Brian Aldiss - Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

'I shan't hurt you,' Yattmur said. 'We were searching to find where you had gone.'

'It is too late, for our hearts are broken by your not coming before,' the man cried, tears rolling down his cheeks. Dried blood from a long scratch across one shoulder had matted his hair at that point, but Yattmur could see the wound was only superficial.

'It's a good thing we found you,' she said. 'There's nothing much wrong with you. You must all get up now and return to the boat.'

At this the tummy-belly burst into fresh complaint; his fellows joined in the chorus, speaking in their peculiarly jumbled dialect.

'O great herders, the sight of you adds to our miseries. How very much we rejoice to see you again, though we know you will kill us, poor helpless loveable tummy-fellows that we are.'

'We are, we are, we are, and though our love is loving you, you cannot love us, for we are only miserable dirt and you are cruel murderers who are cruel to dirt.'

'You will kill us though we are dying! O how we admire your bravery, you clever tail-less heroes!'

'Stop this filthy babbling,' Gren ordered. 'We are not murderers and we have never desired to harm you.'

'How clever you are, master, to be pretending that cutting us off our lovely tails is no harm! O we thought you were dead and finished with making sandwiches in the boat when the watery world turned solid, so we crept away in good grief, crept away on all our feet because your snores were loud. Now you have caught us again and because you do not snore we know you will kill us!'

Gren slapped the cheek of the nearest creature, who wailed and writhed as if in mortal agony.

'Be silent, blubbering fools! We shall not hurt you if you trust us. Stand up and tell us where the rest of your number is.'

His order only brought forth fresh lamentation.

'You can see we four sad sufferers are fatally dying of the death that comes to all green and pink things, so you tell us to stand up, because to make any standing position will kill us badly, so that you kick us when our souls are gone and we can only be dead at you and not crying with our harmless mouths. O we fall down from our lying flat at such a sly idea, great herder!'

As they cried out, they tried blindly to grasp Yattmur and Gren's ankles and kiss their feet, making the two humans skip about to avoid this embrace.

'There's very little wrong with the foolish creatures,' said Yattmur, who had been trying to examine them during this orgy of lamentation. 'They are scratched and bruised, nothing more.'

'I'll soon heal them,' Gren said. His ankle had been caught; he kicked out into a podgy face. Impelled by loathing, he grasped one of the other prone tummy-bellies and dragged the creature to its feet by force.

'How wonderfully strong you are, master,' it groaned, trying at once to kiss and bite his hands. 'Your muscles and your cruelty are huge to poor little dying chaps like us whose blood is going bad inside them because of bad things and other bad things, alas!'

'I'll push your teeth down your throat if you don't keep quiet,' Gren promised.

With Yattmur's help, he got the other three weeping tummy-bellies to their feet; as she had said, there was little wrong with them apart from self-pity. Silencing them, he asked them whither their sixteen companions had gone.

'O wonderful no-tail, you spare this poor tiny number four to enjoy killing the big number sixteen. What self-sacrifice you sacrifice! We happily tell you of the happiness we feel in telling you which way went our jolly sad sixteen number, so we can be spared to go on living and enjoying your smacks and blows and cruel kicks in the noses of our tender face. The sixteen number laid us down here to die in peace before they ran on that way for you to catch them and play killing.'

And they pointed dejectedly along the shore.

'Stay here and keep quiet,' Gren ordered. 'We will come back for you when we've found your fellows. Don't go away or something may eat you.'

'We will wait in fear even if we die first.'

'See that you do.'

Gren and Yattmur set off along the beach. Silence descended; even the ocean made hardly a murmur as it nuzzled against the land; and they felt again a huge unease, as if a million eyes watched them unseen.

As they walked, they surveyed their surroundings. Creatures of the jungle, they would never face anything more alien than the sea; yet the land here held strangeness. It was not simply that the trees – with leathery leaves that seemed suitable for the colder climate – were of an unknown variety; nor that behind the trees there rose the steep cliff, so steep, so grey, so pitted, rising to a spire so far above their heads, that it dwarfed everything and seemed to cast a gloom over the whole scene.

Beside all these elements of visual strangeness was another, one to which they could give no name, but which seemed all the more obtrusive after their brush with the tummy-bellies. The murmuring silence of the beach contributed to their unease.

Taking a nervous glance across her shoulder, Yattmur looked up towards the towering cliff again. Gathering cloud scudding across the sky made that great wall look as if it were toppling.

Yattmur fell on her face and covered her eyes.

The mighty cliffs are crashing down on us!' she cried, pulling Gren down with her.

He looked up once. The illusion caught him too: that grand and high tower was coming grandly down on top of them! Together they squeezed their soft bodies among the hard rocks, seeking safety by pressing their faces into damp shingly sand. They were creatures who belonged to the jungles of the hothouse world; so many things here were alien to them, they could respond only with fear.

Instinctively, Gren called the fungus that draped his head and neck.

'Morel, save us! We trusted you and you brought us to this dreadful place. Now you must get us away from it, quickly before the cliff comes down on us.'

'If you die, I die,' said the morel, sending its twanging harmonics through Gren's head. It added more helpfully, 'You can both get up. The clouds move; the cliff does not.'

A moment or two passed – an interval of waiting filled with the dirge of the ocean – before Gren dared to test the truth of this observation. At length, finding that no rocks cascaded down on to his naked body, he peered up. Feeling him move, Yattmur whimpered.

Still the cliff seemed to fall. He braced himself to look at it more thoroughly.

The cliff appeared to be sailing out of the heavens on to him, yet at last he assured himself that it did not move. He dared to look away from its pitted face and nudge Yattmur.

'The cliff is not harming us yet,' he said. 'We can go on.'

She raised a woebegone face, its cheeks patterned redly where they had pressed against the tiny stones of the shore, some of which still clung there.

'It is a magic cliff. It always falls yet it never falls,' she said at last, after regarding the rock carefully. 'I don't like it. It has eyes to watch us.'

They scrambled on, Yattmur looking nervously up from time to time. Clouds were gathering, their shadows moving in from the sea.

The shore curved sharply and continuously, its sands often buried under great masses of rock on which the jungle encroached at one end and the sea at the other. Over these masses they had laboriously to climb, moving as quietly as possible.

'We shall soon be back where we started from,' Gren said, looking back and finding that their boat was now concealed behind the central cliff.

'Correct,' twanged the morel. We are on a small island, Gren.'

'We can't live here then, morel?'

'I think not.'

'How do we get away?'

'As we arrived – in the boat. Some of these giant leaves would serve us as sails.'

'We hate the boat, morel, and the watery world.'