The Fungi and the Coward

​Dead wood snapped under their boots with piercing notes, echoing off the bare tree trunks on its way out of the barren forest. Like blanched, broken bones the fallen branches and twigs covered the floor in a thick tangle; they were the remnants of a great battle in ages past, remains left to nature and stained by time. Given the choice, Doctor Garcia would have preferred not to be there. The good doctor’s back felt yet another jab from the barrel of a primitive but highly effective energy rifle, reminding him that any choice in being here was the last thing he’d be given.
                Piles of wooden sticks tumbled down the slope and rang out like a macabre xylophone, playing the ceremonial rhythm of his capture and goodness only knew what else. He didn’t think highly of that concept, nor did he think much of the tune. In fact, all he could really think about was how terrified he felt being force-marched through a dead and half-petrified woodland, and how much he regretted ever coming to this planet. Another jab from the gun made him think about how he didn’t want that to keep happening. He hadn’t even slowed down to deserve it that time; there was just no need for it. Perhaps his rear-warden just thought that was what you had to do when walking behind captives, the mushroom-headed barbarian.
                “Don’t call them mushroom-headed! That’s xenophobic!” he imagined Natalya lecturing him. He’d like to see how long that attitude stuck around if she got kidnapped by a bunch of fungoid bandits. Ahead of him, crunching and sweeping through the detritus on great spongy legs, a line of mushroom-headed, thick-bodied, and multi-armed fungoids trampled through the forest. Each one of them was armed with some kind or other of energy weapon and stunstick, clad in a variety of hard-wearing but heavily worn garments. One of them puffed a cloud of spores from its head occasionally, each time wafting into Dr Garcia’s face. He frantically wiped at his face with his hands and desperately tried not to think about it. At least they hadn’t bound his hand or feet; that was some small mercy for which to be grateful. Actually no, not grateful! That was bloody well the baseline expectation! No-one should go about binding other people or kidnapping them at all. If he was being pushed through an unknown, disturbing forest at gun point then he wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of any gratitude at all.
                Some of the leading mushrooms had started talking to one another in their peculiarly squeaky and puffy language. It sounded a lot like a squeegee sliding down a glass window, merged with the clicking of a cockroach whilst someone deflated a particularly large hot air balloon nearby. Oh gods, what if they were planning to transport him by balloon? He pushed that terrifying notion to one side. Whatever they were discussing, squeaking as they went, puffing at this and clicking at the other, it was keeping their attention.
                Like a lightning flash across his mind the idea of making a run for it launched a campaign to achieve reality. Just as quickly as lightning fades, however, Dr Garcia dismissed the idea, on account of the staggering danger associated with such action. Even though his fungoid captors seemed distracted by conversation, that didn’t make then blind, deaf or disarmed. He didn’t much fancy an energy bolt in the spine, and subsequently falling face first into the sea of broken branches held little charm of its own. Besides, the fact that they hadn’t bound him probably pointed to them feeling like they didn’t really need to; even the guns were probably surplus to requirements. He looked up at the toadstoolish fungus in front of him, particularly at his arms. Each of them was as thick as Dr Garcia’s waist, so it was unlikely that he could overpower even one of them, let alone the five of them it seemed to have. Every one of his captors towered over him by a clear foot, if not more; he was walking through one forest and being escorted by another.
               
               
                Dr Garcia should have known better than to accept a field study invitation on an unknown planet like that. Going to barely mapped planets was always risky, and now here he was, kidnapped by technologically paradoxical fungus. Statistics were out to get him again; even a 1% chance of things going wrong was practically a guarantee that he'd fail. He'd been told that luck was just probability taken personally, but in his own case he was certain that stats had thrown the first stone and bloody well made it personal. Bad things happened all the time out in the expanses of space, predominantly to him it seemed.
                However, an invitation from renowned anthropologist Professor Dale Kirkpatrick just wasn’t the sort of thing to turn down lightly. Sure the danger was both immediate and unknown, but so was the scientific potential. A planet with over thirty percent more floral, fungal and arboreal biomass than any other surveyed world. It had sounded like the perfect playground for a plant biologist like Dr Garcia. Now it was just an interesting prison.
                He should have just stayed in his cosy, safe research institute back on Thesson. There were no creepy forests and no bandit gangs of roving mushrooms, except for those they either made in the lab or left to grow in a forgotten coffee cup. Instead, he took an interstellar voyage and ended up on a shuttle which looked like it had been redundant several decades previously, soaring downwards towards the planet surface and disaster.
                Before the litter of twigs had even had a chance to settle down from the engines’ backdraft, the fungal bandits were on them. Strapped into his seat Dr Garcia had felt the crunching impact of small arms fire, and the booming of magnetic snares binding themselves to the shuttle’s hull. The whole journey had been full of unsettling noises from the aged and somewhat dilapidated shuttle, but this had a far more sinister and assault-y vibe to it. Preparing to have a good old fashioned panic about impending doom, he had overheard the pilot urgently informing his security team about the array of weapons trained on the vessel from outside. This news caused the doctor to revise his plans and instead opt for a bad, new-fashioned panic. It was similar in concept, but involved a great amount more volume and whining.
                As some of the fellow passengers joined in, and others tried to calm Garcia and his co-panickers, the loud hiss of an opening shuttle door sounded from the front of the vessel. Cool air carrying the scent of dry wood and a damp forest floor rushed in, competing against other bodies of air for the best seats and overhead storage space. Dr Garcia couldn’t have said whether it was the hissing or the air flow which got his attention in the first place, even if he’d been inclined to tell anyone at all, but his first glimpse of the fungal bandits certainly kept it. They didn’t fit in the shuttle. They didn’t exactly fit out of it very well either, but that was another issue for another day. Trapped in the shuttle with an unknown organism of somewhat hostile intent, the passengers who had been panicking now wished they’d saved some overreacting ability for this new imminence of threat.
                At the front of the group was an enormous Portobello. It moved its head around rfom side to side to look across the shuttle interior, the brown and white spots giving it a certain polka-dot menace, the first of the bandits spoke in his squelchy, airy language. Some of the passengers shouted back immediately, pleading for their lives or for some in-flight snacks, but volume was no substitute for a common parlance. The intimidating mushroom then shouted something else, or more accurately squealed it like a frying mushroom pressed under a spatula. Despite his lack of linguistic knowledge, Dr Garcia took this to mean that everyone should shut up.  There may or may not have been a threat relating to his glowing energy rifle in attendance too, judging by the way the enormous mushroom was waggling it about the place, passing it between a few of its arms to sweep across the whole shuttle. This seemed to get the message across, even if the ‘words’ were ineffective. In the newfound silence, except for quiet whimpering, the mushroom sputtered, clicked and gurgled some more demands. It was terrifying and intimidating, and no-one made a move. No-one except one of the security team, that is, who fired at the mushroom, puncturing a hole clean through its fungal head. That was when the situation got messy.
                Furious burbling filled the shuttle as the Portobello, quite understandably miffed about being shot through the head, voiced his or her displeasure. In the same way that a bridge collapses suddenly, with a speed that seems wholly unnatural for something so huge, the bandit swung around, handing its gun between many arms, and unleashed a volley of fire. The security guard on the receiving end of the bombardment didn’t make nearly as much of a fuss or a racket about getting shot. He did, however, make a terrible mess of the shuttle wall.
                Adrenaline fuelled rage, or whatever the equivalent was for bipedal fungus, surged through the bandit as he flicked the end of his rifle from passenger to passenger. He was daring them to try the same thing, with beige-yellow eyes wide and hooded eyelids held back. Dr Garcia ducked his head down and covered it with both arms, cowering in his seat lest he too be executed by an incensed Portobello. Eyes shut tight and facing down, he didn’t realise that someone had stood up until he heard their strange coughing fit increasing in volume. One of the mushroom people burbled instructions back, and following some more coughing Dr Garcia braced to hear further gunfire. The instructions were probably to sit down, shut up and definitely not, under any circumstances, try to shoot him in the head again. This is normally a given, deep within the subtext of any other instruction, but probably necessary to make explicit in the current situation. The exchange, conducted in the various sounds of a respiratory infection, escaping gases and frying vegetables continued, despite Dr Garcia’s continued internal wishing that whoever was coughing would just take a sip of water and stop it. His nerves couldn’t take much more anxiety or terror, and Natalya’s voice in his head telling him to get a grip wasn’t helping.
                “Everyone remain calm.” Said the person from the front who had been coughing along with the fungoids. Dr Garcia risked a glance up and saw a gentleman wearing a sweaty pink pinstriped shirt with navy trousers. He looked far more comfortable in the situation than he should have, especially for someone with such awful breathing problems.
                “No harm will come to anyone else as long as my instructions are followed. Any attempt to resist or attack will be met with extreme prejudice.” The man commanded, traitorously seeming to take the side of the fungoids. Natalya certainly wouldn’t have liked the ‘humans vs fungoids’ culture emerging on the shuttle, and for once Dr Garcia fully agreed, but only because the humans seemed to be losing.
                One by one, names and seat numbers were read from the shuttle’s passenger list, and terrified passengers whimpered when it was their turn. After every name the man would mutter something in fungoid, receive orders from the bandits, and then instruct two more of the mushroom men to take the passenger in question away. It quickly became clear that anyone valuable was being pulled aside for ransom, and everyone else was to be taken as a slave.
                While the interpreter read through the manifesto and gave instruction, there was a lot of burbled discussion going on in the background. It was getting heated, with arms being pointed at the passengers, jabbed towards the remains of the security guard, and waved at one another. Simultaneously in fact; there were plenty of arms around to do so. It seemed like the one with a whole in his face was still peeved, and not even close to just getting over it. His companions had been presumably trying to calm him down, but their patience was wearing as thin as their attempt as a spoken language.
                 “Herman Garcia.” The interpreter said, raising Dr Garcia’s heart rate by remote. “12C. Scientist. No worth. Slave.” He finished, before squeaking and bubbling to the fungi. Dr Garcia had no idea what the words meant, but understood the enormous spongy hands locking around his biceps and pulling him towards the door.
                “No! Wait! I’m a doctor! I’m a doctor! I can be useful, I’ll fix his head!” Dr Garcia screamed desperately, sliding across the shuttle floor as he resisted the fungoids.
                The interpreter paused, weighing up options that Dr Garcia couldn’t fathom. He clicked his tongue, or possibly said something in the fungal language, twirled his pen, and finally squeaked something at the chaperones who were taking such an active interest in Herman’s location. Hurriedly, he approached the three avid debaters at the front and either cleared his throat or directly asked for attention.  Dr Garcia couldn’t tell which, and wasn’t convinced there was any difference at all.
                Whatever foul sounding conversation followed seemed to be in his favour. He was taken with his captors.
               
               
                Plant life always took over. It engulfed any plot of land or abandoned facility, any discarded object, or anything otherwise left exposed. Studies on deserted planets and failed settlements saw vines ascending walls, weeds cracking open pavements, trees taking residence in the master bedrooms of stately homes, and mushrooms making themselves quite at home in the walls of community centres. Moss lived in gutters whether a building was abandoned or not, so that didn’t really count.  In those normal cases, however, it was a slow and passive revolution, with planets accepting squatters’ rights on properties no-one else wanted. The fungoid bandit camp, however, had been a hostile takeover.
                The dry and dead forest had gradually sprung back into life as Herman was led through. It started with small shoots and scrubby patches of undergrowth, but moved into new tree growth, shrubs, brambles, and leafy bushes. Eventually the ravaged trunks gave way to living trees, with all their bark intact and green foliage covering their limbs. But among the woodland was something else entirely unnatural.
                Great sheared pieces of spacefaring dreadnought hull loomed into the canopy, wound and bound with rope and vines. Taking the place of trees they rose high above the increasingly dense forest floor, stained by creeping mosses and blending their way into the biome. Nature was smothering the ship wreckage, embarrassed by its presence and hiding it from the light. Dr Garcia would have been awed by it, if he hadn’t been preoccupied with terror at his own plight. That feeling only deepened when the rest of the torn hull came into view.
                In a clearing of the forest, stretching monolithically towards the open sky, were huge tracts of the ex-dreadnoughts superstructure. Steel walls several times larger than Dr Garcia’s home had been were sunk into the ground, forming the walls of improvised buildings. Wonky rows stretched away from Herman, in streets and avenues of re-purposed riveted plates of metal flanked by variously sized and shaped structures. Nature might have tried to cover the shipwreck up, but the fungi were trying to fill it instead.
                These bandits were seasoned veterans from a long line of hijackers and vagabonds, having established a whole town with their scavenged parts and ill-got gains. They weren’t squatting in some shanty or living in a cave network, but the citizenship of a functioning town.
                Without any heavy machinery in sight, it was a mystery how these fungi had managed to arrange the vast tonnage of scrap into buildings, but that wasn’t on the forefront of Dr Garcia’s mind. He was more worried about petty human concerns like how he was going to cope with the lies and false promises he’d made, and whether or not he was just going to be eaten. He’d not lied when claiming to be a doctor, but he couldn’t heal anyone; he didn’t know where to start. Far from being a medical professional as he had implied, he was in fact a planet biologist, and not even one specialised in fungi.
                To their credit, the mushrooms had made a picturesque enough township, in a manner of speaking. Half of an enormous booster shield had been planted into the ground as a semi-circular archway, framing the entrance to the settlement and covered with flowering planets and hanging moss. Avenues, tracks and roadways led through in an irregular grid, loosely spaced so that everything remained open. They might have been killers, slavers and kidnappers, but they knew good town planning practices and recycling habits.
                Along one of the muddy avenues the mushroom people advanced with Dr Garcia in their midst. A variety of fungal faces emerged from doorways and windows, hanging out of their abodes to see the great parade. Like a chained animal Dr Garcia's head snapped this way and that, looking with wide, uncertain, and uncomfortable eyes at the faces gawping his way. No-one made any great noises to protest a kidnapping, nor did they rush out to get a better look, they just stood in their homes and stared with the same interest as someone watching a bus go by. It was with depressing certainty that Dr Garcia recognised his situation as a routine practice. Prisoners must have been brought here all the time and shepherded through the streets towards some kind of awful, despicable fate.
                Furry moss clung to the edge of a steel structure with the same shape as a cuttlefish shell, like a green hand in need of a shave curling around the shoulder of a friend. None of Dr Garcia's friends had ever left their hands on his shoulder long enough to grow moss, which was good for the condition of his lab coat but not so great as a statement of commitment.
                Herman was roughly pushed along the road, and eventually shoved through the doors of the cuttlefish building, leaving the light of day and entering the dim shade of a fallen space-farer.
                Inside, the ship was like a cathedral of tarnishing metal and wood, raised in reverence to a shipwright turned architect. Lights buzzed up the walls and across the ceiling, probably the original ones the ship had carried in its spacegoing days, long before whatever had happened to bring it down to this planet’s surface. Herman had flown on enough cruisers to know that this gargantuan fragment of hull was standing upright rather than laying as it had been intended. Stripped of its gantries and tiered floors, it lost the spectacle of unknowable depth and replaced it with a direct reminder that these vessels were practically floating cities unto themselves. He wished he was up in one right now, and that he’d never got aboard the tiny, doomed shuttle.
                On ground level, the interior situation was a little less cathedral and a lot more hospital. In a great interior chamber which took up the majority of the interior, fungoids moved with the characteristic shuffle of illness, obvious limps, and terrible migraines. They populated a great ward, whilst other mushrooms rushed around tending to them. Herman’s mind struggled to comprehend the idea of bandits forming a healthcare system, but the evidence was right there to see, and it made him question his own judgement. Natalya would have told him that even criminals deserved medical care, but Herman wasn’t convinced that any of them would take on a nurse’s workload to administer it.
                Although they had clearly adopted the concept of living indoors and creating permanent structures, the notion of flooring seemed to have escaped this fungoid race. Bare earth was all that Dr Garcia felt underfoot, and it didn’t bode well for the medical environment he would be expected to work in. His own lack of medical experience didn’t exactly paint him as an expert, but it seemed that these mushrooms had failed to grasp even the basics of hygiene. All around him were the sick and injured, and every one of them was lying or sitting on the exposed ground in some capacity. On some level it made him feel better about being able to bluff his way through as a healer to whatever these things called themselves; even starting his work with ‘don’t let the infirm be covered in mud’ would be revolutionary medical practise.
                Once pushed clear of the ward, Dr Garcia was marched into a smaller, square room with a seriously bare approach to furnishing. He’d thought that his bunk on the transport ship during the bulk of the journey here had been basic, with its slightly-smaller-than-a-person bed and little else, but the fungoids had gone one further. This pokey cell had no bed at all to speak of and, in their apparent tradition, it seemed that even the luxury of a floor had to be earned rather than given freely.
                Since the room was a dead-end, Herman stopped moving. Standing there in his walled off patch of dirt, he felt his heart thumping away, having made the snap decision to panic whether or not his conscious mind was on board with the idea. Obviously his brain was all about the panicking, since he was no longer able to follow the only order he’d manage to understand, namely to keep moving and stay quiet. He had no faith in the fungi’s capacity to understand that he couldn’t move through solid walls, but also didn’t want to prove it by slamming face-first into one. However, Dr Garcia forced himself to maintain some restraint, even whilst trapped by the logical conundrum of necessary stasis versus obedient motion, lest the armed guards mistake his hysteria for aggression. The chap with a hole in the head had calmed down a little, but not a whole lot; especially whenever he touched a hand to his scalp and found it disappearing inside.
                Dr Garcia kept facing the wall and tried to hide how much he was shaking. He hadn't been ordered to turn around, not that he had heard at least, so he stayed exactly where he was.
                For their part, his mushroom escorts stared briefly at the strange little human, standing perfectly still and staring at a blank wall. None of them knew an awful lot about human physiology, but they were fairly certain that he wasn't asleep. He also didn’t seem particularly bright, so their tentative hopes that he was a medical genius were fraying away with every passing moment.
                Staring at the wall and wishing that he would mysteriously teleport out of his predicament, Dr Garcia heard the door open once more. He scrunched his face up tight, bracing himself to feel a rough hand grab him from behind to punish him for lying about being a healer, but no such omniscient hand came. Instead he heard coaster wheels rattling against the floor, and boxes stacked on one another. Risking a look around once the activity had died down, Herman saw that his previously bare room had been stocked with wooden crates containing a jumble of bottles, a surgeon's trolley of drawers, and various other boxes of supplies. Judging by the markings which had been partially erased by both time and fungal hands, these were looted from other hijacked ships, or could possibly have even come from the wreckage in which they stood.
                Herman cast a fearful, long distance glance over the bottles and medication. Whatever labels they had been originally sporting were now half peeled and written over in some strange, cursive alphabet. Presumably it was the fungoids' own. Even Natalya would have had to concede that it was a strange one. Given that everything had been looted, there was a good chance that Herman was being expected to heal someone using not only unknown but quite probably expired ingredients. His confidence could barely drop any lower.
                His, for want of a better word, patient strode through the doorway without a word. Marching towards Herman, he stopped short of the terrified doctor, stood in the centre of the dirt floor and seemed to deflate slightly. Herman wondered what on earth was about to happen, suspecting that a second, smaller mushroom was about to step out of a huge flesh suit, or that the mushroom man was about to crinkle like an overcooked cabbage. As had been the case throughout his career, however, Herman’s instincts and intuition were proven wrong. Small roots started to creep their way out of the mushroom’s feet, feeling their way across the earth like probing tongues which had misunderstood how good dirt tasted. Gradually they started to burrow and bed themselves into the ground, pulling the Portobello’s feet tight to the earth and securing his enormous bulk in place.
                Heavy lids shook and started to close across the injured man’s eyes. Unlike the human eyelids with which Dr Garcia was most familiar, the fungoid lids closed from all sides simultaneously, like a drawstring bag being pulled tightly closed and meeting at a tight pinch in the centre. In all honestly it seemed like a sub-optimal solution to the problem, not least of all because it left the possibility of light leaking directly through the centre, but he didn’t try to fix that. He’d be terribly lucky if he could fix anything in fact; avoiding doing more damage would be enough of an achievement.
                With his eyes closed, the tension melted away from all across the mushroom’s head. His nostrils ceased flaring and sank down to a pair of slits, and his mouth softened until the break between his lips seemed to disappear among the wrinkled fungal flesh.
                Despite the series of relaxed muscles, the patient was still standing of his own accord, the wound held a clear foot higher than Dr Garcia could access. He would need a stepladder to try to do anything, and for that reason hoped that height-aids were something which this society had never embraced as a technology.
                One of the nurses who had escorted Herman into the operating allotment, a white button mushroom, presented him with a bag of mushroom pieces, quickly recognisable as the scavenged chunks of the patient’s head. The image of one of these titanic fungi crawling about on its hands and knees to pick lumps of head out of the shuttle’s seating was distinctly unnerving to Dr Garcia, so he tried to push it out of his mind. Just like the bullet had pushed all these pieces out of the mushroom’s mind, he supposed to himself in a fit of poor taste.
                Dr Garcia looked at the sorry collection of fungus fragments in front of him and felt oddly squeamish. He’d handled raw mushroom countless times before, and just because these particular parts were previously someone’s head it didn’t mean that they were any different. But still he had that peculiar put-off feeling, like when forced to handle leftover food which has fallen into the sink.
                Accusing, untrusting and above-all working eyes studied Herman as he gingerly held the bag of head pieces. His bluff had carried him for a few extra hours, but this might be it. The sleeping patient was ready for him, and his nurses awaited the medical miracle. Dr Garcia wracked his brain or anything he could possibly do. The array of bottles and tools in front of him were completely alien in a perfectly literal sense, and the writing was entirely unintelligible.
                With shaking hands, since they were the only kind he had available, Dr Garcia lifted up one of the glass vials and examined the fluid inside. He had no idea what he was looking for, but it would buy a few more precious moments. His last minutes alive might well end up spent staring at unknown chemicals and indulging in some amateur malpractice, but every one he clawed back was another victory. There had to be something he could do, anything he’d overheard from the medical biologists at a conference he could apply. The lights switched on inside Herman’s head. That was it; human medicine was useless because these were fungi and they needed fungal biology. Even gardening experience would do at a push. Promoting growth didn’t come from a revolutionary new procedure; it came from richly fertilised soil. Repair was a little different, granted, but it meant that those barely relevant conference talks he’d attended for the free food might come in handy after all.
                There was something familiar in his memory, bearing a resemblance to the thought he was trying to have about mending fungi. It was a talk by some old, boring, tweed-clad man on accelerating cell repair and some kind of fungal equivalent of clotting a wound. It had been sufficiently boring that Herman had struggled to pay attention to the title, let along the content. He had also, incidentally, struggled to pay his entry fee to the conference, or more accurately struggled against the staff when he had tried to enter without paying it. What was it the old man had yammered on about, he asked himself. It was some kind of chemical stitch made from basic constituents, which simulated growth hormones or something. Names started coming back to him slowly, with a rough ordering and some ideas of relative proportions. When it came to preparing medical solutions it was generally accepted that precision was better than guesswork, but this was still the best plan Dr Garcia had.
                Herman gave the bottles another look over, trying to see what the labels said underneath the thin ink applied by the fungoids. On one or two he could just about tell what they should have been, and another handful became obvious when he opened the tops up and made his eyes water. The fungoid guards, or perhaps nurses in the context, regarded him with disinterest, not even sparing a tilt of the head for a supposed doctor sniffing bottles of unknown fluid before performing surgery. These people had an awful lot to learn about malpractice, and Herman felt like he was giving them a pretty comprehensive demonstration.
                Eventually, Dr Garcia settled on probable candidates for the ingredients he wanted and got to work. After a significant amount of relatively convincing measuring, dispensing and stirring, Herman’s medicine sat in a vial in front of him. It was just off translucent grey, distorting what lay behind like a sickly storm cloud. Satisfied, in a manner of speaking, with his creation, he gave a nervous nod towards his nurse guards.
                If the smells coming from the individual chemicals had been sharp before, then now, mixed together, the stench was an artisan blade capable of shaving down time itself. By all rights everyone in the room should have had a nose bleed, or the fungal equivalent of a nose should have been doing something analogous to bleeding.
                Herman stacked a few of the crates into a loose pedestal to gain the requisite height and shakily lifted himself to the level of the Portobello’s dormant head. Between his own nervous trembling and the unsteady platform on which he’d elevated himself, delicately painting the pieces of displaced head with some of his untrustworthy concoction and placing them back into the mainstay of Portobello’s skull was challenging. More than once he overbalanced and poured a bundle of spongy chunks from the bag into the cavity, having to then plunge his hand in and retrieve them, but trying to do so subtly enough that the nurses didn’t catch on. Trained medical professionals rarely dropped large quantities of eviscerated body into open wounds.
                When the chunks were finally in place but wouldn’t hold properly, Herman resorted to pouring on more and more of his bottled substance under the hope that quantity of treatment can substitute for quality of care. On the whole, it was a macabre, unpleasant, and above all incompetently executed process.
                It took two hours of effort before Dr Garcia finally admitted that he could do no more, and declared himself to be finished. Portobello’s head glistened with the slightly viscous fluid Herman had liberally applied, leaving his patient looking like an oiled vegetarian dinner.
                The formula appeared, on very close inspection, to be dissolving the mushroom flesh which it was contacting, kicking up an entirely new layer of chemical odour in the process. The nurse guards were now watching intently despite their earlier disinterest. The smell was arousing their suspicions, in a way that was objectively understandable and made Dr Garcia even more deeply nervous. If they would just do him the courtesy of not questioning why this healing technique was doing more up front damage rather than repairing the lacerations, then everybody would be much happier; him in particular.
                If Herman was going to be honest about it, which he most certainly wasn’t with the present company, it had been very soon after starting to create his snake oil concoction that he’d realised he had failed to recall the ingredients correctly. In fact, it should have been obvious even to a cursory observer that what he was brewing up had no convincing case for being involved in this kind of operation. Dr Garcia thanked whatever marginally-less-unlucky star was hovering over him at that moment that the mushrooms in his company had no idea of what they were looking at.
                Disposing of the arbitrary mixture of medical compounds would have been too much of a challenge and given away that he didn’t know what he was doing, but luckily Herman’s miscellaneous mental database of other uses for these chemicals had come to the rescue. He’d inadvertently fouled up the mixture in a manner which left a way out open to him. A cure-all regenerative compound was most certainly not going to come of his work, but he still knew how to make a stellar batch of superglue. His medicine was slowly curing away in the mushroom’s head, it was just in a different context to that which the nurses had expected. The glue was fixing the hole, just like Herman had promised.
                As long as the glue held, and the replaced fragments of head didn’t start to decay, Dr Garcia would be in the clear for at least another couple of days.  Maybe less, if his heart didn’t slow down from its terror induced thumping.
                Herman stepped away from his patient, victim, and test subject, and looked towards the nurse guards with an attempt at a smile which ended, predictably, in failure. Thick arms and legs shuffled slightly, rearranging the weight of spongy fungal flesh and not so much articulating as squashing about and bending where appropriate. Despite no definite threats being made, it remained the single most intimidating idle shifting of weight that Dr Garcia had ever seen, even from nurses. He supposed that these nurses had the unfair advantage of being gigantic and armed with high powered weaponry, but that wasn’t really the point. Once again he tried to convey the message that he was done with the operation, but a second smile earned no more response than the first.
                Facial expressions had proven themselves to be worthless. Herman was about to try clearing his throat to get their attention, when he decided at the last minute that it was a bad idea. After all, he might inadvertently end up insulting their taste in music or calling their home a vast toilet in the service station of the universe. Whatever popular cinema had tried to teach everyone, insulting one’s captors rarely wins them over or ends well for the hapless victim. There was no way that Herman was going to entertain the possibility of tapping one of the nurses on the shoulder, either.
                Bereft of any means with which to get their attention, or more accurately any means with which Herman felt comfortable, he instead elected to walk away from the sleeping mushroom and stand at the back wall, trying to make it obvious that he was finished.
                It was only a few seconds until one of the nurses noticed and made a gurgling noise at their companion. Both of them looked towards Dr Garcia’s handiwork and looked back over at him in their silent, fungal way. Herman raised his hands in front of himself, palms outwards, to show that he was no longer holding any medical equipment and intended to do no more of his noble work today. It was a lot for a pair of empty hands to say.
                White button mushroom stepped over to the patient and took a closer look at the wound. His or her body language was a complete mystery to Herman. In fact, he would go further than that and say that the whole body and everything about it was a mystery to him, except for the small patch of exploded head with which he had come into contact. Tense as ever, he waited for judgement to be passed on his handiwork. When he saw wrinkling appear across the button mushroom’s face, entirely like that of someone crunching up their nose after smelling something foul, he somehow found a way to become tenser. Quite honestly he didn’t realise that his muscles were capable of that, given that he’d neglected them for so long. When he saw a thick, mushroomy hand rising up towards the patchwork of glued head, no amount of tensed muscle could keep Dr Garcia’s heart from leaping into his mouth.
                “No!” he shouted reflexively. A finger stopped mere centimetres from the wound, and a button head turned towards Herman with the sound of old, creaking leather. Chestnut mushroom nurse, still waiting by the door, took a step forwards and half-way raised its gun.
                “It needs time to set, er, to finish healing up.” Herman said quickly with hands still raised, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. That much, at least, was well within his power.
                Both of the nurses continued staring at him, neither one of them giving even a hint of comprehension. It was only a matter of time until they gave up trying to work out what he was going on about and poked at the skull jigsaw. Even if they didn’t immediately cotton-on to what he’d done, they’d realise later on in the evening when their hands got stuck to their trousers.
                “Don’t poke it. He can’t touch it either.” Dr Garcia tried to explain again, pointing towards the patient. More groaning and croaking accompanied the tipping of heads. They were like comically large, fungal puppies trying to work out what the angry man with the soiled lawn was trying to convey.
                Adopting a different approach, Herman tapped a finger to his own head and then made what he hoped was a universal ‘no’ gesture with both hands. The button mushroom extended its finger again, moved it closer to the foul-smelling collection of glue and head pieces, and then looked back towards Herman for his reaction. The doctor was flailing his arms around wildly and shaking his head from side-to-side, making it perfectly clear that he had strong feelings on the matter. Unfortunately, the mushrooms still had no idea what those ideas were.
                It took a heartbreakingly drawn-out series of poke fake-outs for the mushrooms to finally understand that they should leave the wound alone. Dr Garcia wanted to make them tell the patient to leave it alone whenever he woke up from his dirt-nap, but couldn’t face trying to get that message across. Not after the elaborate dance routine it had taken to try and mime ‘wait for three days before you let anything touch it’. There had been a lot of arms raised to the sky to imply the sun, plenty of hands held palm-to-palm by his face to signify sleep, and the patience of a saint to keep at it for so long. A voice at the back of his mind was reminding him that he was currently trying to help the people who had kidnapped him and enslaved his fellow passengers, but when it came down to it he just didn’t care. If providing medical care to murderous bandits kept him alive, then he’d wear a stethoscope all day and continue learning on the job. Natalya would be proud of that kind of understanding and forgiving attitude, but Herman didn’t care about that either.
               
               
                All four of them had remained in the cell or operating theatre or whatever it was for at least another hour before anyone came to check up on them. Without knocking, a closed-cup chap whom Herman didn’t recognise entered the room and spoke authoritatively to the nurses, who answered in short, sharp bursts of burbles and clicks. Several arms pointed between the patient, Dr Garcia, and their own heads, which Herman optimistically took to mean that they had understood his advice and were passing it on. When they started mimicking his mime artistry, however, he got the distinct impression that they were in fact mocking him and would probably end up poking the poor chap’s skull right back out of place again.
                Regardless, Herman laughed with nervous relief. Being the subject of mockery meant that he wasn’t perceived as a threat, so he wasn’t likely to be executed. He was humiliated and disrespected for sure, but still very much alive. He’d rather live as the court jester than die as a stubborn academic with too many principles to perform medicine by guesswork.
                Each of the fungoids stared at Herman again, the way they always did when he tried to communicate with them in any way. He immediately stopped laughing, rapidly concluding that it wasn’t making the situation any better. The closed-cup shrugged and the three mushrooms went back to their conversation, leaving Herman to wait silently for them.
                Finally taking the hint that he was finished, the mushroom guards started to usher Dr Garcia from the room. He spared a furtive glance back towards his sleeping patient, complete with crazy-paving on his scalp. Herman gave himself one last chance to think of anything he could do to make sure the pieces didn't fall out, but short of standing over it with a hairdryer to cure the glue more rapidly he was drawing a blank. That would look suspicious enough as it was, but having observed that none of the mushrooms he'd met had any hair, it would also necessitate building a hairdryer from scratch. There was no time for that.
               
               
                Just as gruffly as before, but at least without pressing the barrel of a gun into Herman’s spine, the fungoids marched him out of the operating theatre. In the time he’d spent performing his dubious procedures, the main ward had emptied out somewhat. Vacant spaces similar to that in which his own patient had slept were being raked, tilled, and spread with a layer of fresh and fertilised soil. Nurses in muddy overalls worked the ground into an even, flat, and exceptionally neat pasture, then picked up their tools and moved onto the next allotment. Herman felt like he was witnessing the mutant abomination formed by the eldritch fusion of a garden centre and a hospital.
               
               
                Metal stairs, another artefact from the fallen vessel which now formed a fungoid hospital, led Dr Garcia and his escort up to a mezzanine level. Judging by the extensive work done to the interior, the ship must have come down hard enough to shred the inner walls, somehow without annihilating the hull or superstructure. In all the news broadcasts Herman had seen about ship wrecks and disasters, he’d never come across that kind of gutting. Perhaps it broke up in orbit and everything was torn out during re-entry, leaving the shell he saw now. Perhaps the fungoids had just been brutal with how they’d pulled it apart, but he didn’t see how they could have melted quite so many of the stubs of sheared walls. Whatever the case, it had only a few cabins left intact, and the fungoids had been forced to build elaborate wooden platforms between them.
                There were no obvious wards or patients on the higher levels. It seemed to be reserved for storage of tools and equipment. Herman’s mind leapt naturally and immediately to two conclusions. Either these fungoids were planning to store him like any other tool for later use, or they were going to use these deserted rooms and the equipment therein to torture him for filling their colleague’s head with improvised glue. He wasn’t thrilled about either possibility.
                Chestnut mushroom stopped next to one of the simple wooden doors and pushed it open, waving Dr Garcia in with one of his many free hands. Herman hesitated and swallowed hard, expecting to see either a store room or a torture chamber and trying to steel himself for it. In reality he only managed to tin-foil himself, what with his nerves being shot to pieces and not even that great to begin with. However, fortune had smiled upon him this time, or at least decided to frown upon him a little less than it had done earlier; the room was a simple cabin, torn walls patched up with woodwork, complete with a bundle of heavy cloths in one corner, a partially functional chair, and a small porthole window allowing in the dying light of the day. Whether cell or dormitory, it was a place to keep him in working order for some time, with no evidence that he was going to spend that time on the wrong end of a mushroom’s ire.
                When he was all of two steps inside, the door slammed shut behind him. There was a faint clicking as some kind of lock was engaged, and Dr Garcia was alone. At the very least, it had settled the cell-or-hotel argument quite promptly.
                The fungoids had clearly been members of the intergalactic community for long enough to know that not everyone sleeps in dirt, judging by the blankets provided in place of a square of bare earth. It begged the question of why there were no warnings about hostile life on the planet, and why none of the fungoids spoke any of the common intergalactic languages, but the only answer Dr Garcia could reach was that they were talented enough bandits to take down ships without ever integrating themselves with the larger society. In the darkness of his prison cell, that made him feel even worse.
                Finally alone after several hours of scrutiny and supervision, Dr Garcia sagged into the parts of the chair which had been provided. All the anticipation, anxiety, fear and amateur malpractice had distracted him from his own body, but hunger immediately started to gurgle away in his stomach. Desperately he hoped that the fungoids understood the mammalian requirement for food. Few terrestrial plants or fungi ate food, as such, but who knew if arthropod fungi had a different approach? His mind turned back to the sight of his patient sprouting roots out and planting them into the dirt bed, and of seeing nurses spreading fresh soil. That would be it; their feeding pattern. They took root to gain nutrients and then walked around unhindered. They might well have no knowledge of digestion or separately ingested food. And at the other end of the process… his gaze scanned around the room urgently, and fell upon a bucket in the corner. His despair only deepened.
                A short while after darkness fell, Herman’s door ‘clicked’ unlocked and opened gently inwards. Following the door’s lead, an enormous mushroom foot stepped lightly into the cell. Dr Garcia watched the foot slowly squash and spread out as weight was shifted onto it from above. Based on his knowledge of buying mushrooms and handling the bits of head from before, Herman suspected that these fungoids were low mass creatures by comparison to humans. Given how much the foot was deforming, they must have been very delicate and squashy, possibly for the sake of silent motion. If they were hunters who had evolved to do so for sport alone, without any need for food, then he had even less of a clue of what to make of it. He opted for his default option of mortal fear.
                As the rest of the silent presumed-hunter-killer padded through the doorway, Dr Garcia shot to the back of the room, cowering like a wounded animal for good measure. A good measure of what, exactly, was yet to be determined.
                The new mushroom was striking to behold. Its head was bright red with a series of brilliant-white lumps all over. What was visible of the rest of its body, underneath the long coat and sweater-vest combo, was also a stark and clean white, unlike the creamy beige of its associates. In short, this one looked just as poisonous as Herman expected a hunter would.
                Herman heard Natalya’s voice in his head again, telling him not to make judgements based on appearances. Under the circumstances, however, it seemed perfectly sensible. The whole reason that many terrestrial species were bright was to serve as a warning that they were poisonous, venomous, or otherwise not to be trifled with. To ignore that now would be a slap in the face of evolutionary biology.
                Redshroom closed the door softly and made eye-contact with Dr Garcia. In an attempt to show that its hands were empty and to appear unthreatening, it opened its front-most arms wide.  This of course caused them to bunch up tighter with the arms farther back, but some allowances had to be made in pursuit of communication by body language. Dr Garcia relaxed slightly but kept himself pressed against the back wall, not wanting to appear like fleeing prey. His clear terror probably gave that impression regardless.  More softly than the others he’d been around, Redshroom said something which sounded a lot like “Schrkquergh”, if such a word could be uttered through a wet pipe inside a rubber balloon full of butter.
                Dr Garcia had no idea what that meant. He did, however, think that he could read body language better than his captors, and suspected that Redshroom wanted him to feel at ease and unthreatened. Problematically he also thought that this was a trick and didn’t want to be taken in by it. Redshroom repeated the mystery word equally softly, but with an exaggerated slowness and falling inflection. She was speaking to him as if he were a frightened animal, which in fairness is exactly what he was. He resisted the urge to squeal. Redshroom held eye contact and took a slow, measured step towards Herman. With nowhere left to back away to, he simply pushed himself harder against the wall.
                Handing it around from its back-most hands to the front, Redshroom produced a bag and placed it on the floor between Herman and itself. This went somewhat against its earlier efforts to show that its hands were empty, and in fact reinforced the point that these people could be concealing anything perfectly easily at any time. With the previously hidden payload deposited, Redshroom took as long of a step backward as it could, then indicated towards the bag with three hands.
                Dr Garcia looked guardedly between the bag and Redshroom, unsure of what to expect. If he was being presented with yet another bag of head pieces then he was in the mood to reject the offering. Quite aside from finding it off-putting the first time, he had no confidence in his own ability to recreate the exact glue mixture from earlier. Inconsistency in his chemical lies could draw unnecessary suspicion towards himself. Interpreting the Redshroom’s actions in the way he would expect a human to mean them, which he knew he had no reason to do, Herman gingerly let himself move away from the wall and pick up the bag. It had a reassuring weight, contrary enough to the bag of head from earlier.
                On opening the bag Herman was pleased to discover that it didn’t contain body parts of any description. In fact, it seemed to be some form of root vegetable with a peculiar but not entirely off-putting turquoise colour. Herman took it in one hand and examined it, noting the triple-bulbed shape and indentations running along the length from leaf to tip. In a normal situation Herman would take his time over counting the indents, measuring the relative size of the bulbs, investigating the stems and shapes of the leaves, and characterising the surface texture of the flesh. However, this situation was far from normal and he instead adopted the research techniques of the infant, sinking his teeth into the unknown plant and biting off a huge chunk.
                To Herman’s distinct pleasure and relief, the vegetable didn’t taste poisonous, nor did it start to dissolve his mouth or do any of the other things which make biting something a risky move. If it had screamed then that would have been a whole new kind of disturbing. As it was, the vegetable tasted somewhere between a parsnip, an aubergine, and smoky bacon crisps.
                Redshroom regarded him curiously as he crunched his way through the first mouthful, apparently waiting for some, or any, kind of reaction. Once he’d swallowed, Redshroom raised one of its many fists and awkwardly raised a single thumb-like opposable protrusion. If someone asked Dr Garcia to picture concept of ham-fisted communication then that sight would have been perfect. Such judgement was a bit rich coming from the medical mime artist himself, but hypocrisy was the privilege of the kidnapee. Fearful of what he might be agreeing to precisely, but desperate to cling on to the one thing he understood, Herman gave a thumbs-up back.
                After such a glowing display of inter-species positivity, Herman took another bite of the peculiar vegetable. Redshroom watched with disproportionate interest, patiently holding its front arms in front of itself at waist height, hand over hand.
                It took several more mouthfuls for Herman to devour the rest of the turquoise whatever-it-was. Time would tell whether or not it agreed with his digestive system, but for the moment it was filling him up, and that was all he really cared about.
                “Ktlrchk.” Redshroom said when Dr Garcia looked back up at it, pointing towards itself with one hand and keeping the others deliberately lowered. It was certainly committed to the non-threatening angle. Herman looked distinctly puzzled and indistinctly tired. Taking a stab in the dark he offered out of the stub of vegetable to Redshroom, looking obviously unconfident in his own actions. With patience, Redshroom waved the stump away, and then used two hands to point to itself.
                “Ktlrchk.” It repeated a little slower. “Ktlrchk.” The hands were now moving to emphasise the pointing action.
                “You’re Kh… Khtuhl…” Herman tried.
                “Ktlrchk.” Redshroom said, nodding encouragingly. It hoped that the nod was encouraging anyway; from what it knew of human customs it was either a positive gesture, or a death threat.
                Mimicking Ktlrchk’s actions, which it had considerately limited to the number of limbs that Herman had to work with, Dr Garcia pointed to himself and said “Herman”. Ktlrchk nodded slowly.
                “Herman” he said a second time, eager to be able to communicate with someone. Begging for mercy would be markedly more effective if the receiving party could understand what was being said.
                “Hchyrr-myrrnch” Ktlrchk burbled in response, parodying human speech with the insufficient vocal tools it had available. Still, it was doing its very best to get the pronunciation just right.
                “Herman.” Dr Garcia corrected. “Herman the human” he added before he could stop himself. Herman the human indeed; it was bad enough that he was both a hostage and a chemical attacker, but now he was a rhyming-named children’s book character as well.
                With two of its hands Ktlrchk scribbled various notes on a clipboard produced from somewhere or other unseen. Dr Garcia sincerely hoped the scrawlings didn’t say ‘Herman the human’ or ‘prime hunting target’, but was hard pushed to say which one he would have preferred.
               
                Ktlrchk didn’t stay long, despite its clear fascination with Herman. Once it was clear that Herman wouldn’t be eating the bag in which the vegetable had come, it left the cell with a quiet wave using four arms. The fifth operated the door. Left in his own silent solitude to contemplate the visit, Herman was at somewhat of a loss. He spent some time wondering about what might be about to happen to him, had a sit down on the chair piece, and finally prepared a nest for himself in the corner. Locked away by sentient fungus, lying on the floor in a pile of miscellaneous sheets, and quite possibly about to be executed for adhesive assault masquerading as medical science, Herman worried himself to sleep.
                The next morning, after a coarse but not necessarily rough awakening, Dr Garcia was back in the operating allotment, his door once again guarded by titanic mushroom nurses. Seeing all the tonics and chemicals reminded him of the kinds of injury these people got in the course of their slaving and kidnapping. Maybe there had been another ship attacked during the night and there were more wounded to patch up, discomfortingly literally. Neither of the nurses gave anything away, not that Dr Garcia would have known what they were saying even if they’d tried. After their reactions to his perfectly good mime artistry from the previous day, he was in no rush to ask them anything anyway. At the very least, the surgery had now been furnished with a chair which was similarly poorly conditioned to the one in his cell.
                Just as Herman was contemplating risking a sit in this new danger-chair, there was a knock at the theatre door. Without looking, one of the nurses used a rear-facing arm to turn the door handle and pull it open.
                Through the doorway strode a lumpy, brackety toadstool of a fungoid. Where the majority of the others Herman had seen had had smooth, evenly sloped heads, this one had thrown consistent shaping off to the wind. Whilst there was a clear head section, it was comprised of the wide, flat peaks of hundreds of smaller growths, almost like fungal scales. Its limbs were a woven tangle of thin stems, curling around and looping through one another until they culminated in a scaly set of hands and feet. If Herman had encountered this in a terrestrial lab, he would have said it was a collective of smaller organisms working together to get into an over eighteen’s film; slap a long trench coat on it and the illusion would have been complete. But in this context, he didn’t know what to think aside from ‘urgh’.
                Maintaining some semblance of professional integrity, mostly to avoid the toadstool punching him with one of those disgusting hands, Dr Garcia didn’t give away his overwhelming repulsion.
                Standing next to his chair pieces, Herman anxiously watched on as the toadstool held a conversation with the nurses. After a few words from each party, the toadstool lifted one arm and pointed to something which Dr Garcia couldn’t see, eliciting non-committal nods and very little else from the nurses. Some more prompting from the toadstool was met with even deeper disinterest, to the degree that Herman was worried they might leave the room entirely to make their point.
                Finally accepting that there was no more help to be garnered from the nurse guards, the toadstool strode across the operating theatre towards Herman, who looked even smaller now that he was cowering. Heavily it plopped the mass of its entangled rump on the bare earth bed and held the arm out towards Dr Garcia, now that it was at an easier height. With another of its hands, the toadstool lifted one of the scales partially to reveal a second, altogether more vibrant patch of growth.
                Herman peered uneasily but curiously at the green and pink patch of foreign life which had sprung up on the toadstool’s arm. Equally unappealing in its colour palette and its distinct furriness, the growth seemed to nucleate at the base of one scale and spread outwards from that point. Dr Garcia was full of questions; how long had it taken to grow that much? Did it hurt? Had the toadstool plunged its arm into any pools of stagnant water or rotting material recently? Unfortunately he didn’t trust either his own miming ability or the toadstool’s mime interpretation skills enough to adequately make those enquiries.
                In lieu of being able to ask about the nature and circumstances of his patient’s malady, Dr Garcia made further investigations of his own. With a plastic probe of some sort which was poking from the medical supplies, Herman poked gently at the growth, breaking for a panicked glance up at the toadstool when he realised that he’d just dived right in. Displaying admirable patience, the toadstool peered back impassively with its massive yellow eyes, neither confirming nor denying that it was comfortable with having its arm prodded.
                Professional curiosity winning out over fear for once, Dr Garcia continued his poking and noted how parts of the growth seemed to crumble away, and others split open to reveal a spongy interior with small, aerated cavities. In his own opinion, based on several years of unpleasant sights in shared changing rooms, he thought that this particular toadstool may have had an exotic, alien form of athlete’s foot. On its arm. Athlete’s arm was clearly distinct from tennis elbow, and far less visually appealing.
                An odd sense of pride came over Herman as he recalled that the appropriate course of action here would be to apply athlete’s foot powder to the affected area. Improvising that shouldn’t pose a problem for him; it was just a drying agent of some sort combined with antifungals, as far as he could tell. Immediately he dashed away to the stash of partially unknown and definitely mislabelled chemicals and started to mix something up.
                Half a flask of fluid later, swirling in a solution of something either chlorinated or otherwise smelly, he came to a sudden stop. Eddy currents in the medical solution decelerated, calming themselves into a placid liquid surface once more. He was mixing up a batch of antifungals to apply to a fungus’ arm. It was literally just a batch of incredibly corrosive poison. Gradually the realisation swept over Herman that he’d been congratulating himself for deciding on curing an infection by creating a chemical weapon. One day on this planet and he was already attempting to commit a war crime!
                He couldn’t very well just pour the solution away. It would be the equivalent of tainting the ground with arsenic and cyanide on a human planet. And corrosive agent or otherwise, it would definitely kill the infection on the toadstool’s arm. As long as it didn’t decide to drink the medicine, or stand around licking its own arm, then surely the antifungal wouldn’t be able to do too much harm if properly diluted and applied via a powder, Herman justified to himself.
                Placing the flask down on his meagre workspace, Herman dug through the supplies until he found something which he very much hoped was talcum powder. The alternative was that the mystery substance was self-raising flour, and applying yeast to a fungal infection wasn’t quite the angle he’d been going for.
                After a period of delicate pouring, mixing, and hand-wiping, Herman approached the toadstool once again with a dish of antifungal-laced powder in his hands. Anticipating what might be about to happen, the toadstool helpfully held his arm out, and pushed back the scale with one hand to allow Dr Garcia easy access. Using his plastic probe a second time, Herman pushed a small pile of his home-made bioweapon onto the site of the infection and spread it around evenly.
                Stepping back in case it started to bubble and spit, Herman watched intently for a minute or so, until it became clear that nothing interesting was going to happen. He raised one eyebrow and looked to the toadstool for any reaction, but it just stared back at Herman with the same impassive expression. Anything other than placid silence would have been useful; a yelp of pain, a smile, a nod, anything at all. Sadly, the toadstool didn’t seem to be in the sharing mood.
                Feeling a theme coming on having used a second amateur medicine on a poorly understood malady, Herman stepped away from the toadstool and poured the remainder of his powder into a small bottle, before handing it to one of the toadstool’s free arms. Still holding the scale back and exposing the now powdery infection, it looked curiously down at Herman’s work and then back at the doctor.
                Seizing the moment for some world class mime, Herman pointed to the bottle and then to the arm. Toadstool followed Herman’s finger then looked back up at his face and nodded. After this unprecedented success Herman tried to go a step further, holding up three fingers and then pointing between the bottle and arm again. The toadstool nodded a second time.
                Buoyed by his own display of expert mushroom-whispering, Herman pointed to the bottle, then to his own mouth, and then shook his head violently, making all the same ‘no’ gestures from the day before but with a renewed vigour. It was at around this time that the toadstool decided Herman must have been having some kind of seizure and leapt to its feet in case it should need to get out of the way in a hurry.
                Reflexively, Dr Garcia threw his arms up over his head and cowered away from the towering toadstool with its infected and poison laden arm. From the doorway he could hear a familiar bubbling sound, and realised the nurses were laughing at him again. Well the joke was on them; two successful treatments in as many days, and he didn’t even know what he was going on about.
               
                That night Herman lay on his nest and wondered about the concept of a giant toadstool getting a fungal infection. Every time he tried to think of a human analogue he came up with the concept of someone coming into work with a mammalian infection, tiny rodents or perhaps some marsupials growing out of their otherwise human flesh, and treating it with medical grade rat poison. The imagery made him shudder.
                He was rescued from his hypothetical horror by another visit from Ktlrchk. It opened the door to his cell and entered just as softly as the night before, casually holding another bag of vegetables and the same clipboard in two of its hands.
                Herman stood up immediately, glad to have been brought some food but still not entirely comfortable in the presence of these titanic creatures.
                By way of greeting, Ktlrchk attempted another inexpert thumbs up, this time employing a second hand to appear twice as happy to see him. Dr Garcia followed suit in the hope of getting his vegetables a little sooner; these mushrooms seemed to operate under the assumption that he, like them, only needed to feed once a day. They could not have been more mistaken.
                Apparently pleased with his welcoming nature, Ktlrchk offered the bag out straight away and Dr Garcia took it hungrily. This time there were two of the strange blobby turquoise roots, and something which looked like a jellyfish made from onions.
                Once Herman had demolished the first turquoise root, Ktlrchk made one of the throat clearing sounds which could have meant anything. Dr Garcia looked it in the eye and waited a little anxiously, just in case it’d been asking him to do something. Glancing hurriedly at the clipboard, Ktlrchk drew a deep breath and pulled a face of deep concentration.
                “Hcchello, Hyerrman.” It said, with the sound of a frog croaking inside a wet drain pipe.
                Herman nearly dropped his bag of mixed legumes.
               
                It seemed that Ktlrchk had been busy since the previous day. While Dr Garcia had been formulating mild bioweapons, she had gathered herself a lexicon of common words from Herman’s language. Not only did that speak of her willingness to communicate properly, but also that these mushroom people had more knowledge of, or access to, the intergalactic community than Herman had thought. It was a lifeline, the possibility of a way out, somehow. And she blessedly seemed to have forgotten the ‘Herman the human’ rhyming fiasco.
                There was little that Herman himself could do to further the cause of their parlance. He was a biologist, not a linguist, and most of his abilities were being used in bluffing his way through medical procedures without accidentally murdering his patients. At the very least he had made the move of deciding on female pronouns for Ktlrchk, because all of that ‘it’ business was objectifying and didn’t lend itself to a warm working relationship. There was little hope of a warm relationship in his other slave work, so he wanted to make the most of that aspect.
                Dr Garcia was sitting precariously on his chair pieces in the operating theatre the following day, mind racing with possibilities at being able to talk to Ktlrchk, when the Portobello whose head he’d glued together came storming back into the room. Herman shot to the back of the room as it thumped towards him, pointing at its scalp and burbling angrily. It gave him an overwhelming urge to turn down the temperature on a frying pan somewhere before it burned the contents, but there were no hobs in sight. There was only a very angry looking mushroom.
                Looming over him like the vengeful ghost of past meals, the mushroom shouted unintelligibly until Herman was visibly shaking. It didn’t take much. Stamping back to the earth bed it knelt down and pointed at its head again.
                Warily, Dr Garcia crept towards the terrifying brown-white ship-jacker. His handiwork from the previous day was largely as he remembered it, but now had a polished finish; he’d very effectively varnished the pieces back into place, but the remedy had not managed to make them stitch back onto the living flesh, and the fragments looked like they were starting to go septic. There was also a sickly colour about the edges of the wound which led Dr Garcia to believe that he may not have helped the situation at all by partially dissolving the head in a powerful adhesive.
                Swallowing hard, Herman held up his hands to indicate that Portobello should give him a moment, and he dashed over to his stash of chemicals. Eyes flitting from bottle to bottle he desperately tried to remember the proper formula for accelerated fungal growth. He knew it was relatively simple, that had been one of the main selling points that the boring professor had been trying to convey, and he had learned two days before that it was different to the recipe for glue. So that was a starting point if nothing else.
                Extreme anxiety wasn’t the ideal emotional state for this kind of work, but Herman had to make do with what he had. Focusing with all his might he tried to will the memories into place. Every time he came close, however, he was interrupted by a mortifying vision of the Portobello losing its temper and shooting him like the security guard it’d executed on the shuttle. Herman forced himself to pour a few liquids into a dish on a best-guess basis, allowing broken fragments of memory to direct his decisions and deliberately not looking back at Portobello.
                After stalling for as long as he could, Herman crossed back over to the mushroom patient with his new mixture. It was markedly less viscous than the previous concoction, and didn’t come with such a painfully acrid smell either. Even if it didn’t work, it was at least less unpleasant to be around than the corrosive glue.
                Quivering, Herman poured a small splash of the hopefully miraculous cure-all onto the varnished portion of the Portobello’s head. Where there was still organic material exposed, septic or otherwise, the fluid soaked in and stained it darkly. Along the glue lines, however, it ran freely over the surface and trickled across the Portobello’s face. It didn’t like that, particularly when the solution flowed into its eyes.
                A perversely throaty roar erupted as the stinging and burning realised itself. Cure or not it wasn’t designed for ocular application, and Portobello’s temper was wafer thin at the best of times. Lurching to back to its feet with alarming agility, the enraged mushroom backhanded Herman hard across the face. Despite the severity of the blow, Herman held fast and was surprised to find how painful it wasn’t; the spongy body of the mushroomoids provided a kind of natural damping for this kind of physical confrontation, it seemed.
                That sense of relief was short-lived, however. Sponginess didn’t rob the mushroom of strength, and it lifted Herman easily into the air by the throat, closing its soft digits around his neck like a scarf made from thick packing foam. As Herman dangled comfortably above the ground, his usually fear-addled mind allowed itself to consider that maybe, just maybe, these mushrooms weren’t quite as dangerous as he’d thought. This notion was immediately disregarded when he started to soar across the room and crashed bodily into the cold steel wall of the operating theatre. A pathetic wheeze escaped his body as the breath was forcibly ejected and he landed on a box of badly labelled bottles.
                Thoughts, senses and interpretations rattled around in Herman’s head, having been jumbled up by his flight and impact. Nothing lined up or made sense. There was a lot of pain in various places, a definite underlying sensation of fear, and a chemical smell sticking around his nostrils. He was also fairly sure that several bicycle pumps were being frantically blown through some shallow, thick fluid judging by the strange popping, bubbling and puffing sounds he could hear. For the life of him he couldn’t think why someone would be pumping in such a way with that degree of urgency.
                Fragments of comprehension settled into place. He was still in the operating theatre, he was surrounded by anthropomorphised fungus, and one such specimen had seen through his otherwise masterful plan to fake medical prowess.
                Herman lifted his head up and saw the nurses arguing with Portobello. He wondered if they were debating the finer points of his earlier mime, and trying to determine exactly the course of treatment he’d recommended. Or maybe they were discussing how to finish the job of his execution, and tempers were fraying over who got the honours. Whatever the nature of the commotion, it ended with Portobello stomping out of the room, and one of the nurses rushing out after. Every muscle in Dr Garcia’s body tensed and clenched as the other nurse walked his way.
                Resting painfully on a crate of stolen supplies, Herman wasn’t able to move himself out of reach, and the nurse lifted him easily by the armpits. Once again he felt the comfortable grasp of the fungoid, but struggled to relax into it after last time. It didn’t help that being suspended like that clarified exactly which parts of his body had suffered the most as a result of crashing into a metal wall at speed.
                Gently, the nurse rested Dr Garcia on the floor, staring in puzzlement when no roots sprang from him into the dirt. It knew that Herman wasn’t like the mushrooms, but hadn’t considered that his biology would be so perverse as to not even take root on such rich, fertile land. So confused was it that it needed to scratch its head with a full three hands to get the point across. To the nurse’s credit, that message was read loud and clear by Ktlrchk when she was led hurriedly into the room with the returning nurse.
                “Hccchrrrmaaan!” she said. He would have loved to say that she sounded concerned, but was nowhere near ready to be discerning tones of voice. Truth be told, he still wasn’t able to reliably tell the difference between conversation and coughing.
                “Hello Kuhtllerch.” Herman wheezed, using his possibly cracked ribs to mask the poor grasp he had on how to pronounce her name. That same trick had never gone well whenever he’d tried it on a first date, but he had faith that it would pay off this time.
                Either oblivious or apathetic to Herman’s linguistic progress, Ktlrchk exchanged hurried words with the nurses. They explained with some mime of their own what had happened, and Herman saw Ktlrchk ball several of her hands into fists. He didn’t know whether he was a prisoner, a slave, or a pet, but Herman was grateful to have someone looking out for him whatever the case.
               
                Herman spent the remainder of that day in his cell, resting. Suspecting that it might help his recovery, Ktlrchk brought him a bumper supply of vegetables to eat, but didn’t sit and try to talk with him. As nervous as the presence of the fungoids made him, Dr Garcia was a little saddened by the lack of her company. He wanted desperately to find out what was going to happen to him, and whether he was trapped here forever, and Ktlrchk was the best way of finding out. Maybe even the only way of finding out, except for doing it the old fashioned way and just waiting to see what happened. But that scarcely allowed one to plan ahead.
                It wasn’t until that evening, at what Herman guessed was around the normal time, that she came back with further vegetables.
                “Hrch…hcho… hchoow aarr ychou?” Ktlrchk asked him, sitting on the floor and facing Herman in his nest.
                Although a full complement of pains and bruises had started to develop around Herman’s body, he didn’t think there was anything seriously damaged.
                “I’m OK.” Herman said slowly.  “Thank you.” He added, offering a careful thumbs up to provide some immediate context before she fully translated the sentence.
                “Gchood.” She assessed, proud of herself for not having to look that word up before speaking. She scribbled some notes.
                Herman held another unknown vegetable in his hands and paused before eating.
                “How are you?” he asked back. As intimidating as she looked, Ktlrchk had put effort into feeding him, trying to communicate with him, and saving him from the rampaging Portobello. Despite her being one of his captors, Herman couldn’t help but care how she was.
                With a puzzled but determined face, Ktlrchk scanned through a separate page on her clipboard.
                “Aaiicchh” she muttered, stalling for time. Dr Garcia wondered if that was the fungoid equivalent of ‘erm’ but couldn’t think of an appropriate means by which to ask the question. She was struggling enough with basic pleasantries.
                “Aiii… eechxited.” Ktlrchk’s mouth pulled into a relieved smile when she’d finished her one-word response.
                “Excited?” Dr Garcia’s mind flashed to the worst interpretations of that concept, anticipating that she was happy to have learned definitively that he could be tossed around like a rag doll, or would make a sporting target for the hunt. But then he forced himself to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, her track record of behaviour meant that she was excited to be in his company, an alien specimen.
                “Excited to study me?” he asked hopefully.
                “Aiiich.”
                Ktlrchk’s smile transformed into confusion and she reviewed all of her notes. Not finding what she was looking for, she scanned through a second time. Satisfied that no new words had appeared between her two viewings she shrugged with the many shoulders at her disposal.
                “Aiiii… doaan’…knoaw.”
                Dr Garcia nodded and took a bite of vegetable whilst struggling to think of a more common synonym for ‘study’ which someone might have written down for Ktlrchk. Word-by-word they were learning to understand one another.
               
                A torn shoulder opened its maw to the operating allotment, showing off the internal air pockets and hyphae which gave the mushrooms their sponginess. It was a common injury which the doctor had healed many times before, and one to be expected for strong limbs comprised of delicate tissue. Inevitably, if something heavy was lifted then despite the limb’s capability to output that amount of force, the flesh binding that limb to the torso failed.
                A clear, slightly viscous fluid was painted onto the severed arm surfaces with a delicate brush, and the shoulder was pushed back together carefully. A second bottle, one which came with an acrid scent, was opened and poured over the join, slowly oozing down to form a shining, slimy barrier.
                “Schteeeu kuh gurtchk” the doctor spoke in his strange, alien accent as he fitted a fabric strap around the patient’s torso to hold the repaired shoulder in place.
                “Kchyiu?” the patient asked unsurely. From the doorway, a nurse clarified the situation.
                “Schtiuch ktgrtch” it said, repeating what the doctor had said, but in such a way that it wasn’t utter nonsense.
                The doctor looked at the floor to hide his embarrassment. For several months now he’d been trying to learn a few basic phrases, but that one continued to elude the capabilities of his throat, despite filling his mouth with water before speaking to properly hit the gurgling notes. He may as well have continued his policy of awkward mime to convey ‘don’t move it for three days’.
                “Aiich.” The patient said, confirming that it had understood the advice when offered by someone who knew how to speak. With a nod of thanks to the healer, the strapped up mushroom stomped its way out of the operating theatre to continue with its day, followed by the nurse.
                Dr Garcia sat in his complete and stable chair in the corner of the room, behind a modest desk, and made a few cursory notes. Documenting each case helped him to learn how the fungoids worked, and gave him a method of improving his craft.
                He mended severed body parts. He sutured wounds. Chief Surgeon Garcia took the injured and made them whole again. It was another glorious endorsement of the benefits of kidnapping and slavery, which a person with stronger morals than Herman might have tried to nullify. Natalya, whatever she was doing by then, would certainly have taken objection to such aggrandising praise of indentured servitude. All that mattered to Herman, though, was that he was relatively safe. Over the last several months of the fungoids’ preposterously long year, Herman had often wondered how Dale Kirkpatrick had been able to study here for so long without himself being captured. The mushrooms seemed to be able to intercept the clear majority of landing craft, but Kirkpatrick’s expedition had never mentioned danger or poor resources. It didn’t add up, but nor did bipedal fungi existing in the first place, so Herman was unsure of how to feel about anything.
                Without so much as a knock, Ktlrchk entered the theatre once the patient had left, right on cue.
                “Hchello Hchermaan. Arr ychou ready to teach classch?” She asked brightly, with a cheery voice spoken through a gurgling sink drain.
                “Hi Ktlrchk. Give me a few seconds.” Herman responded, tidying away his bottles. In all honesty he felt more like a witch brewing up potions than a doctor. He was beginning to understand how fungoid physiology worked, mostly by drawing parallels to his own plant biology knowledge, but the cure-all mixture was still as good as sorcery to him.
                “Tyorn schyoulder?” Ktlrchk asked curiously.
                “Yes. Very fragile joints.” Chief Surgeon Garcia confirmed.
                “Olld Cootsch Formulaa to tear, then byandage well.” She recited proudly.
                As time had gone by, Ktlrchk had proven the true depths of her capacity to learn. Where her study materials were was a mystery, but day after day her grasp of Herman’s language had improved. Every night they sat together and talked. Far from the patchy, two-word discussions of their first meetings, she and Herman had grown to speak about their favourite colours, food groups, and preferred academic subjects, as was fitting for foreign language students. Naturally, once they could communicate sufficiently to pass on details of Herman’s experimental medicine, it had overtaken Ktlrchk’s curiosity.
                “Yes, correct. It promotes healing and recombination of severed tissues.” Herman said in an attempt to sound scholarly. Describing the effect without explaining why it happened was the coward’s way out so, naturally, it was the one he always took.
                Old Coot’s Formula was the best name that Herman could think of on the spur of the moment for his miracle solution. Despite wanting to protect his own importance, he couldn’t in good conscience take credit for another man’s discovery, even as a hostage on a remote planet. With the man’s name forgotten, the fact he was a boring old coot was the only defining characteristic that Dr Garcia had been able to recall.
                “Shall we get going?” he asked once his bottles were safely stashed away.
                “Chwe chwill go.”
               
                A crowd of young mushrooms and toadstools waited in one of the empty wards in the great hospital, standing around and chattering on top of the bare earth bed spaces. One or two had sprouted innocuous roots into the ground, and stood sleepily among the assembled students. At the rear of the ward was a small section of hull with a stick of chalk resting in one of the rivet holes.
                Ktlrchk made some indistinct clicking sounds to announce their arrival in the classroom. Chief Surgeon Garcia walked behind her, eclipsed entirely by her enormous frame and outshone by her tremendous red hue. All in all she was an imposing sight, and when she strode into a room, everyone took notice.
                The sea of whites, off-whites, browns, and occasional sickly blue simmered their conversation down to a murmur and watched Herman take his place next to the greyboard. Ktlrchk stood in her normal position between him and the class, preparing to act in her official capacity as interpreter as well as listen to the lecture. As the only mushroom who had taken even a slight interest in learning Herman’s language, she was filling a vital role in allowing the doctor to pass on any information at all. His own attempts at mime had, overall, had the effect of actually removing information from the recipients’ heads.
                “We’re going to focus today on hypha structure and internal tissue features.” Herman started, launching into his lecture plan because he found hellos to be humiliating. After a few-second delay to allow for mental translation time, Ktlrchk began burbling, clicking and squelching the fungoid-language version of Herman’s teachings. It transpired that teaching fungoids was a faster-paced affair then teaching humans, or other two-armed students. Many appendages made for light work, allowing them to make notes, copy diagrams, and transcribe spoken words all at the same time.
                “The entirety of your body is comprised of a network of air pockets and tubular channels, aside from a few organs I guess.” The chief surgeon informed his class. Plants didn’t have organs; they were much tidier than that. He missed simple, normal, non-sentient plants. "These hyphae are capable of extending their tips out of the surface and directly entering the ground, to absorb nutrients, water and whatever else it is that you need to keep living; they’re your main exchange network for vitamins, minerals, bacteria, and suchlike. They can exit the body... well frigging anywhere I suppose. But mostly it happens through the feet."
                In his time among the fungoids Herman had noticed that the vast majority slept on their feet, as he had seen Portobello do during his first treatment. Every now and again he would see one of them on all-four-to-sevens, hands pressed into the earth and similar hyphae roots growing out to increase the rate of nutrient intake. As far as Herman could tell, the only reason they didn’t all use their hands when sleeping was because it looked silly.
                It was peculiar to be teaching an alien race about their own physiology. All he was really capable of covering was the basics, but still all of them, even Ktlrchk, lapped it up with great interest. It begged the obvious question of where the devil all of their own medics were, or how they had managed to get this far without a medical community when they were so excited about it all.
                Naturally, the first thing that Ktlrchk and the others had wanted to learn was how to create the miraculous cure-all, and how exactly it worked. Ever since healing the hole in Portobello’s head, it was the talk of the strange, ship wreckage town. Given that Herman still wasn’t confident that he’d got the recipe exactly right, however, and the fact that he had no idea about how the solution accelerated growth or cell repair so much, it was a difficult question for him to answer. He therefore elected not to bother, instead giving them the basic formula he was currently using and claiming that a deeper understanding of their own anatomy was required before any explanation would be comprehensible. It was a staple answer for the evasive educator. In delaying, Chief Surgeon Garcia had also given himself a platform and excuse to think out loud about his own observations and research into fungoid biology.
                “And so from these sketches we can see that hypha density is greatest around the palms and the soles of the feet.”
                “Dchensity?” Ktlrchk repeated uncertainly.
                “Oh. Erm, how many there are in a given space. Number in an area.”
                “Aiiicch.” She accepted, pondering to herself for a moment before relaying the information. The need for Herman to translate words and phrases was getting less common. She was doing well.
               
                After another successful lecture of presenting speculation and hypothesis as verified fact, Herman returned to his theatre. The course of the day saw a typical string of patients, with a couple of fungal infections, a torn knee, perforated fingers, and a colourful mushroom with a rake stuck in its back. Those kinds of foreign object inclusion injuries were alarmingly common among the fungoids, but also reasonably intuitive once Chief Surgeon Garcia stopped to think about it. With such soft, spongy flesh and an apparent dearth of surface nerves, they had a tendency to lie down or step on things without noticing, until of course someone pointed out that there was an item of garden tooling lodged in their spine. Thankfully it rarely seemed to dull their mood.
                Ktlrchk stayed in the theatre with Herman to observe those patients who let her do so, and waited patiently outside for those who didn’t. For a good half of the time, however, she observed and made notes on Herman himself, staring at him with the same fascination that she would a medical miracle. Flattering as it was, Herman hoped that she was using more rigour and raw data to draw conclusions than he had been with his own experimentation. A single data point of healing Portobello’s head had been taken as definitive proof of the solution’s efficacy, and he’d liberally applied subtly different formulations of it to all manner of injuries.
                Their ability to discuss academia had led Ktlrchk to reveal that she was a zoologist by field, which went a long way to explaining her behaviour to Herman. She was feverishly studying the perverse form of life which he represented, and committed all of her energies to making sure that they could exchange information between one another. Once upon a time Herman would have resented being studied and observed so closely, but she was a watchful eye and his only means of communicating with anyone; a little studying was worth that any day.
               
                For the remainder of the protracted summer, spanning a good few more months, life followed that same routine. Herman healed the sick or injured, especially those hurt in the line of kidnapping duty, he taught dubious and poorly-understood mushroom medicine between operations, and he conversed all evening with Ktlrchk. Sometimes they sat up in his cell like the old days, which was still a little pokey despite the gradually increasing quantity and quality of furnishings, and sometimes they talked at Ktlrchk’s own private soil patch. She’d had a seat brought in especially for him to use during his visits, which Herman found far more meaningful than any other chair acquisition he’d come across in his life.
                Prisoner, slave, doctor, zoological specimen; whatever he was, Herman had a routine and he was being shown something at least approximating to respect, rightly or wrongly. All things considered, life wasn’t much worse among the fungoids than it had been when he was just a research assistant. That kind of contentment, however, is something that the universe will only let someone realise when things are about to change.
               
                A change in the smell of the air and a drop in the temperature told Herman that the summer was finally drawing to a close. He’d been half-expecting it to last all year round, but the subtle shift in daylight hours and fungoid fashion choices confirmed that the seasons were starting to pass. From the day that a chill first crept into the hospital overnight, great rafts of insulation were produced from some other storage location and fitted to the interior walls of certain rooms.
                Moving through the hospital on his daily routine, Chief Surgeon Garcia noticed cabling being trailed through the wards and allotments, winding its way up posts and poles toward huge light bulbs. Staring curiously at the array of lampposts being erected around the hospital, he wondered for a moment whether they were planning to shoot a great cinematic masterpiece about the plucky human doctor who had become the saviour of all fungoid kind. Reality quickly kicked that dream to pieces, reminding him that his main export to the majority of these mushrooms was the opportunity to mock his attempts at miming important diagnostic information. Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his Chief Surgeon’s labcoat, he paced away to the operating theatre for another day’s work.
                After dealing with a particularly severe case of shovel-in-the-lower-lumbar, Herman sat behind his desk and made notes on the internal composition he’d observed after removing the digging tool. He’d long given up being shocked that fungoids could continue to function with significant wounds like abdominal shovels, and now relished the opportunity to study what they revealed. He was just sketching out what he remembered of the portions of severed mycelium when Ktlrchk entered the operating theatre.
                “Hello Ktlrchk.” Herman said for the usual reasons.
                “Hchello Hcherman.” She answered, in the same customary fashion. “Schooveell in back. Looked like a deep one.” Her accent was fading impressively rapidly when she spoke Herman’s tongue.
                “Yes, it pushed all the way into the… central nervous hyphae. That sounds good.” He assessed. Naming anatomical features on the fly was a regular part of his job now.
                “Ouuld Coot’s Forrmulaa?” she asked with a twang of mischief.
                “There’s nothing it can’t heal.” Herman replied defensively. He was terrified that the fungoids might realise he was relying on that crutch to keep himself afloat and dispose of him. He was more honest around Ktlrchk than anyone else, but that still had its limits.
                “Soo iccht wouuuld seem.”
                “I have a question for you, if that’s OK?” he said, changing the subject.
                “Yeesss. Aassk.”
                “What’s all the padding and lighting for?”
                “Aiiicch… padding?” Ktlrchk asked back.
                “The big sheets of thick stuff on the walls.”
                “Ooh. Warmth. Kcheep waarrm in winter.” She said, explaining how insulation works perfectly.
                “And the lights?”
                “Hch… heat lamps. Kcheep warrrm in winter.”
                Herman thought about the scale of work being done in the hospital, then about the size of the town he’d passed through to get there many months before. Even if the town had been just what he could see from the hospital windows, there would have to be hundreds, possibly thousands of lamps set up to keep everyone warm.
                “Everyone has lamps in their homes?”
                “Nooo. Only the awaiike.”
                Chief Surgeon Garcia wanted to ask more, but was rudely interrupted by a titanic Shitake mushroom with a leg which had almost rotted through with infection. For fear that it would leak all over the room and stain the furniture if left unchecked, Herman was forced to immediately tend to that situation.
               
                Several hours of gruelling disinfecting, a few anti-fungal near misses, and more mouthfuls of peculiar vegetables than was strictly orthodox for major surgery saw the Shitake resting peacefully, rooted into the ground. The offending leg had been saved, thanks in no small part to Ktlrchk’s assistance in flooding the wound with Old Coot’s Formula and binding it up whilst Herman held it in place.
                Staring at the patient, which was an apt descriptor for the kind of person who could allow infection to get that bad before seeking any help at all, Chief Surgeon Garcia and his bright red minder sank to the floor in exhaustion.
                “Good work, Ktlrchk.”
                “Thhyank ychou Heerrrmaaan.” She wheezed, her accent slipping back in through her tiredness. “Thaat was a hyaard lchessooon.”
                “Lesson? Oh, yes well, I had to give you a challenge.” He bluffed.
                “At leeeast with winter comiiing soon it daaasn’t matter if the leeg comes off.”
                Herman nodded automatically, before processing the words and then nodding absent-mindedly in shock.
                “What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”
                “Hchee will goooo forrr the long sleep. Waaike up in summer with nyeew leeeg.” She explained. “Do ychou not knooow?”
                “I don’t think I do.” Herman admitted. Ktlrchk smiled.
                “Ychou will.”
               
                Winter fell onto the fungoid settlement. It didn’t drift in quietly on a cold breeze. It didn’t roll over the hilltops or soak upwards from the cold earth. It collapsed mercilessly, hammering the town on a frozen anvil and stripping away whatever meagre warmth it could find.
                Inside the hospital, Herman paced uneasily under the heat lamps, grateful for the preparatory work the mushrooms had put in at the end of the summer. Despite the vast heating power of the lamps, straying too far from their beams resulted in steaming breath and chilly toes. Chief Surgeon Garcia didn’t want chilly toes at all, so he stayed in their thawing light. It was also his job to keep a watchful eye over what they were supposed to be heating.
                “Ecchverything OK?” Ktlrchk asked, seeing him pause next to one of the earth allotments on the ward.
                “Yeah. Just staying warm.” He said, looking at the shape on the ground. Whilst he was genuinely trying to stave off the interminable cold, he was mostly pausing to stare in morbid fascination at the limp, deflated, desiccated husk of a fungoid on the earth in front of himself. They didn’t cope well with winter as a species, it seemed, and had evolved something similar to hibernation. But instead of simply going to sleep, they took deep root in the ground and effectively evacuated their body to occupy some form of dormancy under the surface. Above, they left the empty shell of their bipedal form, like a thick bin bag left unceremoniously on the street. If Herman had to put words to it, he’d describe the practice as ‘grim’.
                Despite how uncomfortable the deflated bodies made him feel, Herman found the process to be fascinating. A species of people, an actual sentient race, were completely deciduous. It was hibernation taken to the extreme, leaving a leaf-litter of whole bodies. Everything that Ktlrchk had told him about it left the Chief Surgeon with a slack jaw and deep wonder. He just wished that she’d told him about it before he stumbled across an apparently hollowed out skin sack one morning. It had taken hours to calm him down, and all the while Ktlrchk had been giggling to herself; she’d forgotten how amusing Herman’s wide-eyes terror was.
                From how she described it, the hibernation was as much of a compulsion for the fungoids as sleeping was for humans. When they started to cool down sufficiently, they were drawn to fertile ground and started sprouting hundreds of hyphae. Gradually their bodies slowed down until they were effectively sleepwalking, and they would nod off into their hibernation once rooted in. Every winter a small number of fungoids stayed awake to keep watch and prevent anything silly from happening, like wild animals eating the bodies or intergalactic binmen collecting them up by accident. For that to be possible the heat lamps were critical, preventing the watchers from succumbing to the cold slumber. This year, Ktlrchk had volunteered for the duty so that she could keep Herman company. She strode the wards in an inexpertly manufactured coat, which looked like several blankets stapled together and bundled over her body. Largely, it's because that was exactly how the coat had been made.
                “Myai siiiide is chleear.” Ktlrchk called over.
                “Good.” Herman said, purely for the sake of replying.
                “Aii will be in your room, tchk.”
                “OK. Be there in a minute.”
                Herman shuffled along under the heat lamps and kept checking on his deflated charges. Aside from shooing away the odd hardy winter insect there wasn’t a whole lot that he needed to do on his rounds, but it at least kept him moving. Without any patients to treat or students to teach, his days were consumed by tending to the winter sleepers, talking to Ktlrchk, and trying to perfect Old Coot’s Formula. Of course, there were far fewer opportunities to test it out during the winter, and he wasn’t about to start slashing Ktlrchk to pieces, but it was useful time for theory-crafting and preparing samples.
                Beyond his research and medicine, though, another thought had been forming in the back of his mind. Something which his fear of the titanic fungoids had kept in check all summer. But now, they were asleep.
               
                Ktlrchk watched Herman from the balcony as he slowly padded from deflated body to deflated body. She was constantly surprised by how he’d adapted to life among them. It was like having a household pet capable of rudimentary speech and complex medicine, to the point that they had immediately allowed him to pour some unknown fluid into a mushroom’s head. Thinking about it for the first time, she wondered if that had been an objectively sound decision.
                What struck her though, as he darted from lamp to lamp and shooed away insects, was how alone he must have been feeling. Although they’d had each other’s company since he’d got here, she had also been able to interact easily with other people. Herman, on the other hand, had struggled to get information across to anyone without her help. No-one else from her species seemed to have any interest in learning the common intergalactic languages, even if it meant they’d be able to learn from the human more easily. It confused and saddened her.
                Once he was finished, Herman strode up the staircase and joined Ktlrchk in his cell. Packed out with insulation, cluttered with thick blankets, and flanked with strong heat lamps, it was now a haven of cosiness. Ktlrchk was crouched in one corner, half lost among a bundle of duvets.
                “How long did you say winter lasts?” Herman asked as he sat down. He was sure that they’d been over this several times, but between puzzling over how the fungoids could deflate their air pockets so efficiently and trying to create an optimised Old Coot’s Formula, he had completely forgotten the answer.
                “Tchree moonths.” She told him patiently.
                That was it. Three long fungoid months, which he estimated to be at least one and a half times as long as a standard Earth month. The thought from the back of his mind gained some substance.
                “With nearly everyone asleep, aren’t you scared I’ll try to run away?”
                Ktlrchk tipped her head slightly to one side.
                "Dchoon't ychou like it here?" She asked him sincerely.
                “I’m a slave!” Herman pointed out.
                "Ychou are doctor. Ychou are teacher. You have food and I look after ychou." Ktlrchk counter-pointed.
                "I still live in a prison cell and do what I’m told, whatever I am. And what happens when I've taught you everything? Will I be thrown down with the other slaves doing... whatever it is you have them doing?"
                "No! Not you. I dchoon't like slaves. I like animals. I waaant them free. I schtudy you to help. I wchill keep you safe." Ktlrchk protested.
                “I used to study things too. Plants. I guess I still do in a manner of speaking, no offence. You can study one of the other slaves. I’ve helped enough of you to earn my life back.”
                “Ychou can’t go.” Ktlrchk told him, shaking her head. “Ychou are my reesyearchk. Ychou are too importyaant. Othersch will not be the saaame.”
                “And my life isn’t important?” Herman snapped, strangely hurt for someone who had just been labelled as highly important.
                “Aiich… even if you tried to leave you would need too haaiide somewhere uuntil summer. Ychou would freeze before then.”
                “What?”
                “No shyips in winter. Alll sleeping. No-oooone to haaiiijaccck shyips. No use in scheduling shyips to land. Need to wait untyil summer, to hyave a chance.” Ktlrchk said, still shaking her head.
                “Scheduling them? What do you mean?” Herman pushed.
                “Otherrr maaan brings shyips in. Daaaiiile.”
                “Dale?” Herman muttered. Dale Kirkpatrick had extended a research invitation to him, that was the whole reason he’d come to this planet in the first place. He scheduled the ships coming in. “That sneaky bastard! He tricked us all! Lured us into a trap!”
                It was the first time Ktlrchk had seen anger from Herman. Furiously she scrabbled for her clipboard to make notes, whilst raising two other arms in a non-threatening, calming manner.
                “It’sch paaart of the deal.”
                “What deal? He sold me into slavery!” Herman shouted. He was beyond miffed about the human rights abuses, mostly if not entirely because he was the victim.
                “We let hchim schtudy here, and he proviiides shyips and slaves.”
                Herman had no words to offer. He simply stared in silent rage, mouth slightly open, and seethed. Not only had the prominent anthropologist stolen Herman’s freedom, he’d done it for the sake of bad research. The whole existence of such a deal was changing the fungoid way of life; Kirkpatrick was interfering with their society by trying to study it. All the nights of terror, the beating Portobello had given him, the sight of that security guard being blown to pieces; it had all been payment for a paper based on spurious data which would never be read by anyone.
                Chief Surgeon Garcia crumpled down into a pile of blankets, and there he stayed. Lost in his own anguished thoughts, Ktlrchk could do nothing to tease him out again. Eventually, she decided that he probably needed some space.
               
                Out of respect for his outburst of emotion, Ktlrchk left Herman to his own devices for the next day, taking care of the body checks on her own and questioning whether or not she should have said anything. The contract between Kirkpatrick and the fungoids was common knowledge for everyone, but she supposed in hindsight that it wouldn’t seem like such a cornerstone of civilised life to a victim of the slave trade. It took until late that evening for Herman to finally emerge from his cell.
                “Hchello Hcherrman.” She said tentatively as he descended the metal staircase.
                “Hi.” He replied simply.
                Herman walked over to her in silence. He’d spent a whole day churning the situation over in his head, winding himself up to the point of wailing and then curling his body back into the mass of duvets. Being swaddled in comfortable bedding made livid seething more difficult, but not entirely impossible. Rehearsed in his mind he had a speech to relay to Ktlrchk, full of self-righteous indignation at slavery, rage at being tricked, vengeance against Kirkpatrick, and courageous intentions to cross the icefields. She would know where his expedition was camped and how to get there.
                “Aare you leaving?” she asked softly. The speech immediately disappeared from Herman’s mind and his courage failed him. She sounded so sad, and there’s nothing good about sad words spoken through a submerged pipe.
                “I’d never survive in this cold.” Was the best he could manage.
                “No. Ychou wouldn’t.” Ktlrchk agreed.
                “I’ll teach you everything I know about fungi this winter. And then just before everyone wakes up I’ll try to escape.”
                “Aiicch…”
                "You could take me to Kirkpatrick.  He must have a ship and I could leave on that. I’d be free then." Herman persisted.
                "Dyaaale doesn't let slaves leave. Kills them to stop them waaarning anyone. Caaan’t let ychou go."
                "Then how does he get away with ransoming people off?
                "Dchoon't know." She said with a shrug.
                Herman lamented that Kirkpatrick hadn’t tried to get a ransom for him. But then he reminded himself that no-one would want to pay to get him back. They’d pay to have him kidnapped, maybe, but not to get him back. Except perhaps Natalya, but she didn't have the money. He sagged. Any ship to arrive in the summer would be hijacked, and even if he got to Kirkpatrick’s camp he’d be executed before getting away. Herman had no idea of how to pilot a ship even if he managed to steal one in the first place.
                “Fine.” He said with a defeated sigh, all the fight gone. “I guess I don’t have a choice. I’ll stay here as a slave until I die.”
                A gigantic, spongy hand rested on Herman’s shoulder.
                "Look. Ychou save his legs, and gave him monthsch of better wyaalking.” Ktlrchk said, pointing at the desiccated sacking which had previously been a chestnut mushroom. “And her fingers.” She reminded, pointing towards a second flaccid pile of flesh with another hand. “Pchulled hose pipe from his shoulder. Healed her ripped torso. Taught her how to byandage rotting flyesh. They wyould be worse without ychou. Ychou are more than slave. Ychou are healer. And ychou are important."
                Chief Surgeon Garcia looked up at Ktlrchk’s face. She was trying, and although he still had very little idea about tone of voice with the fungoids, she sounded sincere.
                “Thank you.” He muttered, looking back at the floor. A lifetime of being a doctor to giants and pet to a zoologist wasn’t what he’d wished for as a child. Dale had betrayed him and taken his life away, but perhaps it hadn’t completely doomed him after all.
               
                Just as quickly as winter had crashed onto the fungoid forest, summer cascaded over the horizon and thawed the world. One day Herman’s pile of duvets had felt a little too cosy for comfort. The next, he heard footsteps from the wards below. It was a new year and a new bloom.
                Like the fresh growth of spring, everyone who had fallen into dormancy over the winter had returned enhanced. They were taller, thicker, more vibrant, and terrifyingly energetic, running around the ward, bursting through doors, and burbling excitedly with their companions. It was almost adorable, if Herman ignored that they were prolific slavers and bandits.
                Herman found himself at a loss. Everyone had a refreshed body so there were no injuries to heal or infections to cure, and any medical students were certainly too hyperactive to listen in a lecture. In short, he had no duties to which to attend. Even Ktlrchk was away somewhere, probably discussing the winter with someone or other and reporting on her research. In only a day the world had moved on beyond Herman again, so he moved quietly back into his cell. At least he could have a day or so of solid moping before the work began.
                In the early afternoon Ktlrchk finally invited herself into Herman’s cell. He was lying atop his vast winter nest, wallowing in his temporary redundancy and future of fungal medicine.
                “Hchello Hcherman.”
                “Hello.” He muttered. Somehow seeing everything move on without him had stripped away the quiet optimism that Ktlrchk had made him feel through the end of the winter. He felt unimportant again, trapped in the hospital to be used as a healing tool and ignored otherwise. Ktlrchk’s next words were the last thing he’d expected.
                “Would ychou liiike to go outsyide?”
               
                Fresh, outdoor air blew gently against Herman’s skin, drifting through the forest and carrying the wonderfully organic scents of trees and life. Out here the acrid scent of chemical healing agents didn’t cling to everything, nor did the cold sterility of metal walls. It was the real world again, and it made him want to run and leap into the air, but he daren’t make a scene.
                Ktlrchk led Herman back through the ship graveyard which served as a town for the fungoids, resting one vast hand on his shoulder. The last time he’d seen the monolithic metal structures he’d been fearful for his life, riding on the back of a desperately ambitious bluff about being able to repair a gunshot wound. Now he was fearful for his future, riding on the back of somehow succeeding in repairing a gunshot wound and building a strangely academic career from it.
                Without the anticipation of torture or execution hanging over him this time, Herman could appreciate the hanging moss in more detail, taking in its delicate fractal forms and growth patterns. Underfoot the dirt road was flanked with verges of something vaguely like grass but altogether more spherical. Herman would have loved to stoop down and examine it, but Ktlrchk kept him moving onwards.
                “Hchappy?” she asked brightly but curtly.
                “Yes. Thank you.”
                Sheltered and chaperoned by Ktlrchk, Herman marched through the bandits’ town in wide-eyed wonder at all the life flowering between metal hull fragments and roads. Everywhere was coming to life with colour, a far cry from the deep greys of the hospital.
                Eventually, they wound their way out of the town and into the verdant forest, undergrowth recovering from the winter and stretching up to reach knee height where it could. Herman brushed his hands along foliage and bark, taking in whatever details he could and letting his mind run wild with speculation about the morphology and evolution of everything. But still Ktlrchk wouldn’t let him stop.
                Farther and farther they walked into the forest, past bracket fungi which may well have been related to the townsfolk, tiny flowering vines, and sprouting branches. Herman was astounded by the speed with which these plants had sprung up after the thaw; barely two days and they were already bursting with life. It seemed that everything which had evolved here was imbued with a violent urgency.
                Suddenly, without any warning, Ktlrchk heaved Herman off his feet and covered his eyes with one enormous hand.
                “Arck!” he grunted as Ktlrchk squeezed some of the air from his body. Unknowingly he’d shouted for a side-salad in fungoid, but Ktlrchk ignored his request.
                “Have you taken me out back to put me down like an old dog?!” he cried in sudden panic. He should have known it was too good to be true. The fungoids must have planted Ktlrchk to learn all they could about his medical practices and then take him out once she’d won his trust.
                “Aiicch… I wchill put ychou dooown soooon.” She confirmed. “Whhaat is a dooog?”
                Herman trembled. He couldn’t see a way out of this, and not just because his eyes were covered. She was stronger than him, faster than him, and was currently holding him off the ground. From a tactical perspective he’d not planned well.
                “Schurprise!” Ktlrchk burbled in his ear, releasing her grip on his body and removing her hand from his face. Far from feeling his neck snap, Herman felt ground under his feet once more; soft, cushioned ground. As light flooded back into his eyes, he stood in a vibrant clearing, blanketed in a rainbow spectrum of flowers. Shrubs and bushes were scattered messily through the carpet of bright hues, casting patches of shade over the winding thatch of stems and shoots below. Ambitious thistles and creepers, adorned with golden fronds and blue berries, snaked paths across the forest floor and stretched upwards for the sunlight. If someone had dropped a garden centre onto a fertiliser deposit, then the result could scarcely hope to reach the breath-taking scope of what Herman was seeing.
                “This is incredible!” Herman told Ktlrchk redundantly. She could easily have picked that up from his rapid, involuntary clapping.
                “Aiich... I hyave my research and ychou can have yours.” She said, resting her hand on his shoulder again. “Ychou can’t leave. But ychou don’t have to want to either.”
                Herman looked over the treasure hoard of unstudied plant life in front of him. There was almost no chance of recognition for whatever he learned. In fact, there was a reasonable likelihood that no-one would ever hear about it at all, unless a human rights movement from Ktlrchk’s research got traction. But the wealth of material here would see him out a dozen times over, and he could touch life that no other human might ever see. Natalya was always telling him to find joy in the small things and not chase fame or status. Perhaps she was right.
                “I… I think you have a deal.” Chief Surgeon and Head Botanist Garcia declared.
                “Thankch ychou Hcherman the human.” Ktlrchk said. It would be a fun lifetime.