Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth Page 7

  'We will not wait long,' Veggy said. 'Gren had no need to stay behind. Let us leave him and forget him.'

  'We need him for mating,' Toy said simply.

  'I will mate with you,' Veggy said. 'I am a man child with a big mater to stick into you. Look, you cannot wear this one out! I will mate with all you women before the figs come again! I am riper than the figs.'

  And in his excitement he stood up and danced, showing off his body to the women, who were not averse to it. He was now their only man child; was he not desirable therefore?

  May jumped up to dance with him. Veggy ran at her. Ducking lithely, she shot away. He capered after. She was laughing, he shouting.

  'Come back!' Toy and Poyly called furiously.

  Unheeding, May and Veggy ran from the grass on to sloping sand and shingle. Almost at once a great arm shot up from the sand and grasped May's ankle. As she screamed, another arm came up, then another, fastening on her. May fell on her face, kicking in terror. Veggy flung himself savagely into the attack, pulling out his knife as he did so. Other arms came up from the sand and grasped him too.

  When plant life had conquered the Earth, the animals least affected had been those of the sea. Theirs was an environment less susceptible to change than land. Nevertheless, alterations in size and distribution of the marine algae had forced many of them to change their habits or habitat.

  The new monster seaweeds had proved expert at catching crabs, at wrapping them in a greedy frond as they scuttled over the ocean bed, or at trapping them beneath stones at that vulnerable time when the crabs were growing new shells. In a few million years, the brachyura were all but extinct.

  Meanwhile, the octopuses were already in trouble with the seaweeds. Their extinction of the crabs deprived them of a chief item of their diet. These factors and others forced them into an entirely new mode of life. Compelled both to avoid seaweeds and to seek food, many of them left the oceans. They became shore-dwellers – and the sand octopus evolved.

  Toy and the other humans ran to Veggy's rescue, terrified by this threat to their only remaining man child. Sand flew as they hurled themselves into the fight. But the sand octopus had arms enough to deal with all seven of them. Without raising its body from where it was hidden, it took them all in its tentacles, fight how they might.

  Their knives were of little use against that rubbery embrace. One by one, their faces were pressed down into the slithering sand and their shouts stifled.

  For all that they had finally triumphed, the vegetables had triumphed as much by weight of numbers as by inventiveness. Time and again, they succeeded simply by imitating some device used long since – perhaps on a smaller scale – in the animal kingdom, as the traverser, that mightiest of all plant-creatures, flourished simply by adopting the way of life chosen by the humble spider back in the Carboniferous Age.

  In Nomansland, where the struggle to survive was at its most intense, this process of imitation was particularly noticeable. The willows were a living example of it; they had copied the sand octopus, and by so doing had become the most invincible beings along that dreadful coast.

  Killerwillows now lived submerged under the sand and shingle, only their foliage occasionally showing. Their roots had acquired a steely flexibility and become tentacles. To one of these brutes the group now owed its lives.

  A sand octopus was obliged to stifle its prey as soon as possible. Too long a struggle attracted its rivals, the killerwillows; for those that imitated it had become its deadliest enemies. They moved up on it now, two of them, heaving themselves along under the sand with only their leaves showing like innocent bushes, and a furrow of disturbed dirt behind them.

  They attacked without hesitation or warning.

  Their roots were long and sinewy and fearfully tough. One from one side, one from the other, they took a hold on the tentacles of the sand octopus. It knew that deadly grip, it recognized that obscene strength. Relinquishing its hold on the humans, it turned to fight the killerwillows for its life.

  With a heave that sent the group scattering, it emerged from the sand, its beak agape, its pale eyes round with fright. Giving a sudden twist, one of the killerwillows sent it sprawling upside down. The sand octopus twisted back into position, managing to free all its tentacles but one as it did so. Angrily, it pecked off the offending tentacle with one savage bite, as if its own flesh were the enemy.

  Close at hand lay the sullen sea. Its impulse was to retreat there in an emergency. But even as it began its frantic scuttle, the tentacular roots of the killerwillows thrashed blindly about, seeking for it. They found it! The octopus whipped up a curtain of sand and pebble in its fury as its retreat was checked.

  But the killerwillows had it – and between them they commanded some thirty-five knotty legs.

  Forgetting themselves, the humans stared fascinated at this unequal duel. Then the blindly waving arms flashed in their direction.

  'Run!' Toy cried, picking herself up as sand spurted near her.

  'It's got Fay!' Driff screamed.

  The smallest of the group had been caught. Searching for a hold, one of those thin white tentacles of roots had wrapped Fay round the chest. She could not even cry out. Her face and arms went purple. Next second she was lifted up and dashed brutally against the trunk of a nearby tree. They saw her half-severed body roll bloodily over into the sand. 'It is the way,' Poyly said sickly. 'Let's move!' They fled into the nearest thicket and lay gasping there. As they mourned the loss of their youngest companion, the sounds came to them of the sand octopus being shredded to pieces.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FOR a long while after the horrible noises had stopped, the six members of the group lay where they were. At last Toy sat up and spoke to them.

  'You see what has happened because you do not let me lead you,' she said. 'Gren is lost. Now Fay is dead. Soon we will all be dead and our souls rotting.'

  'We must get out of Nomansland,' said Veggy sulkily. 'This is all the suckerbird's fault.' He was aware that he was to blame for the incident with the sand octopus.

  'We shall get nowhere,' Toy snapped, 'until you obey me. Do you have to die before you know that? After this, you do what I say. Do you understand, Veggy?'

  'Yes.'

  'May?'

  'Yes.'

  'And you, Driff and Shree?'

  'Yes,' they said, and Shree added, 'I'm hungry.'

  'Follow me quietly,' Toy said, tucking her soul more securely into her belt.

  She led them, testing every step she took.

  By now, the din of the sea battle was abating. Several trees had been dragged down into the water. At the same time, much seaweed had been fished out of the sea. This was now being eagerly tossed among the victor trees, anxious as they were for nourishment in that barren soil.

  As the group crept forward, a soft-pelted thing rushed past on four legs and was gone before they had their wits about them.

  'We could have eaten that,' Shree said grumpily. Toy promised us the suckerbird to eat and we never got it.'

  The thing had scarcely disappeared before there was a scuffle in the direction it had taken, a squeal, a hasty gobbling sound, and then silence.

  'Something else ate it," Toy whispered. 'Spread out and we'll stalk it. Knives ready!'

  They fanned out and slid through the long grass, happy to engage in positive action. This part of the business of living they understood.

  To track down the source of that quick gobbling sound was easy. The source was in captivity and could not move away.

  From a particularly gnarled tree a pole hung; attached to the bottom of the pole was a crude cage consisting of only a dozen wooden bars. The bars dug down into the ground. Contained in the cage, its snout protruding one way, its tail another, was a young alligator. Some scattered pieces of pelt lay by its jaws, the remains of the furry thing the group had seen alive five minutes before.

  The alligator stared at the humans as they emerged from the long grass and they stared ba
ck at it.

  'We can kill it. It cannot move,' May said.

  'We can eat it,' Shree said. 'Even my soul is hungry."

  The alligator, thanks to its armour, proved difficult to kill. Right at the onset, its tail sent Driff spinning into a pile of shingle, where she cut her face badly. But by stabbing at it from all sides, and by blinding it, they at last exhausted it enough for Toy to thrust her hand bravely into the cage and cut the creature's throat.

  As the reptile threshed about in its death agony, a curious thing happened. The bars of the cage lifted upwards so that their pronged ends emerged from the ground, and the whole contraption clenched together like a hand. The straight pole above it twisted into several loops; it and the cage vanished up into the green boughs of the tree.

  With exclamations of awe, the group seized their alligator and ran.

  Winding their way though tight-packed tree trunks, they came on a bare outcrop of rock. It looked like a safe refuge, particularly as it was fringed by a spiky local variant of the whistlethistle.

  Crouching on the rock, they began their unlovely meal. Even Driff joined in, though her face still bled from where she had grazed it on the shingle.

  Scarcely were their jaws in motion than they heard Gren calling for help near at hand.

  'Wait here and guard the food,' Toy commanded. 'Poyly will come with me. We will go and find Gren and bring him back here.'

  Her command was a good one. To travel with food was never wise; travelling alone was dangerous enough.

  As she and Poyly skirted the thistles, Gren's cry came again to guide them. The two girls moved round a bank of mauve cactus, and there he lay. He sprawled face downwards under a tree similar to the one beneath which they had killed the alligator, penned in a cage similar to the alligator's.

  'Oh, Gren!' cried Poyly. 'How we missed you!'

  Even as they ran towards him, a trailer creeper swung at him from the limb of a nearby tree, a creeper with a wet red mouth at its extremity, bright as a flower, poisonous-looking as a dripper-lip. It swooped for Gren's head.

  Poyly's feelings for Gren went deep. Without thought, she flung herself at the creeper, meeting it as it swung forward, catching it as high as possible to avoid those pulpy lips. Drawing a new knife, she severed the stem that pulsed beneath her fingers. Then she dropped back lightly to the ground. It was easy to avoid the mouth that now writhed there, ineffectually pursing and opening.

  'Above you, Poyly!' Toy cried in warning, darting forward. The parasite, alerted now to danger, uncurled a full dozen of its trailing mouths. Gay and deadly, they swung about Poyly's head. But Toy was beside her. Expertly they lopped away, till milk spurted from the creeper's wounds, till the mouths lay gasping at their feet. Vegetable reaction time is not the fastest thing in the universe, perhaps because it is rarely prompted by pain.

  Breathing hard, the two girls turned their attention to Gren, who still lay pinned beneath the cage.

  'Can you get me out?' he asked, looking up helplessly at them.

  'I am leader. Of course I can get you out,' Toy said. Using some of the knowledge she had gained from dealing with the alligator, she said, 'This cage is a part of the tree. We will make it move and let you go.'

  She knelt down and began to saw at the bars of the cage with her knife.

  Over the land where the banyan ruled, covering everything with its layers of green, the chief problem for lesser breeds was to propagate their kind. With plants like the whistlethistle that had developed the curious dumblers, and the burnurn that had turned its seedcases into weapons, the solution of this problem was ingenious.

  No less ingenious were some of the solutions of the flora of Nomansland to their particular problem. Here the main problem was less one of propagation than of sustenance; this accounted for the radical difference between these outcasts of the beaches and their cousins inland.

  Some trees like the mangroves waded into the sea and fished deadly seaweeds for mulch. Other like the killerwillows took on the habits of animals, hunting in the manner of carnivores and nourishing themselves on decomposed flesh. But the oak, as one million-year stretch of sunlight succeeded another, shaped some of its extremities into cages and caught animals alive, letting their dung feed its starving roots. Or if they eventually starved to death, in decomposing they would still feed the tree.

  Nothing of this Toy knew. She knew only that Gren's cage should move, just as the one enclosing the alligator had done. Grimly, with Poyly helping, she hacked at the bars. The two girls worked at each of the twelve bars in turn. Perhaps the oak assumed the damage being done was greater in fact than it was; the bars were suddenly pulled from the ground and the whole contraption sprang up into the boughs above them.

  Ignoring tabu, the girls grabbed Gren and ran with him back to the rest of the party.

  When they were reunited, they devoured the alligator meat, keeping guard as they did so.

  Not without a certain amount of boasting, Gren told them what he had seen inside the termight's nest. They were unbelieving.

  'Termights have not enough sense to do all that you say,' Veggy said.

  'You all saw the castle they made. You sat on it."

  'In the forest, termights have not so much sense,' May said, backing Veggy up as usual.

  'This is not the forest,' Gren said. 'New things happen here. Terrible things.'

  'Only in your head they happen,' May teased. 'You tell us about these funny things so that we will forget you did wrong to disobey Toy. How could there be windows underground to look out on to the sea?'

  'I tell you only what I saw," Gren said. He was angry now. 'In Nomansland, things are different. It is the way. Many ter-

  mights also had a bad fungus growth on them such as I have not seen before. I have seen this fungus again since then. It looks bad.'

  'Where did you see it?' Shree asked.

  Gren threw a curiously-shaped piece of glass into the air and caught it, perhaps pausing to create suspense, perhaps because he was not too keen to mention his recent fright.

  'When I was caught by the snaptrap tree,' he said, 'I looked up into its branches. There among the leaves I saw a fearful thing. I could not make out what it was until the leaves stirred. Then I saw one of the fungi that grew on the termights, all shining like an eye and growing on the tree.'

  'Too many things bring death here,' she said. 'Now we must move back to the forest where we can live happily. Get up, all of you.'

  'Let me finish this bone off,' Shree said.

  'Let Gren finish his story,' Veggy said.

  'Get up, all of you. Tuck your souls in your belts, and do as I order.'

  Gren slipped his curious glass under his belt and jumped up first to show he was anxious to obey. As the others stood up too, a dark shadow passed overhead; two rayplanes fluttered by, locked in combat.

  Over the disputed strip called Nomansland many sorts of veg-bird passed, both those that fed at sea and those that fed on land. They passed without alighting, knowing well the dangers that lurked there. Their shadows sped and dappled over the outcast plants without pause.

  The rayplanes were so mortally engaged they did not know where they went. With a crash they sprawled among the upper branches near the group.

  At once Nomansland sprang to life.

  The famished angry trees spread up and lashed their branches. Toothed briars uncurled. Gigantic nettles shook their bearded heads. Moving cactus crawled and launched its spikes. Climbers hurled sticky bolas at the enemy. Cat-like creatures, such as Gren had seen in the termight's nest, bounded past and swarmed up the trees to get to the attack. Everything that could move did so, prodded on by hunger. On the instant, Nomansland turned itself into a war machine.

  Those plants that possessed no sort of mobility came alert for secondary spoils. The thicket of whistlethistles near which the group now lay trembling shook its thorns in anticipation. Harmless enough in its normal habitat, here the need to feed its roots had goaded the whistlethistle
into a more offensive role. It would impale any passer-by it could. Similarly, a hundred other plants, small and stationary and armed, prepared to ignore the doomed rayplanes but to feed on those who – returning from their feed – blundered into their path.

  A great killerwillow appeared, heaving itself into view with root-tentacles waving. Sand and grit poured off its pollarded head as it struggled up. Soon it too was grappling with the luckless rayplanes, with the snaptrap trees, and indeed with any living thing whose existence offended it.

  The scene was chaos. The rayplanes never had a chance.

  'Look – there's some of the fungus!' Gren exclaimed, pointing.

  In among the short snake-like branches that formed the head of the killerwillow grew the deadly fungus. Nor was this the first time Gren had seen it since the rayplanes crashed. Several of the plants lumbering past had borne traces of it. Gren shuddered at the sight, but the others were less impressed. Death, after all, had many shapes; everyone knew it: it was the way.

  Twigs showered on them from the target area. The rayplanes were shredded by now; the fight was among the feasters.

  'We are too close to the trouble,' Poyly said. 'Let's move.'

  'I was about to order it myself,' Toy said stiffly.

  They scrambled up and made their way as best they could. All were armed now with long poles which they thrust out before them to test the ground for danger. The fearful remorselessness of the killerwillows had struck caution into their hearts.

  For a long while they moved, overcoming obstacle after obstacle and frequently avoiding death. Finally they were overcome – by sleep.

  They found a fallen trunk of a tree that was hollow. They beat out the poisonous leafy creature that lived in it, and slept there, curled up together and feeling secure. When they awoke, they were prisoners. Both ends of the tree trunk were sealed.

  Driff, who was the first to rouse and discover this, set up a howl that quickly brought the others to investigate. No doubt of it, they were now sealed in and liable to suffocation. The walls of the tree that previously had felt dry and rotten were now tacky, dripping a sweetish syrup on to them. In fact, they were about to be digested!