Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [87]
The clouds came rumbling up from behind the mountain, big and black and pompous. They curdled through the passes, turning to sour milk where the sun lit them. Presently they obscured the sun. The whole mountainside was swallowed. It began to snow sluggish wet flakes like sick kisses.
Five humans burrowed together, turning their backs upwards to the drift. Underneath them, the stalker trembled.
Soon this trembling turned to a steady sway. The stalker’s legs sank a little into the moistened ground; then, as they too became softened by wet, they began to buckle. The stalker became increasingly bow-legged. In the mists of the mountainside, other stalkers lacking the assistance of weight on top of them – began slowly to copy it. Now the legs quivered farther and farther apart; its body sank lower.
Suddenly, frayed by the countless miles of travel and subverted by wet, its joints reached breaking point and split. The stalker’s six legs fell outwards, its body dropped to the muddy ground. As it hit, the six drums that comprised it burst, scattering notchy seeds all about.
This sodden ruin in the middle of snow was at once the end and the beginning of the stalker plant’s journey. Forced like all plants to solve the terrible problem of overcrowding in a hothouse world, it had done so by venturing into those chilly realms beyond the timberline where the jungle could not grow. On this slope, and a few similar ones within the twilight zone, the stalkers played out one phase of their unending cycle of life. Many of the seeds dispersed now would germinate, where they had plenty of space and some warmth, growing into the hardy little crawlpaws; and some of those crawlpaws, triumphing over a thousand obstacles, would eventually find their way to the realms of true warmth and light, there to root and flower and continue the endless vegetable mode of being.
When the seed drums split, the humans were flung aside into mud. Painfully they stood up, their limbs creaking with stiffness. So thickly swirled the snow and cloud about them that they could hardly see each other: their bodies became white pillars, illusory.
Yattmur was anxious to gather the tummy-belly men together before they became lost. Seeing a figure glistening in the thick dim light, she ran to it and grasped it. A face turned snarling towards her, yellow teeth and hot eyes flared into her face. She cowered from attack, but the creature was gone in a bound.
This was their first intimation that they were not alone on the mountain.
‘Yattmur!’ Gren called. ‘The tummy-bellies are here. Where are you?’
She went running to him, her stiffness forgotten in fright.
‘Something else is here,’ she said. ‘A white creature, wild and with teeth and big ears!’
The three tummy-bellies set up a cry to the spirits of death and darkness as Yattmur and Gren stared about.
‘In this filthy mess, it’s impossible to see anywhere,’ Gren said, dashing snow from his face.
They stood huddled together, knives ready. The snow slackened abruptly, turned to rain, cut off. Through the last shower they saw a line of a dozen white creatures bounding over a brow of the mountain towards the dark side. Behind them they pulled a sort of sledge loaded with sacks, from one of which a trail of stalker seeds bounced.
A ray of sun pierced across the melancholy hillsides. As if they feared it, the white creatures hurried into a pass and disappeared from view.
Gren and Yattmur looked at each other.
‘Were they human?’ Gren asked.
She shrugged. She did not know. She did not know what human meant. The tummy-bellies, now lying in the mud and groaning: were they human? And Gren, so impenetrable now that it seemed as if the morel had taken him over: could it be said he was still human?
So many riddles, some she could not even formulate in words, never mind answer… But once more the sun shone warm on her limbs. The sky was lined with crumpled lead and gilt. Above them on the mountain were caves. They could go there and build