Hothouse

by Brian Aldiss

  She and Gren called these beings Mountainears, and kept a sharp watch out for them, for the creatures were fast and well-armed, though they had never offered the humans any harm.

  For a moment the tableau held: three tummy-belly men trotting downhill, eight mountainears moving up, and the one surviving bird wheeling overhead, uncertain whether to mourn or escape. The mountainears were armed with bows and arrows; tiny but clear in the distance, they lifted their weapons, and suddenly Yattmur was full of anxiety for the three plump halfwits with whom she had travelled so far. Clutching Laren to her breast, she stood up and called to them.

  ‘Hey, you tummies! Come back!’

  Even as she called, the first fierce mountainear had unleashed his arrow. Swift and sure it went – and the surviving leatherfeather spiralled down. Beneath it, the leading tummy-belly ducked and squealed. The falling bird, its wings still faintly beating, hit him between the shoulder blades as it dropped. Staggering, he fell, while the bird flopped feebly about him.

  The group of tummy-bellies and mountainears met.

  Yattmur turned and ran. She burst into the smoky cave where she, Gren, and the baby lived.

  ‘Gren! Please come! The tummy-bellies will be killed. They are out there with the terrible big-eared white ones attacking them. What can we do?’

  Gren lay propped against a column of rock, his hands clasped together on his stomach. When Yattmur entered, he fixed her with a dead gaze, then dropped his eyes again. Pallor marked his features, contrasting with the rich livery brown that glistened about his head and throat, framing his face with its sticky folds.

  ‘Are you going to do anything?’ she demanded. ‘What is the matter with you these days?’

  ‘The tummy-bellies are useless to us,’ Gren said. Nevertheless, he stood up. She put out her hand, which he clutched listlessly, and dragged him to the cave mouth.

  ‘I’ve grown fond of the poor creatures,’ she said, almost to herself.

  They peered down the steep slope to where figures moved against a backdrop of hazy shadow.

  The three tummy-belly men were walking back up the hill, dragging one of the leatherfeathers with them. Beside them walked the mountainears, pulling their sleigh, on the top of which lay the other leatherfeather. The two groups went amicably together, chattering with plentiful gesticulation from the tummy-bellies.

  ‘Well, what do you make of that?’ Yattmur exclaimed.

  It was an odd procession. The mountainears in profile were sharp-snouted; they moved in an irregular fashion, sometimes dropping forward to pace on all fours up the incline. Their language came to Yattmur in short barks of sound, though they were too far away for her to distinguish what was being said – even provided that what they said was intelligible.

  ‘What do you make of it, Gren?’ she asked.

  He said nothing, staring out at the little crowd that was now clearly heading for the cave in which he had directed the tummy-bellies to live. As they passed beyond the stalker grove, he saw them point in his direction and laugh. He made no sign.

  Yattmur looked up at him, suddenly struck with pity at the change that had recently possessed him.

  ‘You say so little and you look so ill, my love. We have come so far together, you and I with only each other to love, yet now it is as if you were gone from me. From my heart flows only love for you, from my lips only kindness. But love and kindness are lost things on you now, O Gren; O my Gren!’

  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 mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil. Instinctively, she jerked her child back.

  ‘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

  ____________________________________________________

  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 be far easier to control than you are. True, he is weak as yet, but Yattmur and you will look after him until he becomes able to look after himself.’

  ‘Not if it means looking after you as well.’

  Before Gren finished speaking he received a blow, scattering directly over his brain, that sent him huddling against the cave wall in pain.

  ‘You and Yattmur will not desert the baby under any circumstances. You know that, and I see it in your thought. You know also that if any opportunity came you would get away from these barren miserable slopes to the fertile lands of light. That also fits in with my plan. Time presses, man; I must move according to my needs.

  ‘Knowing every fibre of you as I do, I pity your pain – but it can mean nothing at all to me when set against my own nature. I must have an able and preferably witless host that will carry me rapidly back into the sunlit world, so that I can seed there. So I have chosen Laren. That would be the best course for my progeny, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m dying,’ Gren moaned.

  ‘Not yet,’ twanged the morel.

  At the back of the tummy-belly cave sat Yattmur, half asleep. The foetid air of the place, the yammer of voices, the noise of the rain outside, all combined to dull her senses. She dozed, and Laren slept on a pile of dead foliage beside her. They had all eaten scorched leatherfeather, half-cooked, half-burnt over a blazing fire. Even the baby had accepted tit-bits.

  When she appeared distraught at the cave entrance, the tummy-bellies welcomed her in, crying ‘Come, lovely sandwich lady, out of the raining wetness where the clouds fall. Come in with us to cuddle and make warmth without water.’

  ‘Who are these others with you?’ She looked anxiously at the eight mountainears, who were grinning and jumping up and down at the sight of her.

  Seen close to, they were very formidable: a head taller than the humans, with thick shoulders on which long fur stood out like a mantle. They had grouped together behind the tummy-bellies, but now began circling Yattmur, showing their teeth and calling to each other in a weird perversion of speech.

  Their faces were the most fearsome Yattmur had ever seen. Long-jawed, low-browed, they had snouts and brief yellow beards, while their ears curled out of fuzzy short fur like segments of raw flesh. Quick and irritable in movement, they seemed never to leave their faces in repose: bars of long, sharp ivories appeared and disappeared behind grey lips as they snapped out questions at her.

  ‘You yap you live here? On the Big Slope you yakker-yakker live? With the tummy-bellies, with the tummy-bellies live? You and them together, yipper-yap, slap-sleeping running living loving on the Big Big Slope?’

  One of the largest mountainears asked Yattmur this rapid fire of questions, jumping before her and grimacing as he did so. His voice was so coarse and gutteral, his phrases so chopped into barks, that she had difficulty in understanding him at all. ‘Yipper yapper yes live you on Big Black Slope?’

  ‘Yes, I live on this mountain,’ she said, standing her ground. ‘Where do you live? What people are you?’

  For answer he opened his goat eyes at her until a red brink of gristle showed all round them. Then he closed them tight, opened his cavernous jaws and emitted a high clucking soprano chord of laughter.

  ‘These sharp-fur people are gods, lovely sharp gods, sandwich lady,’ the tummy-bellies explained, the three of them hopping before her, jostling each other in an agony to be first to unburden their souls to her. ‘These sharp-fur people are called sharp-furs. They are our gods, missis, for they run all over the Big Slope mountain, to be gods for dear old tummy-belly men. They are gods, gods, they are big fierce gods, sandwich lady. They have tails!’

  This last sentence was delivered in a cry of triumph. The whole mob of them went streaming round the cave, shrieking and whooping. Indeed the sharp-furs had tails, sticking out of their rumps at impudent angles. These the tummy-bellies chased, trying to pull and kiss them. As Yattmur shrank back, Laren, who had watched this rout for a moment wide-eyed, began to bawl at the top of his voice. The dancing figures imitated him, interposing shouts and chants of their own.

  ‘Devil dance on the Big Slope, Big Slope. Teeth many teeth bite-tear-chew night or light on Big Slope. Tummy-belly men are singing for tails of sharp-fur gods. Many big bad things to sing about on the Bad Slope. Eat and bite and drink when rain comes raining. Ai, ai, ai-yah!’

  Suddenly as they galloped by, one of the fiercest sharp-furs snatched Laren out of Yattmur’s arms. She cried out – he was gone, whirled away with startlement on his small red face. The long-ja
wed creatures tossed him from one to another, first high then low, almost striking the floor or nearly scraping the ceiling, barking with laughter at their game.

  Outraged, Yattmur flung herself on the nearest sharp-fur. As she tore at his long white fur, she felt the muscles beneath it, rippling as the creature turned. A leathery grey hand flashed up, rammed two fingers up her nostrils, and pushed. Scissoring pain cut between her eyes. She fell back, her hands going up to her face, lost her footing, and sprawled on the ground. Instantly the sharp-fur was on to her. Almost as quickly, the others piled on as well.

  This was Yattmur’s saving. The sharp-furs began to fight among themselves and forgot her. She crawled away from them to rescue Laren, who lay now drugged with surprise, perfectly unharmed on the ground. Sobbing with relief, she hugged him to her. He began at once to cry – but when she looked fearfully round, the sharp-furs had forgotten about her and the fight, and were preparing to cook the dead leatherfeathers again.

  ‘Oh don’t have wet rain in the eyes, lovely sandwich lady,’ said the tummy-bellies, clustering round her, patting her clumsily, trying to stroke her hair. She was alarmed at their familiarity with her when Gren was not about, but she said in a low voice, ‘You were so afraid of Gren and me: why have you no fear of these terrible creatures? Do you not see how dangerous they are?’

  ‘Do you not see see see how these gods of sharp-fur have tails? Only tails that grow on people have people with tails to be gods to us poor tummy-belly men.’

  ‘They will kill you.’

  ‘They are our gods, so we make happiness to be killed only by gods with tails. Yes, they have sharp teeth and tails! Yes, and the teeth and tails are of a sharpness.’

  ‘You are like children, and they are dangerous.’

  ‘Ai-ee, the sharp-fur gods wear danger in their mouth for teeth. Yet the teeth do not call us hard names like you and the brain man Gren. Better to have a jolly death, miss!’