The Lotus Caves

by John Christopher

  “O.K.,” Steve said. “We’ll try.” He sounded a bit more cheerful. “But even if we do get anywhere with him we can’t make plans except at night and when night falls he flops out.”

  “If we can get him interested, he might not.”

  Steve yawned again. “I’m really beat. There’s nothing we can do now, is there?”

  “We could go up to the crawler and get some food.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “So we wouldn’t be too hungry tomorrow, I meant.”

  “You go, if you like. I don’t think I could face ham ’n’ egg roll. I’m too tired.”

  Marty was tired, too. They were getting some exercise, of course, with swimming, but he felt it was not really, or not entirely, a physical tiredness. He fought it for a while, and then drifted into sleep.

  • • •

  The Plant said: “We understand your request, and grant it.”

  The boys were on the island again, having been told by Thurgood that they were wanted. They stood in front of this brightness which seemed to have other pulsing brightnesses inside it that Marty had not noticed before. There was the same feeling of peace and benevolence, except that if anything it was stronger, surer, more all-surrounding. Notions of escape, of leaving the caves, were far-off, small, unimportant. The Plant was good, and he felt a bursting joy at the thought that it wanted to share its goodness with them. Steve had asked for the trailing vines on which they could swing out over the lake. The swimming place was nearly complete, with its firm leafy ledge running all around—you could sit on it, dangling your legs, or run along it and dive in—and the tree was over fifteen feet high, its jutting flat branches almost strong enough to bear them. Anything else they wanted would, he knew, be given them. He wanted to thank the Plant but words seemed inadequate. The Plant was so wise and great, they so puny and unimportant.

  The Plant spoke to them of itself, of its own nature. Its existence was a cycle, continually self-­renewing. In the caves it created forms and patterns that changed, never repeating themselves. The Plant watched its creation and delighted in it. The other part of the cycle was meditation. In this it withdrew into its inner self. Creation slept, while Mind concentrated at its deepest and most profound, withdrawn from externals and appendages and absorbed in its own glory and wonder.

  All things were at harmony in the Plant. Sound had been unknown before Thurgood came—the caves had lived and flowered in eternal silence. From him the Plant had learned music, and out of the simple primitive chords which he provided it had fashioned complex glories. They too, in their small way, might contribute to this world, this universe, of joy and peace.

  • • •

  The spell lasted for some time after the raft took them away from the island. They sat on the grass, still dazed and overwhelmed. Thurgood had taken the raft and gone off across the lake. Marty found himself envying his freedom to go to the Plant rather than wait to be called. There was something gnawing at the back of his mind: something he had meant to do, a plan of action of some kind. But it could not be important. All that mattered was lying here in the warm scented air. The tree was still growing, and looking at the wall of the cave he could see that a vine-like plant had started climbing up from the base toward the roof. The orchestra-­tree was playing Strauss again. Presumably when they had the sort of rapport with the Plant that Thurgood had they would get the kind of music they wanted. It was pleasant enough even so. Everything was pleasant because the Plant wanted them to be happy.

  He did not jerk out of this mood until Steve said something about going up to the orchard. Then he remembered what they had decided the previous night: to eat as little of the fruit as pos­sible. He said: “I’m not hungry just yet,” and saw Steve remember also. They went for a swim instead, and he thought of the rest of the plan. It must wait until Thurgood returned. He scanned the lake impatiently for the returning raft.

  The thought of the fruit would not go out of his head. Now that the suggestion had been made he did feel hungry, really hungry. They would have been wiser, he realized, to have eaten food from the crawler during the night, despite the effort involved in getting it. He was glad that Steve was with him in this. It made it that little bit easier.

  His hunger increased as the minutes went by. It was different from any hunger he had known before, sharper and more avid. He was tantalized by the recollection of how delicious the fruits were, of their taste, their ripe juiciness. The one advantage the hunger gave was that it cleared his mind of the fog of well-being. He realized that the Plant’s influence on their minds was spreading and strengthening. Time was not on their side. If they were to escape they must make the attempt soon.

  At last Thurgood came back. They went to him, and talked. He was even more taciturn than usual: probably, Marty thought, because he had just returned from communion with the Plant. The questions they put, about his life before the caves, were ignored, or answered laconically and unsatisfactorily. “I don’t recall.” “I forget.” “Maybe it was like that—I don’t know.”

  Steve dropped out, shrugging his shoulders at the impossibility of getting anywhere. But they had to keep on, Marty thought. They had to find where the Plant’s weaknesses were, and only Thurgood could help them. He continued, ignoring the silences and the brusque responses. A normal man would have got irritated by his persistence, but Thurgood was not normal. There was no place for irritability in a mind dominated by the bland euphoric calm which the Plant inspired.

  In the end, he gave up questions as such but kept on talking, and talking about Earth. He talked about TV programs he had seen, ran through the plots of movie after movie, at one time found himself giving a résumé of a geography lesson on Malaysia. Thurgood lay on the grass, his eyes closed. Marty was not sure whether he was listening, whether he was awake even. Steve returned and made an effort at contributing, but soon gave it up again. Marty persisted. He was bored himself, desperately bored, and embarrassed by this monologue which he had to keep going without the least encouragement. Then a small spark ignited.

  Marty had been talking about his parents, about his mother who as a girl had traveled all over the planet with her artist father. He said, as a casual afterword to this: “My father never moved out of one small town until he went to college. He was a New Englander. New Hampshire.”

  The first bit was something he had gleaned from his mother, during their talks following the balloon episode; his father, except that one time at the reservoir, had never mentioned his past. Thurgood opened his eyes. He said, in a remote voice: “New Hampshire? I’m from Vermont.”

  Marty said quickly: “What part?” Thurgood did not reply. “Were you born there?” he asked. “Did you go to school in Vermont? What was it like?”

  There was no answer. It looked as though it had been merely a flicker of memory, no sooner aroused than quenched. Still he kept on, doggedly pounding away at it. He racked his mind for anything that would provide a talking point, recklessly inventing where he could not recall. He thought he was going to talk himself hoarse. His throat felt dry and the idea of an orange from the trees just up the slope was torture. But he went on and at last, very slowly, the monologue ceased to be entirely that: Thurgood was beginning to talk as well.

  Steve lent a hand then, taking some of the load off him. He had thought Steve, with his imagination, would be good at this, but in fact he faltered more than Marty had done, and it was necessary to go on helping out. They prodded Thurgood into talking of anything and everything, but they found it was his childhood that gave the best response. He had been born on a farm in hill country, with fields that fitted into the lie of an old, long-inhabited land. It had been chiefly dairy farming. They had a herd of Friesians, and he remembered a tale his grandmother had told him about two of the cows: that they had been so fond of her father, his great-grandfather, that they had swum all the way from Holland when he emigrated to America. He could
not have been older than four or five, and he had believed it to be true and had stared in awe at the cows, imagining their huge black and white bodies battling with the waves all the way across the vast storm-tossed ocean.

  “She used to make wonderful cookies,” Thurgood said, “with blobs of chocolate all the way through. And she gave me buttermilk to drink with them, pouring it out of a big blue and white jug. She said buttermilk was the best thing you could drink.”

  He paused. Marty was thinking of something to keep him going when he went on: “I’m getting hungry. Who’s coming up to the orchard?”

  It was essential to keep him in this mood of companionship. They must go with him and try to eat as little as possible. Marty was hungry, too—ravenously so. He took a banana, slowly peeled it and still more slowly started to eat. It was torture. The taste seemed even better than before, and he had to fight the impulse to gobble it down. He kept close to Thurgood, but not so close that the man would notice he was scarcely eating anything. They wandered through the orchard. Steve had been following the same technique, but Marty saw him eat an apple and then pull up one of the turnip-cheeses and nibble it. He threw him a look of warning, but Steve appeared not to notice it.

  After they had eaten they went back to the lake, and Marty continued the campaign against Thurgood. It was less successful than earlier—the fruit could have had something to do with that—but he managed to keep the tenuous link of conversation in being. Then the light faded and Thurgood, as it did so, dropped into heavy, insensible sleep.

  • • •

  Marty said: “I vote the first thing we do is go up to the crawler and get something to eat. I’m starving.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” Steve said. “I want to rest.”

  “If we rest we may go to sleep, and not wake up till it’s light again. We’d better go now.”

  Steve said: “It’s a bit pointless, anyway.”

  “What is?”

  “Trying to get information out of Thurgood.”

  “He’s been talking quite a lot.”

  “About the Earth. Not about the Plant.”

  “He’s remembering he’s human: that’s what matters.”

  Steve said: “Look, if you did get him to a point where he was willing to tell us something, it would have to be at night, wouldn’t it? And the moment the darkness comes, bingo he’s out. So what’s the good?”

  “If we had him talking we might be able to keep him awake.”

  “He was talking tonight, but it didn’t help.”

  There was no sense in arguing about it. It was their only hope and it had to be made to work. Marty said: “Anyway, are you coming up to the crawler?”

  Steve yawned. “You go, if you’re hungry.”

  Which meant that Steve was not. He must have eaten more of the fruit than Marty had thought.

  He felt more despair then than he had done since the initial discovery that they were trapped. Much of this was due to the shock of realizing how much he had been depending on Steve’s help—more than that, on his leadership. There had been jealousy and rivalry underlying their friendship from the start. His suggestion of taking the crawler to First Station had been caused by that. At the back of his mind had been the feeling that Steve was cleverer and stronger than he was; stronger not just physically but in character. The incident of Steve’s insistence of going to look for the Flower had borne that out. He had been looking for that strength and determination now, as the factor which could just tip the balance and help them to win through. And it was not there: obstinacy and willfulness were not strength, in a case like this the reverse of it.

  He said: “You won’t come, Steve?”

  “No. I’m too tired.”

  His voice was as final and uncompromising as over the hunt for the Flower. Marty knew he was on his own. He said: “O.K. I’ll bring you something.”

  Steve did not bother to reply, or maybe he was already asleep.

  • • •

  He went back through the caves, lighting his way with the flashlight. It was an eerie journey. The trees were as still as though frozen. They looked gray and drab; even the fruits looked gray. The moss on the walls and ceiling, where the beam of his flashlight lighted on it, was gray, too. Color and life had been drained together as the Plant’s consciousness withdrew into itself in its incomprehensible meditation.

  Marty felt very much alone as he made his way along the tunnel, down the ladder tree, and through the arch to the second cave. The tree-shapes, which he had only seen threshing in motion, were as fixed as everything else, and as gray, their branches turned into stiff, lifeless tentacles. He found the rope at the bottom of the slope, and hauled himself up it, the flashlight tucked in his belt and flashing at odd angles as he swung from the rope. He reached the top and headed through the next tunnel to the top cave. The crawler lay beside the curled stem and huge bud of the Flower. He went inside, picked the first can he found in the food locker, opened it and ate ravenously.

  He thought about Steve. It was important to keep him from slipping any further under the influence of the Plant. He must take some ordinary food back and get him to eat it, so that he would eat less from the trees tomorrow. But if he took it in a can the can would remain as evidence and the Plant would know they were getting food from the crawler. Even if they threw it in the lake, the Plant might know of it. One could not set limits to its awareness of the minutest details.

  They must leave no traces at all, and the only way he could think of doing that was taking the food out of the can here and carrying it back in his bare hands. It was something which normally would have stood condemned on many grounds, hygiene not the least, but which answered the prime need. He picked a can whose contents seemed to be the least likely to crumble, opened it, and pried them out in a single roll.

  The return journey was easier in that he was now more accustomed to the petrified night world of the caves, but had the new problem of the ham-soya roll which he had to carry. Getting down the rope was the really tricky part, but he managed it using an arm and a hand. He had to stick the flashlight back in his belt while he climbed the ladder tree one-handed, but the rest was straightforward. He came down through the orchard—even the grass was stiff as his feet brushed through, stiff and gray—and found Steve fast asleep where he had left him.

  Marty put the flashlight down and shook him with his free hand. Steve mumbled but stayed asleep. He shook him again, and this time Steve turned over. As he did so, his face came into the beam of light. It was that which woke him. He blinked and sat up.

  Marty gave him the ham-soya roll. He obediently took a bite, made a face, but went on eating it. Marty explained why he had taken it out of the can.

  Steve said: “The taste hasn’t improved.”

  “It doesn’t matter about the taste as long as it keeps us from eating too much of the fruit.”

  “What’s the good?” Steve said. “Thurgood will still fall asleep the moment the light goes. There’s nothing you can do about that.”

  The flashlight lay on its side, throwing a beam of light that took in one branch of the tree by the lakeside. Marty reached out and switched it off, to conserve the battery. The idea came to him as he did so. It might work. It just might work. But it was a slim chance. He decided not to mention it to Steve. In his present mood of despondency he would only pour cold water on the whole thing.

  11

  The Pearl

  THE DAY STARTED WELL. MARTY woke with the returning light—for the first time he saw the glow build up in the mossy roof over his head, the waters of the lake turn indigo and then blue. He watched Thurgood’s slow wakening. It was more like a man emerging from a trance than from sleep, eyes opening first and seconds passing before the first movement tremored the slack immobility of his body. Marty was by him, and talking. Before night fell Thurgood had been telling an anecdote about hi
s Dutch grandmother, and Marty picked on this. Had she really made her own cheese, in a churn?

  Thurgood said: “She did. It was wonderful cheese. I never tasted anything like it anywhere else.”

  Not even, Marty wondered, in the turnip-cheeses that grew in the cave? But he did not want to draw Thurgood’s attention in that direction. What was so good was the animation in his voice and face. Marty said: “But by herself, and a churn?”

  “Well, it was powered.” Thurgood smiled. “She was born in 1901, not in the Middle Ages. But she did it all herself—wouldn’t let anyone lend a hand. She sold it, too, in the town. There were people who drove up all the way from New York to buy it. At least, I suppose they had other reasons for driving up, but that was the way it seemed to me as a boy. They were from New York, and they came specially to buy it: I knew that.”

  It was fairly easy to keep him going, by a question or a comment here and there. Thurgood wanted to talk. Now that the gate was down, reminiscence came in a flood. He spoke about the farm, his parents, relatives. There was a lot about his younger brother, David.

  “He was a bit like you,” he told Marty. “Not so much in looks as in his way of talking.” He smiled. “I remember a trick he had: he used to swing on my arm when he wanted something, dragging all his weight on me.”

  “Did you and he fight a lot?”

  “No. He was five years younger. He was always getting into trouble and I was always bailing him out. There was one time he found a wild bees’ nest. It was in an old stone wall and he tried to open it up, hoping to get honey from it. He was about nine at the time. I found him bawling in the lane and swarming with bees. I grabbed him and heaved us both into the pond. We came up covered in green slime and drowned bees. But Mother still had to comb them out of his hair when I got him home.”