Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [50]
Twanging at their brains, it roused Gren and Poyly. Though they turned over exhaustedly, there was no escaping that inner voice.
‘Gren! Poyly! I have made a great discovery! We are more nearly brothers than you know!’
Pulsing with an emotion they had never before known it to show, the morel forced on them pictures stored in their own limbos of unconscious memory.
It showed them first the great age of man, an age of fine cities and roads, an age of hazardous journeys to the nearer planets. The time was one of great organization and aspiration, of communities, communes and committees. Yet the people were not noticeably happier than their predecessors. Like their predecessors, they lived in the shade of various pressures and antagonisms. All too easily they were crushed by the million under economic or total warfare.
Next, the morel showed, Earth’s temperatures began to climb as the sun went into its destructive phase. Confident in their technology, the people prepared to meet this emergency.
‘Show us no more,’ Poyly whimpered, for these scenes were very bright and painful. But the morel paid her no heed and continued to force knowledge upon her.
As their preparations were being made, people began to fall sick. The sun was pouring out a new band of radiation, and gradually all mankind succumbed to the strange sickness. It affected their skin, their eyes – and their brains.
After a prolonged spell of suffering, they became immune to the radiations. They crawled forth from their beds. But something had changed. They no longer had the power to command and cogitate and fight.
They were like different creatures!
They crawled away from their great and beautiful towns, left their cities, deserted their houses – as if all that had once been home had suddenly become alien. Their social structures also collapsed, and all organization died overnight. From then on, the weeds began to flourish in the streets, and the pollen to blow over the cash registers; the advance of the jungle had begun.
The downfall of man happened not gradually but in one dreadful rush, like the collapse of a tall tower.
‘It’s enough,’ Gren told the morel, struggling against its power. ‘What is past is no concern of ours. Why should we care what happened so very long ago? You’ve worried us enough! Let us sleep.’
A curious sensation took him, as if his inside were being rattled while his outside remained still. The morel was metaphorically shaking him by the shoulders.
‘You are so indifferent,’ twanged the morel, still gripped by excitement. ‘You must attend. Look! We are going back now to very distant days, when man had no history or heritage, when he was not even Man. He was then a puny thing similar to what you are now…’
And Poyly and Gren could do nothing but see the visions that followed. Though the glimpses were blurred and muddy, they watched tarsier-like people sliding down trees and running barefoot among the ferns. They were small people, nervous and without language. They squatted and pranced and hid in bushes. No detail was clear, for there had never been clear perception to record it. Scents and sounds were sharp – yet taunting as a riddle. The humans saw merely flashes of half-light, as in that primaeval world the little lives scampered and enjoyed and died.
For no reason that they recognized, nostalgia flooded them and Poyly wept.
A clearer picture came. A group of the little people paddled in marsh under giant ferns. From the ferns, things dropped and landed on their heads. The things that dropped were recognizable as morel fungi.
‘In that early oligocene world, my kind was the first to develop intelligence,’ twanged the morel. ‘There’s the proof of it! In ideal conditions of gloom and moisture we first discovered the power of thought. But thought needs limbs it can direct. So we became parasitic on those small creatures, your remote ancestors!