by Brian Aldiss
‘O shades protect me from foolish women! You don’t understand – ’
He stopped.
They had left their escape from the ridge too late.
Moving in an impressive silence, perhaps because they needed their breath, the first lines of sharp-furs appeared over the crest of the hill.
They halted on confronting the humans, but the back ranks jostled them forward. With their mantles standing out stiff about their shoulders and their teeth bared, they did not have the look of friends. One or two of them wore the ridiculous helmets shaped out of gourds on their heads.
Through cold lips, Yattmur said, ‘Some of these were the ones who promised they would help the tummy-bellies to get home.’
‘How can you tell? They are so much alike.’
‘That old one with the yellow whiskers and a finger missing – I’m sure I recognize him at least.’
Lily-yo, coming up with her group, asked, ‘What are we going to do? Will these beasts trouble us if we let them have the traverser?’
Gren made no reply. He walked forward until he stood directly in front of the yellow-whiskered creature Yattmur had pointed out.
‘We bear you no ill-will, sharp-fur bamboon people. You know we never fought you when we were on Big Slope. Do you have the three tummy-belly men who were our companions with you?’
Without answering, Yellow Whiskers shambled round to consult with his friends. The nearest sharp-furs reared upon their hind legs and talked yappingly to each other. Finally Yellow Whiskers turned back to Gren, showing his fangs as he spoke. He cuddled something in his arms.
‘Yip yip yap yes, skinny one, the bouncing-bellies are wiff wiff with us. See! Look! Catch!’
With a quick motion, he threw something at Gren – who was so close he could do nothing but catch it.
It was the severed head of one of the tummy-bellies.
Gren acted without thought. Dropping the head, he flung himself forward in scarlet fury, thrusting out with his knife as he did so. His blade caught the yellow-whiskered sharp-fur in the stomach before he could dodge. As the creature staggered sideways screaming, Gren grabbed his grey paw with both hands. He spun completely round on one heel, and cast Yellow Whiskers right over the edge of the tall cliff.
Absolute silence fell, a silence of surprise, as Yellow Whiskers’ cries died.
In the next moment, our fate is decided, Gren thought. His blood ran too high for him to care. He sensed Yattmur, Lily-yo and the other humans behind him, but he did not deign to look back at them.
Yattmur leant forward to the broken and bloodied object lying at their feet. The head by its severance had been reduced to a mere thing, a thing of horror. Looking into the watery jelly that had been eyes, Yattmur read there the fate of all three tummy-belly men.
Unheard she cried, ‘And they were always so gentle with Laren!’
Then the noise broke out behind her.
A terrible roar burst forth, a roar of alien cadence and power, a roar – breaking over their heads so unexpectedly – that turned her blood to snow. The sharp-furs cried in awe: then they turned about, jostling and fighting to get back into the safety of the shadows below the crest of the mountain.
Deafened, Gren looked round. Lily-yo and her companions were heading back towards the dying traverser. Yattmur was trying to pacify the baby. Hands over their heads, the Arabler women lay prone on the ground.
Again the noise came, swelling with an anguished despair. Sodal Ye had recovered consciousness and cried aloud his wrath. And then, opening his fleshy mouth with its huge lower lip, he spoke, in words that only gradually merged into sense.
‘Where are your empty-headed heads, you creatures of the darkling plains. You have toads in the head, not to understand my prophecies where the green pillars grow. Growing is symmetry, up and down, and what is called decay is not decay but the second part of growth. One process, you toad-heads – the process of devolution, that carries you down into the green well from which you came… I’m lost in the mazes – Gren! Gren, like a mole I tunnel through an earth of understanding… Gren, the nightmares – Gren, from the fish’s belly I call to you. Can you hear me? It’s I – your old ally the morel!’
‘Morel?’
In his astonishment, Gren dropped to his knees before the catchy-carry-kind. Blank-faced, he stared at the leprous brown crown that now adorned its head. As he stared, the eyes opened, filmily at first, and then they focused on him.
‘Gren! I was near death… Ah, the pain of consciousness… Listen, man, it is I, your morel, who speaks. I hold the sodal in check, and am using his faculties, as once I had to use yours; there’s so much richness in his mind – coupling it with my own knowledge… ah, I see clearly not just this little world but all the green galaxy, the evergreen universe…’
Frantically, Gren jumped up.
‘Morel, are you crazed? Do you not see what a position we are in here, all about to be killed by these sharp-furs when they gather courage to charge? What are we to do? If you are truly here, if you are sane, help us!’
‘I’m not crazed – unless to be the only wise creature in a toad-minded world is to be crazed… All right, Gren, I tell you help comes! Look into the sky!’
The landscape had long been suffused with an uncanny light. Away in the distant and unbroken ranks of jungle stood the green pillar, joined now by another which had formed some way off. They seemed to taint the lower atmosphere with their glow, so that it did not surprise Gren to see cloud bars of viridescent hue striping the sky. From one of these clouds dropped a traverser. Falling at leisurely speed, it seemed to aim at the promontory on which Gren and the others stood.
‘Is it coming here, morel?’ Gren asked. Though he resented the resurrection of the tyrant that had recently sapped his life blood, he saw that the fungus, dependent on the legless sodal, could offer him only help, not harm.
‘It’s descending here,’ the morel answered. ‘You and Yattmur and the baby come and lie down here so that it does not crush you when it lands. It is probably coming to mate – to cross-fertilize – with the dying traverser. Directly it gets down, we must climb on to it. You must carry me, Gren, do you understand? Then I’ll tell you what else to do.’
As he spoke through the sodal’s blubber mouth, wind ruffled the grass. The hairy body overhead expanded until it filled almost their whole view: and gently the traverser landed on the brink of the cliff, perching on top of its dying mate. Its great legs came down, steadying it like buttresses on which rank mosses grew. It scratched for a hold and then was still.
Gren, with Yattmur and the tattooed women trailing behind, came up to it and stared up its height. He released the tail of the sodal, which he had dragged over the ground.
‘We can’t climb up there!’ he said. ‘You’re mad to consider such a thing, morel. It’s far too big!’
‘Climb, man creature, climb!’ bellowed the morel.
Still hesitating, Gren stood while Lily-yo and the others of her band came round. They had hidden behind the tall crag, and were anxious to get away.
‘As your fish-creature says, this is our only way to safety,’ Lily-yo said. ‘Climb, Gren! You can come with us and we’ll look after you.’
‘You don’t have to fear a traverser, Gren,’ Haris said.
He still stood there, not encouraged by their prompting. The thought of clinging to something that flew through the air made him sick; he remembered his ride on the back of the vegbird that crashed in Nomansland, remembered too the journeys by boat and stalker, each landing him in a worse situation than the last. Only on the journey just concluded, which he had undertaken under his own control with the sodal, had the destination seemed preferable to the starting point.
As he wavered, the morel was again bellowing with the sodal’s voice, goading the others to climb the fibrous leg, even goading the tattooed women to carry him up, which they did with the aid of Lily-yo’s party. They were soon all perched high up on the immense back, looking down
and calling at him. Only Yattmur stood by him.
‘Just when we are free of the tummy-bellies and the morel, why should we have to depend on this monstrous creature?’ he muttered.
‘We must go, Gren. It will take us away to the warm forests, far from the sharp-furs, where we can live with Laren in peace. You know we can’t stay here.’
He looked at her, and at the big-eyed child in her arms. She had endured so much trouble for him, ever since the time the Black Mouth sang its irresistible song.
‘We will go if you wish it, Yattmur. Let me carry the boy.’ And then with a flash of anger he peered up, calling to the morel. ‘And stop your stupid shouting – I’m coming!’
He called too late: the morel had already stopped. When Gren and Yattmur finally pulled themselves panting on to the top of the living hill, it was to discover the morel busily directing Lily-yo and her company in a new enterprise.
The sodal turned one of its piggy stares at Gren and said, ‘As you know as well as anyone, it is time for me to divide, to propagate. So I’m going to take over this traverser as well as the sodal.’
‘Mind it doesn’t take you over,’ Gren said feebly. He sat down with a thud as the traverser moved. But the huge creature, in the throes of fertilization, had so little sensitivity that it remained engrossed in its own blind affairs as Lily-yo and the others, working savagely with their knives, cut into its epidermis.
When they had a crater exposed, they lifted the Sodal Ye so that he hung head down into it; though he wriggled weakly, the morel had him too much under control for him to do more. The ugly pitted brown shape of the morel began to slide; half of it dropped into the hole, after which – under direction – the others covered it with a sort of bung of flesh. Gren marvelled at the way they hurried to do the morel’s bidding; he seemed to have developed an immunity to orders.
Yattmur sat and suckled her child. As Gren settled beside her, she pointed a finger across the dark side of the mountain. From their vantage point, they could see sad and shadowy clusters of sharp-furs moving away to safety to await events; here and there their torches gleamed, punctuating the gloom like blossoms in a melancholy wood.
‘They’re not attacking,’ Yattmur said. ‘Perhaps we could climb down and find the secret way to Bountiful Basin?’
The landscape tilted.
‘It’s too late,’ Gren said. ‘Hold tightly! We’re flying. Have you got Laren safely?’
The traverser had risen. Below them flashed the high cliff and they were falling down it, sweeping rapidly over rock. Bountiful Basin spun towards them, growing as it turned and came nearer.
Into long shade they slipped, then into light – their shadow pasted across the stippled water – into shade again, and then once more into light as they rose, gained certainty, and headed towards the plumed sun.
Laren gave a yelp of alarm and then returned to the breast, shutting his eyes as if it was all too much for him.
‘Gather round, everyone,’ cried the morel, ‘while I speak to you through this fish’s mouth. You must all listen to what I have to say.’
Clinging to fibrous hairs, they settled about him, only Gren and Yattmur showing any reluctance to do so.
‘Now I am two bodies,’ pronounced the morel, ‘I have taken control of this traverser; I am directing its nervous system. It will go only where I wish. Have no fear, for no harm will come to any of you immediately.
‘What is more fearful than flight is the knowledge I have drained from this fishy catchy-carry-kind, Sodal Ye. You must hear about it, for it alters my plans.
‘These sodals are people of the seas. While all other beings with intelligence have been isolated by vegetable life, the sodals in the freedom of the oceans have been able to keep in contact with all their communities. They can still rove the planet uninterruptedly. So they have gained rather than lost knowledge.
‘They have discovered that the world is about to end. Not immediately – not for many generations – but certainly it will end, and those green columns of disaster rising from the jungle to the sky are signs that the end has already begun.
‘In the really hot regions – regions unknown to any of us, where the burning bushes and other fire-using plants live – the green columns have already been for some time. In the sodal’s mind I find knowledge of them. I see some blazing on shores glimpsed from a steaming sea.’
The morel was silent. Gren knew how he would be dredging down for more intelligence. He shuddered, admiring somehow the morel’s excitement for facts, yet disgusted by his nature.
Underneath them, floating slowly by, bobbed the coast of the Lands of Perpetual Twilight. They showed appreciably brighter before the heavy lips moved and once more the voice of the sodal carried the thoughts of the morel.
‘These sodals don’t always understand all the knowledge they have gained. Ah, the beauty of the plan when you see it… Humans, there is this burning fuse of a force called devolution… How can I put it so that your tiny brains will understand?
‘Very long ago, men – your remote ancestors – discovered that life grew and evolved from, as it were, a speck of fertility: an amoeba, which served as the gateway to life like an eye of a needle, beyond which lay the amino acids and the inorganic world of nature. And this inorganic world too, they found, evolved in its complexity from one speck, a primal atom.
‘These vast processes of growth men came to understand. What the sodals have discovered is that growth incorporates also what men would have called decay: that not only does nature have to be wound up to wind down, it has to wind down to be wound up.
‘This creature I now inhabit knows the world is in a winding down phase. This he has vaguely been trying to preach to you lesser breeds.
‘At the beginning of this sun system’s time, all forms of life were blurred together and by perishing supplied other forms. They arrived on Earth from space like motes, like sparks, in Cambrian times. Then the forms evolved into animal, vegetable, reptile, insect – all varieties and species that flooded the world, many of them now gone.
‘Why are they gone? Because the galactic fluxes which determine the life of a sun are now destroying this sun. These same fluxes control animate life; they close it down as they will close Earth’s existence. So nature is devolving. Again the forms are blurring! They never ceased to be anything but interdependent – the one always living off the other – and now they merge together once more. Were the tummy-bellies vegetable or human? Are the sharp-furs human or animal? And the creatures of the hothouse world, these traversers, the killerwillows in Nomansland, the stalkers that seed like plants and migrate like birds – how do they stand under the old classifications?
‘I ask myself what am I?’
For a moment the morel was silent. His listeners looked at each other covertly, full of unease, until a flick of the sodal’s tail recalled them to the discourse.
‘All of us here have by accident been swept aside from the main stream of devolution. We live in a world where each generation becomes less, and less defined. All life is tending towards the mindless, the infinitesimal: the embryonic speck. So will be fulfilled the processes of the universe. Galactic fluxes will carry the spores of life to another and new system, just as they once brought it here. Already you see the process at work, in these green pillars of light that draw life from the jungles. Under steadily increasing heat, devolutionary processes accelerate.’
While the morel was speaking, its other half controlling the traverser had brought them steadily lower. Now they floated over dense jungle, over the banyan that covered all of this sunlit continent. Warmth wrapped itself round them like a cloak.
Other traversers were here, moving their great bulks lightly up and down their threads. With hardly a jolt, morel’s traverser alighted in the tips of the jungle.
Gren stood up at once, helping Yattmur to her feet.
‘You are the wisest of creatures, morel,’ he said. ‘I feel no sorrow in leaving you, because you seem now so
well able to look after yourself. After all, you are the first fungus to solve the riddle of the universe. Yattmur and I will speak of you when we are safe in the middle levels of the jungle. Are you coming also, Lily-yo, or is your life given over to riding vegetables?’
Lily-yo, Haris and the others were also on their feet, facing Gren with a mixture of hostility and defensiveness he recognized from long ago.
‘You’re not leaving this splendid brain, this protector, this morel who is your friend?’ Lily-yo asked.
Gren nodded.
‘You are welcome to him – or he is welcome to you. You in your turn must decide as I have had to whether he is a power for good or evil. I have decided. I am taking Yattmur, Laren and the two Arabler women back to the forest where I belong.’ When he snapped his fingers, the tattooed women rose obediently.
‘Gren you are as hard-headed as ever you were,’ Haris said, with a touch of ill-temper. ‘Come back to the True World with us – it’s a better place than the jungle. You just heard the fish-morel say the jungle is doomed.’
To his delight, Gren found he could use arguments in a way that once would have been impossible to him.
‘If what the morel says is correct, Haris, then your other world is doomed as surely as this one.’
The morel’s voice came back, booming and irritable.
‘So it is, man, but you have yet to hear about my plan. In the dim thought centre of this traverser I find awareness of worlds far beyond this, far beyond and basking round other suns. The traverser can be driven to make that journey. I and Lily-yo and the others will live inside it, safe, eating its flesh, until we get to those new worlds. We simply follow the green columns and ride on the galactic fluxes of space and they will lead us to a good fresh place. Of course you must come with us, Gren.’
‘I’m tired of carrying or being carried. Go and good luck! Fill a whole empty world with people and fungus!’
‘You know this Earth will suffer a fire death, you fool man!’
‘So you said, O wise morel. You also said that that would not come for many generations. Laren and his son and his son’s son will live in the green, rather than be cooked into the gut of a vegetable making an unknown journey. Come along, Yattmur. Hup hey, you two women – along you come with me.’