Thomas Disch - The Genocides

“There’s no soil fifty feet down,” Anderson objected. “Nothing but rock. Nothing grows in rock.”

“Tell that to the Plant. I don’t know if it does go that deep, but again I say we should explore. We’ve a length of rope, and even if we didn’t, those vines would support any of us. I tested them.” He paused before he returned to the clinching argument: “If nothing else, it’s a place to hide if those things find their way to us.”

His last argument turned out as valid as it had been effective. Buddy had only just gone down by the rope to the first branching off of the secondary roots from the vertical primary root (Buddy had been chosen because he was the lightest of the men), when there was a grating sound at the entrance of the cave, as when children try to fill a glass bottle with sand. One of the spheres, having tracked them to the cave, was now trying to bulldoze its way through the narrow entrance.

“Shoot!” Neil yelled at his father. “Shoot it!” He started to grab for the Python in his father’s side holster.

“I don’t intend to waste good ammunition on armor plate. Now, get your hands off me and let’s start pushing people down that hole.”

Orville did not have to prompt any further. There was nothing left for them to do. Not a thing. They were the puppets of necessity now. He stood back from the melee and listened as the sphere tried to shove its way into the cave by main force. In some ways, he thought, those spheres were no smarter than a chicken trying to scratch its way through a wire fence that it could walk around. Why not just shoot? Perhaps the three spheres had to be grouped about their target before they could go zap. They were, almost surely, automatons. They directed their own destinies no more than did the animals they were programmed to track down. Orville had no sympathy for the dumb machines and none for their prey. He rather fancied himself at that moment as the puppeteer, until the real puppeteer, necessity, twitched a finger, and Orville went running after his fellow men.

The descent into the root was swift and efficient. The size of the hole insured that no more than one person passed through at a time, but fear insured that that person got through as fast as he could. The unseen (the lamp was below with Buddy) presence of the metal sphere grinding at the ceiling and walls of the cave was a strong motivation to speed.

Anderson made each person strip off his bulky outer clothing and push it through the hole ahead of him. At last only Anderson, Orville, Clay Kestner, Neil and Maryann were left. It was evident that for Clay and Neil (the largest men of the village) and for Maryann, now in her eighth month, the hole would have to be enlarged. Neil chopped at the pulpy wood with frantic haste and much wasted effort. Maryann was eased first through the expanded opening. When she reached her husband, who was astraddle the inverse v formed by the divergence of the branch root from the greater taproot, her hands were raw from having slipped down the rope too quickly. As soon as he laid hold of her, all her strength seemed to leave her body. She could not go on. Neil was the next to descend, then Clay Kestner. Together they carried Maryann on into the secondary root.

Anderson called out, “Watch out below!” and a steady rain of objects—foodstuffs, baskets, pots, clothing, the sled, whatever the people had brought with them from the fire—fell into the abyss, shattering the delicate traceries. Buddy tried to count the seconds between the time they were released and the moment they hit bottom, but after a certain point he could not distinguish between the sounds of the objects ricocheting off the walls of the root and their striking bottom, if any. Anderson descended the rope after the last of the provisions had been dropped down the root.

“How is Orville coming down?” Buddy asked. “Who’ll hold the rope for him?”

“I didn’t bother to ask. Where is everyone else?”

“Down there…” Buddy gestured vaguely into the blackness of the secondary root. The lamp was lighting the main shaft, where the descent was more dangerous. The secondary root diverged at a forty-five degree angle from its parent. The ceiling (for here there could be said to be floor and ceiling) rose to a height of seven feet. The entire surface of the root was a tangle of vines, so that the slope was easy to negotiate. The interior space had been webbed with the same fragile lace, though those who had preceded Anderson into the root had broken most of it away.

Orville clambered down on the vines, the end of the rope knotted about his waist in the manner of a mountain climber. An unnecessary precaution, as it proved: the vines—or whatever they were—held firm. They were almost rigid, in fact, from being so closely knit together.

“Well,” said Orville, in a voice grotesque with good cheer, “here’s everybody, safe and sound. Shall we go down to the basement, where the groceries are?”

At that moment he felt an almost godlike elation, for he had held Anderson’s life in his hands—literally, by a string—and it had been his to decide whether the old man should die just then or suffer yet a little longer. It had not been a difficult choice, but, ah, it had been his!

When they had ventured down the branch root a further twenty-five feet (where, as Orville had promised, it was tolerably warm), they reached a sort of crossroads. There were three new branches to choose from, each as commodious as the one through which they had been traveling. Two descended, like proper roots, though veering off perpendicularly to the right and left of their parent; the other shot steeply upward.

“That’s strange,” Buddy observed. “Roots don’t grow up.”

“How do you know that’s up?” Orville asked.

“Well, look at it. It’s up . Up is… up. It’s the opposite of down.”

“My point exactly. We’re looking up the root, which may be growing down to us—from another Plant perhaps.”

“You mean this thing could be just one big Plant?” Anderson asked, moving into the circle of lamplight, scowling. He resented each further attribute of the Plant, even those that served his purpose. “All of them linking up together down here this way?”

“There’s one sure way to find out, sir—follow it. If it takes us to another primary root—”

“We don’t have time to be Boy Scouts. Not until we’ve found the supplies we dropped down that hole. Will we get to them this way? Or will we have to backtrack and climb down the main root on the rope?”

“I couldn’t say. This way is easier, faster and, for the moment, safer. If the roots join up like this regularly, maybe we can find another way back to the main root farther down. So I’d say—”

“I’ll say,” Anderson said, repossessing, somewhat, his authority. Buddy was sent ahead with the lamp and one end of the rope; the thirty others followed after, Indian file. Anderson and Orville bringing up the rear had only the sounds of the advance party to guide them: both the light and the rope were played out this far back.

But there was a plenitude of sound: the shuffle of feet over the vines, men swearing, Denny Stromberg crying. Every so often Greta inquired of the darkness: “Where are we?” or “Where the hell are we?” But that was only one noise among many. There were, already, a few premonitory sneezes, but they went unnoticed. The thirty-one people moving through the root were still rather shell-shocked. The rope they held to was at once their motive and their will.

Anderson kept stumbling on the vines. Orville put an arm around the old man’s waist to steady him. Anderson tore it loose angrily. “You think I’m some kind of invalid?” he said. “Get the hell out of here!”