Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [28]
Their world held an aspect of flat unreality. Because the great sun burnt overhead, their shadows lay like disregarded dirt below their feet. Everywhere was this same lack of shadow, lending the landscape its flat look. It was as dead as a poor painting.
The coastal battle raged like a fever. There was in this era (as in a sense there had always been) only Nature. Nature was supreme mistress of everything; and in the end it was as if she had laid a curse on her handiwork.
Overcoming her fears, Toy moved forward.
As they ran after Toy and away from that mysterious castle, their feet tingled; the stones beneath their feet were stained with brown poison. In the heat it had dried to harmlessness.
Noise of battle filled their ears. Spume drenched them – but the combatants paid them no attention, so absorbed were they in their mindless antagonism. Frequent explosions now ploughed the sea’s face. Some of the Nomansland trees, beleaguered for century after century in their narrow strip of territory, had plunged their roots down into the meagre sands to find not only nourishment but a way of defence against their enemies. They had discovered charcoal, they had drawn up sulphur, they had mined potassium nitrate. In their knotty entrails they had refined and mixed them.
The gunpowder that resulted had been carried up through sappy veins to nut cases in the topmost branches. These branches now hurled their explosive weapons at the seaweeds. The torpid sea writhed under the bombardment.
Toy’s plan was not a good one: it succeeded through luck rather than judgment. To one side of the land end of the peninsula, a great mass of seaweed had threshed itself far out of the water and covered a gunpowder tree. By sheer weight, it was pulling the tree down, and a fight to the death raged about it. The little humans burst past, and fled into the shelter of tall couch grass.
Only then did they realize Gren was not with them.
chapter eight
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Gren still lay in the blinding sun, hunched behind the ramparts of the castle.
Fear had been the chief but not the only cause for his remaining behind. He had felt, as he had told Toy, that obedience was important. Yet he was by nature hard put to it to obey. Particularly so in this case, when the plan Toy offered seemed to hold such slight hope for survival. Also, he had an idea of his own, though he found it impossible to express verbally.
‘Oh, how can anyone speak!’ he said to himself. ‘There seem so few words. Once there must have been more words!’
His idea concerned the castle.
The rest of the group were less thoughtful than Gren. Directly they had landed on it, their attention had been directed elsewhere. Not so Gren’s; he realized that the castle was not of rock. It had been built with intelligence. Only one species could have built it and that species would have a safe way from the castle to the coast.
So in a little while, after Gren had watched his companions run down the stony path, he rapped with his knife handle on the wall beside him.
At first the knock went unanswered.
Without warning, a section of the tower behind Gren swung open. He turned at the faint sound, to face eight termights emerging from darkness.
Once declared enemies, now termight and human faced each other almost in kinship, as though the teeming millennia of change had wrought a bond between them. Now that men were outcasts rather than the inheritors of Earth, they met the insects on equal terms.
The termights surrounded Gren and inspected him, their mandibles working. He stood still, motionless as their white bodies brushed round him. They were nearly as big as he was. He could smell their smell, acrid but not unpleasant.
When they had satisfied themselves that Gren was harmless, the termights marched to the ramparts. Whether they could see or not in glaring daylight Gren did not know, but at least they could hear the sounds of the sea struggle clearly enough.
Tentatively, Gren moved over to the opening in the tower. A strange cool odour