Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

by Brian Aldiss

  'There we will make a Great Tribe, at first uniting with the Fishers, and then with other tribes in the forests. No longer shall we run in fear. All other things will fear us.'

  In the reticulations of the morel's brain grew a picture of the plantation these humans would make for it. There it would propagate in peace, tended by its humans. At present – it felt the handicap strongly – it had not sufficient bulk to bisect itself again, and so take over some of the herders. But as soon as it could manage it, the day would come when it would grow in peace in a well-tended plantation, there to take over control of all humanity. Eagerly it compelled Gren to speak again.

  'We shall no longer be poor things of the undergrowth. We will kill the undergrowth. We will kill the jungle and all its bad things. We will allow only good things. We will have gardens and in them we will grow – strength and more strength, until the world is ours as it was once long ago.'

  Silence fell. The herders looked uneasily at each other, anxious yet self-defiant.

  In her head, Poyly thought that the things Gren said were too big and without meaning. Gren himself was past caring. Though he looked on the morel as a strong friend, he hated the sensation of being forced to speak and act in a way often just beyond his comprehension.

  Wearily, he flung himself down into a corner and dropped asleep almost immediately. Equally indifferent to what the others thought, Poyly too lay down and went to sleep.

  At first the herders stood looking down in puzzlement at them. Then Hutweer clapped her hands for them to disperse.

  'Let them sleep for now,' she said.

  "They are such strange people! I will stay by them,' Yattmur said.

  'There is no need for that; time enough to worry about them when they wake,' said Hutweer, pushing Yattmur on ahead of her.

  'We shall see how these spirits behave when the spirit of the Black Mouth sings,' Iccall said, as he climbed outside.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHILE Poyly and Gren slept, the morel did not sleep. Sleep was not in its nature.

  At present the morel was like a small boy who dashes into a cave only to find it full of jewels; he had staggered into wealth unsuspected even by its owner and was so constituted that he could not help examining it. His first predatory investigation merged into excited wonder.

  That sleep which Gren and Poyly slept was disturbed by many strange fantasies. Whole blocks of past experience loomed up like cities in a fog, blazed on their dreaming eye, and were gone. Working with no preconceptions which might have provoked antagonism from the unconscious levels through which it sank, the morel burrowed back through the obscure corridors of memory where Gren's and Poyly's intuitive responses were stored.The journey was long. Many of its signs, obnubilated by countless generations, were misleading. The morel worked down to records of the days before the sun had begun to radiate extra energy, to the days when man was a far more intelligent and aggressive being than his present arboreal counterpart. It surveyed the great civilizations in wonder and puzzlement – and then it plunged back still further, far back, into much the longest mistiest epoch of man's history, before history began, before he had so much as a fire to warm him at night, or a brain to guide his hand at hunting.

  And there the morel, groping among the very shards of human memory, made its astonishing find. It lay inert for many heartbeats before it could digest something of the import of what it chanced on.

  Twanging at their brains, it roused Gren and Poyly. Though they turned over exhaustedly, there was no escaping that inner voice.

  'Gren! Poyly! I have made a great discovery! We are more nearly brothers than you know!'

  Pulsing with an emotion they had never before known it to show, the morel forced on them pictures stored in their own limbos of unconscious memory.

  It showed them first the great age of man, an age of fine cities and roads, an age of hazardous journeys to the nearer planets. The time was one of great organization and aspiration, of communities, communes, and committees. Yet the people were not noticeably happier than their predecessors. Like their predecessors, they lived in the shade of various pressures and antagonisms. All too easily they were crushed by the million under economic or total warfare.

  Next, the morel showed, Earth's temperatures began to climb as the sun went into its destructive phase. Confident in their technology, the people prepared to meet this emergency.

  'Show us no more,' Poyly whimpered, for these scenes were very bright and painful. But the morel paid her no heed and continued to force knowledge upon her.

  As their preparations were being made, people began to fall sick. The sun was pouring out a new band of radiation, and gradually all mankind succumbed to the strange sickness. It affected their skin, their eyes – and their brains.

  After a prolonged spell of suffering, they became immune to the radiations. They crawled forth from their beds. But something had changed. They no longer had the power to command and cogitate and fight.

  They were like different creatures!

  They crawled away from their great and beautiful towns, left their cities, deserted their houses – as if all that had once been home had suddenly become alien. Their social structures also collapsed, and all organization died overnight. From then on, the weeds began to flourish in the streets, and the pollen to blow over the cash registers; the advance of the jungle had begun.

  The downfall of man happened not gradually but in one dreadful rush, like the collapse of a tall tower.

  'It's enough,' Gren told the morel, struggling against its power. 'What is past is no concern of ours. Why should we care what happened so very long ago? You've worried us enough! Let us sleep.'

  A curious sensation took him, as if his inside were being rattled while his outside remained still. The morel was metaphorically shaking him by the shoulders.

  'You are so indifferent,' twanged the morel, still gripped by excitement. 'You must attend. Look! We are going back now to very distant days, when man had no history or heritage, when he was not even Man. He was then a puny thing similar to what you are now___'

  And Poyly and Gren could do nothing but see the visions that followed. Though the glimpses were blurred and muddy, they watched tarsier-like people sliding down trees and running barefoot among the ferns. They were small people, nervous and without language. They squatted and pranced and hid in bushes. No detail was clear, for there had never been clear perception to record it. Scents and sounds were sharp – yet taunting as a riddle. The humans saw merely flashes of half-light, as in that primaeval world the little lives scampered and enjoyed and died.

  For no reason that they recognized, nostalgia flooded them and Poyly wept.

  A clearer picture came. A group of the little people paddled in marsh under giant ferns. From the ferns, things dropped and landed on their heads. The things that dropped were recognizable as morel fungi.

  'In that early oligocene world, my kind was the first to develop intelligence,' twanged the morel. "There's the proof of it! In ideal conditions of gloom and moisture we first discovered the power of thought. But thought needs limbs it can direct. So we became parasitic on those small creatures, your remote ancestors!'

  And it pushed Poyly and Gren forward in time again, showing them the true history of the development of man, which was also the history of the morels. For the morels, which began as parasites, developed into symbiotes.

  At first they clung to the outsides of the skulls of the tarsier-people. Then as those people prospered under the connection, as they were taught to organize and hunt, they were induced, generation by slow generation, to increase their skull capacity. At last the vulnerable morels were able to move inside, to become truly a part of the people, to improve their own abilities under a curving shelter of bone...

  'So the real race of men developed,' intoned the morel, throwing up a storm of pictures. "They grew and conquered the world, forgetting the origins of their success, the morel brains which lived and died with them... Without
us, they would still have remained among the trees, even as your tribes live now without our aid.'

  To enforce its point, it again provoked their latent memories of the time when the sun had entered its latest phase and all mankind fell sick.

  'Men were physically stronger than morels. Though they survived the stepping-up of solar radiation, their symbiotic brains did not. They quietly died, boiled alive in the little bone shelters they had fashioned for themselves. Man was left... to fend for himself equipped only with his natural brains, which were no better than those of the higher animals... Small wonder he lost his splendid cities and took again to the trees!'

  'It means nothing to us... nothing at all,' Gren whimpered. 'Why do you haunt us now with this ancient disaster, which all finished uncounted millions of years ago?'

  The morel gave a silent noise like laughter in his head.

  'Because the drama may not yet be finished! I am a sturdier strain than those of my bygone ancestors; I can tolerate high radiation. So can your kind. Now is the historic moment for us to begin another symbiosis as great and profitable as the one which once tempered those tarsiers until they rode among the stars! Again the clocks of intelligence begin to chime. The clocks have hands again...'

  'Gren, he is mad and I do not understand!' Poyly cried, appalled by the turmoil behind her closed eyes.

  'Hear the clocks chime!' twanged the morel. 'They chime for us, children!'

  'Oh, oh! I can hear them!' Gren moaned, twisting restlessly where he lay.

  And in all their ears came a sound to drown all else, a chiming sound like diabolic music.

  'Gren, we are all going mad!' Poyly cried. 'The terrible noises!'

  'The chimes, the chimes!' the morel twanged.

  Then Poyly and Gren awoke, sitting up in a sweat with the morel afire about their heads and necks – and the terrible sound still came, more terrible still!

  Through the disturbed race of their thoughts they perceived that they were now the sole occupants of the cavern under the lava bed. All the herders had gone.

  The terrifying noises they could hear came from outside. Why they should be so frightening was hard to say. The main sound was almost a melody, though it gave no prospect of resolution. It sang not to the ear but to the blood, and the blood responded by alternately freezing and racing to its call.

  'We must go!' Poyly said, struggling up. 'It's singing for us to go.'

  'What have I done?' wailed the morel.

  'What's gone wrong?' Gren asked. 'Why do we have to go?'

  They clung together in fear, yet the urge in their veins would not let them remain. Their limbs moved without obedience. Whatever the dreadful tune was, it had to be followed to its source. Even the morel had no thought but to do otherwise.

  Regardless of their bodies, they scrambled up the rock fall that served as stairs and into the open, to find themselves in the midst of nightmare.

  Now the awful melody blew about them like a wind, though not a leaf moved. Frenziedly it plucked and tugged at their limbs. Nor were they the only creatures answering that syren call. Flying things and running things and hopping things and things that slithered battered their way through the clearing, all heading in one direction – towards the Black Mouth.

  "The Black Mouth!' the morel cried. "The Black Mouth sings to us and we must go!'

  It tugged not only at their ears but at their eyes. Their very retinas were partially drained of sensation, so that all the world appeared in black and white and grey. White the sky glimpsed overhead, grey the foliage that dappled it, black and grey the rocks distorted beneath their running feet. With hands extended before them, Gren and Poyly began to run amid the running things.

  Now through a maelstrom of dread and compulsion they saw the herders.

  Like so many shadows, the herders stood against the last trunks of the banyan. They had strapped or tied themselves there with ropes. In the centre of them, also tied, stood Iccall the Singer. Now he sang! He sang in a peculiarly uncomfortable position, as if disfigured, as if his neck were broken, with his head hanging down and his eyes wildly fixed on the ground.

  He sang with all his voice and all his heart's blood. The song came valiantly out, flinging itself against the might of the Black Mouth's song. It had a power of its own, a power to counteract the evil that would otherwise have drawn all the herders out towards the source of that other melody.

  The herders listened with grim intensity to what he sang. Yet they were not idle. Lashed to the tree trunks, they cast their line nets before them, trapping the creatures that poured past them to the undeniable call.

  Poyly and Gren could not make out the words of Iccall's song. They had not been trained to it. Its message was overridden by the emanations from the mighty Mouth.

  Wildly, they fought against that emanation – wildly but fruitlessly. Despite themselves, they stumbled on. Fluttering things struck them on the cheeks. The whole black and white world heaved and crawled in one direction alone! Only the herders were immune while they listened to Iccall's song.

  When Gren stumbled, galloping vegetable creatures hopped over him.

  Then the jumpvils poured by, teeming through the jungle. Still desperately listening to Iccall's song, the herders snared them as they flocked past, staying them and slaying them in the middle of the melee.

  Poyly and Gren were passing the last of the herders. They were moving faster as the dreadful melody grew stronger. The open lay ahead of them. Framed in a canopy of foreground branches stood the distant Black Mouth! A strangled cry of – what? admiration? horror? – was torn from their lips at that spectacle.

  Terror now had forms and legs and feelings, animated by the Black Mouth's song.

  Towards it – they saw with their drained eyes – poured a stream of life, answering that accursed call, making as fast as it could go over the lava field, and up the volcanic slopes, and finally throwing itself in triumph over the lip and into that great aperture!

  Another chilling detail struck their eyes. Over the edge of the Mouth appeared three great long chitinous fingers which waved and enticed and kept time to the fateful tune.

  Both the humans screamed at the sight – yet they redoubled their speed, for the grey fingers beckoned them.

  'O Poyly! O Gren! Gren!'

  The cry came as a will o' the wisp. They did not pause. Gren managed a quick glance back, towards the jolting blacks and greys of the forest.

  The last herder they had passed was Yattmur; regardless of Iccall's song, she threw off the thong that tied her to the tree. Her hair was flying wild, she was plunging knee deep through the tide of life to join them. Her arms stretched out to him like those of a lover in a dream.

  In the weird light her face was grey, but bravely she sang as she ran, a song like Iccall's to counteract that other evil melody.

  Gren faced ahead again, looking towards the Black Mouth, and instantly forgot about her. The long beckoning fingers beckoned him alone.

  He had hold of Poyly's hand, but as they dashed past one of the outcrops of rock, Yattmur snatched his free hand.

  For a saving moment they paid her attention. For a saving moment her brave song rose uppermost in their attention. Like a flash the morel seized this chance to break from bondage.

  'Swerve aside!' it twanged. 'Swerve aside if you wish to live!'

  A peculiar-looking copse of young shoots stood just by their path. Labouring hand in hand, they turned into its doubtful refuge. A jumpvil hurtled in ahead of them, no doubt looking for a short cut in its stampede. They plunged into the grey gloom.

  At once the Black Mouth's monstrous tune lost much of its power. Yattmur fell against Gren's breast and sobbed – but all was still far from well.

  Poyly touched one of the slender rods near her and screamed. A glutinous mass slid from the rod and over her head. She waved it and clutched it, hardly knowing what she did.

  In despair they stared about, realizing they were in some kind of small enclosure. Their faulty
vision had deceived them into entering a trap. Already the jumpvil that had entered before them was inextricably caught by the mess extruded from the rods.

  Yattmur grasped the truth first.

  'A greenguts!' she cried. 'We've been swallowed by a green-guts!'

  'Cut our way out, quickly!' twanged the morel. 'Your sword, Gren – fast, fast! It's closing on us.'

  The gap had shut behind them. They were totally enclosed. The 'ceiling' started to crumble and come down on them. The illusion of being in a copse faded. They were in a greenguts's stomach.

  Wrenching out their swords, they began to defend their lives. As the rods about them – rods growing so cunningly to suggest the trunks of saplings – buckled and telescoped, so the ceiling lowered, its folds oozing a suffocating jelly. Jumping high, Gren slashed mightily with his sword. A great split appeared in the greenguts's envelope.

  The two girls helped him to enlarge it. As the bag crumpled down, they managed to get their heads through the rent, thus avoiding certain death.

  But now the older menace reasserted itself. Again the death wail from the Mouth seized them by their bloodstreams. They hacked with redoubled energy at the greenguts, to get loose and answer that chilling call.

  They were free now but for their feet and ankles, which were stuck in the jelly. The greenguts was firmly anchored to a shoulder of rock so that it could not obey the call of the Black Mouth. It had collapsed entirely now, its solitary eye mournfully, helplessly, regarding their attempts to cut it to pieces.

  'We must go!' Poyly cried, and at last managed to drag herself free. With her aid, Gren and Yattmur also broke away from the ruined creature. It closed its eye as they hurried off.

  The delay had been longer than they knew. The ooze on their feet impeded them. They made their way over the lava as well as they could, still jostled by other creatures. Yattmur was too exhausted to sing again. Their wills were blotted out by the strength of the Black Mouth's song.