Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [84]
‘O big little tailless herder, you should have been kind and killed us with killing cruelly long when we could sweat, in the time when we still grew on happy long tails. Now here comes the black old end of the world to chop its jaws over us without tails. Alas the happy sunshine, O poor us!’
He could not stop their cries. Ahead lay the darkness, piled up like layers of slate.
Emphasizing that mottled blackness stood one small hill. It stuck up uncompromisingly before them, bearing the weight of the night on its shattered shoulders. Where the sun struck its upper levels it had a golden touch, the world’s last colour of defiance. Beyond it lay obscurity. Already they were climbing its lower slopes. The stalker toiled upwards into light; stretched out across the valley, five more stalkers could be seen, one near, four more half lost in murk.
The stalker was labouring. Yet it climbed up into the sunshine and continued on without pause.
The forest too had come through the valley of shadow. For this it had fought its way through the gloom: to be able to fling its last wave of greenery up the last strip of lit ground. Here, on slopes looking back towards the ever-setting sun, it threw off its blights to grow in something like its old exuberance.
‘Perhaps the stalker will stop here,’ Yattmur said. ‘Do you think it will, Gren?’
‘I don’t know. Why should I know?’
‘It must stop here. How can it go any farther?’
‘I don’t know, I tell you. I don’t know.’
‘And your morel?’
‘He does not know either. Leave me alone. Wait to see what happens.’
Even the tummy-bellies fell silent, staring about them at the weird scene in mingled fear and hope.
Without giving any indication that it ever meant to stop, the stalker climbed on, creaking up the hill. Its long legs continued to pick a safe course through the foliage, until it dawned on them that wherever it intended to go, it was not stopping here on this last bastion of light and warmth. Now they were at the brow of the hill, yet still it marched, an automatic vegetable thing they suddenly hated.
‘I’m going to jump off!’ Gren cried, standing up. Yattmur, catching the wildness in his eyes, wondered whether it was he or the morel that spoke. She wrapped her arms round his thighs, crying that he would kill himself. With his stick half lifted to strike her, he paused – the stalker, unpausing, had commenced to climb down the unlit side of the hill.
Just for a moment the sun still shone on them. They had a last glimpse of a world with gold in the dull air, a floor of black foliage, and another stalker looming up on their left flank. Then the shoulder of the hill shrugged upwards, and down they jolted into the world of night. With one voice they gave forth a cry: a cry that echoed into the unseen wastes about them, dying as it fled.
For Yattmur only one interpretation of events was possible. They had stepped out of the world into death.
Dumbly she buried her face into the soft hairy flank of the nearest tummy-belly, until the steadily continued jolting of the stalker persuaded her that she had not entirely lost company with the things that were.
Gren said, grasping at what the morel told him, ‘This world is fixed with one half always turned towards the sun… we are moving into the night side, across the terminator… into perpetual dark…’
His teeth were chattering. She clasped him, opening her eyes for the first time to search for sight of his face.
In the darkness it floated, a ghost of a face from which she nevertheless drew comfort. Gren put his arms round the girl, so that they crouched there together with cheeks touching. The posture gave her warmth and courage enough to peer furtively around.
She had visualized in her terror a place of reeling emptiness, imagining that perhaps they had fallen into some cosmic seashell washed up on the mythical beaches of the sky. Reality was less impressive and more nasty. Directly overhead, a memory of sunlight lingered, illumining the vale into which they plodded.