Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [23]
A white tongue made them halt.
The tongue lowered itself gradually down to one side of them, keeping close to a sheltering trunk. Noiselessly it sank, pointing down from the Tips whence it had come towards the distant Ground, a fibrous cylindrical thing like a snake, tough and naked. The group watched it go, watched its tip sink out of sight through the foliage towards the dark floor of the forest, watched its visible length paying out.
‘A suckerbird!’ Toy said to the others. Although her leadership was still unsure, most of the other children – all of them but Gren – clustered round her and looked anxiously from her to the moving tongue.
‘Will it harm us?’ Fay asked. She was five, and the youngest by a year.
‘We will kill it,’ Veggy said. He was a man child. He jumped up and down on the branch so that his soul rattled. ‘I know how to kill it, I will kill it!’
‘I will kill it,’ Toy said, firmly asserting her leadership. She stepped forward, unwinding a fibre rope from her waist as she did so.
The others watched in alarm, not yet trusting to Toy’s skill. Most of them were already young adults, with the broad shoulders, strong arms, and long fingers of their kind. Three of them – a generous proportion – were men children: the clever Gren, the self-assertive Veggy, the quiet Poas. Gren was the oldest of the three. He stepped forward now.
‘I also know how to trap the suckerbird,’ he told Toy, eyeing the long white tube that still lowered itself into the depths. ‘I will hold you to keep you safe, Toy. You need help.’
Toy turned to him. She smiled because he was beautiful and because one day he would mate with her. Then she frowned because she was leader.
‘Gren, you are man now. It is tabu to touch you, except during the courtship seasons. I will trap the bird. Then we will all go to the Tips to kill and eat it. It shall be a great feast for us, to celebrate that I now lead.’
Gren’s and Toy’s gaze met challengingly. But just as she had not yet settled into her role as leader, so he had hardly assumed – and was indeed reluctant to assume – the role of rebel. He disagreed with her ideas, but tried as yet not to show it. He fell back, fingering the soul that dangled from his belt, the little wooden image of himself that gave him confidence.
‘Do as you please,’ he said – but Toy had already turned away.
On the topmost branches of the forest perched the suckerbird. Being of vegetable origin, it had little intelligence and only a rudimentary nervous system. What it lacked in this respect, it made up for in bulk and longevity.
Shaped like a mighty two-winged seed, the suckerbird could never fold its wings. They were capable of little movement, although the sensitive flexible fibres with which they were covered, and their overall span of some two hundred metres, made them masters of the breezes that stirred their hothouse world.
So the suckerbird perched, paying out that incredible tongue from its pouch down to the nourishment it needed in the obscure depths of the forest. At last the tender buds on its tip hit Ground.
Cautiously, slowly, the sensitive feelers of the tongue explored, ready to shrink from any of the many dangers of that gloomy region. Deftly, it avoided giant mildews and funguses. It found a patch of naked earth, soggy and heavy and full of nourishment. It bored down. It began to suck.
‘Right!’ Toy said when she was ready. She felt the excitement of the others behind her. ‘Nobody make a sound.’
Her rope was knotted to her knife. Now she leant forward and slipped the loose end about the white hose, knotting it in a slip knot. She sank her blade into the tree, thus securing the arrangement. After a moment, the tongue bulged and expanded up its length