Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

by Brian Aldiss

  The two humans heard its noise and looked up. The speed-seed had sighted land. Slowing, it circled and began to lose height.

  'Is it after us?' Yattmur asked.

  A choice of cover presented itself. They could hide under their boat, or they could dive into the fringe of jungle that curled over the low forehead of the beach. The boat was flimsy shelter from a large bird, should it choose to attack; together, man and woman slid into the foliage.

  Now the speedseed was plunging steeply. Its wings did not retract. Stiffly outspread, they jarred and vibrated through the air under increased momentum.

  Formidable though it was, the speedseed remained but a crude imitation of the true birds which had once filled the skies of Earth. The last of the true birds had perished many eons ago, when the sun had begun to pour out increased energy as it moved into the last phase of its existence. Speedseeds imitated the form of an extinct avian class with a lordly inefficiency in keeping with the supremacy of the vegetable world. The vibratory racket of its wings filled the heavens.

  'Has it seen us, Gren?' Yattmur asked, peering from under the leaves. It was cold in the shadow of the towering cliff.

  For answer Gren merely clutched her arm tightly, staring up with slitted eyes. Because he was both frightened and angry, he did not trust himself to speak. The morel offered him no comfort, withdrawing itself to await events.

  It now became obvious that the clumsy bird could not straighten out in time to avoid hitting the land. Down it came, its shadow swept black over the bush, the leaves stirred as it shot past behind a nearby tree – and silence fell. No sound of impact reached the humans, though the bird must have hit the ground not more than fifty yards from them.

  'Living shades!' Gren exclaimed. 'Did something swallow it?'

  His mind backed hurriedly away from trying to visualize something big enough to swallow a speedseed bird.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THEY stood waiting, but nothing interrupted the silence.

  'It vanished like a ghost!' Gren said. 'Let's go and see what happened to it.'

  She clung to him to hold him back.

  'This is an unknown place, full of unknown perils,' she said. 'Let us not seek trouble when trouble is ready enough to seek us. We know nothing of where we are. First we must find what kind of place this is, and if we can live here.'

  'I would rather find trouble than let it find me,' Gren said. 'But perhaps you are right, Yattmur. My bones tell me that this is not a good place. What has happened to those stupid tummy-belly men?'

  They emerged on to the beach and started to walk slowly along it, the whole time looking watchfully about them, keeping an eye open for signs of their pitiful companions, moving between the flatness of the sea and the steepness of the great cliff.

  The signs they looked for were not far to seek.

  'They've been here,' said Gren, running along the strand.

  Scuffed footprints and droppings marked the place where the tummy-belly men had paddled ashore. Many of the prints were imprecise and pointed this way and that; handprints also were not uncommon, marking where the creatures had stumbled into one another and fallen. The marks clearly betrayed the lumpish and uncertain way in which the tummy-bellies had progressed. After a short distance they led into a narrow belt of trees with leathery and sad leaves that stood between beach and cliff. As Gren and Yattmur followed the prints into the gloom, a low sound made them stop. Moans came from near at hand.

  Drawing out his knife, Gren spoke. Looking into the grove that drew nourishment what it could from the sandy soil, he called, 'Whoever you are, come out before I haul you out squealing!'

  The moans redoubled, a low threnody in which babbled words were distinguishable.

  'It's a tummy-belly!' Yattmur exclaimed. 'Don't be angry with him if he's hurt.' Her eyes had adjusted to the shade, and now she ran forward as she spoke and knelt on the sandy ground among the sharp grasses.

  One of the fat Fishers lay there with three of his companions huddled against him. He shuddered violently away, half-rolling over, as Yattmur appeared.

  'I shan't hurt you,' Yattmur said. 'We were searching to find where you had gone.'

  'It is too late, for our hearts are broken by your not coming before,' the man cried, tears rolling down his cheeks. Dried blood from a long scratch across one shoulder had matted his hair at that point, but Yattmur could see the wound was only superficial.

  'It's a good thing we found you,' she said. 'There's nothing much wrong with you. You must all get up now and return to the boat.'

  At this the tummy-belly burst into fresh complaint; his fellows joined in the chorus, speaking in their peculiarly jumbled dialect.

  'O great herders, the sight of you adds to our miseries. How very much we rejoice to see you again, though we know you will kill us, poor helpless loveable tummy-fellows that we are.'

  'We are, we are, we are, and though our love is loving you, you cannot love us, for we are only miserable dirt and you are cruel murderers who are cruel to dirt.'

  'You will kill us though we are dying! O how we admire your bravery, you clever tail-less heroes!'

  'Stop this filthy babbling,' Gren ordered. 'We are not murderers and we have never desired to harm you.'

  'How clever you are, master, to be pretending that cutting us off our lovely tails is no harm! O we thought you were dead and finished with making sandwiches in the boat when the watery world turned solid, so we crept away in good grief, crept away on all our feet because your snores were loud. Now you have caught us again and because you do not snore we know you will kill us!'

  Gren slapped the cheek of the nearest creature, who wailed and writhed as if in mortal agony.

  'Be silent, blubbering fools! We shall not hurt you if you trust us. Stand up and tell us where the rest of your number is.'

  His order only brought forth fresh lamentation.

  'You can see we four sad sufferers are fatally dying of the death that comes to all green and pink things, so you tell us to stand up, because to make any standing position will kill us badly, so that you kick us when our souls are gone and we can only be dead at you and not crying with our harmless mouths. O we fall down from our lying flat at such a sly idea, great herder!'

  As they cried out, they tried blindly to grasp Yattmur and Gren's ankles and kiss their feet, making the two humans skip about to avoid this embrace.

  'There's very little wrong with the foolish creatures,' said Yattmur, who had been trying to examine them during this orgy of lamentation. 'They are scratched and bruised, nothing more.'

  'I'll soon heal them,' Gren said. His ankle had been caught; he kicked out into a podgy face. Impelled by loathing, he grasped one of the other prone tummy-bellies and dragged the creature to its feet by force.

  'How wonderfully strong you are, master,' it groaned, trying at once to kiss and bite his hands. 'Your muscles and your cruelty are huge to poor little dying chaps like us whose blood is going bad inside them because of bad things and other bad things, alas!'

  'I'll push your teeth down your throat if you don't keep quiet,' Gren promised.

  With Yattmur's help, he got the other three weeping tummy-bellies to their feet; as she had said, there was little wrong with them apart from self-pity. Silencing them, he asked them whither their sixteen companions had gone.

  'O wonderful no-tail, you spare this poor tiny number four to enjoy killing the big number sixteen. What self-sacrifice you sacrifice! We happily tell you of the happiness we feel in telling you which way went our jolly sad sixteen number, so we can be spared to go on living and enjoying your smacks and blows and cruel kicks in the noses of our tender face. The sixteen number laid us down here to die in peace before they ran on that way for you to catch them and play killing.'

  And they pointed dejectedly along the shore.

  'Stay here and keep quiet,' Gren ordered. 'We will come back for you when we've found your fellows. Don't go away or something may eat you.'

&nb
sp; 'We will wait in fear even if we die first.'

  'See that you do.'

  Gren and Yattmur set off along the beach. Silence descended; even the ocean made hardly a murmur as it nuzzled against the land; and they felt again a huge unease, as if a million eyes watched them unseen.

  As they walked, they surveyed their surroundings. Creatures of the jungle, they would never face anything more alien than the sea; yet the land here held strangeness. It was not simply that the trees – with leathery leaves that seemed suitable for the colder climate – were of an unknown variety; nor that behind the trees there rose the steep cliff, so steep, so grey, so pitted, rising to a spire so far above their heads, that it dwarfed everything and seemed to cast a gloom over the whole scene.

  Beside all these elements of visual strangeness was another, one to which they could give no name, but which seemed all the more obtrusive after their brush with the tummy-bellies. The murmuring silence of the beach contributed to their unease.

  Taking a nervous glance across her shoulder, Yattmur looked up towards the towering cliff again. Gathering cloud scudding across the sky made that great wall look as if it were toppling.

  Yattmur fell on her face and covered her eyes.

  The mighty cliffs are crashing down on us!' she cried, pulling Gren down with her.

  He looked up once. The illusion caught him too: that grand and high tower was coming grandly down on top of them! Together they squeezed their soft bodies among the hard rocks, seeking safety by pressing their faces into damp shingly sand. They were creatures who belonged to the jungles of the hothouse world; so many things here were alien to them, they could respond only with fear.

  Instinctively, Gren called the fungus that draped his head and neck.

  'Morel, save us! We trusted you and you brought us to this dreadful place. Now you must get us away from it, quickly before the cliff comes down on us.'

  'If you die, I die,' said the morel, sending its twanging harmonics through Gren's head. It added more helpfully, 'You can both get up. The clouds move; the cliff does not.'

  A moment or two passed – an interval of waiting filled with the dirge of the ocean – before Gren dared to test the truth of this observation. At length, finding that no rocks cascaded down on to his naked body, he peered up. Feeling him move, Yattmur whimpered.

  Still the cliff seemed to fall. He braced himself to look at it more thoroughly.

  The cliff appeared to be sailing out of the heavens on to him, yet at last he assured himself that it did not move. He dared to look away from its pitted face and nudge Yattmur.

  'The cliff is not harming us yet,' he said. 'We can go on.'

  She raised a woebegone face, its cheeks patterned redly where they had pressed against the tiny stones of the shore, some of which still clung there.

  'It is a magic cliff. It always falls yet it never falls,' she said at last, after regarding the rock carefully. 'I don't like it. It has eyes to watch us.'

  They scrambled on, Yattmur looking nervously up from time to time. Clouds were gathering, their shadows moving in from the sea.

  The shore curved sharply and continuously, its sands often buried under great masses of rock on which the jungle encroached at one end and the sea at the other. Over these masses they had laboriously to climb, moving as quietly as possible.

  'We shall soon be back where we started from,' Gren said, looking back and finding that their boat was now concealed behind the central cliff.

  'Correct,' twanged the morel. We are on a small island, Gren.'

  'We can't live here then, morel?'

  'I think not.'

  'How do we get away?'

  'As we arrived – in the boat. Some of these giant leaves would serve us as sails.'

  'We hate the boat, morel, and the watery world.'

  'But you prefer them to death. How can we live here, Gren? It is merely a great round tower of rock skirted by a strip of sand.'

  Gren lapsed into confused thought without reporting this unspoken conversation to Yattmur. The wise thing, he concluded, would be to postpone a decision until they had found the rest of the tummy-belly men.

  He became aware of Yattmur looking more and more frequently over her shoulder at the high tower of rock. Bursting with nerves, he said, 'What's the matter with you? Look where you are going or you will break your neck.'

  She took his hand.

  'Hush! It will hear you,' she said. 'This terrible big tower of cliff has a million eyes that watch us all the time.'

  As he began to turn his head she seized his face, pulling him down with her behind a protruding rock.

  'Don't let it see that we know,' she whispered. 'Peep at it from here.'

  So he did, his mouth dry, his gaze going over that large and watchful surface of grey. Cloud had obscured the sun, rendering the rock in the dull light more forbidding than ever. Already he had noticed that it was pitted; now he saw how evenly spaced those pits were, how much they resembled sockets, how uncannily they seemed to stare down at him from the rock face.

  'You see!' Yattmur said. 'What terrible thing broods over this place? The place is haunted, Gren! What life have we seen since we came here? Nothing moving in the trees, nothing scampering on the beach, nothing climbing on that rock face. Only the speedseed, that something swallowed. Only we are alive, and for how much longer will that be?'

  Even as she moaned, something moved on the tower of rock. The bleak eyes – now there was no mistaking them for anything else – rolled; countless numbers of them rolled in unison, and turned in a new direction as if to stare at something out to sea.

  Compelled by the intensity of that stone gaze, Gren and Yattmur also turned. From where they crouched, only a section of the sea was visible, framed among the nearby broken rock lying on the beach. It was view enough for them to observe, far out on the grey waters, a commotion marking where a large swimming thing laboured towards the island.

  'O shades! That creature's heading towards us! Do we run back to the boat?' Yattmur asked.

  'Let's lie still. It cannot have seen us between these rocks.'

  'The magic tower with eyes is calling it to come and devour us!'

  'Nonsense,' said Gren, speaking also to his secret fears.

  Hypnotized, they watched the sea thing. Spray made it difficult to distinguish its shape. Only two great flippers that flailed the water like crazy paddlewheels could be seen clearly at intervals. Occasionally they thought they could see a head poised as though straining towards the shore; but visibility was still failing.

  The broad sheet of sea puckered. A rain curtain blew in from the heavy skies, cutting off sight of the sea creature and sousing everything with cold stinging droplets.

  Obeying a common impulse, Gren and Yattmur dived for the trees, to stand dripping against one of the trunks. The rain redoubled its strength. For a moment they could see no farther than the tattered frill of whiteness that marked the margin of the sea.

  From out of the wetness came a forlorn chord, a warning note as if the world were falling away. The sea creature was signalling for guidance. Almost at once it received answer. The island or the rock tower itself gave voice in return.

  One hollow jarring note was wrenched from its very foundations. Not that it was a loud note; but it filled all things, spilling down to land and sea like the rain itself, as though every decibel was a drop that had to make itself individually felt. Shaken by the sound, Yattmur clung to Gren and cried.

  Above her weeping, above the noise of the rain and sea, above the reverberations of the voice of the tower, another voice rose in a ragged intensity of fright and then died. It was a composite voice containing elements of supplication and reproach, and Gren recognized it.

  'The missing tummy-belly men!' he exclaimed. 'They must be near at hand.'

  He looked hopelessly about, dashing rain from his eyes as he did so. The great leathery leaves sagged and sprang up again under varying loads of water pouring off the cliff. Nothing but fores
t could be seen, forest bowing in submission to the downpour. Gren did not move; the tummy-bellies would have to wait till the rain abated. He stood where he was with an arm round Yattmur.

  As they peered out towards the sea, the greyness before them was broken in a flurry of waves.

  'O living shades, that creature has come to get us,' Yattmur breathed.

  The vast marine creature had entered shallow water and was heaving itself from the sea. They saw the rain sizzling in cataracts off a great flat head. A mouth as narrow and heavy as a grave creaked open – and Yattmur broke from Gren's arms and ran off along the beach in the direction from which they had come, shrieking with fright.

  'Yattmur!' His muscles strained to follow her, but the full dead weight of the morel's will fought unexpectedly against him. Gren stayed locked, momentarily immobile in a sprinter's stance. Caught off balance, he fell sideways into the streaming sand.

  'Stay where you are,' twanged the morel. 'Since the creature is obviously not after us, we must stay to see what it is doing. It will do us no harm if you keep quiet.'

  'But Yattmur -'

  'Let the silly child go. We can find her later.'

  Through the violence of the rain came an irregular and protracted groaning. The vast creature was out of breath. Laboriously it dragged itself up the shelving beach some few yards from where Gren lay. The rain folded it in grey curtains, so that with its anguished breathing and pained movements it took on the aspect, lumbering there in surroundings as unlikely as itself, of a grotesque symbol of pain conjured up in a dream.

  Its head became hidden from Gren by the trees. Only its body could be seen, moved forward by jerks from its unwieldy flippers, before that too was concealed. The tail slithered up the beach; then it also was swallowed by the jungle.

  'Go and see where it has gone,' ordered the morel.

  'No,' said Gren. He knelt, and his body ran brown where rain and sand mingled.

  'Do as I tell you,' twanged the morel. Always at the back of its mind lay its basic purpose, to propagate as widely as possible. Although this human had at first seemed by reason of its intelligence to hold promise as a useful host, it had hardly come up to expectations; a brute of mindless power such as they had just seen was worth investigation. The morel propelled Gren forward.