Thomas Disch - The Genocides

“What’s to be gained killing ourselves?” Buddy asked rhetorically, after having come within one slippery fingerhold of doing exactly this for himself. “I don’t know where this slop is coming from, but it doesn’t seem to be letting up. The higher we go, the more likely we are to break our necks if we fall. Why not go back along my rope after all? It’s not that likely we’ll run into Neil, and if we do, we don’t have to let on that we know anything he wouldn’t want us to. I’d rather risk five, ten minutes with him than another hundred yards up this greased chimney.”

This seemed a sensible course, and they returned to the tuber. The descent was easy as sliding down a firepole.

Following Buddy’s line up a mild slope, they noticed that here too the vines were slimed and slippery beneath their bare feet. Feeling down beneath the layer of vines, Orville discovered that a little rivulet of the slime was flowing down the slope.

“What is it, do you suppose?” Buddy wondered.

“I think the springtime has come at last,” Orville replied.

“And this is the sap—of course! I recognize the feel of it now—and the smell—oh, don’t I know that smell!”

“Springtime!” Blossom said. “We’ll be able to return to the surface!”

Happiness is contagious (and wasn’t there every reason for a young man newly in love to be happy in any case?), and Orville quoted part of a poem he remembered:

“What a lovely poem!” she said, catching hold of his hand and squeezing.

“What a lot of nonsense!” Buddy said. “ Cuckoo, jugjug, pu-we, to-witta-wo! ”

The three of them laughed gaily. The sun seemed to be shining on them already, and nothing was needed to make them laugh again but that one of them repeat the silly old Elizabethan words.

Some two thousand feet above their heads, the reviving land basked under the bright influence of the sun, which had indeed passed the equinox. Even before the last patches of snow had melted from the southern sides of boulders, the leaves of the great Plants unfurled to receive the light and began without further ado to set about their work as though October were only yesterday.

Except for the noise of the leaves snapping open (and that was over in a day), it was a silent spring. There were no birds to sing.

The leaves spoke hungrily to the stems, drained dry to last out the freezing northern winter, and the stems spoke to the roots, where the solute-bearing sap, which the leaves needed to make new food, began to boil up through myriad capillaries. Where these capillaries had been broken by the passage of man, the sap oozed forth and spread over the vines that lined the hollows of the roots. As more and more sap poured through the arteries of the awakening Plant, the thin sap formed little rivulets, which, merging with other rivulets, became little streams, and these streams ran down to flood the lowest depths of the roots. When they flowed into hollows in which the capillaries were still intact, they were reabsorbed, but elsewhere the levels of these streams rose higher and higher, flooding the roots, like sewers in a sudden March thaw.

Now the tubers of the fruit, which had been forming for years, took on a fine, autumnal richness. The airy floss at their cores, receiving their final supplies of food from the leaves above, thickened to the consistency of whipped egg white.

In both hemispheres, the Plant was coming to the end of a long season, and now, at regular intervals over the green earth, there descended from the spring skies gleaming spheres so immense that each one, landing, crushed several of the Plants under its ponderous bulk. Viewed from the proper distance, the landscape would have resembled a bed of clover overspread with gray basketballs.

These gray basketballs basked a few hours in the sun, then extruded, from apertures at their bases, hundreds of exploratory cilia, each of which moved toward a nearby Plant and with tidy, effective little drill bits, began to bore down through the woody stem into the hollow of the root below. When a satisfactory passage had been opened, the cilium was drawn back into the gray basketball.

The harvest was being prepared.

Neil had gone three times about the circle of rope he had fashioned to trap Buddy, and he was beginning, dully, to sense that he had been caught in his own snare (though how it had happened he did not yet understand). Then, as he had feared, Buddy could be heard returning along the root. Blossom and Orvifie were with him, all of them laughing! At him? He had to hide, but there was nowhere to hide, and he didn’t want to hide from Blossom anyhow. So he said, “Uh, hi.” They stopped laughing.

“What are you doing here? ” Buddy asked.

“Well, you see, uh…. This rope here, it keeps… No, that’s not it, either.” The more he talked, the more confused he became, and the more impatient Buddy.

“Oh, never mind then. Come along. I’ve found Blossom. And Orville too. Let’s round up the others now. It’s spring. Haven’t you noticed the slime—Hey—what’s this?” He had found the point where the end of his own rope was knotted to its own middle. “This surely isn’t the intersection where we left each other. I’d remember if I’d gone down any root as small as this.”

Neil didn’t know what to do. He wanted to hit his snoopy brother over the head, that’s what he wanted to do, and shoot Orville, just blast his brains out. But he sensed that this had better be done away from Blossom, who might not understand. Then too, when you’re lost the most important thing is to get home safe. When you’re home safe, things won’t seem so muddled as when you’re lost.

A whispered conversation was going on among Buddy, Orville and Blossom. Then Buddy said: “Neil, did you—”

“No! I don’t know how… it just must of happened! It’s not my fault!”

“Well, you dumb clod!” Buddy began to laugh. “Why, if you had to saw a limb off a tree, I swear you’d sit on the wrong side to do it. You’ve tied my line in a circle, haven’t you?”

“No, Buddy, honest to God! Like I said, I don’t know how—”

“And you didn’t bring your own line along so you could get back. Oh, Neil, how do you do it? How do you always find a way?”

Orville and Blossom joined Buddy’s laughter. “Oh, Neil! ” Blossom cried out. “Oh, Neil! ”

That made Neil feel good, to hear Blossom say his name like that, and he began to laugh along with everybody else. The joke was on him!

Surprisingly, it seemed that Buddy and Orville weren’t going to make a big stink. Maybe they knew what was good for them!

“It seems we’ll have to find our way back as best we can,” Orville said with a sigh, when they were all done laughing. “Neil, would you like to lead the way?”

“No,” Neil said, somber again and touching the Python in his holster for assurance. “No, I’ll be the leader, but I’ll bring up the rear.”

An hour later they had come up against a dead end, and they knew they were thoroughly lost. It was no longer possible to shatter the capillaries with a wave of one’s arm. They were swollen with sap and resilient. It would have been no more difficult to crawl through a honeycomb than through the unopened hollows. They were compelled therefore to stay strictly within the bounds of paths already blazed. Thanks to Anderson’s explorations, there were quite enough of these. Quite too many.

Orville summed up their situation. “It’s back to the subbasement, my dears. We’ll have to take another elevator to get to the ground floor.”