Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [75]
He flashed her a humble look of gratitude.
The big stones had long been part of the natural landscape. Where the brook ran among them they were buried in mud and pebbles. Grass and sedge grew on them, deep earth covered them in many places. In particular, here prospered a crop of the flowers that bore their seed pods aloft on tall stalks, which the humans had seen from the iceberg; these Yattmur had casually called stalkers, without realizing until much later how appropriate the title was.
Over the stones ran the roots of the stalkers, like so many lengths of petrified snake.
‘What a nuisance these roots are,’ grumbled Yattmur. ‘They grow everywhere!’
‘The funny thing is the way the roots from one plant grow into another as well as into the ground,’ Gren said, answering abstractedly. He was squatting by a branch of two roots, one of which ran back to one plant, one to another. After they had joined, they curled over a block of stone and down into an irregular gap between other stones to the earth.
‘You can get down there. You will come to no harm,’ said the morel. ‘Scramble down between the stones and see what you can see.’
A hint of that painful tune sprang again over Gren’s nerves.
He scrambled down between the blocks as he was directed, nimble as a lizard for all his reluctance. Feeling cautiously, he discovered that they rested on other blocks below, and those on other blocks below that. They lay loosely; by twisting his body he was able to slide himself down between their cool planes.
Yatmur climbed after him, showering down a gentle rain of dirt on to his shoulders.
After crawling down the depth of five blocks, Gren reached solid ground. Yattmur arrived beside him. Now they were able to move horizontally, half squashed between the walls of stone. Attracted by a lessening in the darkness, they squeezed along to a large space, large enough for them to stretch out their arms.
‘The smell of cold and dark is in my nostrils and I am afraid,’ Yattmur said. ‘What has your morel made us come down here for? What has he to tell of this place?’
‘He is excited,’ Gren replied, unwilling to admit that the morel was not communicating with him.
Gradually they began to see more clearly. The ground above had fallen away to one side, for the source of light was the sun, shining in horizontally between the piled stone, sending a thin ray probing there. It revealed twisted metal among the blocks, and an aperture ahead of them. In the collapse of these stones long ago, this gap had remained. Now the only living things here beside themselves were stalker roots, twisting down into the soil like petrified serpents.
Obeying the morel, Gren scrabbled in the grit at his feet. Here was more metal and more stone and brick, most of it immovable. Fumbling and tugging, he managed to pull out some broken bits of guttering; then came a long metal strip as tall as himself. One end of it was shattered; on the rest of it was a series of separate marks arranged to form a pattern:
OWRINGHEE
‘That is writing,’ wheezed the morel, ‘a sign of man when he had power in the world, uncounted ages ago. We are on his tracks. These must once have been his buildings. Gren, climb forward into the dark aperture and see what else you can find.’
‘It is dark! I cannot go in there.’
‘Climb forward, I tell you.’
Shards of glass glinted dully by the aperture. Rotted wood fell away all round it as Gren put a hand forward to steady himself. Plaster showered down on his head as he climbed through. On the other side of the aperture was a drop; Gren slid down a slope of rubble into a room, cutting himself on glass as he went.
From outside, Yattmur gave a squeak of alarm. He called back softly to reassure her, pressing a hand to his heart to steady it. Anxiously he stared about in the all-but-blackness. Nothing moved. The silence of the centuries, thick and cloying, lay here, lived here, more sinister than sound, more terrible than fear.
For a spell he stood frozen, until the morel nudged him.
Half the roof had collapsed. Metal beams and brick made