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listen, anyone who would watch.
    Despite the fantastic nature of their story, or maybe because of it, no one really seemed to care. Another obscure piece of remote Amazonian real estate had disappeared—so what? That stuff was going up in smoke all the time back then. The kinder seismologists and vulcanologists interpreted their tale of the ascent of Caracamuni as an “anomalous volcanic eruption” and filed it away for future reference. Those less kind had interpreted Larkin’s short tape of the tepui rising as a video hoax, nothing more.
    Fash’s anthropologists and archeologists, initially intrigued by what Jacinta claimed to have found on and in Caracamuni, cancelled their expedition. The controversy over the arrival date for human beings in the New World—to which Jacinta had contributed—continued unabated. The idea that a pocket of living-fossil Homo sapiens neandertalensis had survived into the present day on an isolated tepui in South America was dismissed out of hand. Those organizations that had granted or loaned Jacinta funds and equipment hassled Paul and his parents for a time but eventually wrote off both Jacinta and her failed expedition under something called a “forgiveness clause.”
    After Paul’s brief emergency leave from KFSN—to take care of “family matters”—had ended, his employers expected to go on with his life as if nothing had happened.
    Nothing but flying mountains. Nothing but mushrooms from space. Nothing but incredibly ancient indigenes and failed white goddesses gone native. Nothing but “forty-odd aboriginal astronauts and a crazed ethnobotanist as humanity’s first personal ambassadors to the universe.”
    Taking another sip of the Edradour, he held the square of paper lightly, contemplatively, a relaxed arm’s length away. Symbol for him of all the events he had endured at Caracamuni tepui, the square of paper stood as well for all the pain and trouble those events and their telling had caused him since. Through the smoky haze of the scotch, he tried to remember who had first mentioned that “forty odd aboriginal astronauts . . .” et cetera phrase—had it been him? The media? The media quoting him, when he was still part of the media? Before the “trashy controversy” over his Caracamuni tape had cost him his first career as a broadcast journalist?
    Now, the “flying mountaintop” story had cost him a second career, the one he had built laboriously built for himself over the past decade. The old sensational story had reappeared in the media and, in his refusal to disavow it, Paul had completely unraveled his career in Biology—all within the last four months. He didn’t want to think about it, but his mind kept going there, like a tongue to the empty socket of a pulled wisdom tooth.
    Paul stared hard again at the spore print. His last card, the strange ace in the hole he had never wanted to play. He had played it, at last, but what good had it done him?
    Two months back, desperate at being reduced to the status of “independent researcher,” Paul got in touch with Professor Phil Damon, who had headed his dissertation committee. Damon had been reluctant to help a tainted former student but he had, mercifully enough, listened to the story of the spore print and the bizarre fungus it might grow. Damon agreed to examine the spore print and have some of it plated out and grown.
    Taking another smoky sip of the Edradour and examining the spore print now, Paul could see the blank area in the upper left hand corner. Almost six weeks ago, Damon and a mycologist colleague, in a chamber under a ventilation hood, had scraped spores from that corner of the paper, then shaken them onto a series of Petri dishes filled with various growth media, before handing the print back to him.
    Three weeks into his testing of the fungus, Damon had called and quite unexpectedly announced that he had set up a meeting between Paul and Athena Griego, a “venture capital agent.” Griego