Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [42]
Although the morel remained unaware of the phrase ‘In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king,’ it was nevertheless in the same position of power. The life forms of the great hothouse world lived out their days in ferocity or flight, pursuit or peace, before falling to the green and forming compost for the next generation. For them there was no past and no future; they were like figures woven into a tapestry, without depth. The morel, tapping human minds, was different. It had perspective.
It was the first creature in a billion years to be able to look back down the long avenues of time. Prospects emerged that frightened, dizzied, and nearly silenced the harp-like cadences of its voice.
‘How can morel protect us from the terrors of the Ground?’ Poyly asked after a spell. ‘How can he protect us from a wiltmilt or a dripperlip?’
‘He knows things,’ Gren said simply. ‘He made us put on these fruit skins to hide us from enemies. They have kept us safe. When we find this other tribe we will be still safer.’
‘My fruit skin chafes my thighs,’ Poyly said, with a womanly gift for irrelevance that eons of time had not quenched.
As she lay there, she felt her mate’s hand grope for her thigh and rub it tenderly. But her eyes still wandered among the boughs overhead, alert for danger.
A vegetable thing as bright as a parakeet fluttered down and settled on a branch above them. Almost at once a jittermop fell from its concealment above, dropping smack on to the vegbird. Antipathetic liquids splashed. Then the broken vegbird was drawn up out of sight, only a smear of green juice marking where it had been.
‘A jittermop, Gren! We should move on,’ Poyly said, ‘before it falls on us.’
The morel too had seen this struggle – had in fact watched with approval, for vegbirds were great fanciers of a tasty morel.
‘We will move, humans, if you are ready,’ it said. One pretext for moving on was as good as another; being parasitic, it needed no rest.
They were reluctant to move from their temporary comfort even to avoid a jittermop, so the morel prodded them. As yet it was gentle enough with them, not wishing to provoke a contest of wills and needing their co-operation. Its ultimate objective was vague, vain-glorious and splendid. It saw itself reproducing again and again, until fungus covered the whole Earth, filling hill and valley with its convolutions.
Such an end could not be achieved without humans. They would be its means. Now – in its cold leisurely way – it needed as many humans under its sway as it could get. So it prodded. So Gren and Poyly obeyed.
They climbed back head downwards on to the trunk that was their highway, clinging to its rounded surface, and resumed their advance.
Other creatures used the same route, some harmless like the leafabians, making their endless leafy caravanserais from the depths of the jungle to its heights, some far from harmless, green in tooth and claw. But one species had left minute distinguishing marks down the trunk: a stab mark here, a stain there, that to a trained eye meant that humanity was somewhere near at hand. It was this trail the two humans followed.
The great tree and the denizens of its shade went about their business in silence. So did Gren and Poyly. When the marks they pursued turned along a side branch, they turned too, without discussion.
So they continued, horizontally and vertically, until Poyly glimpsed movement.