Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [7]
Slightly deflated, Gren jumped about, waving the strip of crocksock still wrapped round his left arm. He called and boasted at the women to show how little he cared for them.
‘You are a baby yet,’ hissed Toy. She was ten, his senior by one year. Gren fell quiet. The time would come to show them all that he was someone special.
Scowling, Lily-yo said, ‘The children grow too old to manage. When Flor and I have been to the Tips to bury Clat’s soul, we shall return and break up the group. Time has come for us to part. Guard yourselves!’
She saluted them and turned about with Flor beside her.
It was a subdued group that watched their leader go. All knew that the group had to split; none cared to think about it. Their time of happiness and safety – so it seemed to all of them – would be finished, perhaps forever. The children would enter a period of lonely hardship, fending for themselves before joining other groups. The adults embarked on old age, trial, and death when they Went Up into the unknown.
chapter two
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Lily-yo and Flor climbed the rough bark easily. For them it was like going up a series of more or less symmetrically placed rocks. Now and again they met some kind of vegetable enemy, a thinpin or a pluggyrug, but these were small fry, easily despatched into the green gloom below. Their enemies were the termight’s enemies, and the moving column had already dealt with the foes in its path. Lily-yo and Flor climbed close to the termights, glad of their company.
They climbed for a long while. Once they rested on an empty branch, capturing two wandering burrs, splitting them, and eating their oily white flesh. On the way up, they had glimpsed one or two groups of humans on different branches; sometimes these groups waved shyly, sometimes not. Eventually they climbed too high for humans.
Nearer the Tips, new dangers threatened. In the safer middle layers of the forest the humans lived, avoiding the perils of the Tips or the Ground.
‘Now we move on,’ Lily-yo told Flor, getting to her feet when they had rested. ‘Soon we will be at the Tips.’
A commotion silenced the two women. They looked up, crouching against the trunk for protection. Above their heads, leaves rustled as death struck.
A leapycreeper flailed the rough bark in a frenzy of greed, attacking the termight column. The leapycreeper’s roots and stems were also tongues and lashes. Whipping round the trunk, it thrust its sticky tongues into the termights.
Against this particular plant, flexible and hideous, the insects had little defence. They scattered but kept doggedly climbing up, each perhaps trusting in the blind law of averages to survive.
For the humans, the plant was less of a threat – at least when met on a branch. Encountered on a trunk, it could easily dislodge them and send them helplessly falling to the green.
‘We will climb on another trunk,’ Lily-yo said.
She and Flor ran deftly along the branch, once jumping a bright parasitic bloom round which treebees buzzed, a forerunner of the world of colour above them.
A far worse obstacle lay waiting in an innocent-looking hole in the branch. As Flor and Lily-yo approached, a tigerfly zoomed up at them. It was all but as big as they were, a terrible thing that possessed both weapons and intelligence – and malevolence. Now it attacked only through viciousness, its eyes large, its mandibles working, its transparent wings beating. Its head was a mixture of shaggy hair and armour-plating, while behind its slender waist lay the great swivel-plated body, yellow and black, sheathing a lethal sting in its tail.
It dived between the women, aiming to hit them with its wings. They fell flat as it sped past. Angrily, it tumbled against the branch as it turned on them again; its golden-brown sting flicked in and out.
‘I’ll get it!’ Flor said. A tigerfly had killed one of her babes.
Now the creature came in fast and low. Ducking, Flor reached up and seized its shaggy hair, swinging the tigerfly off balance. Quickly