The Lotus Caves

by John Christopher

  “And if it grew several trees along the lake edge, we could swing from one to the other on the vines. And wind up swinging out across the lake, and dropping in.”

  “Yes,” he said drowsily. “Sounds fun.”

  “We might also get the Plant to grow us an orchestra-­tree that played different music. A little Mozart, maybe. And persuade it to tone down this one. I’m getting bored with marches and sickly waltzes.”

  He must give some more thought to escaping. But later, Marty decided. His brain felt too idle at the moment. And there was plenty of time.

  • • •

  Sometime during that day—they had come to think of the bright periods as day, the dark, naturally enough, as night—Thurgood disappeared again. The secret of where he went was solved, in part at least, by his return. They saw him coming in from the far reaches of the lake on the plant-raft. Steve spotted him, and drew Marty’s attention.

  Marty said: “I suppose he’s been to the island.”

  “Or there could be other caves beyond.”

  Marty asked him when he stepped ashore. Once again he failed to answer and the question had to be repeated. He said then: “Yes, I have been to the Plant.”

  He spoke in an abstracted, detached voice. Marty said: “Do you talk to it? What about?”

  “You would not understand.”

  Marty felt a familiar resentment against adults who thought because you were young you must also be dumb. He said: “Try us.”

  “It is not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you are not ready.”

  Marty started to argue about this. Simultaneously Steve was asking when they were likely to be called to the island again, as the Plant had said they would be. They both stopped and then began again. In the middle of this confusion, Thurgood without warning dropped to the ground. It was a weird movement, seeming part conscious, part automatic. Steve said: “I think . . .”

  He did not need to finish: the light was draining away, darkness falling on the cave. Marty said: “I suppose we couldn’t get the Plant to leave us a night-light? Oh, well. I imagine we’ll get used to it, though I’m not keen on just going out the way Thurgood does.”

  Steve said: “No. I feel a bit tired, though, don’t you?”

  “This business of light and dark,” Marty said. “Thurgood said the darkness comes because the Plant withdraws into its inner self and meditates. Like someone’s head being awake but the rest of his body asleep, I suppose. That means that the Plant doesn’t know what’s happening in the outer caves during the darkness. I suppose it must have some sort of reflexes—to reseal that cave, for instance, if something crashed through at that time—but that’s probably not conscious. So if we ever do find a way of getting out we would have to take advantage of it during the darkness. And that means we really ought to have a flashlight from the crawler. Don’t you think so? Steve?”

  Steve very plainly was asleep.

  • • •

  He had told himself that he would raise the question of the flashlight first thing the next morning, but it slipped his mind. Thurgood was awake before them, and they all went up to the orchard for breakfast. One did not really get used to these fruits, Marty thought: they tasted better all the time. He wondered again about the Plant’s ability to grow them. It must have got the data somehow direct from Thurgood’s mind, because it was difficult to see how anyone could spell out an adequate description in words. And there was taste, too, which surely was completely indescribable. Thurgood, of course, had lived on the Earth and would remember what the tastes were like. There would have been nothing in his mind or Steve’s to be read and copied.

  But how was it that the Plant could read Thurgood’s mind, while it needed to have Steve and him say things? Because Thurgood was older when he first came to the caves? Or through something, a sort of hypnotic closeness, which developed over the years? That seemed more likely. It could account for the way Thurgood had known the Plant wanted them to go the island. He thought he might ask Thurgood about it and, looking, saw that once more he was missing.

  But it was not too difficult to find him. Marty looked and saw him on the raft, which was floating out into the lake. He told Steve, who nodded.

  “Off to the island again.”

  “I wonder what he does there?”

  “Talks, I suppose.”

  “What does he have to talk about, after seventy years? And he doesn’t seem keen on talking to us.”

  “I wish he’d mentioned he was going,” Steve said. “We could have got him to ask the Plant about those trailing vines.”

  Marty stared out across the water. The raft and Thurgood were barely visible in the shimmering haze. He must be almost at the point where the raft would turn right, carrying him to the hidden part of the lake. He said: “We could follow him.”

  “How? Dial another raft?”

  “We could swim it. It’s not far—not much more than a couple of hundred yards. And the water’s warm and more buoyant than we’re used to. You could always float if you got tired.”

  “Do you think we should?”

  Thurgood might not like being followed. The Plant might not approve of their going to the island except when they were summoned. Marty decided not to brood over these possibilities. He pulled off his clothes and waded out into the lake, and after a slight hesitation Steve followed him. They swam out together. The still water foamed away from their arms and legs, leaving a faint trail of phosphorescence.

  The water’s buoyancy made it very easy. They turned the corner and saw the column of golden light that marked the island. There was still more light showing, a bright arc of it to one side. That would be because the fronds had parted, because Thurgood was on the island talking to the Plant. Marty had a moment’s misgiving, remembering Steve’s query. But it was not something which had been forbidden. Neither Thurgood nor the Plant had given any indication that there was anything forbidden here. He remembered the golden voice inside his mind: “We seek your happiness.”

  So they swam on toward the island. Their direction was oblique to the arc of light, but they could see it and soon see Thurgood’s figure outlined against it. Marty paused, treading water. It was a posture he had not seen before except in pictures, but it could not be mistaken. Thurgood knelt before the light, head bowed, arms stretched out in supplication and self-abasement. What they were looking at was an act of worship.

  10

  The Hinge of Memory

  THEY TURNED AND SWAM BACK in silence through the cave. In part this was due to a sense of having intruded on something private and personal; in part to shock. Marty’s thoughts seemed to circle around in his head. He tried to find some other explanation for what he had seen, but could not. At last they climbed, dripping, out of the lake and sat on the grass. The tree was a lot higher, he noticed. Branches came out from it on the lake side only, at convenient intervals. Already you could see they were going to be broad and flat, making excellent diving boards. Probably springy, too, Marty thought. The Plant-God looked after its creatures.

  He said: “I wonder how long he’s been like that.”

  “Thurgood? I don’t know. Years probably. Decades, maybe.”

  “And us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Marty said: “How long before we start kneeling down and praying to it?”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Is it?”

  “There’s probably something wrong with him—with his mind.”

  “That’s what they thought at First Station. They were wrong. He was sane enough.”

  “But after being seventy years in the caves . . .”

  “All right,” Marty said. “And after we’ve been seventy years in them?”

  “We’ll find a way out long before then.”

  “He didn’t.”
<
br />   Steve was silent, and then said: “Perhaps he didn’t try hard enough.”

  Marty was on the point of saying that if he did not it was probably because the Plant found a means of stopping him; when he remembered what Thurgood had said about the Plant knowing everything that went on in the caves. It could be listening to them, and it understood human speech. The time to talk was when the light went and the outer parts of the Plant slept. He tried to remember what they had just said. Nothing, he thought, that counted. The Plant would also know that they had swum out and seen Thurgood on the island, and would expect them to have a reaction to that. It would expect them to be shocked, even rebellious. What mattered was not revealing to it any plan of action they might work out.

  He said: “I suppose that could be it. You’re right. We’ll find something.”

  Steve was apparently content. They lay on the grass for a while, drying off. Then Marty suggested another trip of exploration into the other caves, and Steve agreed. There was always a chance, Marty thought, that they would see something that would give them a clue to escaping, though it was a slim one. He had another motive as well. After they had explored a couple more caves, each with its quota of plant-things, he led the way up to the crawler. The moss was beginning to grow up over the tracks but had not yet got very far. Marty went inside and came out with a flashlight. He said, in case the Plant were listening: “Might as well have our own night-light since none’s provided.”

  • • •

  The day passed in idling, swimming, eating. Thurgood was back by the lake when they returned. He said nothing about the Plant or the island. He would scarcely have noticed them, with all his attention concentrated on his praying, but Marty supposed the Plant might have told him of their being there. He clearly did not want to talk, and because of that Marty pressed him. When would they be called back to the island?

  Thurgood said: “The Plant will decide.”

  “Does it have to decide everything?” Thurgood looked at him blankly. “Well, does it?”

  “You will learn.”

  “Learn what?” Marty asked. “Why the Plant thinks it can tell us what to do and when to do it?”

  Thurgood’s blue eyes stared from his white face. Marty had thought he might be provoked into resentment or anger at what he would regard as impudence, maybe as sacrilege. But his reaction did not seem to be at all like that. It was more like someone in the wisdom of age listening with quiet, infinitely tolerant contempt to the foolishness of the very young. He reminded himself that Thurgood was very old, a hundred years old. Yet with a shiver of fear he realized that the impression was of something much more ancient than a hundred years: it seemed as though the Plant itself looked through his eyes.

  Then night fell and Thurgood crumpled into sleep.

  Marty said: “Steve, listen.”

  “I’m listening.” He yawned loudly. “I’m dog tired.”

  “Stay awake,” Marty said urgently. “We’ve got to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “I was saying last night—but you’d gone to sleep—that this is the only safe time to talk without the Plant hearing us. To find a way of escaping.”

  “We’ll find something. We’ve only been here a few days.”

  “Look,” Marty said, “when we were talking about Thurgood after we swam back from the island, you said that perhaps he didn’t try hard enough. But why didn’t he? He wasn’t a man who gave up easily. Look at the way he stuck to the business of finding the Flower.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t want to try. Perhaps he liked it here from the start.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Plant,” Marty said. “It’s complete in itself. It doesn’t need anything from outside. When Thurgood came in it was like a grain of sand getting into an oyster. It would be an irritant if it couldn’t be neutralized, absorbed somehow. Well, he has been absorbed—or his mind has. And now there are two more grains of sand to be treated the same way. The Plant is probably getting at us already. In fact, I’m sure it is. Thurgood goes to sleep as soon as the light dims—we don’t quite do that but we feel tired. It’s part of the same thing.”

  “How is it getting at us? It didn’t summon us to the island at all today.”

  “Perhaps that isn’t important. These fruits, the water from the drinking-fountain tree—maybe the air we breathe: they could all be changing us. Remember the lotus-eaters in the Odyssey? They ate this fruit that made them happy and made them forget where they were or where they had come from. Isn’t that what we’re doing? Don’t you find that the Bubble—that everything before the caves—is beginning to seem less real?”

  “In a lot of ways this is better than the Bubble. No one to tell us to do things, no school. Everything we want given us.”

  Steve, Marty remembered, had been an orphan and a loner. There was no one he desperately wanted to see again. But even in himself he could feel the beginning of a change. He could remember his mother clearly, but his father had become a vague and distant figure.

  “Everything given us so far,” Marty said. “But in the end we won’t want anything except to be fed and to go to the island every day and pray. Thurgood told us he had a swimming place once. It went because he no longer wanted it—no longer wanted anything except to pray to the Plant.”

  Steve was silent; then said: “I don’t see a lot of harm in him doing that.”

  “Don’t you? When I was talking to him just now—he wasn’t really there at all. It was the Plant I was talking to. A lot of the time he’s part of the Plant. At least, his mind is, which is what matters. Do you want your mind to be taken over like that, so that you only think and want what the Plant thinks and wants?”

  “It’s not all the time—and he’s been seventy years in the caves.”

  “So the process is not complete yet. The Plant is in no hurry. Time doesn’t exist here: Thurgood said that. It could be a thousand years before he belongs to the Plant utterly. Or ten thousand.”

  “Well,” Steve said, “what’s the rush? After five hundred years maybe we’ll need to start worrying.”

  He was angry with Steve’s obtuseness but knew he had to tread carefully, to be very, very patient. Steve had no family of his own that he missed and wanted to get back to. It was just one difference between them, but it could be a big one. In a weird way the thought of the Plant’s protectiveness could be a special attraction to him—almost as though the Plant itself could represent the family he had never had.

  Marty said: “In every process there’s a point of no return. Like when our crawler was sliding down that slope. Nothing could stop us crashing once the slide had started. If we give in now the Plant has got us. Bit by bit we’ll stop being individuals, stop having minds and wills of our own.”

  Steve was silent again. Marty did not know how far he was getting over to him. He pressed on: “Think about that. It’s worse than the character in that book you were writing. He was chained up to a wall, but he could still think for himself. There was something to hope for—the possibility of getting free someday. Our bodies wouldn’t be chained up but our minds would be. And there would be nothing to hope for because we wouldn’t even want to get free. Remember the balloons? Getting punished was a proof that we were free to do what we liked. The Plant would never punish us. It would never need to.”

  For several moments Steve’s silence continued. Marty was racking his brain for further arguments when Steve said: “You think the fruit is dangerous—that it can make us change?”

  “I think it’s part of it. Perhaps the most important part.”

  “We could stop eating it—live on the crawler rations. Only won’t that make the Plant suspicious?”

  “We’d better eat some, but limit it as much as possible.” There was an overwhelming relief in realizing that Steve was on his side still, that
they could talk about things and make plans. “We could go to the crawler at night, and fill up.”

  In a discouraged voice, Steve said: “The supplies won’t last very long. Not seventy days, never mind seventy years.”

  “We don’t have seventy years. In fact, if we’re still here in seventy days we’re finished. We need to do something fast to have any hope at all.”

  “Do what? Is there any hope, anyway?”

  There was another hazard, Marty realized. One could appreciate the horrifying menace of the Plant, and even so despair of overcoming it. He put all the confidence he could muster into his voice: “There’s one chance. When we first met Thurgood, and he was telling us how the Plant got here and the way it worked—he said something which might help.”

  “What?”

  “He said there were other places besides the one we fell through where the rock cover is not complete. Three or four, he said. Saying that meant he knew where they were. If one of them were in the right position, and big enough for the crawler to break through . . .”

  “Small chance.”

  “Better than none.”

  “Anyway, he wouldn’t tell us. You’ve said yourself: he worships the Plant. He won’t do anything, or tell us anything, that would be against the Plant’s wishes.”

  “He won’t unless we can change him.”

  “How are we going to do that? Feed him canned battery-chicken roll and hope it cancels out the lotus fruits?”

  “He was human once. Part of him still is, underneath. If we can make him remember . . .”

  “He’s not interested,” Steve said. “He doesn’t want to talk about anything except the Plant. He knows all his own people are dead long ago and he doesn’t care about any others. When you mention the Bubble, or Earth, he doesn’t want to know.”

  “We’ve got to keep at him—keep prodding away.”

  “But if he’s gone past the point of no return, as you said—like our crawler sliding . . .”

  “No return when you’re on your own is not the same as no return when you’ve got help. If there had been a couple of other crawlers standing by and they’d been able to throw us anchors we might have made it. And he’s not been taken over completely. If he’s worshiping the Plant that must mean that part of him is still separate from it. You can’t worship yourself.”