Brian Aldiss - Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

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.

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, without 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.'