Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth Page 3

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THEY lay among the sharp leaves of two whistlethistle plants, dazed by the bright sun but still alert for danger. Their climb had been completed. Now the nine children saw the Tips for the first time – and were struck mute by it.

  Once more Lily-yo and Flor lay seige to a burnurn, with Daphe helping them to shade it with upheld leaves. As the plant slumped defencelessly, Daphe severed six of the great transparent pods that were to be their coffins. Hy helped her carry them to safety, after which Lily-yo and Flor dropped their leaves and ran for the shelter of the whistlethistles.

  A cloud of paperwings drifted by, their colours startling to eyes generally submerged in green: sky blues and yellows and bronzes and a viridian that flashed like water.

  One of the paperwings alighted fluttering on a tuft of emerald foliage near the watchers. The foliage was a dripper-lip. Almost at once the paperwing turned grey as its small nourishments content was sucked out. It disintegrated like ash.

  Rising cautiously, Lily-yo led the group over to the nearest cable of traverser web. Each adult carried her own urn.

  The traversers, largest of all creatures, vegetable or otherwise, could never go into the forest. They spurted out their line among the upper branches, securing it with side strands.

  Finding a suitable cable with no traverser in sight, Lily-yo turned, signalling for the urns to be put down. She spoke to Toy, Gren, and the seven other children.

  'Now help us climb with our souls into our burnurns. See us tight in. Then carry us to the cable and stick us to it. And then good-bye. We Go Up, and leave the group in your hands. You are the living now!'

  Toy momentarily hesitated. She was a slender girl, her breasts like pearfruit.

  'Do not go, Lily-yo,' she said. 'We still need you, and you know we need you.'

  'It is the way,' Lily-yo said firmly.

  Prising open one of the facets of her urn, she slid into her coffin. Helped by the children, the other adults did the same. From habit, Lily-yo glanced to see that Haris the man was safe.

  They were all in their transparent prisons at last. A surprising coolness and peace stole over them.

  The children carried the coffins between them, glancing nervously up at the sky meanwhile. They were afraid. They felt helpless. Only the bold man child Gren looked as if he was enjoying their new sense of independence. He more than Toy directed the others in the placing of the urns upon the traverser's cable.

  Lily-yo smelt a curious smell in the urn. As it soaked through her lungs, her senses became detached. Outside, the scene that had been clear clouded and shrank. She saw she hung suspended on a traverser cable above the tree tops, with Flor, Haris, Daphe, Hy and Jury in other urns nearby, hanging helplessly. She saw the children, the new group, run to shelter. Without looking back, they dived into the muddle of foliage on the platform and disappeared.

  The traverser drifted very high above the Tips, safe from its enemies. All about it, space was indigo, and the invisible rays of space bathed it and nourished it. Yet the traverser was still dependent on the earth for nourishment. After many hours of vegetative dreaming, it swung itself over and climbed down a cable.

  Other traversers hung motionless nearby. Occasionally one would blow a globe of oxygen or hitch a leg to try and dislodge a troublesome parasite. Theirs was a leisureliness never attained before. Time was not for them; the sun was theirs, and would ever be until it became unstable, turned nova, and burnt both them and itself out.

  The traverser fell, its feet twinkling, hardly touching its cable. It fell straight to the forest, it plunged towards the leafy cathedrals of the forest. Here in the air lived its enemies, enemies many times smaller, many times more vicious, many times more clever. Traversers were prey to one of the last families of insect, the tigerflies.

  Only tigerflies could kill traversers – in their own insidious, invincible way.

  Over the long slow eons as the sun's radiation increased, vegetation had evolved to undisputed supremacy. The wasps had developed too, keeping pace with the new developments. They grew in number and size as the animal kingdom fell into eclipse and dwindled into the rising tide of green. In time they became the chief enemies of the spider-like traversers. Attacking in packs, they could paralyse the primitive nerve centres, leaving the traversers to stagger to their own destruction. The tigerflies also laid their eggs in tunnels bored into the stuff of their enemies' bodies; when the eggs hatched, the larvae fed happily on living flesh.

  This threat it was, more than anything, that had driven the traversers farther and farther into space many millennia past. In this seemingly inhospitable region, they reached their full and monstrous flowering.

  Hard radiation became a necessity for them. Nature's first astronauts, they changed the face of the firmament. Long after man had rolled up his affairs and retired to the trees from whence he came, the traversers reconquered that vacant pathway he had lost. Long after intelligence had died from its peak of dominance, the traversers linked the green globe and the white indissolubly – with that antique symbol of neglect, a spider's web.

  The traverser scrambled down among foliage of the Tips, erecting the hairs on its back, where patchy green and black afforded it natural camouflage. On its way down it had collected several creatures caught fluttering in its cables. It sucked them peacefully. When the soupy noises stopped, it vegetated.

  Buzzing roused it from its doze. Yellow and black stripes zoomed before its crude eyes. A pair of tigerflies had found it.

  With great alacrity, the traverser moved. Its massive bulk, contracted in the atmosphere, had an overall length of over a mile, yet it moved lightly as pollen, scuttling up a cable back to the safety of vacuum.

  As it retreated, its legs brushing the web, it picked up various spores, burrs, and tiny creatures that adhered there. It also picked up six burnurns, each containing an insensible human, which swung unregarded from its shin.

  Several miles up, the traverser paused. Recovering from its fright, it ejected a globe of oxygen, attaching it gently to a cable. It paused. Its palps trembled. Then it headed out towards deep space, expanding all the time as pressure dropped.

  Its speed increased. Folding its legs, the traverser began to eject fresh web from the spinnerets under its abdomen. So it propelled itself , a vast vegetable almost without feeling, rotating slowly to stabilize its temperature.

  Hard radiations bathed it. The traverser basked in them. It was in its element.

  Daphne roused. She opened her eyes, gazing without intelligence. What she saw had no meaning. She only knew she had Gone Up. This was a new existence and she did not expect it to have meaning.

  Part of the view from her urn was eclipsed by stiff yellowy wisps that might have been hair or straw. Everything else was uncertain, being washed either in blinding light or deep shadow. Light and shadow revolved.

  Gradually Daphe identified other objects. Most notable was a splendid green half-ball mottled with white and blue. Was it a fruit? To it trailed cables, glinting here and there, many cables, silver or gold in the crazy light. Two traversers she recognized at some distance, travelling fast, looking mummified. Bright points of lights sparkled painfully. All was confusion.

  This was the region of the gods.

  Daphe had no feeling. A curious numbness kept her without motion or the wish to move. The smell in the urn was strange. Also the air seemed thick. Everything was like an evil dream. Daphe opened her mouth, her jaw sticky and slow to respond. She screamed. No sound came. Pain filled her. Her sides in particular ached. Even when her eyes closed again, her mouth still hung open.

  Like a great shaggy balloon, the traverser floated down to the moon.

  It could hardly be said to think, being a mechanism or little more. Yet somewhere in it the notion stirred that its pleasant journey was too brief, that there might be other directions in which to sail. After all, the hated tigerflies were almost as many now, and as troublesome, on the moon as on the earth. Perhaps
somewhere there might be a peaceful place, another of these half-round places with green stuff, in the middle of warm delicious rays...

  Perhaps some time it might be worth sailing off on a full belly and a new course...

  Many traversers hung above the moon. Their nets straggled untidily everywhere. This was their happy base, better liked than the earth, where the air was thick and their limbs were clumsy. This was the place they had discovered first – except for some puny creatures who had been long gone before they arrived. They were the last lords of creation. Largest and lordliest, they enjoyed their long lazy afternoon's supremacy. The traverser slowed, spinning out no more cable. In leisurely fashion, it picked its way through a web and drifted down to the pallid vegetation of the moon...

  Here were conditions very unlike those on the heavy planet. The many-trunked banyans had never gained supremacy here; in the thin air and low gravity they outgrew their strength and collapsed. In their place, monstrous celeries and parsleys grew, and it was into a bed of these that the traverser settled. Hissing from its exertions, it blew off a cloud of oxygen and relaxed.

  As it settled down into the foliage, its great sack of body rubbed against the stems. Its legs too scraped into the mass of leaves. From the legs and body a shower of light debris was dislodged – burrs, seeds, grit, nuts, and leaves caught up in its sticky fibres back on distant earth. Among this detritus were six seed casings from a burnurn plant. They rolled over the ground and came to a standstill.

  Haris the man was the first to awaken. Groaning with an unexpected pain in his sides, he tried to sit up. Pressure on his forehead reminded him of where he was. Doubling up knees and arms, he pushed against the lid of his coffin.

  Momentarily, it resisted him. Then the whole urn crumbled into pieces, sending Haris sprawling. The rigours of vacuum had destroyed its cohesive powers.

  Unable to pick himself up, Haris lay where he was. His head throbbed, his lungs were full of an unpleasant odour. Eagerly he gasped in fresh air. At first it seemed thin and chill, yet he sucked it in with gratitude.

  After a while, he was well enough to look about him.

  Long yellow tendrils were stretching out of a nearby thicket, working their way gingerly towards him. Alarmed, he looked about for a woman to protect him. None was there. Stiffly, his arms so stiff, he pulled his knife from his belt, rolled over on one side, and lopped the tendrils off as they reached him. This was an easy enemy!

  Haris cried as he saw his own flesh. He jumped unsteadily to his feet, yelling in disgust at himself. He was covered in scabs. Worse, as his clothes fell in shreds from him, he saw that a mass of leathery flesh grew from his arms, his ribs, his legs. When he lifted his arms, the mass stretched out almost like wings. He was spoilt, his handsome body ruined.

  A sound made him turn, and for the first time he remembered his fellows. Lily-yo was struggling from the remains of her burnurn. She raised a hand in greeting.

  To his horror, Haris saw that she bore disfigurements like his own. In truth, he scarcely recognized her at first. She resembled nothing so much as one of the hated flymen. He flung himself to the ground and wept as his heart expanded in fear and loathing.

  Lily-yo was not born to weep. Disregarding her own painful deformities, breathing laboriously, she cast about around the indifferent legs of the traverser, seeking out the other four coffins.

  Flor's was the first she found, half-buried though it was. A blow with a stone shattered it. Lily-yo lifted up her friend, as hideously transformed as she, and in a short while Flor roused. Inhaling the strange air raucously, she too sat up. Lily-yo left her to seek the others. Even in her dazed state, she thanked her aching limbs for feeling so light of body.

  Daphe was dead. She lay stiff and purple in her urn. Though Lily-yo shattered it and called aloud, Daphe did not stir. Her swollen tongue stayed dreadfully protruding from her mouth. Daphe was dead, Daphe who had lived, Daphe who had been the sweet singer.

  Hy was also dead, a poor shrivelled thing lying in a coffin that had cracked on its arduous journey between the two worlds. When that coffin shattered under Lily-yo's blow, Hy too fell away to powder. Hy was dead, Hy who had born a man child, Hy always so fleet of foot.

  Jury's urn was the last. She stirred as the headwomen reached her and brushed the burrs from her transparent box. A minute later, she was sitting up, eyeing her deformities with a stoical distaste, breathing the sharp air. Jury lived.

  Haris staggered over to the women. In his hand he carried his soul.

  'Four of us!' he exclaimed. 'Have we been received by the gods or no?'

  'We feel pain – so we live,' Lily-yo said. 'Daphe and Hy have fallen to the green.'

  Bitterly, Haris flung down his soul and trampled it underfoot.

  'Look at us! Better be dead!' he said.

  'Before we decide that, we will eat,' said Lily-yo.

  Painfully, they retreated into the thicket, alerting themselves once more to the idea of danger. Flor, Lily-yo, Jury, Haris, each supported the other. The idea of tabu had somehow been forgotten.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  'NO proper trees grow here,' Flor protested, as they pushed among giant celeries whose crests waved high above their heads.

  'Take care!' Lily-yo said. She pulled Flor back. Something rattled and snapped, like a chained dog, missing Flor's leg by inches.

  A trappersnapper, having missed its prey, was slowly reopening its jaws, baring its green teeth. This one was only a shadow of the terrible trappersnappers spawned on the jungle floors of earth. Its jaws were weaker, its movements far more circumscribed. Without the shelter of the giant banyans, the trapper-snappers were disinherited.

  Something of the same feeling overcame the humans. They and their ancestors for countless generations had lived in the high trees. Safety was arboreal. Trees there were here, but only celery and parsley trees offering neither the rock-steadiness nor the unlimited boughs of the giant trees.

  So they journeyed, nervous, lost, in pain, knowing neither where they were nor why they were.

  They were attacked by leapycreepers and sawthorns, and beat them down. They skirted a thicket of nettlemoss taller and wider than any to be met with on earth. Conditions that worked against one group of vegetation favoured others. They climbed a slope and came on a pool fed by a stream. Over the pool hung berries and fruits, sweet to taste, good to eat.

  'This is not so bad,' Haris said. 'Perhaps we can still live.'

  Lily-yo smiled at him. He was the most trouble, the most lazy; yet she was glad he was still here. When they bathed in the pool she looked at him again. For all the strange scales that covered him, and the two broad sweeps of flesh that hung by his side, he was still good to look on just because he was Haris. She hoped she was also comely. With a burr she raked her hair back; only a little of it fell out.

  When they had bathed, they ate. Haris worked then, collecting fresh knives from the bramble bushes. They were not so tough as the ones on earth, but they would have to do. Then they rested in the sun.

  The pattern of their lives was completely broken. More by instinct than intelligence they had lived. Without the group, without the tree, without the earth, no pattern guided them. What was the way or what was not became unclear. So they lay where they were and rested.

  As she lay, Lily-yo looked about her. All was strange, so that her heart beat faintly.

  Though the sun shone bright as ever, the sky was as deep blue as a vandalberry. And the half-globe shining in the sky was streaked with green and blue and white, so that Lily-yo could not know it for somewhere she had lived. Phantom silver lines pointed to it, while nearer at hand the tracery of traverser webs glittered, veining the whole sky. Traversers moved over it like clouds, their great bodies slack.

  All this was their empire, their creation. On their first journeys here, many millennia ago, the traversers had literally laid the seeds of this world. To begin with, they withered and died by the thousand on the inhospitable ash. But even the dead
had brought their little levy of oxygen and other gases, soil, spores, and seed, some of which latter sprouted on the fruitful corpses. Under the weight of dozy centuries, these plants gained a sort of foothold.

  They grew. Stunted and ailing in the beginning, they grew. With vegetal tenacity, they grew. They exhaled. They spread. They thrived. Slowly the broken wastes of the moon's lit face turned green. In the craters creepers began to flower. Up the ravaged slopes the parsleys crawled. As the atmosphere deepened, so the magic of life intensified, its rhythm strengthened, its tempo increased. More thoroughly than another dominant species had once managed to do, the traversers colonized the moon.

  Little Lily-yo knew or cared about any of this. She turned her face from the sky.

  Flor had crawled over to Haris the man. She lay against him in the circle of his arms, half under the shelter of his new skin, and she stroked his hair.

  Furious, up jumped Lily-yo. She kicked Flor on the shin, then flung herself upon her, using teeth and nails to pull her away. Jury ran to join in.

  'This is not time for mating!' Lily-yo cried. 'How dare you touch Haris?'

  'Let me go! Let me go!' cried Flor. 'Haris touched me first.'

  Haris in his startlement jumped up. He stretched his arms, waved them, and rose effortlessly into the air.

  'Look!' he shouted in alarmed delight. 'Look what I can do!'

  Over their heads he circled once, perilously. Then he lost his balance and came sprawling head first, mouth open in fright. Head first he pitched into the pool.

  Three anxious, awe-struck, and love-struck female humans dived in in unison to save him.

  While they were drying themselves they heard the noises in the forest. At once they became alert, their old selves. They drew their swords and looked to the thicket.

  The wiltmilt when it appeared was not like its earthly brothers. No longer upright like a jack-in-the-box, it groped its way along like a caterpillar.