Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [30]
Gren and his guide came at last to where the broad tunnel divided into several lesser ones. Unhesitatingly, the guide chose a fork that sloped upwards into darkness. The darkness was broken suddenly as the termight pushed up a flat stone that covered the tunnel mouth and crawled into daylight.
‘You’ve been very kind,’ Gren said as he crawled out too. He kept as much distance as possible between himself and the brown growth.
The termight scurried back into the hole, pulling the stone into place with never a backward glance.
Nobody needed to tell Gren that he was now in Nomansland.
He could smell the smell of the sullen sea. He could hear the sound of the battle between the seaweeds and the land plants, though the noise was intermittent now, as both sides tired. He could sense a tension round him that never existed in the gentle middle layers of the forest where the human group had been born. Above all, he could see the sun glaring through the matted leaves over his head.
Underfoot, the ground was sour and pasty, a mixture of clay and sand with rocks frequently outcropping. It was infertile stuff, and the trees growing from it showed their sickness. Their trunks were distorted, their foliage meagre. Many of them had intertwined in an attempt to support each other; and where this attempt had failed, they lay spilled over the ground in horrible distortions. Moreover, some of them through the long centuries had evolved such curious ways of defending themselves that they hardly resembled tree forms at all.
Gren decided that his best policy was to creep to the land end of the peninsula and try and pick up the tracks of Toy and the others from there. Once he got to the sea’s edge, it should not be hard to see the peninsula; it would make a prominent landmark.
He had no doubt in which direction the sea lay, for he was able to look through the distorted trees and see the landward border of Nomansland. That was clearly designated.
Along a line that marked the end of good soil, the great banyan had established its outer perimeter. It stood unshakeably, though its boughs were scarred by innumerable assaults from bramble and claw. And to assist it, to help it repel the banished species of Nomansland, the creatures that used its shelter had gathered: trappersnappers, wiltmilts, berrywishes, pluggyrugs, and others, stood ready to scourge the slightest movement along its perimeter.
Keeping this formidable barrier at his back, Gren moved cautiously forward.
His progress was slow. Every sound made him jump. At one point he flung himself flat as a cloud of long deadly needles was launched at him from a thicket. Lifting his head, he saw a cactus shaking itself and rearranging its defences. He had never seen a cactus before; his stomach was like water to think of all the unknown perils about him.
A little later he met something stranger.
He stepped through a tree whose trunk had contorted itself into a loop. As he did so, the loop snapped together. Gren escaped constriction by the skin of his teeth and lost the skin of his legs. As he lay panting, an animal slid past almost near enough to touch.
It was a reptile, long and armoured, with a mirthless grin that revealed many teeth. Once (in the vanished days when humans had a name for everything) it had been called an alligator. It peered through goat’s eyes at Gren, then scuttled under a log.
Almost all animals had died out millennia ago. The sheer weight of vegetable growth, as the sun favoured green things, had crushed and extinguished them. Yet as the last of the old trees were beaten back to the swamps and the fringes of the ocean, a few animals had retreated with them. Here they protracted their existence in Nomansland, enjoying the heat and the savour of life while life lasted.
Going more cautiously