Poison Pie led me deeper into the forest. He said he was going to show me a secret, hallowed place of the mushroom people. "In this place," Poison Pie promised, "the sun never enters. The mushroom people have grown phosphorescent. They live in their own light, without any dependency on the whims of the giant solar sphere. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to live totally independently of the universe, of the position of its sun, free of Kepler's laws of planetary motion, free of meaningless ellipses and confounding wobbles of orbit?"

Poison Pie was not surprised. "Few have," said Poison Pie, "Few have."

I followed Poison Pie through a small cave opening, hidden by rhododendrons and lodged underneath the washed out roots of an enormous old-growth hickory. Inside, Poison Pie said, "The reason that this place remains a secret is not because efforts are made to conceal its location. On the contrary, the mushroom people welcome all visitors. The real reason that this place is unknown is that it is a portal to life outside the universe. Life outside the universe is a difficult to thing to grasp. One moment you may think of this life, your life, as a liberation from the universe, an empowering, nearly omnipotent, liberation. In the flash of a strike of lightning, your perception can change, without reason or justification; you then conceive of your life as an interminable horror, free of the chains of time, which robs you of the small relief that this life would have otherwise been temporary. It is the inability to control the perception of your life, which scares most folks from this place."