Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [86]
They gained the ridge, the stalker hauled itself stiffly over the lip, and the mountain was in full view.
No sight could have been more splendid.
All about, night or a pale brother of night reigned supreme. Nothing stirred; only the chilly breeze moved with stealth through the valleys unseen below them, like a stranger in a ruined town at midnight. If they were not beyond the world, as Yattmur thought, they were beyond the world of vegetation. Utter emptiness obscured utter darkness beneath their feet, magnifying their least whisper to a stammering shriek.
From all this desolation rose the mountain, high and sublime; its base was lost in blackness; its peaks soared tall enough to woo the sun, to fume in rosy warmth, to throw a reflection of that glow into the wide trough of obscurity at its foot.
Taking Yattmur’s arm, Gren pointed silently. Other stalkers had crossed the darkness they had crossed; three of them could be seen steadily mounting the slopes ahead. Even their aloof and eerie figures mitigated the loneliness.
Yattmur woke the tummy-bellies, keen to let them see the prospect. The three plump creatures kept their arms round each other as they gazed up at the mountain.
‘O the eyes make a good sight!’ they gasped.
‘Very good,’ Yattmur agreed.
‘O very good, sandwich lady! This big chunk of ripe day makes a hill of a hill shape to grow in this night-and-death place for us. It is a lovely sun slice for us to live in as a happy home.’
‘Perhaps so,’ she agreed, though already she foresaw difficulties beyond their simpler comprehensions.
They climbed. It grew lighter. Finally they emerged from the margin of shadow. The blessed sun shone on them again. They drank the sight of it until their eyes were blinded and the sombre valleys beneath them danced with orange and green spots. Compressed to lemon shape and parboiled crimson by atmosphere, it simmered at them from the ragged lip of the world, its rays beating outwards over a panorama of shadow. Broken into a confusing array of searchlights by a score of peaks thrusting up from the blackness, the lowest strata of sunlight made a pattern of gilt wonderful to behold.
Unmoved by these vistas, the stalker continued immutably to climb, its legs creaking at every step. Beneath it scuttled an occasional crawlpaw, heading down towards the shrouded valley and ignoring their progress upward. At last the stalker came to a position almost in the dip between two of the three peaks. It halted.
‘By the spirits!’ Gren exclaimed. ‘I think it means to carry us no farther.’
The tummy-bellies set up a hullabaloo of excitement, but Yattmur looked round doubtfully.
‘How do we get down if the stalker is not going to sink as the morel said?’ she asked.
‘We must climb down,’ Gren said, after some thought, when the stalker showed no further sign of moving.
‘Let me see you climb down first. With the cold, and with crouching here too long, my limbs are as stiff as sticks.’
Looking defiantly at her, Gren stood up and stretched himself. He surveyed the situation. Since they had no rope, they had no means of getting down. The smoothly bulging skins of the seed drums prevented the possibility of their climbing down on to the stalker’s legs. Gren sat again, lapsing into blackness.
‘The morel advises us to wait,’ he said. He put an arm about Yattmur’s shoulders, ashamed of his own helplessness.
There they waited. There they ate a morsel more of their food, which had begun to sprout mould. There they had perforce to fall asleep; and when they woke the scene had changed hardly at all, except that a few more stalkers now stood silent farther down the slopes, and that thick clouds were drawing across the sky.
Helpless, the humans lay there while nature continued