Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [91]
‘Give him to me. He won’t be hurt,’ Gren said. ‘A young human could be taught so much.’
Though his movements were generally lethargic, he jumped up with all swiftness. She leapt away angrily, hissing at him, drawing her knife, afraid in all her fibres. She showed him her teeth like an animal.
‘Keep away.’
Laren sent out an irritable wail.
‘Give me the baby,’ Gren said again.
‘You are not yourself. I’m frightened of you, Gren. Sit down again! Stay away! Stay away!’
Still he came forward in a curiously slack way as if his nervous system was having to respond to two rival centres of control. She raised her knife, but he took absolutely no notice of it. In his eyes hung a blind look like a curtain.
At the last moment, Yattmur broke. Dropping her knife, she turned and sprinted from the cave, clutching her baby tightly.
Thunder came tumbling down the hill at her. Lightning sizzled, striking one strand of a great traverser web that stretched from nearby up into the clouds. The strand spluttered and flared until rain quenched it. Yattmur ran, making for the cave of the tummy-bellies, not daring to glance back.
Only when she reached it did she realize how unsure she was of her reception. By then it was too late to hesitate. As she burst in out of the rain, tummy-bellies and mountainears jumped up to meet her.
chapter twenty-three
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Gren sank to his hands and knees among the painful stones at the mouth of the cave.
Complete chaos had overtaken his impressions of the external world. Pictures rose like steam, twisting in his inner mind. He saw a wall of tiny cells, sticky like a honeycomb, growing all about him. Though he had a thousand hands, they did not push down the wall; they came away thick with syrup that bogged his movements. Now the wall of cells loomed above his head, closing in. Only one gap in it remained. Staring through it, he saw tiny figures miles distant. One was Yattmur, down on her knees, gesticulating, crying because he could not get to her. Other figures he made out to be the tummy-bellies. Another he recognised as Lily-yo, the leader of the old group. And another – that writhing creature! – he recognized as himself, shut out from his own citadel.
The mirage fogged over and vanished.
Miserably, he fell back against the wall, and the cells of the wall began popping open like wombs, oozing poisonous things.
The poisonous things became mouths, lustrous brown mouths that excreted syllables. They impinged on him with the voice of the morel. They came so thickly on him from all sides that for a while it was only their shock and not their meaning that struck him. He screamed creakingly, until he realized the morel was speaking not with cruelty but regret; whereupon he tried to control his shivering and listen to what was being said.
‘There were no creatures like you in the thickets of Nomansland where my kind live,’ the morel pronounced. ‘Our role was to live off the simple vegetable creatures there. They existed without brain; we were their brains. With you it has been different. In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.
‘I have seen so much to amaze me in you that I forgot what I should have been about. You have captured me, Gren, as surely as I have captured you.
‘Yet the time has come when I must remember my true nature. I have fed on your life to feed my own; that is my function, my only way. Now I reach a point of crisis, for I am ripe.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Gren said dully.
‘A decision lies before me. I am soon to divide and sporulate; that is the system by which I reproduce, and I have little control over it. This I could do here, hoping that my progeny would survive somehow on this bleak mountain against rain and ice and snow. Or… I could transfer to a fresh host.’
‘Not to my baby.’
‘Why not to your baby? Laren is the only choice for me. He is young and fresh; he will