Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [49]
The herders muttered among themselves, keen to find an answer to her question. None presented itself to them. At length one of the women said, ‘The Fishers have long green tails, O spirit.’
This reply satisfied neither her nor the others. Gren laughed, and the morel launched him into a speech.
‘Oh you children of an empty mouth, you know too little and guess too much! Can you believe that people are able to grow long green tails? You are simple and helpless and we will lead you. We shall go down to the Long Water when we have slept and all of you will follow.
‘There we will make a Great Tribe, at first uniting with the Fishers, and then with other tribes in the forests. No longer shall we run in fear. All other things will fear us.’
In the reticulations of the morel’s brain grew a picture of the plantation these humans would make for it. There it would propagate in peace, tended by its humans. At present – it felt the handicap strongly – it had not sufficient bulk to bisect itself again, and so take over some of the herders. But as soon as it could manage it, the day would come when it would grow in peace in a well-tended plantation, there to take over control of all humanity. Eagerly it compelled Gren to speak again.
‘We shall no longer be poor things of the undergrowth. We will kill the undergrowth. We will kill the jungle and all its bad things. We will allow only good things. We will have gardens and in them we will grow – strength and more strength, until the world is ours as it was once long ago.’
Silence fell. The herders looked uneasily at each other, anxious yet self-defiant.
In her head, Poyly thought that the things Gren said were too big and without meaning. Gren himself was past caring. Though he looked on the morel as a strong friend, he hated the sensation of being forced to speak and act in a way often just beyond his comprehension.
Wearily, he flung himself down into a corner and dropped asleep almost immediately. Equally indifferent to what the others thought, Poyly too lay down and went to sleep.
At first the herders stood looking down in puzzlement at them. Then Hutweer clapped her hands for them to disperse.
‘Let them sleep for now,’ she said.
‘They are such strange people! I will stay by them,’ Yattmur said.
‘There is no need for that; time enough to worry about them when they wake,’ said Hutweer, pushing Yattmur on ahead of her.
‘We shall see how these spirits behave when the spirit of the Black Mouth sings,’ Iccall said, as he climbed outside.
chapter fourteen
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While Poyly and Gren slept, the morel did not sleep. Sleep was not in its nature.
At present the morel was like a small boy who dashes into a cave only to find it full of jewels; he had staggered into wealth unsuspected even by its owner and was so constituted that he could not help examining it. His first predatory investigation merged into excited wonder.
That sleep which Gren and Poyly slept was disturbed by many strange fantasies. Whole blocks of past experience loomed up like cities in a fog, blazed on their dreaming eye, and were gone. Working with no preconceptions which might have provoked antagonism from the unconscious levels through which it sank, the morel burrowed back through the obscure corridors of memory where Gren’s and Poyly’s intuitive responses were stored.
The journey was long. Many of its signs, obnubilated by countless generations, were misleading. The morel worked down to records of the days before the sun had begun to radiate extra energy, to the days when man was a far more intelligent and aggressive being than his present arboreal counterpart. It surveyed the great civilizations in wonder and puzzlement – and then it plunged back still further, far back, into much the longest mistiest epoch of man’s history, before history began, before he had so much as a fire to warm him at night, or a brain to guide his hand at hunting.
And