Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [112]
Absolute silence fell, a silence of surprise, as Yellow Whiskers’ cries died.
In the next moment, our fate is decided, Gren thought. His blood ran too high for him to care. He sensed Yattmur, Lily-yo and the other humans behind him, but he did not deign to look back at them.
Yattmur leant forward to the broken and bloodied object lying at their feet. The head by its severance had been reduced to a mere thing, a thing of horror. Looking into the watery jelly that had been eyes, Yattmur read there the fate of all three tummy-belly men.
Unheard she cried, ‘And they were always so gentle with Laren!’
Then the noise broke out behind her.
A terrible roar burst forth, a roar of alien cadence and power, a roar – breaking over their heads so unexpectedly – that turned her blood to snow. The sharp-furs cried in awe: then they turned about, jostling and fighting to get back into the safety of the shadows below the crest of the mountain.
Deafened, Gren looked round. Lily-yo and her companions were heading back towards the dying traverser. Yattmur was trying to pacify the baby. Hands over their heads, the Arabler women lay prone on the ground.
Again the noise came, swelling with an anguished despair. Sodal Ye had recovered consciousness and cried aloud his wrath. And then, opening his fleshy mouth with its huge lower lip, he spoke, in words that only gradually merged into sense.
‘Where are your empty-headed heads, you creatures of the darkling plains. You have toads in the head, not to understand my prophecies where the green pillars grow. Growing is symmetry, up and down, and what is called decay is not decay but the second part of growth. One process, you toad-heads – the process of devolution, that carries you down into the green well from which you came… I’m lost in the mazes – Gren! Gren, like a mole I tunnel through an earth of understanding… Gren, the nightmares – Gren, from the fish’s belly I call to you. Can you hear me? It’s I – your old ally the morel!’
‘Morel?’
In his astonishment, Gren dropped to his knees before the catchy-carry-kind. Blank-faced, he stared at the leprous brown crown that now adorned its head. As he stared, the eyes opened, filmily at first, and then they focused on him.
‘Gren! I was near death… Ah, the pain of consciousness… Listen, man, it is I, your morel, who speaks. I hold the sodal in check, and am using his faculties, as once I had to use yours; there’s so much richness in his mind – coupling it with my own knowledge… ah, I see clearly not just this little world but all the green galaxy, the evergreen universe…’
Frantically, Gren jumped up.
‘Morel, are you crazed? Do you not see what a position we are in here, all about to be killed by these sharp-furs when they gather courage to charge? What are we to do? If you are truly here, if you are sane, help us!’
‘I’m not crazed – unless to be the only wise creature in a toad-minded world is to be crazed… All right, Gren, I tell you help comes! Look into the sky!’
The landscape had long been suffused with an uncanny light. Away in the distant and unbroken ranks of jungle stood the green pillar, joined now by another which had formed some way off. They seemed to taint the lower atmosphere with their glow, so that it did not surprise Gren to see cloud bars of viridescent hue striping the sky. From one of these clouds dropped a traverser. Falling at leisurely speed, it seemed to aim at the promontory on which Gren and the others stood.
‘Is it coming here, morel?’ Gren asked. Though he resented the resurrection of the tyrant that had recently sapped his life blood, he saw that the fungus, dependent on the legless sodal, could offer him only help, not harm.
‘It’s descending here,’ the morel answered. ‘You and Yattmur and the baby come and lie down here so that it does not crush you when it lands. It is probably coming to mate – to cross-fertilize – with the dying traverser. Directly it gets down, we must climb on to it. You must carry me, Gren, do you understand? Then I’ll tell you what else to do.’
As he spoke through the sodal’s blubber