Brian Aldiss - Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

Deafened, Gren looked round. Lily-yo and her companions were heading back towards the dying traverser. Yattmur was trying to pacify the baby. Hands over their heads, the Arabler women lay prone on the ground.

Again the noise came, swelling with an anguished despair. Sodal Ye had recovered consciousness and cried aloud his wrath. And then, opening his fleshy mouth with its huge lower lip, he spoke, in words that only gradually merged into sense.

'Where are your empty-headed heads, you creatures of the darkling plains You have toads in the head, not to understand my prophecies where the green pillars grow. Growing is symmetry, up and down, and what is called decay is not decay but the second part of growth. One process, you toad-heads – the process of devolution, that carries you down into the green well from which you came... I'm lost in the mazes – Gren! Gren, like a mole I tunnel through an earth of understanding... Gren, the nightmares – Gren, from the fish's belly I call to you. Can you hear me? It's I – your old ally the morel!'

'Morel?'

In his astonishment, Gren dropped to his knees before the catchy-carry-kind. Blank-faced, he stared at the leprous brown crown that now adorned its head. As he stared, the eyes opened, filmily at first, and then they focused on him.

'Gren! I was near death... Ah, the pain of consciousness... Listen, man, it is I, your morel, who speaks. I hold the sodal in check, and am using his faculties, as once I had to use yours; there's so much richness in his mind – coupling it with my own knowledge... ah, I see clearly not just this little world but all the green galaxy, the evergreen universe...'

Frantically, Gren jumped up.

'Morel, are you crazed? Do you not see what a position we are in here, all about to be killed by these sharp-furs when they gather courage to charge? What are we to do? If you are truly here, if you are sane, help us!'

'I'm not crazed – unless to be the only wise creature in a toad-minded world is to be crazed... All right, Gren, I tell you help comes! Look into the sky!'

The landscape had long been suffused with an uncanny light. Away in the distant and unbroken ranks of jungle stood the green pillar, joined now by another which had formed some way off. They seemed to taint the lower atmosphere with their glow, so that it did not surprise Gren to see cloud bars of viridescent hue striping the sky. From one of these clouds dropped a traverser. Falling at leisurely speed, it seemed to aim at the promontory on which Gren and the others stood.

'Is it coming here, morel?' Gren asked. Though he resented the resurrection of the tyrant that had recently sapped his life blood, he saw that the fungus, dependent on the legless sodal, could offer him only help, not harm.

'It's descending here,' the morel answered. 'You and Yattmur and the baby come and lie down here so that it does not crush you when it lands. It is probably coming to mate – to cross-fertilize – with the dying traverser. Directly it gets down, we must climb on to it. You must carry me, Gren, do you understand? Then I'll tell you what else to do.'

As he spoke through the sodal's blubber mouth, wind ruffled the grass. The hairy body overhead expanded until it filled almost their whole view: and gently the traverser landed on the brink of the cliff, perching on top of its dying mate. Its great legs came down, steadying it like buttresses on which rank mosses grew. It scratched for a hold and then was still.

Gren, with Yattmur and the tattooed women trailing behind, came up to it and stared up its height. He released the tail of the sodal, which he had dragged over the ground.

'We can't climb up there!' he said. 'You're mad to consider such a thing, morel. It's far too big!'

'Climb, man creature, climb!' bellowed the morel.

Still hesitating, Gren stood while Lily-yo and the others of her band came round. They had hidden behind the tall crag, and were anxious to get away.

'As your fish-creature says, this is our only way to safety,' Lily-yo said. 'Climb, Gren! You can come with us and we'll look after you.'

'You don't have to fear a traverser, Gren,' Haris said.

He still stood there, not encouraged by their prompting...The thought of clinging to something that flew through the air made him sick; he remembered his ride on the back of the veg-bird that crashed in Nomansland, remembered too the journeys by boat and stalker, each landing him in a worse situation than the last. Only on the journey just concluded, which he had undertaken under his own control with the sodal, had the destination seemed preferable to the starting point.

As he wavered, the morel was again bellowing with the sodal's voice, goading the others to climb the fibrous leg, even goading the tattooed women to carry him up, which they did with the aid of Lily-yo's party. They were soon all perched high up on the immense back, looking down and calling at him. Only Yattmur stood by him.

'Just when we are free of the tummy-bellies and the morel, why should we have to depend on this monstrous creature?' he muttered.

'We must go, Gren. It will take us away to the warm forests, far from the sharp-furs, where we can live with Laren in peace. You know we can't stay here.'

He looked at her, and at the big-eyed child in her arms. She had endured so much trouble for him, ever since the time the Black Mouth sang its irresistible song.

'We will go if you wish it, Yattmur. Let me carry the boy.' And then with a flash of anger he peered up, calling to the morel. 'And stop your stupid shouting – I'm coming!'

He called too late: the morel had already stopped. When Gren and Yattmur finally pulled themselves panting on to the top of the living hill, it was to discover the morel busily directing Lily-yo and her company in a new enterprise.

The sodal turned one of its piggy stares at Gren and said, 'As you know as well as anyone, it is time for me to divide, to propagate. So I'm going to take over this traverser as well as the sodal.'

'Mind it doesn't take you over,' Gren said feebly. He sat down with a thud as the traverser moved. But the huge creature, in the throes of fertilization, had so little sensitivity that it remained engrossed in its own blind affairs as Lily-yo and the others, working savagely with their knives, cut into its epidermis.

When they had a crater exposed, they lifted the Sodal Ye so that he hung head down into it; though he wriggled weakly, the morel had him too much under control for him to do more. The ugly pitted brown shape of the morel began to slide; half of it dropped into the hole, after which – under direction – the others covered it with a sort of bung of flesh. Gren marvelled at the way they hurried to do the morel's bidding; he seemed to have developed an immunity to orders.

Yattmur sat and suckled her child. As Gren settled beside her, she pointed a finger across the dark side of the mountain. From their vantage point, they could see sad and shadowy clusters of sharp-furs moving away to safety to await events; here and there their torches gleamed, punctuating the gloom like blossoms in a melancholy wood.

'They're not attacking,' Yattmur said. 'Perhaps we could climb down and find the secret way to Bountiful Basin?'

The landscape tilted.

'It's too late,' Gren said. 'Hold tightly! We're flying. Have you got Laren safely?'

The traverser had risen. Below them flashed the high cliff and they were falling down it, sweeping rapidly over rock. Bountiful Basin spun towards them, growing as it turned and came nearer.

Into long shade they slipped, then into light – their shadow pasted across the stippled water – into shade again, and then once more into light as they rose, gained certainty, and headed towards the plumed sun.

Laren gave a yelp of alarm and then returned to the breast, shutting his eyes as if it was all too much for him.