Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [114]
The landscape tilted.
‘It’s too late,’ Gren said. ‘Hold tightly! We’re flying. Have you got Laren safely?’
The traverser had risen. Below them flashed the high cliff and they were falling down it, sweeping rapidly over rock. Bountiful Basin spun towards them, growing as it turned and came nearer.
Into long shade they slipped, then into light – their shadow pasted across the stippled water – into shade again, and then once more into light as they rose, gained certainty, and headed towards the plumed sun.
Laren gave a yelp of alarm and then returned to the breast, shutting his eyes as if it was all too much for him.
‘Gather round, everyone,’ cried the morel, ‘while I speak to you through this fish’s mouth. You must all listen to what I have to say.’
Clinging to fibrous hairs, they settled about him, only Gren and Yattmur showing any reluctance to do so.
‘Now I am two bodies,’ pronounced the morel, ‘I have taken control of this traverser; I am directing its nervous system. It will go only where I wish. Have no fear, for no harm will come to any of you immediately.
‘What is more fearful than flight is the knowledge I have drained from this fishy catchy-carry-kind, Sodal Ye. You must hear about it, for it alters my plans.
‘These sodals are people of the seas. While all other beings with intelligence have been isolated by vegetable life, the sodals in the freedom of the oceans have been able to keep in contact with all their communities. They can still rove the planet uninterruptedly. So they have gained rather than lost knowledge.
‘They have discovered that the world is about to end. Not immediately – not for many generations – but certainly it will end, and those green columns of disaster rising from the jungle to the sky are signs that the end has already begun.
‘In the really hot regions – regions unknown to any of us, where the burning bushes and other fire-using plants live – the green columns have already been for some time. In the sodal’s mind I find knowledge of them. I see some blazing on shores glimpsed from a steaming sea.’
The morel was silent. Gren knew how he would be dredging down for more intelligence. He shuddered, admiring somehow the morel’s excitement for facts, yet disgusted by his nature.
Underneath them, floating slowly by, bobbed the coast of the Lands of Perpetual Twilight. They showed appreciably brighter before the heavy lips moved and once more the voice of the sodal carried the thoughts of the morel.
‘These sodals don’t always understand all the knowledge they have gained. Ah, the beauty of the plan when you see it… Humans, there is this burning fuse of a force called devolution… How can I put it so that your tiny brains will understand?
‘Very long ago, men – your remote ancestors – discovered that life grew and evolved from, as it were, a speck of fertility: an amoeba, which served as the gateway to life like an eye of a needle, beyond which lay the amino acids and the inorganic world of nature. And this inorganic world too, they found, evolved in its complexity from one speck, a primal atom.
‘These vast processes of growth men came to understand. What the sodals have discovered is that growth incorporates also what men would have called decay: that not only does nature have to be wound up to wind down, it has to wind down to be wound up.
‘This creature I now inhabit knows the world is in a winding down phase. This he has vaguely been trying to preach to you lesser breeds.
‘At the beginning of this sun system’s time, all forms of life were blurred together and by perishing supplied other forms. They arrived on Earth from space like motes, like sparks, in Cambrian times. Then the forms evolved into animal, vegetable, reptile, insect – all varieties and species that flooded the world, many of them now gone.
‘Why are they gone? Because the galactic fluxes which determine the life of a sun are now destroying this sun. These same fluxes control animate life; they close it down as they will close Earth’s existence. So nature is devolving. Again the forms are blurring! They never ceased