Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [68]
All over the walls and roof of the cave were protruding rods of rock, pointing inwards and ending in eye sockets similar to those on the outside of the cliff. These eye sockets too were watchful; as the tummy-belly men bumped into them, they rolled back lids and began to stare, one by one, more and more.
Finding they were cornered, the men began to sprawl in the sand at Gren’s feet and set up a hullabaloo for mercy.
‘O mighty big killing lord with strong skin, O king of running and chasing, look how we ran to you when we saw you! How glad we are to honour our poor old tummy-eyes with a sight of you. We ran straight to you, though our poor running was confused and somehow our legs sent us the wrong way instead of happy right ways because the rain confused us.’
More eyes were opening round the cave now, directing a stony stare at the group. Gren seized one of the tummy-bellies roughly by his hair and pulled him into a standing position; at this the others fell quiet, glad perhaps that they had been momentarily spared.
‘Now you listen to me,’ Gren said, through clenched teeth. He had come to hate these people with a fierce aversion, for they drew out all the latent bullying instincts in him. ‘I wish none of you harm, as I’ve told you before. But you have all got to get out of here at once. Danger waits here. Back on to the beach, quick, the lot of you!’
‘You will stone us – ’
‘Never mind what I’ll do! Do what I say. Move!’ And as he spoke he sent the fellow reeling towards the cave mouth.
Then what Gren thought of afterwards as the Mirage began.
A critical number of eyes in the cave walls had opened.
Time stopped. The world turned green. The tummy-belly man by the cave mouth perched on one leg in a flying attitude, turned green, petrified in his absurd position. The rain behind him turned green. Everything green and immobile.
And shrinking. To dwindle. To shrivel and contract. To become a drop of rain falling forever down the lungs of the heavens. Or to be a grain of sand marking an eternal tumble through hourglasses of endless time. To be a proton speeding inexhaustibly through its own pocket-sized version of limitless space. Finally to reach the infinite immensity of being nothing… the infinite richness of non-existence… and thus of becoming God… and thus of being the top and tail of one’s own creation…
… of summoning up a billion worlds to rattle along the green links of every second… of flying through uncreated stacks of green matter that waited in a vast ante-chamber of being for its hour or eon of use…
For he was flying, wasn’t he? And these happier notes alongside (weren’t they?), were the beings that he or someone else, someone on another plane of memory, had once called ‘tummy-bellies’. And if it was flight, then it was happening in this impossible green universe of delight, in some element other than air and in some flux apart from time. And they were flying in light, emitting light.
And they were not alone.
Everything was with them. Life had replaced time, that was it; death had gone, for the clocks here would tick off fertilities only. But two of the everythings were familiar…
In that vague other existence – oh it was so hard to recall, a dream within a dream – that existence connected with a beach of sand and grey rain (grey? that could be nothing like green, for green had no likenesses), in that existence there had been a great bird diving and a great beast emerging from the sea… and they had come through the… mirage and were here in this same sappy delight. The element about them was full of the assurance that here there was room for everything to grow and develop without conflict, to develop forever if needed, tummy-belly, bird or monster.
And he knew that the others had been directed to the mirage in a way he had not. Not that it mattered, for here was the sugar of being, of just being in this effortless eternal flight/ dance/song, without time or scale or worry.
With only the fulfilment of growing green and good.
– Yet he was somehow falling behind the others! His first impetus