Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [109]
Still they had some way to go. But at last the sun lay hot on their backs and after a long steady pull they stood panting on the crest of the mountain. The other side of it fell away in a great ravaged cliff down which it would be impossible for anything to climb.
Nestling in a hundred intersecting curtains of shadow lay an arm of the sea, wide and serene. Fanning straight across it, casting a glow over the whole basin of cliffs in which the sea rested, was a swathe of light, just as Sodal Ye had predicted. Creatures moved in the water, leaving their marks momentarily upon it. On a strip of beach, other figures moved, winding between primitive white huts as tiny as pearls in the distance.
The sodal alone was not staring down.
His eyes went to the sun and to the narrow section of fully illumined world that could be seen from this vantage point, the lands where the sun shone perpetually. There the brilliance was almost intolerable. He needed no instruments to tell him that the heat and light had increased in intensity even since they left Big Slope.
‘As I predicted,’ he cried, ‘all things are melting into light. The day is coming when the Great Day comes and all creatures become a part of the evergreen universe. I must talk to you about it some time.’
The lightning which had almost played itself out over the lands of Perpetual Twilight still flittered over the bright side. One particularly vivid shaft struck down into the mighty forest – and stayed visible. Writhing like a snake caught between earth and heaven it remained; and from the base it began to turn green. Green rose up it into the sky, and the shaft steadied and thickened as it went, until something like a pointing finger stretched into the canopy of space and the tip of it was lost to view in the hazy atmosphere.
‘Aaaah, now I have seen the sign of signs!’ said the sodal. ‘Now I see and now I know the end of the Earth draws near.’
‘What in the name of terror is it?’ Gren said, squinting up from under his burden at the green column.
‘The spores, the dust, the hopes, the growth, the essence of the centuries of Earth’s green fuse, no less. Up it goes, ascending, for new fields. The ground beneath that column must be baked to brick! You heat a whole world for half an eternity, stew it heavy with its own fecundity, and then apply extra current: and on the reflected energy rises the extract of life, buoyed up and borne into space on a galactic flux.’
The island of the tall cliff returned to Gren’s mind. Though he did not know what the sodal meant by talking of extracts of life being buoyed up on galactic fluxes, it sounded like his experience in the strange cave with eyes. He wished he could ask the morel about it.
‘The sharp-furs are coming!’ Yattmur cried. ‘Listen! I can hear them shouting.’
Looking back down the way they had come, she saw tiny figures in the gloaming, some still bearing smoky torches, climbing slowly but climbing steadily, swarming uphill mainly on all fours.
‘Where do we go?’ Yattmur asked. ‘They’ll be upon us if you don’t stop talking, Sodal.’
Shaken out of his contemplation, Sodal Ye said, ‘We have to move higher up the crest of the mountain. Only a little way. Behind this big spur sticking up ahead is a secret way leading down among the rocks. There we strike a passage leading right through the cliff down to Bountiful Basin. Don’t worry – those wretches have some distance to climb yet.’
Gren had started moving towards the spur before Sodal Ye stopped speaking.
Anxiously propping Laren over one shoulder, Yattmur ran forward. Then she paused.
‘Sodal,’ she said. ‘Look! One of the traversers has crashed behind the spur. Your escape way will be completely blocked!’
The spur stood up crazily on the sheer edge of the cliff, like a chimney built on top of a steeply-pitched roof. Behind it, massive and firm, lay the bulk of a traverser. Only the fact that they viewed its shadowed side, which rose up like part of the ground, had prevented their noticing it earlier.
Sodal Ye let out a great cry.
‘How are we to get under