by Brian Aldiss
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ROCK and stones lay thick on the ground below the stalker's legs. This detritus had been shed by an ancient river which no longer flowed; the old river bed marked the bottom of a valley; when they crossed it, they began to climb, over ground free of any form of growth.
'Let us die!' moaned one of the tummy-belly men. 'It is too awful to be alive in the land of death. Turn all things the same, great herder, give us the benefit of the cutting of your cosy and cruel little cutting sword. Let tummy-belly men have a quick short cutting to leave this long land of death! O, O, O, the cold burns us, ayeee, the long cold cold!'
In chorus they cried their woe.
Gren let them moan. At last, growing weary of their noise, which echoed so strangely across the valley, he lifted his stick to strike them. Yattmur restrained him.
'Are they not right to moan?' she asked. 'I would rather moan with them than strike them, for soon it must be that we shall die with them. We have gone beyond the world, Gren. Only death can live here.'
'We may not be free, but the stalkers are free. They would not walk to their death. You are turning into a tummy-belly, woman!'
For a moment she was silent. Then she said, 'I need comfort, not reproach. Sickness stirs like death in my stomach.'
She spoke without knowing that the sickness in her stomach was not death but life.
Gren made no answer. The stalker moved steadily over rising ground. Lulled by the threnody of the tummy-bellies, Yattmur fell asleep. Once the cold woke her. The chant had ceased; all her companions were sleeping. A second time she woke, to hear Gren weeping; but lethargy had her, so that she succumbed again to tiring dreams.
When she roused once more, she came fully awake with a start. The dreary twilight was broken by a shapeless red mass apparently suspended in the air. Gasping between fright and hope, she shook Gren.
'Look, Gren,' she cried, pointing up ahead. 'Something burns there! What are we coming to?'
The stalker quickened its pace, almost as if it had scented its destination.
In the near-dark, seeing ahead was baffling. They had to stare for a long while before they could make out what lay in front of them. A ridge stretched immediately above them; as the stalker made its way up to the ridge, they saw more and more of what it had hitherto obscured. Some way behind the ridge loomed a mountain with a triple peak. It was this mountain that glowed so redly.
They gained the ridge, the stalker hauled itself stiffly over the lip, and the mountain was in full view.
No sight could have been more splendid.
All about, night or a pale brother of night reigned supreme. Nothing stirred; only the chilly breeze moved with stealth through the valleys unseen below them, like a stranger in a ruined town at midnight. If they were not beyond the world, as Yattmur thought, they were beyond the world of vegetation. Utter emptiness obscured utter darkness beneath their feet, magnifying their least whisper to a stammering shriek.
From all this desolation rose the mountain, high and sublime; its base was lost in blackness; its peaks soared tall enough to woo the sun, to fume in rosy warmth, to throw a reflection of that glow into the wide trough of obscurity at its foot.
Taking Yattmur's arm, Gren pointed silently. Other stalkers had crossed the darkness they had crossed; three of them could be seen steadily mounting the slopes ahead. Even their aloof and eerie figures mitigated the loneliness.
Yattmur woke the tummy-bellies, keen to let them see the prospect. The three plump creatures kept their arms round each other as they gazed up at the mountain.
'O the eyes make a good sight!' they gasped.
'Very good,' Yattmur agreed.
'O very good, sandwich lady! This big chunk of ripe day makes a hill of a hill shape to grow in this night-and-death place for us. It is a lovely sun slice for us to live in as a happy home.'
'Perhaps so,' she agreed, though already she foresaw difficulties beyond their simpler comprehensions.
They climbed. It grew lighter. Finally they emerged from the margin of shadow. The blessed sun shone on them again.
They drank the sight of it until their eyes were blinded and the sombre valleys beneath them danced with orange and green spots. Compressed to lemon shape and parboiled crimson by atmosphere, it simmered at them from the ragged lip of the world, its rays beating outwards over a panorama of shadow. Broken into a confusing array of searchlights by a score of peaks thrusting up from the blackness, the lowest strata of sunlight made a pattern of gilt wonderful to behold.
Unmoved by these vistas, the stalker continued immutably to climb, its legs creaking at every step. Beneath it scuttled an occasional crawlpaw, heading down towards the shrouded valley and ignoring their progress upward. At last the stalker came to a position almost in the dip between two of the three peaks. It halted.
'By the spirits!' Gren exclaimed. 'I think it means to carry us no farther.'
The tummy-bellies set up a hullabaloo of excitement, but Yattmur looked round doubtfully.
'How do we get down if the stalker is not going to sink as the morel said?' she asked.
'We must climb down,' Gren said, after some thought, when the stalker showed no further sign of moving.
'Let me see you climb down first. With the cold, and with crouching here too long, my limbs are as stiff as sticks.'
Looking defiantly at her, Gren stood up and stretched himself. He surveyed the situation. Since they had no rope, they had no means of getting down. The smoothly bulging skins of the seed drums prevented the possibility of their climbing down on to the stalker's legs. Gren sat again, lapsing into blackness.
'The morel advises us to wait," he said. He put an arm about Yattmur's shoulders, ashamed of his own helplessness.
There they waited. There they ate a morsel more of their food, which had begun to sprout mould. There they had perforce to fall asleep; and when they woke the scene had changed hardly at all, except that a few more stalkers now stood silent farther down the slopes, and that thick clouds were drawing across the sky.
Helpless, the humans lay there while nature continued inflexibly to work about them, like a huge machine in which they were the most idle cog.
The clouds came rumbling up from behind the mountain, big and black and pompous. They curdled through the passes, turning to sour milk where the sun lit them. Presently they obscured the sun. The whole mountainside was swallowed. It began to snow sluggish wet flakes like sick kisses.
Five humans burrowed together, turning their backs upwards to the drift. Underneath them, the stalker trembled.
Soon this trembling turned to a steady sway. The stalker's legs sank a little into the moistened ground; then, as they too became softened by wet, they began to buckle. The stalker became increasingly bow-legged. In the mists of the mountainside, other stalkers – lacking the assistance of weight on top of them – began slowly to copy it. Now the legs quivered farther and farther apart; its body sank lower.
Suddenly, frayed by the countless miles of travel and subverted by wet, its joints reached breaking point and split. The stalker's six legs fell outwards, its body dropped to the muddy ground. As it hit, the six drums that comprised it burst, scattering notchy seeds all about.
This sodden ruin in the middle of snow was at once the end and the beginning of the stalker plant's journey. Forced like all plants to solve the terrible problem of overcrowding in a hothouse world, it had done so by venturing into those chilly realms beyond the timberline where the jungle could not grow. On this slope, and a few similar ones within the twilight zone, the stalkers played out one phase of their unending cycle of life. Many of the seeds dispersed now would germinate, where they had plenty of space and some warmth, growing into the hardy little crawlpaws; and some of those crawlpaws, triumphing over a thousand obstacles, would eventually find their way to the realms of true warmth and light, there to root and flower and continue the endless vegetable mode of being.
When the seed drums split, the human
s were flung aside into mud. Painfully they stood up, their limbs creaking with stiffness. So thickly swirled the snow and cloud about them that they could hardly see each other: their bodies became white pillars, illusory.
Yattmur was anxious to gather the tummy-belly men together before they became lost. Seeing a figure glistening in the thick dim light, she ran to it and grasped it. A face turned snarling towards her, yellow teeth and hot eyes flared into her face. She cowered from attack, but the creature was gone in a bound.
This was their first intimation that they were not alone on the mountain.
'Yattmur!' Gren called. 'The tummy-bellies are here. Where are you?'
She went running to him, her stiffness forgotten in fright.
'Something else is here,' she said. 'A white creature, wild and with teeth and big ears!'
The three tummy-bellies set up a cry to the spirits of death and darkness as Yattmur and Gren stared about.
'In this filthy mess, it's impossible to see anywhere,' Gren said, dashing snow from his face.
They stood huddled together, knives ready. The snow slackened abruptly, turned to rain, cut off. Through the last shower they saw a line of a dozen white creatures bounding over a brow of the mountain towards the dark side. Behind them they pulled a sort of sledge loaded with sacks, from one of which a trail of stalker seeds bounced.
A ray of sun pierced across the melancholy hillsides. As if they feared it, the white creatures hurried into a pass and disappeared from view.
Gren and Yattmur looked at each other.
'Were they human?' Gren asked.
She shrugged. She did not know. She did not know what human meant. The tummy-bellies, now lying in the mud and groaning: were they human? And Gren, so impenetrable now that it seemed as if the morel had taken him over: could it be said he was still human?
So many riddles, some she could not even formulate in words, never mind answer... But once more the sun shone warm on her limbs. The sky was lined with crumpled lead and gilt. Above them on the mountain were caves. They could go there and build a fire. They could survive and sleep warmly again...
Brushing her hair off her face, she began to walk slowly uphill. Although she felt heavy and troubled, she knew enough to know that the others would follow her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LIFE on the big slope was endurable, and sometimes more than just endurable, for the human spirit has a genius for making mountains out of molehills of happiness.
In the great and awful landscape in which they found themselves, the humans were dwarfed almost to insignificance. The pastoral of Earth and the drama of the weather unrolled without taking cognisance of them. Between slope and cloud, amid mud and snow, they lived their humble lives.
Though night and day no longer marked the passage of time, there were other incidents to tell of its passing. The storms increased, while the temperature fell; sometimes the rain that fell was icy; sometimes it was scalding hot, so that they ran screaming for the shelter of their caves.
Gren became more morose as the morel took a firmer hold over his will. Aware of how its own cleverness had brought them to a dead end, it brooded increasingly; oppressed by its need to procreate, it cut Gren off from communication with his fellows.
A third event marked the unceasing progression of time. During a storm, Yattmur gave birth to a son.
It became the reason for her existence. She called it Laren and was content.
On a remote mountainside of Earth, Yattmur cradled her baby in her arms, singing to him though he slept.
The upper slopes of the mountain were bathed in the rays of the ever-setting sun, while the lower slopes were lost in night. This whole tumbled area was one of darkness, lit occasionally by ruddy beacons where mountains thrust themselves up in stony imitation of living things to reach the light.
Even where darkness lay thickest, it was not absolute. Just as death is not absolute – the chemicals of life later reforming to create more life – so the darkness was often to be reckoned merely a lesser degree of light, a realm where lurked creatures that had been forced out of the brighter and more populous regions.
Among these exiles were the leather-feathers, a pair of which skimmed over the mother's head, enjoying an acrobatic flight, storming downwards with their wings closed or spreading them to float upwards on a current of warmer air. The baby awoke and the mother pointed the flying creatures out to him.
'There they go, Laren, wheeee, down into the valley and -look, there they are! – back into the sun again, up so high.'
Her baby wrinkled its nose, indulging her. The leathery fliers dived and turned, flashing in the light before they sank into a mesh of shadows, only to rise again, as if out of a sea, sweeping upwards occasionally almost as far as the low canopy of cloud. The clouds held a bronze aura; they were as much a feature of the landscape as the mountains themselves, reflecting light over the obscure world below, scattering it from their contours like showers, until the barren countrysides were dappled with yellow and fugitive gold.
Amid this cross-hatching of brightness and dusk the leather-feathers sped, feeding on the spores which even here floated thick, wafted from the vast propagating machine that covered the sunlit face of the planet. The infant Laren gurgled in delight, stretching out his hands; Yattmur the mother gurgled too, filled with pleasure at every movement of her child.
One of the fliers was diving steeply now. Yattmur watched with sudden surprise, noticing its lack of control. The leather-feather twisted down, its mate winking powerfully after it. Just for a moment she thought it was going to straighten: then it struck the mountainside with an audible thwack!
Yattmur stood up. She could see the leatherfeather, a motionless heap above which the bereft mate fluttered.
She was not the only one who had observed the fatal dive. Farther over on the big slope, one of the tummy-belly men began running towards the fallen bird, crying to his two companions as he went. She heard the words, 'Come and look see with eyes the fallen birds of wings!' clear in the clear air, she heard the sound of his feet thudding on the ground as he trotted down the slope. Mother-like, she stood watching, clasping Laren and regretting any incident that disturbed her peace.
Something else was after the fallen bird. Yattmur glimpsed a group of figures farther down the hill, coming rapidly from behind a spur of stone. Eight of them she counted, white-clad figures with pointed noses and large ears, outlined sharply against the deep blue gloom of a valley. They dragged a sleigh behind them.
She and Gren called these beings Mountainears, and kept a sharp watch out for them, for the creatures were fast and well-armed, though they had never offered the humans any harm.
For a moment the tableau held: three tummy-belly men trotting downhill, eight mountainears moving up, and the one surviving bird wheeling overhead, uncertain whether to mourn or escape. The mountainears were armed with bows and arrows; tiny but clear in the distance, they lifted their weapons, and suddenly Yattmur was full of anxiety for the three plump half-wits with whom she had travelled so far. Clutching Laren to her breast, she stood up and called to them.
'Hey, you tummies! Come back!'
Even as she called, the first fierce mountainear had unleashed his arrow. Swift and sure it went – and the surviving leather-feather spiralled down. Beneath it, the leading tummy-belly ducked and squealed. The falling bird, its wings still faintly beating, hit him between the shoulder blades as it dropped. Staggering, he fell, while the bird flopped feebly about him.
The group of tummy-bellies and mountainears met.
Yattmur turned and ran. She burst into the smoky cave where she, Gren, and the baby lived.
'Grenl Please come! The tummy-bellies will be killed. They are out there with the terrible big-eared white ones attacking them. What can we do?'
Gren lay propped against a column of rock, his hands clasped together on his stomach. When Yattmur entered, he fixed her with a dead gaze, then dropped his eyes again. Pallor marked
his features, contrasting with the rich livery brown that glistened about his head and throat, framing his face with its sticky folds.
'Are you going to do anything?' she demanded. 'What is the matter with you these days?'
'The tummy-bellies are useless to us,' Gren said. Nevertheless, he stood up. She put out her hand, which he clutched listlessly, and dragged him to the cave mouth.
'I've grown fond of the poor creatures,' she said, almost to herself.
They peered down the steep slope to where figures moved against a backdrop of hazy shadow.
The three tummy-belly men were walking back up the hill, dragging one of the leatherfeathers with them. Beside them walked the mountainears, pulling their sleigh, on the top of which lay the other leatherfeather. The two groups went amicably together, chattering with plentiful gesticulation from the tummy-bellies.
'Well, what do you make of that?' Yattmur exclaimed.
It was an odd procession. The mountainears in profile were sharp-snouted; they moved in an irregular fashion, sometimes dropping forward to pace on all fours up the incline. Their language came to Yattmur in short barks of sound, though they were too far away for her to distinguish what was being said – even provided that what they said was intelligible.
'What do you make of it, Gren?' she asked.
He said nothing, staring out at the little crowd that was now clearly heading for the cave in which he had directed the tummy-bellies to live. As they passed beyond the stalker grove, he saw them point in his direction and laugh. He made no sign.
Yattmur looked up at him, suddenly struck with pity at the change that had recently possessed him.
'You say so little and you look so ill, my love. We have come so far together, you and I with only each other to love, yet now it is as if you were gone from me. From my heart flows only love for you, from my lips only kindness. But love and kindness are lost things on you now, O Gren, O my Gren!'