by Brian Aldiss
'What's this object that nearly hit us? Examine it and let me see. Perhaps it is a weapon. If we could only find something to help us... '
The thing that had fallen was thin, long, and tapered, like a flattened burnurn seed. It seemed to be composed of a material with a soft surface, not cold like metal. The morel pronounced it to be a container. When it found that Gren could lift it with comparative ease, it became excited.
'We must carry this container to the surface,' it said. 'You can pull it up between the stones. We will examine it in daylight and find what it contains.'
'But how can the thing help us? Will it get us to the mainland?'
'I didn't expect to find a boat down here. Have you no curiosity? This is a sign of power. Come on, move! You are as stupid as a tummy-belly.'
Smarting under this gross insult, Gren scrambled back up the debris to Yattmur. She clutched him, but would not touch the yellow case he carried. For a moment they whispered together, pressing each others' genitals to gain strength; then they struggled up between the layers of tumbled stone back to daylight, dragging and pushing the container with them.
' Phooo! Daylight tastes sweet!' Gren muttered as he levered himself up the last block. As they emerged bruised and cut into the misty air, up came the tummy-bellies scampering, their tongues lolling out in relief. Dancing round their masters, they raised a hullabaloo of complaint and reproach at their absence.
'Kill us please, pretty cruel master, before you jump again into the lips of the earth! Stab us with wicked killing before you leave us alone to fight unknown fights alone!'
'Your bellies are too fat for you to have squeezed down that crevice with us,' Gren said, ruefully examining his wounds. 'If you're so pleased to see us, why not get us some food?'
When Yattmur and he had bathed their cuts and bruises in the stream, he turned his attention to the container. Squatting over it carefully, he turned it over several times. There was a strangeness about its symmetry that alarmed him. Evidently the tummy-bellies felt the same.
'That very bad strange shape for touching is a strange bad touching shape,' one of them wailed, dancing up and down. 'Please only do a touching for throwing it into the splashing watery world.' He clung to his companions, and they peered down in silly excitement.
'They offer you sensible advice,' Yattmur said, but with the morel urging him, Gren sat down and took the container between feet and fingers. While he examined it, he felt the fungus snatch at his impressions as soon as they arrived in his brain; shivers ran along his spine.
On the top of the container was one of the patterns that the morel called writing. This one resembled
heckler or HHT303H
depending on which way you looked at it, and was followed by several lines of similar but smaller patterns.
He began to tug and push at the container. It did not open. The tummy-bellies quickly lost interest and wandered away. Gren himself would have flung the thing aside, had the morel not kept him at it, poking and pressing. As he ran his fingers along one of the longer sides, a lid flipped open. He and Yatt-mur looked askance at one another, then peered down at the object in the container, squatting in the dirt and gaping with awe.
The object was of the same silky yellow material as its container. Reverently, Gren lifted it out and placed it on the ground. Releasing it from the box activated a spring; the object, which had been wedge-shaped to conform to the dimensions of its resting place, suddenly sprouted yellow wings. It stood between them, warm, unique, perplexing. The tummy-bellies crept back to stare.
'It's like a bird,' Gren breathed. 'Can it really have been made by men like us and not grown?'
'It's so smooth, so... ' Words failing, Yattmur put out a hand to stroke it. 'We will call it Beauty.'
Age and the endless seasons had puckered its container; the winged thing remained as new. As the girl's hand ran over its upper surface, a lid clicked back, revealing its insides. Four tummy-belly men dived for the nearest bush. Fashioned of strange materials, of metals and plastics, the insides of the yellow bird were marvellous to behold. Here were small spools, a line of knobs, a glimpse of amplifying circuits, a maze of cunning intestines. Full of curiosity, the two humans leant forward to touch. Full of wonder, they let their fingers – those four fingers with opposed thumb that had taken their ancestors so far – enjoy the delight of toggle switches.
The tuning knobs could be twiddled, the switches clicked!
With scarcely a murmur, Beauty rose from the ground, hovered before their eyes, rose above their heads. They cried with astonishment, they fell backwards, breaking the yellow container. It made no difference to Beauty. Superb in powered flight, it wheeled above them, glowing richly in the sun.
When it had gained sufficient altitude, it spoke.
'Make the world safe for democracy!' it cried. Its voice was not loud but piercing.
'Oh, it speaks!' cried Yattmur, gazing in delight at the flashing wings.
Up came the tummy-bellies, running to join in the excitement, falling back in apprehension when Beauty flew over them, standing baffled as it circled round their heads.
'Who rigged the disastrous dock strike of '31?' Beauty demanded rhetorically. "The same men who would put a ring through your noses today. Think for yourselves, friends, and vote for srh – vote for freedom!'
'It – what is it saying, morel?' Gren asked.
'It is talking of men with rings through their noses,' said the morel, who was as baffled as Gren. 'That is what men wore when they were civilized. You must try to learn from what it is saying.'
Beauty circled round one of the tall stalkers and remained overhead, buzzing slightly and emitting an occasional slogan. The humans, feeling they had gained an ally, were greatly cheered; for a long while they stood with their heads back, watching and listening. The tummy-bellies beat their stomachs in delight at its antics.
'Let us go back and try to unearth another toy,' Yattmur suggested.
After a moment's silence, Gren replied, 'The morel says not. He wants us to go down when we do not want to; when we want to go, he does not. I do not understand.'
'Then you are foolish,' grumbled the morel. 'This circling Beauty will not get us ashore. I want to think. We must help ourselves; especially I wish to observe these stalker plants. Keep quiet and don't bother me.'
It did not communicate with Gren for a long while. He and Yattmur were free to bathe again in the pool, and wash the underground dirt from their bodies and hair, while the tummy-bellies lolled near at hand, scarcely complaining, hypnotized by the yellow bird that circled tirelessly above them. Afterwards, they hunted over the ridge of the islet, away from the tumbled stones; Beauty wheeled above them following, occasionally crying 'The srh and a two-day working week!'
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BEARING in mind what the morel had said, Gren took more notice than before of the stalker plants. Despite their strong and interlinked root structure, the actual flowers were of a lowly order, though, canted towards the sun, they attracted the cordate butterflies. Beneath five bright and simple petals grew a disproportionately large seed pod, a sexfid drum, from each face of which protruded gummy and fringed bosses resembling sea anemones.
All this Gren observed without interest. What happened to the flowers on fertilization was more sensational. Yattmur was passing one of them when a treebee bumbled past her and landed on the blossom, crawling over its pistil. The plant responded to pollination with violence. With an odd shrilling noise, flower and seed drum rocked up skywards on a spring that unravelled itself from the drum.
Yattmur dived into the nearest bush in startlement, Gren close behind. Cautiously they watched; they watched the spring unwind more slowly now. Warmed by the sun, it straightened and dried into a tall stalk. The six-sided drum nodded in sunlight, far above their heads.
For the humans, the vegetable kingdom offered no wonders. Anything that held no menace held little interest. They had already seen these stalkers, waving high i
n the air.
'Statistics prove that you are better off than your bosses,' Beauty said, flying round the new pole and returning. 'Be warned by what happened to the Bombay Interplanetary Freight Handlers' Union! Stand up for your rights while you still have them.
Only a few bushes away, another stalker rattled up into the air, its stalk straightening and gaining rigidity.
'Let's get back,' Gren said. 'Let's go and have a swim.'
As he spoke, the morel clamped down on him. He staggered and fought, then fell over into a bush, sprawling in pain.
'Gren! Gren! What is it?' Yattmur gasped, running to him, grasping his shoulders.
'I– I-I -' He could not get the words out of his mouth. A blue tinge spread from his lips outwards. His limbs went rigid. Within his head, the morel was punishing him, paralysing his nervous system.
'I've been too gentle with you, Gren. You're a vegetable! I gave you a warning. In future I will do more commanding and you will do more obeying. Though I do not expect you to think, you can at least observe and let me do the thinking. Here we are on the fringe of finding something valuable about these plants, and you turn stupidly away. Do you want to rot forever on this rock? Now lie still and watch, or I'll visit you with cramps, like this I'
Painfully, Gren rolled over, burrowing his face in grass and dirt. She lifted him up, crying his name in sorrow at his hurt.
'It's this magic fungus!' she said, looking with distaste at the hard glistening crust that ringed his neck. Her eyes filled with tears. 'Gren, my love, come along. Another mist is blowing up. We must get back to the others.'
He shook his head. Again his body was his own – for the present at least – and the cramps died from it, leaving his limbs as weak as jelly.
'The morel wants me to remain here,' he said faintly. Tears of weakness stood in his eyes. 'You go back to the others.'
Distressed, she stood up. She twisted her hands in anger at their helplessness.
'I'll be back soon,' she said. The tummy-bellies had to be looked after. They were almost too stupid to eat by themselves unless directed. As she picked her way back down the slope, she whispered aloud, 'O spirits of the sun, banish that magic fungus of cruelty and guile before he kills my dear lover.'
Unfortunately the spirits of the sun looked particularly weak. A chill wind blew from the waters, carrying with it a fog that obscured the light. Close by the island sailed an iceberg; its creaking and cracking could be heard even when it had disappeared phantom-like into the fog.
Half hidden by bushes, Gren lay where he was, watching. Beauty hovered overhead, faint in the gathering mist, calling out its slogan at intervals.
A third stalker had rocked upwards, squealing as it went. He watched it straighten out, more slowly than its partners now the sun was hidden. The mainland was lost to view. A butterfly fluttered past and was gone; he remained alone on an uncharted mound, rolled up in a universe of watery obscurity.
Distantly, the iceberg groaned, its voice echoing drably across the ocean. He was alone, isolated from his kind by the morel fungus. Once it had filled him with hopes and dreams of conquest; now it gave him only a feeling of sickness; but he knew no way of ridding himself of it.
'There goes another,' fhe morel said, deliberately breaking into his thought. A fourth stalker had sprung up from the rock nearby. Its case loomed above them, hanging like a decapitated head on the dirty wall of fog. A breeze caught it, bumping it against its neighbour. The anemone-like protruberances stuck against each other, so that the two cases remained locked, swaying quietly on their long legs.
'Ha!' said the morel. 'Keep watch, man, and don't worry. These blooms are not separate plants. Six of them with their communal root structure go to make up one plant. They have grown from the six-pronged tubers we have seen, the crawl-paws. You watch and you'll see the other two flowers of this particular group will be pollinated in a short while.'
Something of his excitement passed to Gren, warming him as he lay hunched among cold stones; staring and waiting because he could do nothing else, he let an age go by. Yattmur returned to him, threw over him a mat the tummy-bellies had plaited, and lay down beside him almost without speaking.
At last a fifth stalker flower was pollinated and rattled startlingly upwards. As its stalk straightened, it swayed against one of its neighbours; they joined, nodded on to the other pair as they did so, and then locked, so that a single case and a bundle of four now stood high above the humans' heads.
'What's it mean?' Yattmur asked.
'Wait,' Gren whispered. Scarcely had he spoken when the sixth and last fertilized drum headed up towards its brothers. Quivering, it hung in the mist awaiting a breeze; the breeze came; with hardly a sound, all six drums locked into one solid body. In the shrouded air, it resembled a hovering creature.
'Can we go now?' Yattmur asked.
Gren was shivering.
Tell the girl to fetch you some food,' twanged the morel. 'You are not leaving here yet.'
'Are you going to have to stay here forever?' she asked impatiently, when Gren passed on the message.
He shook his head. He didn't know. Impatiently she vanished into the mist. A long while passed before she returned, and by then the stalker had taken the next step in its development.
The fog parted slightly. Horizontal rays of sun struck the stalker's body, staining it bronze. As if encouraged by the slight additional warmth, the stalker moved one of its six stalks. The bottom of it snapped free from the root system and became a leg. The movement was repeated in each of the other legs. One by one they came free. As the last one was liberated, the stalker turned and began – oh, it was unmistakable, the seed cases on stilts began to walk downhill, slowly but sturdily.
'Follow it,' the morel twanged.
Climbing to his feet, Gren began to move in the wake of the thing, walking as stiffly as it did. Yattmur followed quietly by his side. Overhead, the yellow machine also followed.
The stalker happened to take their usual route to the beach. When the tummy-bellies saw it coming, they ran squealing into the bush for safety. Unperturbed, the stalker kept straight on, jabbed its way delicately through their camp, and headed for the sand.
Nor did it pause there. It stalked into the sea until little but its lumpy six-part body was above the water. It was slowly swallowed by mist as it waded in the direction of the coast. Beauty flew after it, uttering slogans, only to return in silence.
'You see!' exclaimed the morel, sounding so noisily inside Gren's skull that he clutched his head. 'There lies our escape route, Gren! These stalkers grow here, where there is room for their full development, then go back to the mainland to seed themselves. And if these migratory vegetables can get ashore, they can take us with them!'
The stalker seemed to sag a little at its metaphorical knees. Slowly, as if rheumatism had it tight by those long joints, it moved its six legs, one by one, and with long vegetable pauses between each move.
Gren had had trouble getting the tummy-belly men into position. To them, the islet was something to be clung to even in the face of blows, rather than exchange it for some imagined future bliss.
'We can't stay here: the food will probably give out,' Gren told them, as they cowered before him.
'O herder man, gladly we obey you with yesses. If food is all gone here, then we go away with you on a stalk-walker over the watery world. Now we eat lovely food with many teeth and do not go away till it is all gone.'
'It will be too late then. We must go now, while the stalkers are leaving.'
Fresh protests at this, with much slapping of buttocks in anguish.
'Never before have we seen the stalker-walkers to take a walk with them when they go stalking-walking? Where were they then when we never saw them? Terrible herder man and sandwich lady, now you two people without tails find this care to go with them. We don't find the care. We don't mind ever not to see the stalker-walkers stalky-walking.'
Gren did not confine himself to verbal ar
gument for long; when he resorted to a stick, the tummy-bellies were quickly persuaded to acknowledge the truth of his reasoning and move accordingly. Snuffling and snorting, they were driven towards a group of six stalker flowers, the buds of which had just opened. They grew together on the edge of a low cliff overlooking the sea.
Under the morel's direction, Yattmur and Gren had spent some while collecting food, wrapping it in leaves and attaching it with brambles to the stalker seed drums. Everything was ready for their journey.
The four tummy-bellies were forced to climb on to four drums. Telling them to hold on tightly, Gren went among them one by one, pressing his hand into the floury centre of each blossom. One by one, the seed cases shrilled into the air, noisily accompanied by a passenger hanging on for his life.
Only with the fourth case did anything go wrong. That particular flower was tilted towards the edge of the cliff. As the spring uncurled, the extra weight on the pod bore it sideways rather than upwards. It sagged over, an ostrich with a broken neck, and the tummy-belly yelled and kicked as his heels swung in mid-air.
'O mummy! O tummy! Help your fat lovely son!' he cried, but no help came. He lost his grip. Amid a shower of provision he fell, still protesting, an ignoble Icarus into the sea. The current carried him away. They saw his head go down below the swift water.
Freed of its burden, the stalker drum swayed upright, buffeted the three already erect, and joined with them into a solid unit.
'Our turn!' Gren said, turning to Yattmur.
Yattmur was still gazing out to sea. He grasped her arm and pushed her over to the two unsprouted flowers. Without showing anger, she freed herself from his grip.
'Do I have to beat you like a tummy-belly?' he asked her.
She did not laugh. He still held his stick.
When she did not laugh, his hold on the stick tightened. Obediently, she climbed on to the big green stalker drum.
They clutched the ribs of the plant, churning a hand about the pistil of the flower. Next minute, they too were spiralling up into the air. Beauty flew about them, begging them not to let vested interests prosper. Yattmur was most horribly afraid She fell face forward among polleny stamens, almost unable to breathe for the scent of the flower, but incapable of moving. Dizziness filled her.