Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [16]
Flor’s was the first she found, half-buried though it was. A blow with a stone shattered it. Lily-yo lifted up her friend, as hideously transformed as she, and in a short while Flor roused. Inhaling the strange air raucously, she too sat up. Lily-yo left her to seek the others. Even in her dazed state, she thanked her aching limbs for feeling so light of body.
Daphe was dead. She lay stiff and purple in her urn. Though Lily-yo shattered it and called aloud, Daphe did not stir. Her swollen tongue stayed dreadfully protruding from her mouth. Daphe was dead, Daphe who had lived, Daphe who had been the sweet singer.
Hy was also dead, a poor shrivelled thing lying in a coffin that had cracked on its arduous journey between the two worlds. When that coffin shattered under Lily-yo’s blow, Hy too fell away to powder. Hy was dead, Hy who had born a man child, Hy always so fleet of foot.
Jury’s urn was the last. She stirred as the headwomen reached her and brushed the burrs from her transparent box. A minute later, she was sitting up, eyeing her deformities with a stoical distaste, breathing the sharp air. Jury lived.
Haris staggered over to the women. In his hand he carried his soul.
‘Four of us!’ he exclaimed. ‘Have we been received by the gods or no?’
‘We feel pain – so we live,’ Lily-yo said. ‘Daphe and Hy have fallen to the green.’
Bitterly, Haris flung down his soul and trampled it underfoot.
‘Look at us! Better be dead!’ he said.
‘Before we decide that, we will eat,’ said Lily-yo.
Painfully, they retreated into the thicket, alerting themselves once more to the idea of danger. Flor, Lily-yo, Jury, Haris, each supported the other. The idea of tabu had somehow been forgotten.
chapter five
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‘No proper trees grow here,’ Flor protested, as they pushed among giant celeries whose crests waved high above their heads.
‘Take care!’ Lily-yo said. She pulled Flor back. Something rattled and snapped, like a chained dog, missing Flor’s leg by inches.
A trappersnapper, having missed its prey, was slowly reopening its jaws, baring its green teeth. This one was only a shadow of the terrible trappersnappers spawned on the jungle floors of earth. Its jaws were weaker, its movements far more circumscribed. Without the shelter of the giant banyans, the trappersnappers were disinherited.
Something of the same feeling overcame the humans. They and their ancestors for countless generations had lived in the high trees. Safety was arboreal. Trees there were here, but only celery and parsley trees offering neither the rock-steadiness nor the unlimited boughs of the giant trees.
So they journeyed, nervous, lost, in pain, knowing neither where they were nor why they were.
They were attacked by leapycreepers and sawthorns, and beat them down. They skirted a thicket of nettlemoss taller and wider than any to be met with on earth. Conditions that worked against one group of vegetation favoured others. They climbed a slope and came on a pool fed by a stream. Over the pool hung berries and fruits, sweet to taste, good to eat.
‘This is not so bad,’ Haris said. ‘Perhaps we can still live.’
Lily-yo smiled at him. He was the most trouble, the most lazy; yet she was glad he was still here. When they bathed in the pool she looked at him again. For all the strange scales that covered him, and the two broad sweeps of flesh that hung by his side, he was still good to look on just because he was Haris. She hoped she was also comely. With a burr she raked her hair back; only a little of it fell out.
When they had bathed, they ate. Haris worked then, collecting fresh knives from the bramble bushes. They were not so tough as the ones on earth, but they would have to do. Then they rested in the sun.
The pattern of their lives was completely broken. More by instinct than intelligence they had lived. Without the group, without