Brian Aldiss - Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

Breaking into Sodal Ye's swearing, he said angrily, 'What have you to complain of? Didn't this poor wretch carry you until the last lungful of air left his body? You flogged all you could out of him, so be content! He's dead now, and he's free of you, and he'll never carry you again.'

'Then you must carry me,' answered the sodal without hesitation. 'Unless we get out of here quickly, we shall all be torn to bits by those packs of sharp-furs. Listen to them – they're getting nearer! So look smart, man, if you know what's good for you, and make these women lift me on to your back.'

'Oh, no! You're staying there in the gully, sodal. We can get on more quickly without you. You've had your last ride.'

'No!' The sodal's voice rose like a foghorn. 'You don't know what the crest of this mountain's like. There's a secret way down the other side into Bountiful Basin that I can find and these women can't. You'll be trapped on the top without me, that I promise you. The sharp-furs will have you.'

'Oh, Gren, I'm so afraid for Laren. Let's take the sodal rather than stand here arguing, please.'

He stared at Yattmur through the dull dawnlight. She was a blur, a chalk drawing on a rock face, yet he clenched his fist as if she were a real antagonist.

'Do you want to see me as a beast of burden?'

'Yes, yes, anything rather than have us all torn apart! It's only over one mountain, isn't it? You carried the morel far enough without complaint.'

Bitterly he motioned to the tattooed women.

'That's better,' said the sodal, wriggling between Gren's encircling arms. 'Just try and keep your head a little lower, so that no discomfort is caused to my throat. Ah, better still. Fine, yes, you'll learn. Forward, hup ho!'

Head well bent, back bent, Gren struggled up the slope with the catchy-carry-kind on top of him, Yattmur carrying the babe beside him and the two women going on ahead. A desolate chorus of sharp-fur cries floated to them. They scrambled along a stream bed with water washing cold about their knees, helped each other up a precipitous gravel bank, and came on to less taxing ground.

Yattmur could see that over the next rise lay sunshine. When she thought to take in the landscape about them, she observed a new and more cheerful world of slopes and hill tops showing all round. The sharp-fur parties had fallen from view behind boulders.

Now the sky was streaked with light. An occasional traverser sailed overhead, making for the night side or heading up into space. It was like a sign of hope.

Still they had some way to go. But at last the sun lay hot on their backs and after a long steady pull they stood panting on the crest of the mountain. The other side of it fell away in a great ravaged cliff down which it would be impossible for anything to climb.

Nestling in a hundred intersecting curtains of shadow lay an arm of the sea, wide and serene. Fanning straight across it, casting a glow over the whole basin of cliffs in which the sea rested, was a swathe of light, just as Sodal Ye had predicted. Creatures moved in the water, leaving their marks momentarily upon it. On a strip of beach, other figures moved, winding between primitive white huts as tiny as pearls in the distance.

The sodal alone was not staring down.

His eyes went to the sun and to the narrow section of fully illumined world that could be seen from this vantage point, the lands where the sun shone perpetually. There the brilliance wasalmost intolerable. He needed no instruments to tell him that the heat and light had increased in intensity even since they left Big Slope.

'As I predicted,' he cried, 'all things are melting into light. The day is coming when the Great Day comes and all creatures become a part of the evergreen universe. I must talk to you about it some time.'

The lightning which had almost played itself out over the lands of Perpetual Twilight still flittered over the bright side. One particularly vivid shaft struck down into the mighty forest – and stayed visible. Writhing like a snake caught between earth and heaven it remained; and from the base it began to turn green. Green rose up it into the sky, and the shaft steadied and thickened as it went, until something like a pointing finger stretched into the canopy of space and the tip of it was lost to view in the hazy atmosphere.

'Aaaah, now I have seen the sign of signs!' said the sodal. 'Now I see and now I know the end of the Earth draws near.'

'What in the name of terror is it?' Gren said, squinting up from under his burden at the green column.

'The spores, the dust, the hopes, the growth, the essence of the centuries of Earth's green fuse, no less. Up it goes, ascending, for new fields. The ground beneath that column must be baked to brick! You heat a whole world for half an eternity, stew it heavy with its own fecundity, and then apply extra current: and on the reflected energy rises the extract of life, buoyed up and borne into space on a galactic flux."

The island of the tall cliff returned to Gren's mind. Though he did not know what the sodal meant by talking of extracts of life being buoyed up on galactic fluxes, it sounded like his experience in the strange cave with eyes. He wished he could ask the morel about it.

'The sharp-furs are coming!' Yattmur cried. 'Listen! I can hear them shouting.'

Looking back down the way they had come, she saw tiny figures in the gloaming, some still bearing smoky torches, climbing slowly but climbing steadily, swarming uphill mainly on all fours.

'Where do we go?' Yattmur asked. "They'll be upon us if you don't stop talking, Sodal.'

Shaken out of his contemplation, Sodal Ye said, 'We have to move higher up the crest of the mountain. Only a little way. Behind this big spur sticking up ahead is a secret way leading down among the rocks. There we strike a passage leading right through the cliff down to Bountiful Basin. Don't worry – those wretches have some distance to climb yet.'

Gren had started moving towards the spur before Sodal Ye stopped speaking.

Anxiously propping Laren over one shoulder, Yattmur ran forward. Then she paused.

'Sodal,' she said. 'Look! One of the traversers has crashed behind the spur. Your escape way will be completely blocked!'

The spur stood up crazily on the sheer edge of the cliff, like a chimney built on top of a steeply-pitched roof. Behind it, massive and firm, lay the bulk of a traverser. Only the fact that they viewed its shadowed side, which rose up like part of the ground, had prevented their noticing it earlier.

Sodal Ye let out a great cry.

'How are we to get under that great vegetable?' he demanded, and he slapped Gren's legs with his tail in a fury of frustration.

Gren staggered and fell against the woman carrying the gourd. They sprawled together on the grass while the sodal flopped beside them, bellowing.

The woman gave a cry of something between pain and rage, covering her face while her nose trickled blood. She took no notice when the sodal croaked at her. As Yattmur helped Gren up, the sodal said, 'Curse her dung-devouring descendants, I'm telling her to make the spanning woman get spanning and see how we can escape from here. Kick her and make her pay attention – and then get me on to your back again and see you're less careless in future.'

He started shouting at the woman again.

Without warning, she jumped up. Her face was distorted as a squeezed fruit. Seizing the gourd by her side, she brought it swinging down hard on to the sodal's skull. The blow knocked him unconscious. The gourd split under the impact, and the morel slid out like treacle, covering the sodal's head with a sort of lethargic contentment.

Gren and Yattmur's eyes met, worried, questioning. The spanning woman's mouth split open. She cackled soundlessly. Her companion sat down to weep; her period-of-being's one moment of revolt had come and gone.