Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [33]
As the group crept forward, a soft-pelted thing rushed past on four legs and was gone before they had their wits about them.
‘We could have eaten that,’ Shree said grumpily. ‘Toy promised us the suckerbird to eat and we never got it.’
The thing had scarcely disappeared before there was a scuffle in the direction it had taken, a squeal, a hasty gobbling sound, and then silence.
‘Something else ate it,’ Toy whispered. ‘Spread out and we’ll stalk it. Knives ready!’
They fanned out and slid through the long grass, happy to engage in positive action. This part of the business of living they understood.
To track down the source of that quick gobbling sound was easy. The source was in captivity and could not move away.
From a particularly gnarled tree a pole hung; attached to the bottom of the pole was a crude cage consisting of only a dozen wooden bars. The bars dug down into the ground. Contained in the cage, its snout protruding one way, its tail another, was a young alligator. Some scattered pieces of pelt lay by its jaws, the remains of the furry thing the group had seen alive five minutes before.
The alligator stared at the humans as they emerged from the long grass and they stared back at it.
‘We can kill it. It cannot move,’ May said.
‘We can eat it,’ Shree said. ‘Even my soul is hungry.’
The alligator, thanks to its armour, proved difficult to kill. Right at the onset, its tail sent Driff spinning into a pile of shingle, where she cut her face badly. But by stabbing at it from all sides, and by blinding it, they at last exhausted it enough for Toy to thrust her hand bravely into the cage and cut the creature’s throat.
As the reptile threshed about in its death agony, a curious thing happened. The bars of the cage lifted upwards so that their pronged ends emerged from the ground, and the whole contraption clenched together like a hand. The straight pole above it twisted into several loops; it and the cage vanished up into the green boughs of the tree.
With exclamations of awe, the group seized their alligator and ran.
Winding their way through tight-packed tree trunks, they came on a bare outcrop of rock. It looked like a safe refuge, particularly as it was fringed by a spiky local variant of the whistlethistle.
Crouching on the rock, they began their unlovely meal. Even Driff joined in, though her face still bled from where she had grazed it on the shingle.
Scarcely were their jaws in motion than they heard Gren calling for help near at hand.
‘Wait here and guard the food,’ Toy commanded. ‘Poyly will come with me. We will go and find Gren and bring him back here.’
Her command was a good one. To travel with food was never wise; travelling alone was dangerous enough.
As she and Poyly skirted the thistles, Gren’s cry came again to guide them. The two girls moved round a bank of mauve cactus, and there he lay. He sprawled face downwards under a tree similar to the one beneath which they had killed the alligator, penned in a cage similar to the alligator’s.
‘Oh, Gren!’ cried Poyly. ‘How we missed you!’
Even as they ran towards him, a trailer creeper swung at him from the limb of a nearby tree, a creeper with a wet red mouth at its extremity, bright as a flower, poisonous-looking as a dripperlip. It swooped for Gren’s head.
Poyly’s feelings for Gren went deep. Without thought, she flung herself at the creeper, meeting it as it swung forward, catching it as high as possible to avoid those pulpy lips. Drawing a new knife, she severed the stem that pulsed beneath her fingers. Then she dropped back lightly to the ground. It was easy to avoid the mouth that now writhed there, ineffectually pursing and opening.
‘Above you, Poyly!’ Toy cried in warning, darting forward. The parasite, alerted now to danger, uncurled a full dozen of its trailing mouths. Gay and deadly, they swung about Poyly’s head. But Toy was beside her. Expertly they lopped