Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [34]
Breathing hard, the two girls turned their attention to Gren, who still lay pinned beneath the cage.
‘Can you get me out?’ he asked, looking up helplessly at them.
‘I am leader. Of course I can get you out,’ Toy said. Using some of the knowledge she had gained from dealing with the alligator, she said, ‘This cage is a part of the tree. We will make it move and let you go.’
She knelt down and began to saw at the bars of the cage with her knife.
Over the land where the banyan ruled, covering everything with its layers of green, the chief problem for lesser breeds was to propagate their kind. With plants like the whistlethistle that had developed the curious dumblers, and the burnurn that had turned its seedcases into weapons, the solution of this problem was ingenious.
No less ingenious were some of the solutions of the flora of Nomansland to their particular problem. Here the main problem was less one of propagation than of sustenance; this accounted for the radical difference between these outcasts of the beaches and their cousins inland.
Some trees like the mangroves waded into the sea and fished deadly seaweeds for mulch. Other like the killerwillows took on the habits of animals, hunting in the manner of carnivores and nourishing themselves on decomposed flesh. But the oak, as one million-year stretch of sunlight succeeded another, shaped some of its extremities into cages and caught animals alive, letting their dung feed its starving roots. Or if they eventually starved to death, in decomposing they would still feed the tree.
Nothing of this Toy knew. She knew only that Gren’s cage should move, just as the one enclosing the alligator had done. Grimly, with Poyly helping, she hacked at the bars. The two girls worked at each of the twelve bars in turn. Perhaps the oak assumed the damage being done was greater in fact than it was; the bars were suddenly pulled from the ground and the whole contraption sprang up into the boughs above them.
Ignoring tabu, the girls grabbed Gren and ran with him back to the rest of the party.
When they were reunited, they devoured the alligator meat, keeping guard as they did so.
Not without a certain amount of boasting, Gren told them what he had seen inside the termight’s nest. They were unbelieving.
‘Termights have not enough sense to do all that you say,’ Veggy said.
‘You all saw the castle they made. You sat on it.’
‘In the forest, termights have not so much sense,’ May said, backing Veggy up as usual.
‘This is not the forest,’ Gren said. ‘New things happen here. Terrible things.’
‘Only in your head they happen,’ May teased. ‘You tell us about these funny things so that we will forget you did wrong to disobey Toy. How could there be windows underground to look out on to the sea?’
‘I tell you only what I saw,’ Gren said. He was angry now. ‘In Nomansland, things are different. It is the way. Many termights also had a bad fungus growth on them such as I have not seen before. I have seen this fungus again since then. It looks bad.’
‘Where did you see it?’ Shree asked.
Gren threw a curiously-shaped piece of glass into the air and caught it, perhaps pausing to create suspense, perhaps because he was not too keen to mention his recent fright.
‘When I was caught by the snaptrap tree,’ he said, ‘I looked up into its branches. There among the leaves I saw a fearful thing. I could not make out what it was until the leaves stirred. Then I saw one of the fungi that grew on the termights, all shining like an eye and growing on the tree.’
‘Too many things bring death here,’ she said. ‘Now we must move back to the forest where we can live happily. Get up, all of you.’
‘Let me finish this bone off,’ Shree said.
‘Let Gren finish his story,’ Veggy said.
‘Get up, all of you. Tuck your souls in your belts, and do as I order.’
Gren slipped his curious glass under his belt and jumped