Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [101]
Yattmur stood up and took him from them, putting his mouth to one of her own plump breasts, where he at once began pulling greedily and was silent. To feel him there gradually stilled her trembling.
She stooped over Gren.
He turned his face towards her when she touched his shoulder.
‘Yattmur,’ he said.
Weak tears stood in his eyes. All over his shoulders, in his hair, across his face, ran a red and white stippling where the probes of the morel had gone down into his skin for nourishment.
‘Has it gone?’ he asked, and his voice was his own again.
‘Look at it,’ she said. With her free hand, she tilted the gourd over so that he could see in.
For a long while he stared down at the still-living morel, helpless and motionless now, lying like excrement in the gourd. His inner vision was looking back – more with amazement now than fear – at the things that had been since the morel first dropped on him in the forests of Nomansland, the things that had passed like a dream: how he had travelled through lands and performed actions and above all held knowledge in his mind in ways that would have been unknown to his former free self.
He saw how all this had come about under the agency of the fungus that now was no more potent than a burnt mess of food in the bottom of a dish; and quite coolly he saw how he had at first welcomed this stimulus, for it had helped him overcome the limitations natural to him. Only when the morel’s basic needs conflicted with his own had the process become evil, driving him almost literally out of his own mind, so that in working to the dictates of the morel he had almost preyed on his own kind.
It was over. The parasite was defeated. He would never again hear the inner voice of the morel twanging through his brain.
At that, loneliness more than triumph filled him. But he searched wildly along the corridors of his memory and thought, He has left me something good: I can evaluate, I can order my mind, I can remember what he taught me – and he knew so much.
Now it seemed to him that for all the havoc the morel had caused, he had found Gren’s mind like a little stagnant pool and left it like a living sea – and it was with pity he looked down into the bowl that Yattmur held out to him.
‘Don’t weep, Gren,’ he heard Yattmur’s voice say. ‘We are safe, we are all safe, and you will be all right.’
He laughed shakily.
‘I shall be all right,’ he agreed. He formed his scarred face into a smile and stroked her arms. ‘We shall all be all right.’
Then reaction hit him. He rolled over and was instantly asleep.
Yattmur was busy, when Gren awoke, attending to Laren who squealed with delight as she washed him by the mountain stream. The tattooed women were also there, carrying water back and forth to pour over the catchy-carry-kind on his slab, while nearby stood the carrying man, cramped into his habitual gesture of servitude. Of the tummy-bellies, there was no sign.
He sat up gingerly. His face was puffy but his head clear; what then was the jarring he could feel that had woken him? He caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of his eye, and turning saw a trickle of stones roll down a gully some way off. At another point, more stones rolled.
‘An earthquake is in progress,’ said Sodal Ye in a cavernous voice. ‘I have discussed it with your mate Yattmur and have told her there is no need for alarm. The world is ending on schedule, according to my predictions.’
Gren rose to his feet and said, ‘You have a big voice, fish face; who are you?’
‘I delivered you from the devouring fungus, little man, for I am the Sodal and Prophet of the Nightside Mountains, and all the denizens of the mountains hear what I have to say.’
Gren was still thinking this over when Yattmur came up and said, ‘You’ve slept so long since the morel left you. We too have slept, and now we must prepare to move.’
‘To move? Where is there to go from here?’
‘I will explain to you as I explained to Yattmur,’ said the sodal, blinking as his women threw another gourd full of water over him. ‘I devote