Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth Read online

  "Then would I be great too?'

  'It would probably have to be that way... '

  All at once a wave of sleep came over Gren. The sleep was fathomless, but full of strange fish – dreams he could not afterwards grasp by their flickering tails.

  He woke suddenly. Something had moved nearby.

  On the top of the bank, where the bright sun would always shine, stood Poyly.

  'Gren, my sweet!' she said, when his slight movement revealed him. 'I have left the others to be with you and be your mate."

  His brain was clear now, clear and sharp as spring water. Many things were plain to him that had been hidden before. He jumped up.

  Poyly looked down at him in the shade. With horror she saw the dark fungus growing from him as it had from the snaptrap trees and the killerwillows. It protruded from his hair, it formed a ridge down the nape of his neck, it stood like a ruff half way round his collarbone. It glistened darkly in its intricate patterns.

  'Gren! The fungus!' she cried in horror, backing away. 'It's all over you!'

  He climbed out rapidly and caught her by the hand.

  'It's all right, Poyly, there's no cause for alarm. The fungus is called morel. It will not hurt us. It can help us.'

  At first Poyly did not answer. She knew the way in the forest, and in Nomansland. Things looked after themselves, not after others. Dimly she guessed that the real purpose of the morel was to feed on others and to propagate itself as widely as possible; and that to this end it might be clever enough to kill its hosts as slowly as possible.

  'The fungus is bad, Gren,' she said. 'How can it be anything but bad?'

  Gren fell on his knee and pulled her down with him, murmuringly reassuring as he did so.

  He stroked her russet hair.

  'Morel can teach us many things,' he said. 'We can be so much better than we are. We are poor creasures; surely there's no harm in being better creatures?'

  'How can the fungus make us better?'

  In Gren's head, morel spoke.

  'She surely shall not die. Two heads are better than one. Your eyes shall be opened. Why – you'll be like gods!'

  Almost word for word, Gren repeated to Poyly what morel had said.

  'Perhaps you know best, Gren,' she said falteringly. 'You were always very clever.'

  'You can be clever, too,' he whispered.

  Reluctantly she lay back in his arms, nestling against him.

  A slab of fungus fell from Gren's neck on to her forehead. She stirred and struggled, made as if to protest, then closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were very clear.

  Like another Eve, she drew Gren to her. They made love in the warm sunlight, letting their wooden souls fall as they undid their belts.

  At last they stood up, smiling at each other.

  Gren glanced down at their feet. 'We've dropped our souls,' he said.

  She made a careless gesture. 'Leave them, Gren. They're only a nuisance. We don't need them any more.'

  They kissed and stretched and began to think of other things, already completely accustomed to the crown of fungus on their heads.

  'We don't have to worry about Toy and the others,' Poyly said. 'They have left us open a way back to the forest. Look!'

  She led him round a tall tree. A wall of smoke drifted gently inland where flame had bitten a path back to the banyan. Hand in hand, they walked together towards that way out of Nomansland, their dangerous Eden.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LITTLE silent things without minds sped around the highway, appearing from and disappearing into the dark greens that surrounded it.

  Two fruit cases moved along the highway. From under them, two pairs of eyes looked askance at the silent things, and flitted here and there like the things themselves in their search for danger.

  The highway was a vertical one; the anxious eyes could see neither its beginning nor its end. Occasional branches forked horizontally from the highway; these were ignored in the slow but steady progress. The surface of the highway was rough, providing excellent holds for the moving fingers and toes that protruded from the fruit cases. Also, the surface was cylindrical, for the highway was one trunk of the mighty banyan tree.

  The two fruit cases moved from its middle layers towards the ground below. Foliage gradually filtered out the light, so that they seemed to move in a green mist towards a tunnel of black.

  At last the leading fruit case hesitated and turned aside on to one of the horizontal branches, pursuing a scarcely visible trail. The other case followed it. Together they sat up, half leaning against each other, and with their backs to their erstwhile highway.

  'I fear going down towards the Ground,' Poyly said, from under her case.

  'We must go where the morel directs,' Gren said with patience, explaining as he had explained before. 'He has more wisdom than we have. Now that we are on the trail of another group, it would be foolish to disobey him. How can we live in the forest on our own?'

  He knew that the morel in her head was soothing her with similar arguments. Yet ever since he and Poyly had left Nomansland several sleeps ago, she had been uneasy, her self-exile from the group having imposed on her a greater strain than she had expected.

  'We should have made a stronger effort to pick up the trail of Toy and our other friends,' Poyly said. 'If we had waited till the fire died down we might have found them.'

  'We had to move on because you were afraid of being burnt,' Gren said. 'Besides, you know Toy would not have taken us back. She had no mercy or understanding even of you, her friend.'

  At this, Poyly merely grunted, and silence fell between them. Then she began again.

  'Need we go farther?' she asked in a tiny voice, taking hold of Gren's wrist.

  Then they waited with a timorous patience for another voice that they knew would answer them.

  'Yes, you shall go farther, Poyly and Gren, for I advise you to go and I am stronger than you.' The voice was already familiar to them both. It was a voice made without lips and heard without ears, a voice born and dying within their heads like a jack-in-the-box eternally imprisoned in its little chest. It had the tone of a dusty harp.

  'I have brought you so far in safety,' the morel continued, 'and I will take you farther in safety. I taught you to wear the fruit cases for camouflage and already we have come a long way in them unharmed. Go a little farther and there will be glory for you.'

  'We need a rest, morel,' Gren said.

  'Rest and then we will go on. We have found the traces of another human tribe – this is not the time to be faint of heart. We must find the tribe.'

  Obeying the voice, the two humans lay down to rest. The cumbersome skins, hacked from two of the oedematous fruits of the forest, crudely pierced with holes for their legs and arms, prevented them from lying flat. They crouched as they could, limbs sprawling upwards as if they had been crushed to death by the weight of the leafage above them.

  Like a distracting background hum, the thoughts of the morel ran somewhere beyond their supervision. In this age of vegetables, plants specialized in size while remaining brainless; the morel fungus, however, had specialized in intelligence – the sharp and limited intelligence of the jungle. To further its own wider propagation, it could become parasitic on other species, adding its deductive powers to their mobility. The particular individual which had bisected itself to take over both Poyly and Gren, laboured under constant surprise as it discovered in their nervous centre something owned by no other creature – a memory that included dim racial memories hidden even from their possessors.

  Although the morel remained unaware of the phrase 'In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king,' it was nevertheless in the same position of power. The life forms of the great hothouse world lived out their days in ferocity or flight, pursuit or peace, before falling to the green and forming compost for the next generation. For them there was no past and no future; they were like figures woven into a tapestry, with
out depth. The morel, tapping human minds, was different. It had perspective.

  It was the first creature in a billion years to be able to look back down the long avenues of time. Prospects emerged that frightened, dizzied, and nearly silenced the harp-like cadences of its voice.

  'How can morel protect us from the terrors of the Ground?'

  Poyly asked after a spell. 'How can he protect us from a wilt-milt or a dripperlip?'

  'He knows things,' Gren said simply. 'He made us put on these fruit skins to hide us from enemies. They have kept us safe. When we find this other tribe we will be still safer.'

  'My fruit skin chafes my thighs,' Poyly said, with a womanly gift for irrelevance that eons of time had not quenched.

  As she lay there, she felt her mate's hand grope for her thigh and rub it tenderly. But her eyes still wandered among the boughs overhead, alert for danger.

  A vegetable thing as bright as a parakeet fluttered down and settled on a branch above them. Almost at once a jittermop fell from its concealment above, dropping smack on to the veg-bird. Antipathetic liquids splashed. Then the broken vegbird was drawn up out of sight, only a smear of green juice marking where it had been.

  'A jittermop, Gren! We should move on,' Poyly said, 'before it falls on us.'

  The morel too had seen this struggle – had in fact watched with approval, for vegbirds were great fanciers of a tasty morel.

  'We will move, humans, if you are ready,' it said. One pretext for moving on was as good as another; being parasitic, it needed no rest.

  They were reluctant to move from their temporary comfort even to avoid a jittermop, so the morel prodded them. As yet it was gentle enough with them, not wishing to provoke a contest of wills and needing their co-operation. Its ultimate objective was vague, vain-glorious, and splendid. It saw itself reproducing again and again, until fungus covered the whole Earth, filling hill and valley with its convolutions.

  Such an end could not be achieved without humans. They would be its means. Now – in its cold leisurely way – it needed as many humans under its sway as it could get. So it prodded. So Gren and Poyly obeyed.

  They climbed back head downwards on to the trunk that was their highway, clinging to its rounded surface, and resumed their advance.

  Other creatures used the same route, some harmless like the leafabians, making their endless leafy caravanserais from the depths of the jungle to its heights, some far from harmless, green in tooth and claw. But one species had left minute distinguishing marks down the trunk: a stab mark here, a stain there, that to a trained eye meant that humanity was somewhere near at hand. It was this trail the two humans followed.

  The great tree and the denizens of its shade went about their business in silence. So did Gren and Poyly. When the marks they pursued turned along a side branch, they turned too, without discussion.

  So they continued, horizontally and vertically, until Poyly glimpsed movement. A flitting human form revealed itself. Ducking among the leaves, it plunged for safety into a clump of fuzzypuzzle on a branch ahead – just the mystery of it, then silence.

  They had seen no more than a flash of shoulder and a glimpse of face alert under flying hair, yet it had an electrifying effect on Poyly.

  'She'll escape if we don't catch her,' she told Gren. 'Let me go and try to get her! Keep watch, in case her companions are near.'

  'Let me go.'

  'No, I'll get her. Make a noise to distract her attention when you think I'm ready to pounce.'

  Shucking off her fruit case and sliding forward on her belly, she edged over the curve of the branch until she hung upside down under it. As she began to work her way along, the morel, anxious for its own safety in an exposed position, invaded her mind. Her perceptions became extraordinarily sharp, her vision clearer, her skin more sensitive.

  'Go in from behind. Capture it, don't kill it, and it will lead us to the rest of its tribe,' twanged the voice in her head.

  'Hush, or she'll hear,' Poyly breathed.

  'Only you and Gren can hear me, Poyly; you are my kingdom.'

  Poyly crawled beyond the fuzzypuzzle patch before climbing on to the upper side of the branch again, never rustling the leaves about her as she did so. Slowly she slid forward.

  Above the soft lollipop buds of the fuzzypuzzle she spied her quarry's head. A fine young female was looking guardedly about, eyes dark and liquid under a sheltering hand and a crown of hair.

  'She did not recognize you under your fruit cases as human, so she hides from you,' said the morel.

  That was silly, Poyly thought to herself. Whether this female recognized us or not, she would always hide from strangers. The morel sucked the thought from her brain and understood why his reasoning had been false; for all he had already learnt, the whole notion of a human being was still alien to him.

  Tactfully he removed himself from Poyly's mind, leaving her free to tackle the stranger in her own way.

  Poyly moved a step nearer, and another step, bent almost double. Head down, she waited for Gren to signal as instructed.

  On the other side of the fuzzypuzzle patch, Gren shook a twig. The strange female peered in the direction of the noise, her tongue running over her open lips. Before she could pull the knife from her belt, Poyly jumped on her from behind.

  They struggled in among the soft fibres, the stranger grappling for Poyly's throat. Poyly in return bit her in the shoulder. Bursting in, Gren gripped the stranger round her neck and tugged her backwards until her saffron hair fell about his face. The girl put up a savage struggle, but they had her. Soon she was bound and lay on the branch looking up at them.

  'You have done well! Now she will lead us -' began the morel.

  'Quiet!' Gren rasped, so that the fungus instantly obeyed.

  Something was moving fast in the layers of the tree above them.

  Gren knew the forest. He knew how predators were attracted by the sounds of struggle. Hardly had he spoken when a thin-pin came spiralling down the nearest trunk like a spring and launched itself at them. Gren was ready for it.

  Swords are useless against thinpins. He caught it a blow with a stick, sending it spinning. It anchored itself by a springy tail before rearing to strike again – and a rayplane curved down from the foliage above, snapped up the thinpin, and swooped on.

  Poyly and Gren flung themselves flat beside their captive and waited. The terrible silences of the forest came in again like a tide all round them, and it was safe once more.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THEIR captive was almost speechless. She pouted and tossed her head in answer to Poyly's questions. They elicited from her only the fact that she went by the name of Yattmur. Obviously she was alarmed by the sinister ruff about their necks and the glistening lumps on their heads.

  'Morel, she is too fearful to speak,' Gren said, moved by the beauty of the girl who sat bound at their feet. 'She does not care for the look of you. Shall we leave her and go on? We'll find other humans.'

  'Hit her and then she may speak,' twanged the silent voice of the morel.

  'But that will make her more fearful.'

  'It may loosen her tongue. Hit her face, on that cheek you seem to admire -'

  'Even though she is causing me no danger?'

  'You silly creature, why can you never use all of your brain at once? She causes us all danger by delaying us.'

  'I suppose she does. I never thought of that. You think deep, morel, that I must admit.'

  'Then do as I say and hit her.'

  Gren raised his hand hesitantly. Morel twitched at his muscles. The hand came down violently across Yattmur's cheek, jerking her head. Poyly winced and looked questioningly at her mate.

  'You foul creature! My tribe will kill you,' Yattmur threatened, showing her teeth at them.

  His eyes gleaming, Gren raised his hand again.

  'Do you want another blow? Tell us where you live.'

  The girl struggled ineffectually.

  'I am only a herder. You do wr
ong to harm me if you are of my kind. What harm did I do you? I was only gathering fruit.'

  'We need answers to questions. You will not be hurt if you answer our questions.' Again his hand came up, and this time she surrendered.

  'I am a herder – I herd the jumpvils. It is not my job to fight or to answer questions. I can take you to my tribe if you wish.'

  'Tell us where your tribe is.'

  'It lives on the Skirt of the Black Mouth, which is only a small way from here. We are peaceful people. We don't jump out of the sky on to other humans.'

  'The Skirt of the Black Mouth? Will you take us there?'

  'Do you mean us harm?'

  'We mean no harm to anyone. Besides you can see there are only two of us. Why should you be afraid?'

  Yattmur put on a sullen face, as if she doubted his words.

  'You must let me up then, and set my arms free. My people shall not see me with tied hands. I will not run away from you.'

  'My sword through your side if you do,' Gren said.

  'You are learning,' the morel said with approval.

  Poyly released Yattmur from her bonds. The girl smoothed her hair, rubbed her wrists, and began to climb among the silent leaves, her two captors following close. They exchanged no more words, but in Poyly's heart doubts rose, particularly when she saw that the endless uniformity of the banyan was breaking.

  Following Yattmur, they descended the tree. One great mass of broken stone crowned with nettlemoss and berrywish thrust itself up beside their way, and then another. But although they descended, it grew lighter overhead; which meant the banyan was here far from its average height. Its branches twisted and thinned. A spear of sunlight pierced through the travellers. The Tips were almost meeting the ground. What could it mean?

  Poyly whispered the question in her mind, and the morel answered.