Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [17]
As she lay, Lily-yo looked about her. All was strange, so that her heart beat faintly.
Though the sun shone bright as ever, the sky was as deep blue as a vandalberry. And the half-globe shining in the sky was streaked with green and blue and white, so that Lily-yo could not know it for somewhere she had lived. Phantom silver lines pointed to it, while nearer at hand the tracery of traverser webs glittered, veining the whole sky. Traversers moved over it like clouds, their great bodies slack.
All this was their empire, their creation. On their first journeys here, many millennia ago, the traversers had literally laid the seeds of this world. To begin with, they withered and died by the thousand on the inhospitable ash. But even the dead had brought their little levy of oxygen and other gases, soil, spores, and seed, some of which latter sprouted on the fruitful corpses. Under the weight of dozy centuries, these plants gained a sort of foothold.
They grew. Stunted and ailing in the beginning, they grew. With vegetal tenacity, they grew. They exhaled. They spread. They thrived. Slowly the broken wastes of the moon’s lit face turned green. In the craters creepers began to flower. Up the ravaged slopes the parsleys crawled. As the atmosphere deepened, so the magic of life intensified, its rhythm strengthened, its tempo increased. More thoroughly than another dominant species had once managed to do, the traversers colonized the moon.
Little Lily-yo knew or cared about any of this. She turned her face from the sky.
Flor had crawled over to Haris the man. She lay against him in the circle of his arms, half under the shelter of his new skin, and she stroked his hair.
Furious, up jumped Lily-yo. She kicked Flor on the shin, then flung herself upon her, using teeth and nails to pull her away. Jury ran to join in.
‘This is not time for mating!’ Lily-yo cried. ‘How dare you touch Haris?’
‘Let me go! Let me go!’ cried Flor. ‘Haris touched me first.’
Haris in his startlement jumped up. He stretched his arms, waved them, and rose effortlessly into the air.
‘Look!’ he shouted in alarmed delight. ‘Look what I can do!’
Over their heads he circled once, perilously. Then he lost his balance and came sprawling head first, mouth open in fright. Head first he pitched into the pool.
Three anxious, awe-struck and love-struck female humans dived in in unison to save him.
While they were drying themselves they heard the noises in the forest. At once they became alert, their old selves. They drew their swords and looked to the thicket.
The wiltmilt when it appeared was not like its earthly brothers. No longer upright like a jack-in-the-box, it groped its way along like a caterpillar.
The humans saw its distorted eye break from the celeries. Then they turned and fled.
Even when the danger was left behind, they still moved rapidly, not knowing what they sought. Once they slept, ate, and then again pressed on through the unending growth, the undying daylight, until they came to where the jungle gaped.
Ahead of them, everything seemed to cease and then go on again.
Cautiously they went to see what they had arrived at. The ground underfoot had been uneven. Now it broke altogether into a wide crevasse. Beyond the crevasse the vegetation grew again – but how did humans span that gulf? The four of them stood anxiously where the ferns ended, looking across at the far side.
Haris the man screwed his face in pain to show he had a troublesome idea in his head.
‘What I did before – going up in the air,’ he began awkwardly. ‘If we do it again now, all of us, we go in the air across to the other side.’
‘No!’ Lily-yo said. ‘When you go up you come down hard. You will fall to the green!’
‘I will do better than before. I think I have the art now.’
‘No!’ repeated Lily-yo. ‘You are not to go. You are not safe.’
‘Let him go,’ Flor said. ‘He says he has the art.’
The two women turned to glare at each other.