Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

by Brian Aldiss

  Walking by the fringe of the trees, they came to the sea creature's tracks. It had churned up a trench as deep as a man's height in its progress up the beach.

  Gren dropped on to hands and knees, his blood racing. The creature could be only a short distince away; a distinct rotten briny smell hung in the air. He peered round a bole of a tree, following the tracks with his eye.

  Here the strip of jungle stopped unexpectedly, to resume some paces farther along the shore. In the gap, the sand led right to the base of the cliff – and in the cliff was a large cave. Through the driving rain the monster's tracks could be seen leading right into the cave. Yet although the limits of the cave were visible – it was large enough to contain the creature, but no more – it stood silent and empty, like a mouth caught in a perpetual yawn of rock.

  Perplexed, forgetting his fright, Gren came out into the open to observe better, and at once saw some of the sixteen tummy belly men.

  They crouched together under the farther trees fringing the avenue of sand, pressing against the cliff very near the cave. Characteristically, they had sought shelter under an outcrop of rock that now sent a continuous spout of rainwater down upon them. With the long hairs of their bodies washed out flat, they looked very wet indeed, wet and frightened. When Gren appeared, they gave a wail of panic, clutching their genitals in apprehension.

  'Come out here!' called Gren, still looking round to try to account for the disappearance of the sea monster.

  With the rain spurting into their faces, the tummy-belly men were thoroughly demoralized; Gren recalled their idiot cry of fear when they had glimpsed the monster. Now they showed an inclination to run from him, milling round in tight circles like sheep and uttering meaningless sounds. Fury for their stupidity filled Gren's veins. He picked up a heavy stone.

  'Come out here to me, you blubbering belly babies!' he called.' Quickly before the monster finds you!'

  'O terror! O master! All things hate poor lovely tummy-belly men!' they cried, blundering into each other and turning their fat backs on him.

  Infuriated, Gren flung his stone. It hit one of the men on the buttock, a good shot that had a bad effect. The stricken one jumped squealing into the avenue of sand, whirled about, and began to run away from Gren towards the cave. Taking up the cry, the others bounded and tumbled after him, all clasping their behinds in imitation.

  'Come back!' Gren cried, running after them down the centre of the sea monster's tracks. 'Stay out of that cave.'

  They paid him no heed. Yelping like curs, they burst into the cave, their noise echoing sharply back from its walls. Gren followed them.

  The briny reek of the sea monster was heavy in the air.

  'Get out of here as quickly as you can,' the morel advised in Gren's mind, sending a twinge through his whole body.

  All over the walls and roof of the cave were protruding rods of rock, pointing inwards and ending in eye sockets similar to those on the outside of the cliff. These eye sockets too were watchful; as the tummy-belly men bumped into them, they rolled back lids and began to stare, one by one, more and more.

  Finding they were cornered, the men began to sprawl in the sand at Gren's feet and set up a hullabaloo for mercy.

  'O mighty big killing lord with strong skin, O king of running and chasing, look how we ran to you when we saw you! How glad we are to honour our poor old tummy-eyes with a sight of you. We ran straight to you, though our poor running was confused and somehow our legs sent us the wrong way instead of happy right ways because the rain confused us.'

  More eyes were opening round the cave now, directing a stony stare at the group. Gren seized one of the tummy-bellies roughly by his hair and pulled him into a standing position; at this the others fell quiet, glad perhaps that they had been momentarily spared.

  'Now you listen to me,' Gren said, through clenched teeth. He had come to hate these people with a fierce aversion, for they drew out all the latent bullying instincts in him. 'I wish none of you harm, as I've told you before. But you have all got to get out of here at once. Danger waits here. Back on to the beach, quick, the lot of you!'

  'You will stone us -'

  'Never mind what I'll do! Do what I say. Move!' And as he spoke he sent the fellow reeling towards the cave mouth.

  Then what Gren thought of afterwards as the Mirage began.

  A critical number of eyes in the cave walls had opened.

  Time stopped. The world turned green. The tummy-belly man by the cave mouth perched on one leg in a flying attitude, turned green, petrified in his absurd position. The rain behind him turned green. Everything: green and immobile.

  And shrinking. To dwindle. To shrivel and contract. To become a drop of rain falling forever down the lungs of the heavens. Or to be a grain of sand marking an eternal tumble through hourglasses of endless time. To be a proton speeding inexhaustibly through its own pocket-sized version of limitless space. Finally to reach the infinite immensity of being nothing... the infinite richness of non-existence... and thus of becoming God... and thus of being the top and tail of one's own creation...

  ... of summoning up a billion worlds to rattle along the green links of every second... of flying through uncreated stacks of green matter that waited in a vast ante-chamber of being for its hour or eon of use...

  For he was flying, wasn't he? And these happier notes alongside (weren't they?), were the beings that he or someone else, someone on another plane of memory, had once called 'tummy-bellies'. And if it was flight, then it was happening in this impossible green universe of delight, in some element other than air and in some flux apart from time. And they were flying in light, emitting light.

  And they were not alone.

  Everything was with them. Life had replaced time, that was it; death had gone, for the clocks here would tick off fertilities only. But two of the everythings were familiar...

  In that vague other existence – oh it was so hard to recall, a dream within a dream – that existence connected with a beach of sand and grey rain (grey? that could be nothing like green, for green had no likenesses), in that existence there had been a great bird diving and a great beast emerging from the sea... and they had come through the... mirage and were here in this same sappy delight. The element about them was full of the assurance that here there was room for everything to grow and develop without conflict, to develop for ever if needed, tummy-belly, bird, or monster.

  And he knew that the others had been directed to the mirage in a way he had not. Not that it mattered, for here was the sugar of being, of just being in this effortless eternal flight/ dance/song, without time or scale or worry.

  With only the fulfilment of growing green and good.

  Yet he was somehow falling behind the others! His first impetus was dying. There was worry, even here, and dimension had some meaning even here, or he would not be behind them.

  They would not be looking back, smiling, beckoning, the bird, the beast, the tummy-bellies. Spores, seeds, happy sappy things, would not be whirling, filling the growing distance between him and his companions. He would not be following, crying, losing it all... Oh, losing all this suddenly dear and bright unimaginable natured place.

  He would not be aware again of fear, of a last hopeless attempt to regain paradise, of the green going, of vertigo taking him, and eyes, a million eyes all saying 'No' and spitting him back where he belonged...

  He was back in the cave, sprawled on the trampled sand in a posture crudely aping flight. He was alone. About him, a million stone eyes closed in disdain, and a green music died from his brain. He was doubly alone as the tower of rock removed its presence from the cave.

  The rain still rained. He knew that that measureless eternity during which he had been away had lasted only for a flicker of time. Time... whatever it was... perhaps it was just a subjective phenomenon, a mechanism in a human bloodstream from which vegetables did not suffer.

  Gren sat up, startled by his thoughts.

  'Morel!' he whispered.<
br />
  'I'm here... '

  A long silence fell.

  At last without prompting the brain fungus spoke.

  'You have a mind, Gren,' it twanged. 'So the tower would not accept you – us. The tummy-bellies were almost as mindless as the sea creature or the bird; they were accepted. What is now mirage to us is now reality to them. They were accepted.'

  Another silence.

  'Accepted where?' Gren asked. It had been so beautiful...

  The morel did not answer directly.

  'This age is the long age of the vegetable,' it said. 'It has grown green upon the earth, it has rooted and proliferated without thought. It has taken many forms and exploited many environments, so that every possible ecological nook has long since been filled.

  "The earth is more impossibly overcrowded than it ever was in any earlier age. Plants everywhere... all ingeniously, mindlessly, seeding and propagating, doubling the confusion, adding to the pressing problem of how one more blade of grass can find a niche in which to grow.

  'When your distant predecessor, man, was ruler of this planet, he had a way with the overcrowded bed in his garden. He transplanted or weeded out. Now, somehow, nature has invented her own gardener. The rocks have shaped themselves into transmitters. Probably there are stations like this all round the coasts... stations where any near-mindless thing can be accepted for onward transmission... stations where plants can be transplanted... '

  'Transplanted where!' Gren asked. 'Where was that place?'

  Something like a sigh floated down the aisles of his mind.

  'Can't you see I'm guessing, Gren? Since I have joined forces with you, I have become part human. Who knows the worlds available to different forms of life? The sun means one thing to you and another to a flower. To us the sea is terrible; to that great creature we saw... There would be neither words nor thought to describe where we went; how could there be, when it was so patently the product of... non-ratiocin-active processes... '

  Gren got unsteadily to his feet.

  'I want to be sick,' he said.

  He staggered out of the cave.

  'To conceive of other dimensions, other modes of being -' continued the morel.

  'For soul's sake, shut up!' Gren cried. 'What does it matter to me that there are places – states – I can't... can't attain. I can't, and that's that. It was all a beastly mirage, so leave me alone, will you? I want to be sick.'

  The rain was abating a little. It pattered lightly on his backbone as he arched it to lean a head forward against a tree. His head throbbed, his eyes watered, his stomach heaved.

  They would have to make sails from the big leaves and sail away from here, he and Yattmur and the four surviving tummy-belly men. They must get away. As it had become colder, they might have to make coverings for themselves out of those same leaves. This world was no paradise, but in some respects it was manageable.

  He was still throwing up the contents of his stomach when he heard Yattmur calling.

  He looked up, grinning feebly. She was coming back to him along the rainy beach.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THEY stood hand in hand, as confusedly he tried to tell her of his experiences in the cave.

  'I'm glad you came back,' she said gently.

  He shook his guilty head, thinking how beautiful and strange the experience had been. Weariness filled him. He dreaded the thought of their having to put to sea again, yet obviously they could not remain on this island.

  'Get moving, then,' said the morel inside his head. 'You're as slow as a tummy-belly.'

  Still holding Yattmur's hand, he turned and they trudged slowly back down the beach. A chilly wind blew up, carrying the rain out to sea. The four tummy-belly men stood huddling together where Gren had told them to wait. They fell on the sand in self-abasement as Gren and Yattmur came up.

  'You can stop that,' he told them without humour. 'We've all got work to do, and you are going to do your share.

  Slapping their fat flanks, he drove them before him towards the boat.

  A breeze blew over the ocean as bright and sharp as glass.

  To the occasional traversers that soared far overhead, the boat with its six passengers looked like nothing more than a drifting log. It floated now far beyond the island of the tall cliff.

  The sail of large and crudely stitched leaves hung from an improvised mast; but adverse winds had long since torn it, robbing it of usefulness. In consequence the boat now moved without control and was carried eastwards on a strong thermal current.

  The humans watched with either apathy or anxiety, according to their natures, as they were swept along. They had eaten several times and slept much since sailing away from the island of the tall cliff.

  Much lay on either side for them to see when they cared to look. To port ran a long coastline, presenting from this distance an unbroken aspect of forest on its cliffs. Throughout uncounted watches it had remained the same; when hills appeared inland, as they did with increasing frequency, they too were clothed in forest.

  Between coast and boat, small islands sometimes interposed themselves. On these grew a variety of foliage the mainland lacked, some being crowned by trees, some being covered in strange blossoms, some remaining mere barren humps of rock. Sometimes it appeared that the boat would be dashed against the shoals that fringed these islands: but so far it had always been carried clear at the last moment.

  To starboard stretched the infinite ocean. This was now punctuated by evil-looking shapes of whose nature Gren and Yattmur had as yet no clue.

  The helplessness of their position, as well as the mystery of it, bore down on the humans, though they were used to a subordinate place in the world. Now to add to their troubles a mist came up, closing round their boat and hiding all landmarks from them.

  'It's the thickest mist I have ever seen,' Yattmur said, as she stood with her mate staring over the side of the boat.

  'And the coldest,' Gren said. 'Have you noticed what is happening to the sun?'

  In the gathering mist, nothing now could be seen except the sea immediately about the boat and a great red sun which hung low over the water in the direction from which they had come, dangling a sword of light across the waves.

  Yattmur pressed more tightly to Gren.

  "The sun used to be high above us,' she said. 'Now the watery world threatens to swallow it.'

  'Morel, what happens when the sun goes?' Gren asked.

  'When the sun goes, there is darkness,' twanged the morel, adding with gentle irony, 'as you might have deduced for yourself. We have entered the realm of eternal sunset and the stream carries us deeper and deeper into it.'

  It spoke reservedly, yet a tremor ran through Gren at the fear of the unknown. He held more tightly to Yattmur as they stared fixedly at the sun, dull and huge through the moisture-laden air. As they watched, one of the phantom shapes they had observed to starboard intervened between them and the sun, taking a great jagged bite out of it. Almost at the same time, the mist thickened and the sun was lost to view.

  'Ohhh! Ahhh!' At the sun's disappearance, a cry of dismay rose from the tummy-bellies. They had been cuddled together on a pile of dead leaves in the stern. Now they came scampering forward, seizing Gren's and Yattmur's hands.

  'O mighty master and sandwich-makers!' they cried. 'All this mighty watery world sailing is too much badness, too much badness, for we have sailed away and lost all the world. The world has gone by bad sailing and we must quickly good-sail to get it back.'

  Their long hair glistened with moisture, their eyes were in a fine frenzy rolling. They bounched up and down, crying their woes.

  'Some creature has eaten the sun, O great herder!'

  'Stop your silly noise,' Yattmur said. 'We are as frightened as you are.'

  'No we are not,' Gren exclaimed angrily, dashing their clammy hands from his flesh. 'Nobody could be as frightened as they are, for they are always frightened. Stand back, you blubbering tummy-bellies! The sun will come again
when the mist clears.'

  'You brave cruel herder,' one of the creatures cried. 'You have hidden the sun to scare us because you love us no more, though we happily enjoy your lovely blows and happy good bad words! You -'

  Gren struck out at the man, glad to relieve his tensions in action. The poor fellow reeled backwards squealing. His companions fell on him instantly, cuffing him for not enjoying the mighty hurts with which his master honoured him. Savagely, Gren pulled them away.

  As Yattmur came to his aid, a shock sent them all reeling. The deck canted sharply, and they sprawled together, six of them in a heap. Splinters of a jagged transparent stuff showered on to them.

  Unhurt, Yattmur picked up one of the splinters and looked at it. As she watched it, the shard changed, dwindled, and left only a tiny puddle of water in her hand. She stared in surprise. A wall of the same glassy substance loomed over the front of the boat.

  'Oh!' she said dully, realizing they had struck one of the phantom shapes they had noticed riding along on the sea. 'A mountain of fog has caught us.'

  Gren jumped up, silencing the loud protestations of the tummy-belly men. A gash was visible in the bows of their boat, through which only a trickle of water ran. He climbed on to the side and peered about.

  The warm current had carried them into a great glassy mountain that appeared to float on the sea. The mountain had been eroded at water level, forming a sloping shelf there; it was up this icy beach that they had been driven, and this that kept their broken bow partly above the water.

  'We shan't sink,' Gren said to Yattmur, 'for there is a ledge under us. But the boat is useless now; off the ledge, it would sink.'

  It was indeed filling steadily with water, as the wails of the tummy-bellies testified.

  'What can we do?' Yattmur asked. 'Perhaps we should have stayed at the island of the tall cliff.'