Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [90]
She put her free arm round him, only to feel him move away. Yet he said, as if the words came wrapped one by one in ice, ‘Help me, Yattmur. Be patient. I am ill.’
Now she was half-preoccupied with the other matter.
‘You’ll be better. But what are those savage mountainears doing? Can they be friendly?’
‘You’d better go and see,’ Gren said, still in his bleak voice. He disengaged her hand, went back inside the cave and lay down, resuming his former position with his hands clasped over his stomach. Yattmur sat down at the cave mouth, undecided. The tummy-bellies and mountainears had disappeared into the other cave. The girl stayed helplessly where she was, while clouds piled up overhead. Presently it began to rain, the rain turning to snow. Laren cried and was given a breast to suck.
Slowly the girl’s thoughts grew outwards, eclipsing the rain. Vague pictures hung in the air above her, pictures that despite their lack of logic were her way of reasoning. Her safe days in the tribe of herders was represented by a tiny red flower that could also, with just the tiniest shift of emphasis, be her, as her safe days had been her: she had not seen herself as a phenomenon distinct from the phenomena about her. And when she tried to do so now, she could only picture herself distantly, in a crowd of bodies, or as part of a dance, or as a girl whose turn it was to take the buckets to Long Water.
Now the red flower days were over, except that a new bud put forth petals at her breast. The crowd of bodies had gone, and vanished with it was the yellow shawl symbol. The lovely shawl! Perpetual sun overhead like a hot bath, innocent limbs, a happiness that did not know itself – these were the strands of the yellow shawl she pictured. Distinctly she saw herself throw it away to follow the wanderer whose merit was that he was the unknown.
The unknown was a big withered leaf in which something crouched. She had followed the leaf – the tiny figure of herself grew nearer and somehow more spiky – while shawl and red petals blew merrily off in the one way wind of time. Now the leaf turned flesh, rolling with her. She became a big figure, swarming with traffic, a land of milk and honeyed public parts. And in the red flower had been no music like the music of the fleshy leaf.
Yet it all faded. The mountain came marching in. Mountain and flower were opposed. Mountain rolled on forever, in one steep slope that had no bottom or top, though the base rested in black mist and the peak in black cloud. Black mist and cloud were reaching everywhere through her reverie, long-handed shorthand for evil; while by another of those tiny shifts of emphasis, the slope became not just her present life, but all her life. In the mind are no paradoxes, only moments; and in the moment of the slope, all the bright flowers and shawls and flesh were as if they had never been.
Thunder snored over the real mountain, rousing Yattmur from her reverie, scattering her pictures.
She looked back into the cave at Gren. He was unmoving. He did not look at her. Her daydreaming brought her the comprehension she sought, and she told herself, ‘It is the magic morel that has brought us this trouble. Laren and I are victims of it as much as poor Gren. Because it preys on him, he is ill. It is on his head and in his head. Somehow, I must find a way to deal with it.’
Comprehension was not the same as comfort. Gathering up the baby, tucking her breast away, she stood up.
‘I’m going to the cave of the tummy-bellies,’ she said, half expecting to get no reply.
Gren answered her.
‘You cannot take Laren through that pouring rain. Give him to me and I will take care of him.’
She crossed the floor towards him. Though the light was bad, she thought the fungus in his hair and round his neck looked darker than before. Certainly it was expanding, standing out over his forehead in a way it had never done. Sudden revulsion checked her movement as she began to offer him the baby.
He glanced up at her from under the morel with a look she could not recognize as his; it held the fatal