Brian Aldiss - Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

'Gather round, everyone,' cried the morel, 'while I speak to you through this fish's mouth. You must all listen to what I have to say.'

Clinging to fibrous hairs, they settled about him, only Gren and Yattmur showing any reluctance to do so.

'Now I am two bodies,' pronounced the morel, 'I have taken control of this traverser; I am directing its nervous system. It will go only where I wish. Have no fear, for no harm will come to any of you immediately.

'What is more fearful than flight is the knowledge I have drained from this fishy catchy-carry-kind, Sodal Ye. You must hear about it, for it alters my plans.

'These sodals are people of the seas. While all other beings with intelligence have been isolated by vegetable life, the sodals in the freedom of the oceans have been able to keep in contact with all their communities. They can still rove the planet uninterruptedly. So they have gained rather than lost knowledge.

'They have discovered that the world is about to end. Not immediately – not for many generations – but certainly it will end, and those green columns of disaster rising from the jungle to the sky are signs that the end has already begun.

'In the really hot regions – regions unknown to any of us, where the burning bushes and other fire-using plants live – the green columns have already been for some time. In the sodal's mind I find knowledge of them. I see some blazing on shores glimpsed from a steaming sea.'

The morel was silent. Gren knew how he would be dredging down for more intelligence. He shuddered, admiring somehow the morel's excitement for facts, yet disgusted by his nature.

Underneath them, floating slowly by, bobbed the coast of the Lands of Perpetual Twilight. They showed appreciably brighter before the heavy lips moved and once more the voice of the sodal carried the thoughts of the morel.

'These sodals don't always understand all the knowledge they have gained. Ah, the beauty of the plan when you see it... Humans, there is this burning fuse of a force called devolution... How can I put it so that your tiny brains will understand?

'Very long ago, men – your remote ancestors – discovered that life grew and evolved from, as it were, a speck of fertility: an amoeba, which served as the gateway to life like an eye of a needle, beyond which lay the amino acids and the inorganic world of nature. And this inorganic world too, they found, evolved in its complexity from one speck, a primal atom.

'These vast processes of growth men came to understand. What the sodals have discovered is that growth incorporates also what men would have called decay: that not only does nature have to be wound up to wind down, it has to wind down to be wound up.

This creature I now inhabit knows the world is in a winding down phase. This he has vaguely been trying to preach to you lesser breeds.

'At the beginning of this sun system's time, all forms of life

were blurred together and by perishing supplied other forms. They arrived on Earth from space like motes, like sparks, in Cambrian times. Then the forms evolved into animal, vegetable, reptile, insect – all varieties and species that flooded the world, many of them now gone.

'Why are they gone? Because the galactic fluxes which determine the life of a sun are now destroying this sun. These same fluxes control animate life; they close it down as they will close Earth's existence. So nature is devolving. Again the forms are blurring! They never ceased to be anything but inter-dependent – the one always living off the other – and now they merge together once more. Were the tummy-bellies vegetable or human? Are the sharp-furs human or animal? And the creatures of the hothouse world, these traversers, the killer-willows in Nomansland, the stalkers that seed like plants and migrate like birds – how do they stand under the old classifications?

'I ask myself what am I?'

For a moment the morel was silent. His listeners looked at each other covertly, full of unease, until a flick of the sodal's tail recalled them to the discourse.

'All of us here have by accident been swept aside from the main stream of devolution. We live in a world where each generation becomes less, and less defined. All life is tending towards the mindless, the infinitesimal: the embryonic speck. So will be fulfilled the processes of the universe. Galactic fluxes will carry the spores of life to another and new system, just as they once brought it here. Already you see the process at work, in these green pillars of light that draw life from the jungles. Under steadily increasing heat, devolutionary processes accelerate.'

While the morel was speaking, its other half controlling the traverser had brought them steadily lower. Now they floated over dense jungle, over the banyan that covered all of this sunlit continent. Warmth wrapped itself round them like a cloak.

Other traversers were here, moving their great bulks lightly up and down their threads. With hardly a jolt, morel's traverser alighted in the tips of the jungle.

Gren stood up at once, helping Yattmur to her feet.

'You are the wisest of creatures, morel,' he said. 'I feel no sorrow in leaving you, because you seem now so well able to look after yourself. After all, you are the first fungus to solve the riddle of the universe. Yattmur and I will speak of you when we are safe in the middle levels of the jungle. Are you coming also, Lily-yo, or is your life given over to riding vegetables?"

Lily-yo, Haris, and the others were also on their feet, facing Gren with a mixture of hostility and defensiveness he recognized from long ago.

'You're not leaving this splendid brain, this protector, this morel who is your friend?' Lily-yo asked.

Gren nodded.

'You are welcome to him – or he is welcome to you. You in your turn must decide as I have had to whether he is a power for good or evil. I have decided. I am taking Yattmur, Laren, and the two Arabler women back to the forest where I belong.' When he snapped his fingers, the tattooed women rose obediently.

'Gren you are as hard-headed as ever you were,' Haris said, with a touch of ill-temper. 'Come back to the True World with us – it's a better place than the jungle. You just heard the fish-morel say the jungle is doomed.'

To his delight, Gren found he could use arguments in a way that once would have been impossible to him.

'If what the morel says is correct, Haris, then your other world is doomed as surely as this one.'

The morel's voice came back, booming and irritable.

'So it is, man, but you have yet to hear about my plan. In the dim thought centre of this traverser I find awareness of worlds far beyond this, far beyond and basking round other suns. The traverser can be driven to make that journey. I and Lily-yo and the others will live inside it, safe, eating its flesh, until we get to those new worlds. We simply follow the green columns and ride on the galactic fluxes of space and they will lead us to a good fresh place. Of course you must come with us, Gren.'

'I'm tired of carrying or being carried. Go and good luck! Fill a whole empty world with people and fungus!'

'You know this Earth will suffer a fire death, you fool man!'

'So you said, O wise morel. You also said that that would not come for many generations. Laren and his son and his son's son will live in the green, rather than be cooked into the gut of a vegetable making an unknown journey. Come along, Yattmur. Hup hey, you two women – along you come with me.'

They moved to go. Ushering the tattooed women before her, Yattmur handed Laren to Gren, who rested him over his shoulder. Haris took a step forward with his knife out.

'You were always as difficult to deal with. You don't know what you are doing," he said.

'That may be true; but at least I know what you are doing.'