Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [45]
As they looked and listened, a horde of strange creatures poured over the pitted ground, loping from the depths of the forest with a strange gait. They were fibrous creatures, plants that over an immensity of eons had roughly learnt to copy the hare family.
Their running was slow and clumsy by the standards of the animals they superseded. As they moved, their fibrous sinews cracked sharply; they lurched from side to side. Each jumpvil had a head all scoop jaw and enormous ears, while its body was without line and irregularly coloured. The front legs were more like poor stumps, small and clumsy, while the hind pair were much longer and captured at least something of the grace of an animal’s leg.
Little of this was apparent to Gren and Poyly. To them, the jumpvils were merely a strange new species of creature with inexplicably ill-shaped legs. To Yattmur they meant something different.
Before they came into sight she pulled a weighted line from round her waist and balanced it between her hands. As the hordes thudded and clacked below the rock, she flung it dexterously. The line extended itself into a sort of elementary net, with the weights swinging at key points.
It tripped three of the queer-limbed creatures. At once Yattmur scrambled down, jumped at the jumpvils before they could right themselves, and secured them to the line.
All the rest of the herd parted, ran on, and disappeared. The three that had been captured stood submissively in vegetable defeat. Yattmur looked challengingly at Gren and Poyly as if relieved to have shown her mettle – but Poyly ignored her, pointing into the clearing ahead of them and shrinking against her companion.
‘Gren! Look! A – monster, Gren!’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘Did I not say this place was evil?’
Against a wide shoulder of rock, and near the path of the fleeing jumpvils, a silvery envelope was inflating. It stretched out into a great globe far higher than any human.
‘It’s a greenguts! Don’t watch it!’ Yattmur said. ‘It makes a bad thing for humans!’
But they stared, fascinated, for the envelope was now a soggy sphere, and on that sphere grew one eye, a huge jelly-like eye with a green pupil. The eye swivelled until it appeared to be regarding the humans.
A vast gap appeared low down in the envelope. The last few retreating jumpvils saw it, paused, then staggered round on a new course. Six of them jumped through the gap, which at once closed over them like a mouth, while the envelope began to collapse.
‘Living shadows!’ Gren gasped. ‘What is it?’
‘It is a greenguts,’ Yattmur said. ‘Have you never seen one before? Many of them live near here, stuck to the tall rocks. Come, I must take these jumpvils to the tribe.’
The morel thought differently. It twanged in the heads of Gren and Poyly. Reluctantly they moved towards the shoulder of rock.
The greenguts had entirely collapsed. It was drawn in, adhering to the rock like so many folds of wet tissue. A still moving bulge near the ground marked its bag of jumpvils. As they surveyed it in horror, it surveyed them with its one striated green eye. Then the eye closed, and they seemed to be looking only at rock. The camouflage was perfect.
‘It cannot hurt us,’ twanged the morel. ‘It is nothing but a stomach.’
They moved away. Again they followed Yattmur, walking painfully on the broken ground, the three captive creatures bumping along at their side as if this was something they did every day.
The ground sloped upwards. In their heads, the morel suggested that this was why the banyan was falling away overhead, and waited to see what they would answer.
Poyly said, ‘Perhaps these jumpvils have long back legs to help them get uphill.’
‘It must be so,’ said the morel.
But that’s absurd, thought Gren, for what about when they want to run downhill again? The morel cannot know everything, or it would not agree to Poyly’s silly idea.
‘You are right that I do not know everything,’ twanged the morel, surprising him. ‘But I am capable of learning quickly, which you are not – for unlike some past members of your race, you