Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [76]
‘In the corner. A square thing. Go there,’ ordered the morel, using his eyesight to advantage.
Reluctantly, Gren picked his way across to the corner. Something scuttled from under his feet and out the way he had come; he saw six thick fingers, and recognized a crawlpaw like the one that had seized Yattmur’s ankle. A square box three times his height loomed over him, its front surface marked by three protruding semi-circles of metal. He could reach only the lowest of these semi-circles, which, the morel instructed him, were handles. He tugged at it obediently.
It opened the width of a hand, then stuck.
‘Pull, pull, pull!’ twanged the morel.
Growing savage, Gren pulled till the whole box rattled, but what the morel termed the drawer would come no farther. Still he pulled, while the tall box shook. Something was dislodged from the top of it. From high above Gren’s head, an oblong thing came crashing down. As he ducked, it fell to the floor behind him, sending up a cloud of dust.
‘Gren! Are you all right? What are you having to do down there? Come out!’
‘Yes, yes, I’m coming! Morel, we’ll never open this stupid box thing.’
‘What’s this object that nearly hit us? Examine it and let me see. Perhaps it is a weapon. If we could only find something to help us…’
The thing that had fallen was thin, long and tapered, like a flattened burnurn seed. It seemed to be composed of a material with a soft surface, not cold like metal. The morel pronounced it to be a container. When it found that Gren could lift it with comparative ease, it became excited.
‘We must carry this container to the surface,’ it said. ‘You can pull it up between the stones. We will examine it in daylight and find what it contains.’
‘But how can the thing help us? Will it get us to the mainland?’
‘I didn’t expect to find a boat down here. Have you no curiosity? This is a sign of power. Come on, move! You are as stupid as a tummy-belly.’
Smarting under this gross insult, Gren scrambled back up the debris to Yattmur. She clutched him, but would not touch the yellow case he carried. For a moment they whispered together, pressing each others’ genitals to gain strength; then they struggled up between the layers of tumbled stone back to daylight, dragging and pushing the container with them.
‘Phooo! Daylight tastes sweet!’ Gren muttered as he levered himself up the last block. As they emerged bruised and cut into the misty air, up came the tummy-bellies scampering, their tongues lolling out in relief. Dancing round their masters, they raised a hullabaloo of complaint and reproach at their absence.
‘Kill us please, pretty cruel master, before you jump again into the lips of the earth! Stab us with wicked killing before you leave us alone to fight unknown fights alone!’
‘Your bellies are too fat for you to have squeezed down that crevice with us,’ Gren said, ruefully examining his wounds. ‘If you’re so pleased to see us, why not get us some food?’
When Yattmur and he had bathed their cuts and bruises in the stream, he turned his attention to the container. Squatting over it carefully, he turned it over several times. There was a strangeness about its symmetry that alarmed him. Evidently the tummy-bellies felt the same.
‘That very bad strange shape for touching is a strange bad touching shape,’ one of them wailed, dancing up and down. ‘Please only do a touching for throwing it into the splashing watery world.’ He clung to his companions, and they peered down in silly excitement.
‘They offer you sensible advice,’ Yattmur said, but with the morel urging him, Gren sat down and took the container between feet and fingers. While he examined it, he felt the fungus snatch at his impressions as soon as they arrived in his brain; shivers ran along his spine.
On the top of the container was one of the patterns that the morel called writing. This one resembled
HECKLER or HECKLER
depending on which way you looked at it, and was followed by several