Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [100]
She stopped. Anger, regret, apprehension, ran through her, then she said firmly, ‘Your troubles are only just beginning if you feel like that. You know I wish to be your friend.’
‘You make all our troubles! Go quickly away!’
She backed away and, as she began to walk towards the other cave where Gren lay, she heard the tummy-bellies crying out to her. Whether their tone was one of abuse or supplication she did not know. Lightning snickered, stirring her shadow about her ankles. The baby wriggled in her arms.
‘Lie still!’ she said sharply. ‘He shall not harm you.’
Gren sprawled at the back of the cave where she had last seen him. Lightning stabbed the brown mask through which his eyes peered. Though she saw him staring at her, he did not move or speak.
‘Gren!’
Still he neither moved nor spoke.
Vibrant with strain, torn between love and hate of him, she leant there indecisively. When the lightning sparked again, she waved a hand before her eyes as though to brush it away.
‘Gren, you can have the baby if you want him.’
Then he moved.
‘Come outside for him; it’s too dark in here.’
Having spoken, she walked away. Sickness rose in her as she felt the miserable difficulty of life. Over the saturnine slopes below her played inconstant light, adding to her dizziness. The catchy-carry-kind still lay on his boulder; beneath his shadow were the gourds, now empty of food and drink, and his forlorn retinue, hands to the sky, eyes to the ground. Yattmur sat down heavily with her back to the boulder, cradling Laren on her lap.
After a pause, Gren came out of the cave.
Walking slowly, slack-kneed, he approached her.
She could not tell whether she sweated from the heat or the tension. Because she was afraid to gaze on that pulpy mash that covered his face, Yattmur shut her eyes, opening them again only when she felt him near, fixing them on him as he stooped over her and the child. Uttering his pleased noise, Laren stretched up his arms with complete confidence.
‘Sensible boy!’ said Gren in his alien voice. ‘You are going to be a child apart, a wonder child, and I shall never leave you.’
Now she shivered so violently that she could not hold the baby still. But Gren was bending close now, down on his knees, so near she caught an acrid and clammy odour from him. Through the fluttering fringes of her eyelashes she saw the fungus on his face begin to move.
It hung above Laren’s head, gathering ready to drop on him. Her vision was full of it, peppered with spongy spores, and with a slab of the big boulder and one of the empty gourds. She believed herself to be breathing in short screams, so that Laren commenced to cry – and again the tissue slid over Gren’s face with the reluctant movement of stiff porridge.
‘Now!’ cried Social Ye in a voice which twitched her into action.
Yattmur whipped the empty gourd forward, over the child. The morel was caught in the bottom as it fell, trapped by the plan the sodal had devised. As Gren sagged sideways, she saw his true face twisted like a rope in a knot of pain. The light ebbed and flowed, quick as a pulse, but she only knew something screamed, not recognizing her own high note before she collapsed.
Two mountains clashed together like jaws with a bloated and squalling version of Laren lost between them. Thrown back to her senses, Yattmur sat up with a jerk and the monstrous vision fled.
‘So you are not dead,’ said the catchy-carry-kind gruffly. ‘Kindly get up and silence your child, since my women are unable to do so.’
It was incredible that everything was much as it had been before she fainted, so long had she seemed to be enveloped in night. The morel lay inert in the gourd that had trapped it, with Gren face down beside it. Sodal Ye was atop his boulder. The pair of tattooed women hugged Laren to their withered