacinta had always loved the desert blooms, especially during El Niño years. The past winter’s rains had been the result of the fourth big southern oscillation since she disappeared. The El Niños were coming more frequently and lasting longer, or the climate had gone into a permanent El Niño cycle, as some claimed. Greenhouse warming making the weather more chaotic, extreme, unpredictable. Or something.
    Looking at the intricate seed capsule in the light of the rising full moon, it seemed to him that the natural world possessed an old dreaming wisdom, deeper and more subtle than human knowledge. We’re arrogant upstarts, he thought, to believe our few thousand years of technology, our few hundreds of years of science, could be wiser than the wisdom embedded in the systems this planet has dreamed up on its own, over billions of years.
    Wilderness is the great unconsciousness where the world dreams, he thought—setting off an inebriated cascade of ideas. Conscious creatures desperately need that. If we don’t dream we don’t learn. Evolution is life’s long unconscious learning. To wipe out species is to end learning. We’ve been burning the classrooms and killing the students for a long time.
    Falling back full length on the sandy patch he’d stumbled into, Paul stared up at the night sky and drank down the last of the Edradour. The warm sizzle of the scotch trickled slowly through his body, moment after moment. A sandy-haired man trying to sink into the sand—that’s what I am, Paul thought with a smile.
    The world is a given, he speculated to himself. Even death. All science and engineering have been reverse-engineering, when you think about it. Just trying to figure out how it’s all put together, how it all works. Maybe the goal of the mind is to engineer an escape from the mortal technology of the body. The way the nervous system and the immune system are hooked up together in the same network...maybe consciousness itself is a sort of super immune system, trying to develop immunity to mortality. Maybe in the end death does not conquer consciousness; consciousness conquers