The Colonists
The ground was rocky, black and brown, dark and apparently uninhabited by any creatures. A lot of the planet was like this, though some was gray basalt and some was reddish with rusty iron. About seventy percent of the surface of the planet was covered with salt water. Another fifteen percent was covered with fresh water lakes and rivers. There was rain and snow at different places in different times of the year. There was volcanic activity that washed parts of the land with red hot lava that would cool into solid black or bubbly gray stone. But there were no plants and no animals native to the land. There were probably sea creatures, but that was as yet unknown.
There were tiny microbes in the water samples analyzed by the unmanned craft that came here before the human explorers arrived. None of the soil and rock samples showed anything alive, though. Perhaps that was because there were only a few samples taken from a very small area. Perhaps it was just that no life on this planet had yet adapted to living on dry land. The seas and the lakes were still the womb of life.
It had been thought that this would be the perfect place to colonize. There was no risk to local plant or animal life. There was no ecosystem to destroy, and yet all the elements for life were available. Humans had very little work to do to make this an oasis. It would be a new home for brave and daring young families who struck off to pioneer new lands.
Each family would pack itself into a fully contained caravan with a cryopod for each person. They would sleep through the long journey from Earth to this new home with only a serial number for a name. When they arrived it would seem to the pioneers as if they'd taken just a single night's sleep. Once they got there they would name the place. Each family who landed would name it, and then they would argue with other families when they met up about what the name should be, and eventually they would agree on a name or continue to battle it out, and this would be the beginning of new nations and new identities.
The families would build farms and houses. Some families would team up and create tribes or villages. Some would recreate micro-nations that mimicked the lands that they had come from on Earth. The families would grow and they would prosper and they would take over the planet as they had back in their first home.
At least that's how it had gone before. That's how the settlements had turned out on other planets, more developed planets, planets where the humans arrived to rape the land and hunt the local fauna. But this planet turned out differently. On this planet there were no villages, no governments, no tribes, no ethnicities. On this planet the people who came did not go very far from their caravans at all. They built, at most, a house or two, and then they became tired.
Within a week of arrival the people would more slowly, speak more slowly. They would sleep more. They became unbearably lazy. And then they would just stop. Within days there would be a solid, mummified statue where a person had once been. It would be shiny with a network of silvery threads of mycelium.
And then the rains came.
Within a day the fruit began to sprout. One after another, the mushrooms grew out of the mummified human remains.
They were Earth mushrooms. They were the ever patient offspring of mycelia that had drawn the humans to them thousands of generations before and tampered with the human mind. These were the mushrooms that had pushed the human race to learn and to explore, to burst out from their monkey habits and reach for the stars in search of new homes.
These were the true pioneers. They had worked and they had waited, knowing what few humans ever really understand: that we are all one. They were in no rush. They knew exactly how to use the tools that they had. They manipulated chemicals and drove the human beasts, and eventually, they arrived at their goal.
Having found a suitable planet, ripe for total colonization, they activated their own growth hormones to take over the vehicles they had used to arrive.
Because of the long journey, no one expected communication from the families that set off from Earth to settle the new planet for many years. In the meantime, families continued to set off to create their fortunes in that new home. It was 25 years before anyone realized that there was a problem, but by then it was too late for thousands of human souls.
For the mushrooms it was a boon, and for the planet that never got a human name, it was the start of a new phase of life. The fungus spread across the land, morphed and mutated as it needed to, and broke the rocks into fertile soil. From there the water microbes and sea plants had a chance to take hold on dry land, and a few billion years later, the animals came breathe clear air.
Always the mushrooms tended the other lifeforms. Always they cared for the land and the water. They picked their new allies carefully, some to help them spread across the planet, others to help them change their shapes or re-scuplt the land. When the time was right, they picked a new beast that would be the thinkers. They lured them carefully, let themselves be eaten, and they changed themselves and the beasts in the process.
Art was always the first step in transforming the beasts. Then came language and stories and dreams externalized. The time would come when they would study the stars and build space ships to reach out to them. It would take millions of years, but the mushrooms are patient.
