Hothouse, aka The Long Afternoon of Earth

CHAPTER ONE

OBEYING an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.

The heat, the light, the humidity-these were constant and had remained constant for... but nobody knew how long. Nobody cared any more for the big question that begin 'How long...?' or 'Why...?' It was no longer a place for mind. It was a place for growth, for vegetables. It was like a hothouse.

In the green light, some of the children came out to play. Alert for enemies, they ran along a branch, calling to each other in soft voices. A fast-growing berrywhisk moved upwards to one side, its sticky crimson mass of berries gleaming. Clearly it was intent on seeding and would offer the children no harm. They scuttled past. Beyond the margin of the group strip, some nettlemoss had sprung up during their period of sleep. It stirred as the children approached.

'Kill it,' Toy said simply. She was the head child of the group. She was ten, had lived through ten fruitings of the fig tree. The others obeyed her, even Gren. Unsheathing the sticks every child carried in imitation of every adult, they scraped at the nettlemoss. They scraped at it and hit it. Excitement grew in them as they beat down the plant, squashing its poisoned tips.

Clat fell forward in her excitement. She was only five, the youngest of the group's children. Her hands fell among the poisonous stuff. She cried aloud and rolled aside. The other children also cried, but did not venture into the nettlemoss to save her.

Struggling out of the way, little Clat cried again. Her fingers clutched at the rough bark-then she was tumbling from the branch.

The children saw her fall on to a great spreading leaf several lengths below, clutch it, and lie there quivering on the quivering green. She looked pitifully up at them, afraid to call.

'Fetch Lily-yo,' Toy told Gren. Gren sped back along the branch to get Lily-yo. A tigerfly swooped out of the air at him, humming its anger deeply. He struck it aside with a hand, not pausing. He was nine, a rare man child, very brave already, and fleet and proud. Swiftly he ran to the Headwoman's hut.

Under the branch, attached to its underside, hung eighteen great homemaker nuts. Hollowed out they were, and cemented into place with the cement distilled from the acetoyle plant. Here lived the eighteen members of the group, one to each homemaker's hut, the Headwoman, her five women, their man, and the eleven surviving children.

Hearing Gren's cry, out came Lily-yo from her nuthut, climbing up a line to stand on the branch beside him.

'Clat has fallen!' cried Gren.

With her stick, Lily-yo rapped sharply on the bough before running on ahead of the child.

Her signal called out the other six adults, the women Flor, Daphe, Hy, Ivin, and Jury, and the man Haris. They hastened from their nuthuts, weapons ready, ready for attack or flight.

As Lily-yo ran, she whistled on a sharp split note.

Instantly to her from the thick foliage nearby came a dumbler, flying to her shoulder. The dumbler rotated, a fleecy umbrella, whose separate spokes controlled its direction. It matched its flight to her movement.

Both children and adults gathered round Lily-yo when she looked down at Clat, still sprawled some way below on her leaf.

'Lie still, Clat! Do not move!' called Lily-yo. 'I will come to you.' Clat obeyed that voice, though she was in pain and fear, staring up hopefully towards the source of hope.

Lily-yo climbed astride the hooked base of the dumbler, whistling softly to it. Only she of the group had fully mastered the art of commanding dumblers. These dumblers were the half-sentient fruits of the whistlethistle. The tips of their feathered spokes carried seeds; the seeds were strangely shaped, so that a light breeze whispering in them made them into ears that listened to every advantage of the wind that would spread their propagation. Humans, after long years of practice, could use these crude ears for their own purposes and instructions, as Lily-yo did now.

The dumbler bore her down to the rescue of the helpless child. Clat lay on her back, watching them come, hoping to herself. She was still looking up when green teeth sprouted through the leaf all about her.

'Jump, Clat!' Lily-yo cried.

The child had time to scramble to her knees. Vegetable predators are not as fast as humans. Then the green teeth snapped shut about her waist.

Under the leaf, a trappersnapper had moved into position, sensing the presence of prey through the single layer of foliage. The trappersnapper was a horny, caselike affair, just a pair of square jaws, hinged and with many long teeth. From one corner of it grew a stalk, very muscular and thicker than a human, and resembling a neck. Now it bent, carrying Clat away down to its true mouth, which lived with the rest of the plant far below on the unseen forest Ground, in darkness and decay.

Whistling, Lily-yo directed her dumbler back up to the home branch. Nothing now could be done for Clat. It was the way.

Already the rest of the group was dispersing. To stand in a bunch was to invite trouble, trouble from the unnumbered enemies of the forest. Besides, Clat's was not the first death they had witnessed.

Lily-yo's group had once consisted of seven underwomen and two men. Two women and one man had fallen to the green. Between them, the eight women had borne twenty-two children to the group, five of them being man children. Deaths of children were many, always. Now that Clat was gone, over half the children had fallen to the green. Lily-yo knew that this was a shockingly high fatality rate, and as leader she blamed herself for it. The dangers in the branches might be many, but they were familiar, and could be guarded against. She rebuked herself all the more because of the surviving offspring, only three man children were left, Gren, Poas, and Veggy. Of them, she felt obscurely that Gren was born for trouble.

Lily-yo walked back along the branch in the green light. The dumbler drifted from her unheeded, obeying the silent instruction of the forest air, listening for word of a seeding place. Never had there been such an overcrowding of the world. No bare places existed. Sometimes the dumblers floated through the jungles for centuries, waiting to alight, epitomizing a vegetable loneliness.

Coming to a point above one of the nuthuts, Lily-yo lowered herself down by the creeper into it. This had been Clat's nuthut. The headwoman could hardly enter it, so small was the door. Humans kept their doors as narrow as possible, enlarging them only as they grew. It helped to keep out unwanted visitors.

All was tidy in Clat's nuthut. From the soft fibre of the inside a bed had been cut; there the five-year-old had slept, when a feeling for sleep came among the unchanging forest green. On the cot lay Clat's soul. Lily-yo took it and thrust it into her belt.

She climbed out on to the creeper, took her knife, and began to slash at the place where the bark of the tree had been cut away and the nuthut was attached to the living wood. After several slashes, the cement gave. Clat's hut hinged down, hung for a moment, then fell.

As it disappeared among the huge coarse leaves, there was a flurry of foliage. Something was fighting for the privilege of devouring the huge morsel.

Lily-yo climbed back on to the branch. For a moment she paused to breathe deeply. Breathing was more trouble than it had been. She had gone on too many hunts, borne too many children, fought too many fights. With a rare and fleeting knowledge of herself, she glanced down at her bare green breasts. They were less plump than they had been when she first took the man Haris to her; they hung lower. Their shape was less beautiful.

By instinct she knew her youth was over. By instinct she knew it was time to Go Up.

The group stood near the Hollow, awaiting her. She ran to them, outwardly as active as ever, though her heart felt dead. The Hollow was like an upturned armpit, formed where the branch joined the trunk. In the Hollow a water supply had collected.

The group was watching a line of termights climb the trunk. One of the termights now and again signalled greetings to the humans. The humans waved back. As far as they had allies at all, the termights were their allies. Only five great families survived among the rampant green life; the tigerflies, the tree-bees, the plantants and the termights were social insects mighty and invincible. And the fifth family was man, lowly and easily killed, not organized as the insects were, but not extinct, the last animal species in all the all-conquering vegetable world.

Lily-yo came up to the group. She too raised her eyes to follow the moving line of termights until it disappeared into the layers of green. The termights could live on any level of the great forest, in the Tips or down on the Ground. They were the first and last of insects; as long as anything lived, the termights and tigerflies would.

Lowering her eyes, Lily-yo called to the group.

When they looked, she brought out Clat's soul, lifting it above her head to show to them.

'Clat has fallen to the green,' she said. 'Her soul must go to the Tips, according to the custom. Flor and I will take it at once, so that we can go with the termights. Daphe, Hy, Ivin, Jury, you guard well the man Haris and the children till we return.'

The women nodded solemnly. Then they came one by one to touch Clat's soul.

The soul was roughly carved of wood into the shape of a woman. As a child was born, so with rites its male parent carved it a soul, a doll, a totem soul-for in the forest when one fell to the green there was scarcely ever a bone surviving to be buried. The soul survived for burial in the Tips.

As they touched the soul, Gren adventurously slipped from the group. He was nearly as old as Toy, as active and as strong. Not only had he power to run. He could climb. He could swim. Further, he had a will of his own. Ignoring the cry of his friend Veggy, he scampered into the Hollow and dived into the pool.

Below the surface, opening his eyes, he saw a world of bleak clarity. A few green things like clover leaves grew at his approach, eager to wrap round his legs. Gren avoided them with a flick of his hands as he shot deeper. Then he saw the crocksock – before it saw him.

The crocksock was an aquatic plant semi-parasitic by nature. Living in hollows, it sent down its saw-toothed suckers into the trees' sap. But the upper section of it, rough and tongue-shaped like a sock, could feed also. It unfolded, wrapping round Gren's left arm, its fibres instantly locking to increase the grip.

Gren was ready for it. With one slash of his knife, he clove the crocksock in two, leaving the lower half to thrash uselessly at him as he swam away.

Before he could rise to the surface, Daphe the skilled huntress was beside him, her face angered, bubbles flashing out silver like fish from between her teeth. Her knife was ready to protect him.

He grinned at her as he broke surface and climbed out on to the dry bank. Nonchalantly he shook himself as she climbed beside him.

'Nobody runs or swims or climbs alone,' Daphe called to him, quoting one of the laws. 'Gren, have you no fear? Your head is an empty burr!'

The other women too showed anger. Yet none of them touched Gren. He was a man child. He was tabu. He had the magic powers of carving souls and bringing babies – or would have when fully grown, which would be soon now.

'I am Gren, the man child!' he boasted to them, thumping his chest. His eyes sought Haris's for approval. Haris merely looked away. Now that Gren was so big, Haris did not cheer him on as once he had, though the boy's deeds were braver than before.

Slightly deflated, Gren jumped about, waving the strip of crocksock still wrapped round his left arm. He called and boasted at the women to show how little he cared for them.

'You are a baby yet,' hissed Toy. She was ten, his senior by one year. Gren fell quiet. The time would come to show them all that he was someone special.

Scowling, Lily-yo said, 'The children grow too old to manage. When Flor and I have been to the Tips to bury Clat's soul, we shall return and break up the group. Time has come for us to part. Guard yourselves!'

She saluted them and turned about with Flor beside her.

It was a subdued group that watched their leader go. All knew that the group had to split; none cared to think about it. Their time of happiness and safety – so it seemed to all of them – would be finished, perhaps for ever. The children would enter a period of lonely hardship, fending for themselves before joining o'ther groups. The adults embarked on old age, trial, and death when they Went Up into the unknown.

CHAPTER TWO

Lily-yo and Flor climbed the rough bark easily. For them it was like going up a series of more or less symmetrically placed rocks. Now and again they met some kind of vegetable enemy, a thinpin or a pluggyrug, but these were small fry, easily despatched into the green gloom below. Their enemies were the termight's enemies, and the moving column had already dealt with the foes in its path. Lily-yo and Flor climbed close to the termights, glad of their company.

They climbed for a long while. Once they rested on an empty branch, capturing two wandering burrs, splitting them, and eating their oily white flesh. On the way up, they had glimpsed one or two groups of humans on different branches; sometimes these groups waved shyly, sometimes not. Eventually they climbed too high for humans.

Nearer the Tips, new dangers threatened. In the safer middle layers of the forest the humans lived, avoided the perils of the Tips or the Ground.

' Now we move on,' Lily-yo told Flor, getting to her feet when they had rested. 'Soon we will be at the Tips.'

A commotion silenced the two women. They looked up, crouching against the trunk for protection. Above their heads, leaves rustled as death struck.

A leapycreeper flailed the rough bark in a frenzy of greed, attacking the termight column. The leapycreeper's roots and stems were also tongues and lashes. Whipping round the trunk, it thrust its sticky tongues into the termights.

Against this particular plant, flexible and hideous, the insects had little defence. They scattered but kept doggedly climbing up, each perhaps trusting in the blind law of averages to survive.

For the humans, the plant was less of a threat – at least when met on a branch. Encountered on a trunk, it could easily dislodge them and send them helplessly falling to the green.

'We will climb on another trunk,' Lily-yo said.

She and Flor ran deftly along the branch, once jumping a bright parasitic bloom round which treebees buzzed, a forerunner of the world of colour above them.

A far worse obstacle lay waiting in an innocent-looking hole in the branch. As Flor and Lily-yo approached, a tigerfly zoomed up at them. It was all but as big as they were, a terrible thing that possessed both weapons and intelligence – and malevolence. Now it attacked only through viciousness, its eyes large, its mandibles working, its transparent wings beating. Its head was a mixture of shaggy hair and armour-plating, while behind its slender waist lay the great swivel-plated body, yellow and black, sheathing a lethal sting in its tail.

It dived between the women, aiming to hit them with its wings. They fell flat as it sped past. Angrily, it tumbled against the branch as it turned on them again; its golden-brown sting flicked in and out.

'I'll get it!' Flor said. A tigerfly had killed one of her babes.

Now the creature came in fast and low. Ducking, Flor reached up and seized its shaggy hair, swinging the tigerfly off balance. Quickly she raised her sword. Bringing it down in a mighty sweep, she severed that chitinous and narrow waist.

The tigerfly fell away in two parts. The two women ran on.

The branch, a main one, did not grow thinner. Instead, it ran on and grew into another trunk. The tree, vastly old, the longest lived organism ever to flourish on this little world, had a myriad trunks. Very long ago – two thousand million years past – trees had grown in many kinds, depending on soil, climate, and other conditions. As temperatures climbed, the trees proliferated and came into competition with each other. On this continent, the banyan, thriving in the heat and using its complex system of self-rooting branches, gradually established ascendancy over the other species. Under pressure, it evolved and adapted. Each banyan spread out farther and farther, sometimes doubling back on itself for safety. Always it grew higher and crept wider, protecting its parent stem as its rivals multiplied, dropping down trunk after trunk, throwing out branch after branch, until at last it learnt the trick of growing into its neighbour banyan, forming a thicket against which no other tree could strive. Their complexity became unrivalled, their immortality established.

On the continent where the humans lived, only one banyan tree grew now. It had become first King of the forest, then the forest itself. It had conquered the deserts and the mountains and the swamps. It filled the continent with its interlaced scaffolding. Only before the wider rivers or at the margins of the sea, where the deadly seaweeds would assail it, did the tree not go.

And at the terminator, where all things stopped and night began, there too the tree did not go.

The women climbed slowly now, alert as the odd tigerfly zoomed in their direction. Splashes of colour grew everywhere, attached to the tree, hanging from lines, or drifting free. Lianas and fungi blossomed. Dumblers moved mournfully through the tangle. As they gained height, the air grew fresher and colour rioted, azures and crimsons, yellows and mauves, all the beautifully tinted snares of nature.

A dripperlip sent its scarlet dribbles of gum down the trunk. Several thinpins, with vegetable skill, stalked the drops, pounced, and died. Lily-yo and Flor went by on the other side.

Slashweed met them. They slashed back and climbed on.

Many fantastic plant forms there were, some like birds, some like butterflies. Ever and again, whips and hands shot out, taking them in mid-flight.

'Look!' Flor whispered. She pointed above their heads.

The tree's bark was cracked almost invisibly. Almost invisibly, a part of it moved. Thrusting her stick out at arm's length, Flor eased herself up until stick and crack were touching. Then she prodded.

A section of the bark gaped wide, revealing a pale deadly mouth. An oystermaw, superbly camouflaged, had dug itself into the tree. Jabbing swiftly, Flor thrust her stick into the trap. As the jaws closed, she pulled with all her might, Lily-yo steadying her. The oystermaw, taken by surprise, was wrenched from its socket.

Opening its maw in shock, it sailed outward through the air. A rayplane took it without trying.

Lily-yo and Flor climbed on.

The Tips was a strange world of its own, the vegetable kingdom at its most imperial and most exotic.

If the banyan ruled the forest, was the forest, then the traversers ruled the Tips. The traversers had formed the typical landscape of the Tips. Theirs were the great webs trailing everywhere, theirs the nests built on the tips of the tree.

When the traversers deserted their nests, other creatures built there, other plants grew, spreading their bright colours to the sky. Debris and droppings knitted these nests into solid platforms. Here grew the burnurn plant, which Lily-yo sought for the soul of Clat.

Pushing and climbing, the two women finally emerged on to one of these platforms. They took shelter from the perils of the sky under a great leaf and rested from their exertions. Even in the shade, even for them, the heat of the Tips was formidable. Above them, paralysing half the heaven, burned a great sun. It burnt without cease, always fixed and still at one point in the sky, and so would burn until that day – now no longer impossibly distant – when it burnt itself out.

Here in the Tips, relying on that sun for its strange method of defence, the burnurn ruled among stationary plants. Already its sensitive roots told it that intruders were near. On the leaf above them, Lily-yo and Flor saw a circle of light move; it wandered over the surface, paused, contracted. The leaf smouldered and burst into flames. By focusing one of its urns on them, the plant was fighting them with its terrible weapon – fire.

'Run!' Lily-yo commanded, and they dashed behind the top of a whistlethistle, hiding beneath its thorns, peering out at the burnurn plant.

It was a splendid sight.

High reared the plant, displaying perhaps half a dozen cerise flowers, each flower larger than a human. Other flowers, fertilized, had closed together, forming many-sided urns. Later stages could be seen, where the colour drained from the urns as seed swelled at the base of them. Finally, when the seed was ripe, the urn – now hollow and immensely strong – turned transparent as glass and became a heat weapon the plant could use even after its seeds were scattered.

Every vegetable and creature shrank from fire – except the humans. They alone could deal with the burnurn plant and use it to advantage.

Moving cautiously, Lily-yo stole forth and cut off a big leaf which grew through the platform on which they stood. It was taller than she was. Clutching it to her, she ran straight for the burnurn, hurling herself among its foliage and shinning to the top of it without pause, before it could turn its urn-shaped lenses up to focus on her.

'Now!' she cried to Flor.

Flor was already on the move, sprinting towards her.

Lily-yo raised the leaf above the burnurn, holding it between the plant and the sun, so that the menacing urns were in shadow. As if realizing that this ruined its method of defence, the plant drooped in the shade, a picture of vegetable dejection with its flowers and is urns hanging limply.

With a grunt of approval, Flor darted forward and cut off one of the great transparent urns. They carried it between them as they ran back for the cover of the whistlethistle. As the shadowing leaf fell away from over it, the burnurn came back to furious life, flailing its urns as they sucked in the sun again.

The two women reached cover just in time. A vegbird swooped out of the sky at them – and impaled itself on a thorn.

In no time, a dozen scavengers were fighting for its body. Under cover of the confusion, Lily-yo and Flor attacked the urn they had won. Using both their knives and all their strength, they prised up one side enough to put Clat's soul inside the urn. The side instantly snapped back into place again, an airtight join. The soul stared woodenly out at them through the transparent facets.

'May you Go Up and reach heaven,' Lily-yo said.

It was her business to see the soul stood at least a sporting chance of doing so. With Flor, she carried the urn across to one of the cables spun by a traverser. The top end of the urn, where the seed had been, exuded gum and was enormously sticky. The urn adhered easily to the cable and hung there glittering in the sun.

Next time a traverser climbed up the cable, the urn stood an excellent chance of sticking like a burr to one of its legs. Thus it would be carried away to heaven.

As they finished the work, a shadow fell over them. A mile long body drifted down towards them. A traverser, that gross vegetable equivalent of a spider, was descending to the Tips.

Hurriedly, the women burrowed their way through the platform of leaves. The last rites for Clat had been carried out; it was time to return to the group.

Before they climbed down again to the green world of middle layers, Lily-yo looked back over her shoulder.

The traverser was descending slowly, a great bladder with legs and jaws, fibery hair covering most of its bulk. To her it was like a god with the powers of a god. It came down a cable. It floated nimbly down a cable which trailed up into the sky.

Other cables could be seen, stretching up from the jungle close by or distantly. All slanted up, pointing like slender drooping fingers into heaven. Where the sun caught them, they shone. It could be seen that they trailed up in a certain direction. In that direction, a silver half globe floated, remote and cool, but visible even in the sunshine.

Unmoving, steady, the half moon remained always in that sector of the sky.

Throughout the eons, the pull of this moon had gradually slowed the axial revolution of its parent planet to a standstill, until day and night slowed, becoming fixed forever: one on one side of the planet, one on the other. At the same time, a reciprocal braking effect had checked the moon's apparent flight. Drifting farther from Earth, it had shed its role as satellite and rode along in a Trojan position, an independent planet in its own right hugging one angle of a vast equilateral triangle which held the Earth and the sun at its other angles. Now Earth and Moon, for what was left of the afternoon of eternity, faced each other in the same relative position. They were locked face to face, and so would be, until the sands of time ceased to run, or the sun ceased to shine.

And the multitudinous strands of cable floated across the gap between them, uniting the worlds. Back and forth the traversers could shuttle at will, vegetable astronauts huge and insensible, with Earth and Luna both enmeshed in their indifferent net.

With surprising suitability, the old age of the Earth was snared about with cobwebs.

CHAPTER THREE

THE journey back to the group was fairly uneventful. Lily-yo and Flor travelled at an easy pace, sliding down again into the middle layers of the tree. Lily-yo did not press forward as hard as usual, for she was reluctant to face the break-up of the group that had to come.

She could not express her thoughts. In this green millenary, there were few thoughts and fewer words.

'Soon we must Go Up like Clat's soul,' she said to Flor, as they climbed down.

'It is the way,' Flor answered, and Lily-yo knew she would get no deeper a word on the matter than that. Nor could she frame deeper words herself; human understandings trickled shallow these days. It was the way.

The group greeted them soberly when they returned. Being weary, Lily-yo offered them a brief salutation and retired to her nuthut. Jury and Ivin soon brought her food, setting not so much as a finger inside her home, that being tabu. When she had eaten and slept, she climbed again on to the home strip of branch and summoned the others.

'Hurry!' she called, staring fixedly at Haris, who was not hurrying. How he could vex her, when he knew she favoured him most! Why should a difficult thing be so precious – or a precious thing so difficult?

At that moment, while her attention was diverted, a long green tongue licked out from behind the tree trunk. Uncurling, it hovered daintily for a second. It took Lily-yo round the waist, pinning her arms to her side, lifting her off the branch, while she kicked and cried in a fury at having been less than alert.

Haris pulled a knife from his belt, leapt forward with eyes slitted, and hurled the blade. Singing, it pierced the tongue and pinned it to the rough trunk of the tree.

Haris did not pause after throwing. As he ran towards the pinioned tongue. Daphe and Jury ran behind him, while Flor scuttled the children to safety. In its agony, the tongue eased its grip on Lily-yo.

Now a terrific thrashing had set in on the other side of the tree trunk: the forest seemed full of its vibrations. Lily-yo whistled up two dumblers, fought her way out of the green coils round her, and got safely back on the branch. The tongue, writhing in pain, flicked about meaninglessly. Weapons out, the four humans moved forward to deal with it.

The tree itself shook with the wrath of the creature trapped by its tongue. Edging cautiously round the trunk they saw it. Its great vegetable mouth distorted, a wiltmilt stared back at them with the hideous palmate pupil of its single eye. Furiously it hammered itself against the tree, foaming and mouthing. Though they had faced wiltmilts before, yet the humans trembled at the sight.

The wiltmilt was many times the girth of the tree trunk at its present extension. If necessary, it could have extended itself up almost to the Tips, stretching and becoming thinner as it did so. Like an obscene jack-in-the-box, it sprang up from the Ground in search of food, armless, brainless, gouging its slow way over the forest floor on wide and rooty legs.

'Pin it!' Lily-yo cried. 'Don't let the monster break away!'

Concealed all along the branch were sharp stakes that the group kept for emergencies. With these they stabbed the tongue still cracking like a whip about their heads. At last they had a good length of it secured, staked down to the tree. However much the wiltmilt writhed, it could never get free now.

'Now we must leave and Go Up,' Lily-yo said.

No human could ever kill a wiltmilt, for its vital parts were inaccessible. But already its struggles were attracting predators, the thinpins – those mindless sharks of the middle layers – rayplanes, trappersnappers, gargoyles, and smaller vegetable vermin. They would tear the wiltmilt to living pieces until nothing of it remained – and if they happened on a human at the same time... well, it was the way. So the group melted quickly away into the curtains of green.

Lily-yo was angry. She had brought on this trouble. She had been caught off guard. Alert, she would never have been trapped by a slow-moving wiltmilt. Her mind had been tied with thought of her own bad leadership. For she had caused two dangerous trips to be made to the Tips where one would have done. If she had taken all the group with her when Clat's soul was disposed of, she would have saved the second ascent that now lay before them. What ailed her brain that she -did not see this beforehand?

She clapped her hands. Standing for shelter under a giant leaf, she made the group come about her. Sixteen pairs of eyes stared trustingly at her, awaiting her words. She was angry to see how they trusted her.

'We adults grow old,' she told them. 'We grow stupid. I grow stupid – I let a slow wiltmilt catch me. I am not fit to lead you any more. The time is come for the adults to Go Up and return to the gods who made us. Then the children will be on their own. They will be the new group. Toy will lead the group. By the time you are sure of your group, Gren and soon Veggy will be old enough to give you children. Take care of the man children. Let them not fall to the green, or the group dies. Better to die yourself than let the group die.'

Lily-yo had never made, the others had never heard, so long a speech. Some of them did not understand it all. What of this talk about falling to the green? One did or one did not: it needed no talk. Whatever happened was the way, and talk could not touch it.

May, a girl child, said cheekily, 'On our own we can enjoy many things.'

Reaching out, Flor clapped her on an ear.

'First you make the hard climb to the Tips,' she said.

'Yes, move,' Lily-yo said. She gave the order for climbing, who should lead, who follow. There was no further discussion between them, no curiosity; only Gren said wonderingly, 'Lily-yo would punish us all for her mistake.'

About them the forest throbbed, green creatures sped and snapped through the greenery, as the wiltmilt was devoured.

'The climb is hard. Begin quickly,' Lily-yo said, looking restlessly about her, and laying a particularly severe look on Gren.

'Why climb?' Gren asked rebelliously. 'With dumblers we can fly easily to the Tips and suffer no pain.'

It was too complicated to explain to him that a human drifting in the air was far more vulnerable than a human shielded by a trunk, with the good rough bark nodules to squeeze between in case of attack.

'While I lead, you climb,' Lily-yo said. 'You talk so much you must have a toad in your head.' She could not hit Gren; he was a tabu man child.

They collected their souls from their nuthuts. There was no pomp about saying good-bye to their old home. Their souls went in their belt, their swords – the sharpest, hardest thorns available – went in their hands. They ran along the branch after Lily-yo, away from the disintegrating wiltmilt, away from their past.

Slowed by the younger children, the journey up to the Tips was long. Although the humans fought off the usual hazards, the tiredness growing in small limbs could not be fought. Half way to the Tips, they found a side branch to rest on, for there grew a fuzzypuzzle, and they sheltered in it.

The fuzzypuzzle was a beautiful, disorganized fungus. Although it looked like nettlemoss on a larger scale, it did not harm humans, drawing in its poisoned pistils as if with disgust when they came to it. Ambling in the eternal branches of the tree, fuzzypuzzles desired only vegetable food. So the group climbed into the middle of it and slept. Guarded among the waving viridian and yellow stalks, they were safe from nearly all forms of attack.

Flor and Lily-yo slept most deeply of the adults. They were tired by their previous journey. Haris the man was the first to awake knowing something was wrong. As he roused, he woke up Jury by poking her with his stick. He was lazy; besides, it was his duty to keep out of danger. Jury sat up. She gave a shrill cry of alarm and jumped at once to defend the children.

Four winged things had invaded the fuzzypuzzle. They had seized Veggy, the man child, and Bain, one of the younger girl children, gagging and tying them before the pair could wake properly.

At Jury's cry, the winged ones looked round.

They were flymen!

In some respects they resembled humans. That is to say, they had one head, two long and powerful arms, stubby legs, and strong fingers on hands and feet. But instead of smooth green skin, they were covered in a glittering horny substance, here black, here pink. And large scaly wings resembling those of a vegbird grew from their wrists to their ankles. Their faces were sharp and clever. Their eyes glittered.

When they saw the humans waking, the flymen grabbed up the two captive children. Bursting through the fuzzypuzzle, which did not harm them, they ran towards the edge of the branch to jump off.

Flymen were crafty enemies, seldom seen but much dreaded by the group. They worked by stealth. Though they did not kill unless forced to, they stole children, which was reckoned almost a graver crime. Catching them was hard. Flymen did not fly properly, but the crash glides they fell into carried them swiftly away through the forest, safe from human reprisal.

Jury flung herself forward with all her might, Ivin behind her. She caught one of the flymen's ankles before he could launch himself, seizing part of the leathery tendon of wing where it joined the foot, and clung on. The flyman staggered with her weight and turned to free himself, releasing his hold on Veggy. His companion, taking the full weight of the boy child, paused, dragging out a knife to defend himself.

Ivin flung herself at him with savagery. She had mothered Veggy: he should not be taken away. The flyman's blade came to meet her. She threw herself on it. It ripped her stomach till the brown entrails showed, and she toppled from the branch with no cry. There was a commotion in the foliage below as trappersnappers fought for her as she fell.

Knocked backwards by Ivin's charge, the flyman dropped the bound Veggy and left his friend still struggling with Jury. He spread his wings, taking off heavily after the two who had borne Bain away between them into the green thicket.

All the group were awake now. Lily-yo silently untied Veggy, who did not cry, for he was a man child. Meanwhile Haris knelt by Jury and her winged opponent, who fought without words to get away. Haris raised his knife to settle the struggle.

'Don't kill me. I will go!" cried the flyman. His voice was harsh, his words hardly understandable. The mere strangeness of him filled Haris with savagery, so that his lips curled back and his tongue came quickly between his teeth.

He thrust his knife deep between the flyman's ribs, four times over, till the blood poured across his clenched fist.

Jury stood up gasping and leant against Flor. 'I grow old,' she said. 'Once it was no trouble to kill a flyman.'

She looked at the man Haris with gratitude. He had more than one use.

With one foot she pushed the limp body over the edge of the branch. It rolled messily, then dropped. With its old wizened wings tucked uselessly about its head, the flyman fell to the green.

CHAPTER FOUR

THEY lay among the sharp leaves of two whistlethistle plants, dazed by the bright sun but still alert for danger. Their climb had been completed. Now the nine children saw the Tips for the first time – and were struck mute by it.

Once more Lily-yo and Flor lay seige to a burnurn, with Daphe helping them to shade it with upheld leaves. As the plant slumped defencelessly, Daphe severed six of the great transparent pods that were to be their coffins. Hy helped her carry them to safety, after which Lily-yo and Flor dropped their leaves and ran for the shelter of the whistlethistles.

A cloud of paperwings drifted by, their colours startling to eyes generally submerged in green: sky blues and yellows and bronzes and a viridian that flashed like water.

One of the paperwings alighted fluttering on a tuft of emerald foliage near the watchers. The foliage was a dripper-lip. Almost at once the paperwing turned grey as its small nourishments content was sucked out. It disintegrated like ash.

Rising cautiously, Lily-yo led the group over to the nearest cable of traverser web. Each adult carried her own urn.

The traversers, largest of all creatures, vegetable or otherwise, could never go into the forest. They spurted out their line among the upper branches, securing it with side strands.

Finding a suitable cable with no traverser in sight, Lily-yo turned, signalling for the urns to be put down. She spoke to Toy, Gren, and the seven other children.

'Now help us climb with our souls into our burnurns. See us tight in. Then carry us to the cable and stick us to it. And then good-bye. We Go Up, and leave the group in your hands. You are the living now!'

Toy momentarily hesitated. She was a slender girl, her breasts like pearfruit.

'Do not go, Lily-yo,' she said. 'We still need you, and you know we need you.'

'It is the way,' Lily-yo said firmly.

Prising open one of the facets of her urn, she slid into her coffin. Helped by the children, the other adults did the same. From habit, Lily-yo glanced to see that Haris the man was safe.

They were all in their transparent prisons at last. A surprising coolness and peace stole over them.

The children carried the coffins between them, glancing nervously up at the sky meanwhile. They were afraid. They felt helpless. Only the bold man child Gren looked as if he was enjoying their new sense of independence. He more than Toy directed the others in the placing of the urns upon the traverser's cable.

Lily-yo smelt a curious smell in the urn. As it soaked through her lungs, her senses became detached. Outside, the scene that had been clear clouded and shrank. She saw she hung suspended on a traverser cable above the tree tops, with Flor, Haris, Daphe, Hy and Jury in other urns nearby, hanging helplessly. She saw the children, the new group, run to shelter. Without looking back, they dived into the muddle of foliage on the platform and disappeared.

The traverser drifted very high above the Tips, safe from its enemies. All about it, space was indigo, and the invisible rays of space bathed it and nourished it. Yet the traverser was still dependent on the earth for nourishment. After many hours of vegetative dreaming, it swung itself over and climbed down a cable.

Other traversers hung motionless nearby. Occasionally one would blow a globe of oxygen or hitch a leg to try and dislodge a troublesome parasite. Theirs was a leisureliness never attained before. Time was not for them; the sun was theirs, and would ever be until it became unstable, turned nova, and burnt both them and itself out.

The traverser fell, its feet twinkling, hardly touching its cable. It fell straight to the forest, it plunged towards the leafy cathedrals of the forest. Here in the air lived its enemies, enemies many times smaller, many times more vicious, many times more clever. Traversers were prey to one of the last families of insect, the tigerflies.

Only tigerflies could kill traversers – in their own insidious, invincible way.

Over the long slow eons as the sun's radiation increased, vegetation had evolved to undisputed supremacy. The wasps had developed too, keeping pace with the new developments. They grew in number and size as the animal kingdom fell into eclipse and dwindled into the rising tide of green. In time they became the chief enemies of the spider-like traversers. Attacking in packs, they could paralyse the primitive nerve centres, leaving the traversers to stagger to their own destruction. The tigerflies also laid their eggs in tunnels bored into the stuff of their enemies' bodies; when the eggs hatched, the larvae fed happily on living flesh.

This threat it was, more than anything, that had driven the traversers farther and farther into space many millennia past. In this seemingly inhospitable region, they reached their full and monstrous flowering.

Hard radiation became a necessity for them. Nature's first astronauts, they changed the face of the firmament. Long after man had rolled up his affairs and retired to the trees from whence he came, the traversers reconquered that vacant pathway he had lost. Long after intelligence had died from its peak of dominance, the traversers linked the green globe and the white indissolubly – with that antique symbol of neglect, a spider's web.

The traverser scrambled down among foliage of the Tips, erecting the hairs on its back, where patchy green and black afforded it natural camouflage. On its way down it had collected several creatures caught fluttering in its cables. It sucked them peacefully. When the soupy noises stopped, it vegetated.

Buzzing roused it from its doze. Yellow and black stripes zoomed before its crude eyes. A pair of tigerflies had found it.

With great alacrity, the traverser moved. Its massive bulk, contracted in the atmosphere, had an overall length of over a mile, yet it moved lightly as pollen, scuttling up a cable back to the safety of vacuum.

As it retreated, its legs brushing the web, it picked up various spores, burrs, and tiny creatures that adhered there. It also picked up six burnurns, each containing an insensible human, which swung unregarded from its shin.

Several miles up, the traverser paused. Recovering from its fright, it ejected a globe of oxygen, attaching it gently to a cable. It paused. Its palps trembled. Then it headed out towards deep space, expanding all the time as pressure dropped.

Its speed increased. Folding its legs, the traverser began to eject fresh web from the spinnerets under its abdomen. So it propelled itself , a vast vegetable almost without feeling, rotating slowly to stabilize its temperature.

Hard radiations bathed it. The traverser basked in them. It was in its element.

Daphne roused. She opened her eyes, gazing without intelligence. What she saw had no meaning. She only knew she had Gone Up. This was a new existence and she did not expect it to have meaning.

Part of the view from her urn was eclipsed by stiff yellowy wisps that might have been hair or straw. Everything else was uncertain, being washed either in blinding light or deep shadow. Light and shadow revolved.

Gradually Daphe identified other objects. Most notable was a splendid green half-ball mottled with white and blue. Was it a fruit? To it trailed cables, glinting here and there, many cables, silver or gold in the crazy light. Two traversers she recognized at some distance, travelling fast, looking mummified. Bright points of lights sparkled painfully. All was confusion.

This was the region of the gods.

Daphe had no feeling. A curious numbness kept her without motion or the wish to move. The smell in the urn was strange. Also the air seemed thick. Everything was like an evil dream. Daphe opened her mouth, her jaw sticky and slow to respond. She screamed. No sound came. Pain filled her. Her sides in particular ached. Even when her eyes closed again, her mouth still hung open.

Like a great shaggy balloon, the traverser floated down to the moon.

It could hardly be said to think, being a mechanism or little more. Yet somewhere in it the notion stirred that its pleasant journey was too brief, that there might be other directions in which to sail. After all, the hated tigerflies were almost as many now, and as troublesome, on the moon as on the earth. Perhaps somewhere there might be a peaceful place, another of these half-round places with green stuff, in the middle of warm delicious rays...

Perhaps some time it might be worth sailing off on a full belly and a new course...

Many traversers hung above the moon. Their nets straggled untidily everywhere. This was their happy base, better liked than the earth, where the air was thick and their limbs were clumsy. This was the place they had discovered first – except for some puny creatures who had been long gone before they arrived. They were the last lords of creation. Largest and lordliest, they enjoyed their long lazy afternoon's supremacy. The traverser slowed, spinning out no more cable. In leisurely fashion, it picked its way through a web and drifted down to the pallid vegetation of the moon...

Here were conditions very unlike those on the heavy planet. The many-trunked banyans had never gained supremacy here; in the thin air and low gravity they outgrew their strength and collapsed. In their place, monstrous celeries and parsleys grew, and it was into a bed of these that the traverser settled. Hissing from its exertions, it blew off a cloud of oxygen and relaxed.

As it settled down into the foliage, its great sack of body rubbed against the stems. Its legs too scraped into the mass of leaves. From the legs and body a shower of light debris was dislodged – burrs, seeds, grit, nuts, and leaves caught up in its sticky fibres back on distant earth. Among this detritus were six seed casings from a burnurn plant. They rolled over the ground and came to a standstill.

Haris the man was the first to awaken. Groaning with an unexpected pain in his sides, he tried to sit up. Pressure on his forehead reminded him of where he was. Doubling up knees and arms, he pushed against the lid of his coffin.

Momentarily, it resisted him. Then the whole urn crumbled into pieces, sending Haris sprawling. The rigours of vacuum had destroyed its cohesive powers.

Unable to pick himself up, Haris lay where he was. His head throbbed, his lungs were full of an unpleasant odour. Eagerly he gasped in fresh air. At first it seemed thin and chill, yet he sucked it in with gratitude.

After a while, he was well enough to look about him.

Long yellow tendrils were stretching out of a nearby thicket, working their way gingerly towards him. Alarmed, he looked about for a woman to protect him. None was there. Stiffly, his arms so stiff, he pulled his knife from his belt, rolled over on one side, and lopped the tendrils off as they reached him. This was an easy enemy!

Haris cried as he saw his own flesh. He jumped unsteadily to his feet, yelling in disgust at himself. He was covered in scabs. Worse, as his clothes fell in shreds from him, he saw that a mass of leathery flesh grew from his arms, his ribs, his legs. When he lifted his arms, the mass stretched out almost like wings. He was spoilt, his handsome body ruined.

A sound made him turn, and for the first time he remembered his fellows. Lily-yo was struggling from the remains of her burnurn. She raised a hand in greeting.

To his horror, Haris saw that she bore disfigurements like his own. In truth, he scarcely recognized her at first. She resembled nothing so much as one of the hated flymen. He flung himself to the ground and wept as his heart expanded in fear and loathing.

Lily-yo was not born to weep. Disregarding her own painful deformities, breathing laboriously, she cast about around the indifferent legs of the traverser, seeking out the other four coffins.

Flor's was the first she found, half-buried though it was. A blow with a stone shattered it. Lily-yo lifted up her friend, as hideously transformed as she, and in a short while Flor roused. Inhaling the strange air raucously, she too sat up. Lily-yo left her to seek the others. Even in her dazed state, she thanked her aching limbs for feeling so light of body.

Daphe was dead. She lay stiff and purple in her urn. Though Lily-yo shattered it and called aloud, Daphe did not stir. Her swollen tongue stayed dreadfully protruding from her mouth. Daphe was dead, Daphe who had lived, Daphe who had been the sweet singer.

Hy was also dead, a poor shrivelled thing lying in a coffin that had cracked on its arduous journey between the two worlds. When that coffin shattered under Lily-yo's blow, Hy too fell away to powder. Hy was dead, Hy who had born a man child, Hy always so fleet of foot.

Jury's urn was the last. She stirred as the headwomen reached her and brushed the burrs from her transparent box. A minute later, she was sitting up, eyeing her deformities with a stoical distaste, breathing the sharp air. Jury lived.

Haris staggered over to the women. In his hand he carried his soul.

'Four of us!' he exclaimed. 'Have we been received by the gods or no?'

'We feel pain – so we live,' Lily-yo said. 'Daphe and Hy have fallen to the green.'

Bitterly, Haris flung down his soul and trampled it underfoot.

'Look at us! Better be dead!' he said.

'Before we decide that, we will eat,' said Lily-yo.

Painfully, they retreated into the thicket, alerting themselves once more to the idea of danger. Flor, Lily-yo, Jury, Haris, each supported the other. The idea of tabu had somehow been forgotten.

CHAPTER FIVE

'NO proper trees grow here,' Flor protested, as they pushed among giant celeries whose crests waved high above their heads.

'Take care!' Lily-yo said. She pulled Flor back. Something rattled and snapped, like a chained dog, missing Flor's leg by inches.

A trappersnapper, having missed its prey, was slowly reopening its jaws, baring its green teeth. This one was only a shadow of the terrible trappersnappers spawned on the jungle floors of earth. Its jaws were weaker, its movements far more circumscribed. Without the shelter of the giant banyans, the trapper-snappers were disinherited.

Something of the same feeling overcame the humans. They and their ancestors for countless generations had lived in the high trees. Safety was arboreal. Trees there were here, but only celery and parsley trees offering neither the rock-steadiness nor the unlimited boughs of the giant trees.

So they journeyed, nervous, lost, in pain, knowing neither where they were nor why they were.

They were attacked by leapycreepers and sawthorns, and beat them down. They skirted a thicket of nettlemoss taller and wider than any to be met with on earth. Conditions that worked against one group of vegetation favoured others. They climbed a slope and came on a pool fed by a stream. Over the pool hung berries and fruits, sweet to taste, good to eat.

'This is not so bad,' Haris said. 'Perhaps we can still live.'

Lily-yo smiled at him. He was the most trouble, the most lazy; yet she was glad he was still here. When they bathed in the pool she looked at him again. For all the strange scales that covered him, and the two broad sweeps of flesh that hung by his side, he was still good to look on just because he was Haris. She hoped she was also comely. With a burr she raked her hair back; only a little of it fell out.

When they had bathed, they ate. Haris worked then, collecting fresh knives from the bramble bushes. They were not so tough as the ones on earth, but they would have to do. Then they rested in the sun.

The pattern of their lives was completely broken. More by instinct than intelligence they had lived. Without the group, without the tree, without the earth, no pattern guided them. What was the way or what was not became unclear. So they lay where they were and rested.

As she lay, Lily-yo looked about her. All was strange, so that her heart beat faintly.

Though the sun shone bright as ever, the sky was as deep blue as a vandalberry. And the half-globe shining in the sky was streaked with green and blue and white, so that Lily-yo could not know it for somewhere she had lived. Phantom silver lines pointed to it, while nearer at hand the tracery of traverser webs glittered, veining the whole sky. Traversers moved over it like clouds, their great bodies slack.

All this was their empire, their creation. On their first journeys here, many millennia ago, the traversers had literally laid the seeds of this world. To begin with, they withered and died by the thousand on the inhospitable ash. But even the dead had brought their little levy of oxygen and other gases, soil, spores, and seed, some of which latter sprouted on the fruitful corpses. Under the weight of dozy centuries, these plants gained a sort of foothold.

They grew. Stunted and ailing in the beginning, they grew. With vegetal tenacity, they grew. They exhaled. They spread. They thrived. Slowly the broken wastes of the moon's lit face turned green. In the craters creepers began to flower. Up the ravaged slopes the parsleys crawled. As the atmosphere deepened, so the magic of life intensified, its rhythm strengthened, its tempo increased. More thoroughly than another dominant species had once managed to do, the traversers colonized the moon.

Little Lily-yo knew or cared about any of this. She turned her face from the sky.

Flor had crawled over to Haris the man. She lay against him in the circle of his arms, half under the shelter of his new skin, and she stroked his hair.

Furious, up jumped Lily-yo. She kicked Flor on the shin, then flung herself upon her, using teeth and nails to pull her away. Jury ran to join in.

'This is not time for mating!' Lily-yo cried. 'How dare you touch Haris?'

'Let me go! Let me go!' cried Flor. 'Haris touched me first.'

Haris in his startlement jumped up. He stretched his arms, waved them, and rose effortlessly into the air.

'Look!' he shouted in alarmed delight. 'Look what I can do!'

Over their heads he circled once, perilously. Then he lost his balance and came sprawling head first, mouth open in fright. Head first he pitched into the pool.

Three anxious, awe-struck, and love-struck female humans dived in in unison to save him.

While they were drying themselves they heard the noises in the forest. At once they became alert, their old selves. They drew their swords and looked to the thicket.

The wiltmilt when it appeared was not like its earthly brothers. No longer upright like a jack-in-the-box, it groped its way along like a caterpillar.

The humans saw its distorted eye break from the celeries. Then they turned and fled.

Even when the danger was left behind, they still moved rapidly, not knowing what they sought. Once they slept, ate, and then again pressed on through the unending growth, the undying daylight, until they came to where the jungle gaped.

Ahead of them, everything seemed to cease and then go on again.

Cautiously they went to see what they had arrived at. The ground underfoot had been uneven. Now it broke altogether into a wide crevasse. Beyond the crevasse the vegetation grew again – but how did humans span that gulf? The four of them stood anxiously where the ferns ended, looking across at the far side.

Haris the man screwed his face in pain to show he had a troublesome idea in his head.

'What I did before – going up in the air," he began awkwardly. 'If we do it again now, all of us, we go in the air across to the other side.'

'No!' Lily-yo said. 'When you go up you come down hard. You will fall to the green!'

'I will do better than before. I think I have the art now.'

'NoI' repeated Lily-yo. 'You are not to go. You are not safe.'

'Let him go," Flor said. 'He says he has the art.'

The two women turned to glare at each other. Taking his chance, Haris raised his arms, waved them, rose slightly from the ground, and began to use his legs too. He moved forward over the crevasse before his nerve broke.

As he fluttered down, Flor and Lily-yo, moved by instinct, dived into the gulf after him. Spreading their arms, they glided about him, shouting. Jury remained behind, crying in baffled anger down to them.

Regaining a little control, Haris landed heavily on an outcropping ledge. The two women alighted chattering and scolding beside him. They looked up, pressing against the cliff for safety. Two lips fringed with fern sucked a narrow purple segment of sky above their heads. Jury could not be seen, though her cries still echoed down to them. They called back to her.

Behind the ledge on which they stood, a tunnel ran into the cliff. All the rock face was peppered with similar holes, so that it resembled a sponge. From the tunnel ran three flymen, two male and one female, ropes and spears in their hands.

Flor and Lily-yo were bending over Haris. Before they had time to recover, they were knocked sprawling and tied with ropes. Other flymen launched themselves from other holes and came gliding in to help secure them. Their flight seemed more sure, more graceful, than it had done on earth. Perhaps the fact that humans were lighter here had something to do with it.

'Bring them in!' the flymen cried to each other. Their sharp, clever faces jostled round eagerly as they hoisted up their captives and bore them into the gloom of tunnel.

In their alarm, Lily-yo, Flor and Haris forgot about Jury, still crouching on the lip of the crevasse. They never saw her again.

The tunnel sloped gently down. Finally it curved and led into another which ran level and true. This in its turn led into an immense cavern with regular sides and a regular roof. Grey daylight flooded in at one end, for the cavern stood at the bottom of the crevasse.

To the middle of this cavern the three captives were brought. Their knives were taken from them and they were released. As they huddled together uneasily, one of the flymen stood forward and spoke.

'We will not harm you unless we must,' he said. 'You come by traverser from the Heavy World. You are new here. When you learn our ways, you will join us.'

'I am Lily-yo,' Lily-yo proudly said. 'You must let me go. We three are humans and you are flymen.'

'Yes, you are humans, we are flymen. Also we are humans, you are flymen, for we are all the same. Just now you know nothing. Soon you will know more when you have seen the Captives. They will tell you many things.'

'I am Lily-yo. I know many things.'

'The Captives will tell you many more things,' the flyman insisted.

'If there were many more things, then I should know them, for I am Lily-yo.'

'I am Band Appa Bondi and I say come to see the Captives. Your talk is stupid Heavy World talk, Lily-yo.'

Several flymen began to look aggressive, so that Haris nudged Lily-yo and muttered, 'Let us do what he asks. Do not make more trouble.'

Grumpily, Lily-yo let herself and her two companions be led to another chamber. This one was partially ruined, and stank. At the far end of it, a fall of tindery rock marked where the roof had collapsed, while a shaft of the unremitting sunlight burnt on the floor, sending up a curtain of golden light about itself. Near this light were the Captives.

'Do not fear to see them. They will not harm you.' Band Appa Bondi said, going forward.

The encouragement was needed, for the Captives were not prepossessing.

Eight of them there were, eight Captives, kept in eight great burnurns big enough to serve them as narrow cells. The cells stood grouped in a semicircle. Band Appa Bondi led Lily-yo, Flor and Haris into the middle of this semicircle, where they could survey and be surveyed.

The Captives were painful to look on. All had some kind of deformity. One had no legs. One had no flesh on his lower jaw. One had four gnarled dwarf arms. One had short wings of flesh connecting ear lobes and thumbs, so that he lived perpetually with hands half raised to his face. One had boneless arms dangling at his side and one boneless leg. One had monstrous wings which trailed about him like carpet. One was hiding his ill-shaped form away behind a screen of his own excrement, smearing it on the transparent walls of his cell. And one had a second head, a small wizened thing growing from the first that fixed Lily-yo with a malevolent eye. This last captive, who seemed to lead the others, spoke now, using the mouth of his main head.

'I am the Chief Captive. I greet you, children, and invite you to know yourselves. You are of the Heavy World; we are of the True World. Now you join us because you are of us. Though your wings and your scars are new, you are welcome to join us.'

'I am Lily-yo. We three are humans, while you are only flymen. We will not join you.'

The Captives grunted in boredom. The Chief Captive spoke again.

'Always this talk from you denizens of the Heavy World! Understand that you have joined us by becoming like us. You are flymen, we are human. You know little, we know much.'

'But we – '

'Stop your stupid talk, woman!'

'We are – '

'Be silent, woman, and listen,' Band Appa Bondi said.

'We know much,' repeated the Chief Captive. 'Some things we will tell you now to make you understand. All who make the journey from the Heavy World become changed. Some die. Most live and grow wings. Between the worlds are many strong rays, not seen or felt, which change our bodies. When you come here, when you come to the True World, you become a true human. The grub of the tigerfly is not a tigerfly until it changes. So humans change, becoming what you call flymen.'

'I cannot know what he says,' Haris said stubbornly, throwing himself down. But Lily-yo and Flor were listening.

'To this True World, as you call it, we came to die,' Lily-yo said, doubtingly.

The Captive with the fleshless jaw said, 'The grub of the tigerfly thinks it dies when it changes into a tigerfly.'

'You are still young,' said the Chief Captive. 'You have entered a fresh life. Where are your souls?'

Lily-yo and Flor looked at each other. In their flight from the wiltmilt they had heedlessly thrown down their souls. Haris had trampled on his. It was unthinkable!

'You see. You needed your souls no more. You are still young, and may be able to have babies. Some of those babies may be born with wings.'

The Captive with the boneless arms added, 'Some may be born wrong, as we are. Some may be born right.'

'You are too foul to live!' Haris growled. 'Why are you not killed for your horrible shapes?'

'Because we know all things," the Chief Captive said. His second head roused itself and declared in a husky voice, 'To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important. Because we cannot move well, we can think. This tribe of the True World is good and understands the value of thought in any shape. So it lets us rule it.'

Flor and Lily-yo muttered together.

'Do you say that you poor Captives rule the True World?' Lily-yo asked at last.

'We do.'

'Then why are you captives?'

The flyman with ear lobes and thumbs connected, making his perpetual little gesture of protest, spoke for the first time in a rich and strangled voice.

'To rule is to serve, woman. Those who bear power are slaves to it. Only an outcast is free. Because we are Captives, we have the time to talk and think and plan and know. Those who know command the knives of others. We are power, though we rule without power.'

'No hurt will come to you, Lily-yo,' Band Appa Bondi added. 'You will live among us and enjoy your life free from harm.'

'No!' the Chief Captive said with both mouths. 'Before she can enjoy, Lily-yo and her companion Flor – this other man creature is plainly useless – must help our great plan.'

'You mean we should tell them about the invasion?' Bondi asked.

'Why not? Flor and Lily-yo, you arrive here at a good time. Memories of the Heavy World and its savage life are still fresh in you. We need such memories. So we ask you to go back there on a great plan we have.'

'Go back?' gasped Flor.

'Yes. We plan to attack the Heavy World. You must help to lead our force.'

CHAPTER SIX

THE long afternoon of eternity wore on, that long golden road of an afternoon that would somewhen lead to everlasting night.

Motion there was, but motion without event – except for those neglible events that seemed so large to the creatures participating in them.

For Lily-yo, Flor and Haris there were many events. Chief of these was, that they learnt to fly properly.

The pains associated with their wings soon died away as the wonderful new flesh and tendon strengthened. To sail up in the light gravity became an increasing delight – the ugly flopping movements of flymen on the Heavy World had no place here.

They learnt to fly in packs, and then to hunt in packs. In time they were trained to carry out the Captives' plan.

The series of accidents that had first delivered humans to this world in burnurns had been a fortunate one, growing more fortunate as millennia rolled away. For gradually the humans adapted better to the True World. Their survival factor became greater, their power surer. All this: as on the Heavy World conditions grew more and more adverse to anything but vegetation.

Lily-yo at least was quick to see how much easier life was in these new conditions. She sat with Flor and a dozen others eating pulped pluggyrug, before they did the Captives' bidding and left for the Heavy World.

It was hard to express all she felt.

'Here we are safe,' she said, indicating the whole green land that sweltered under the silver network of webs.

'Except from the tigerflies,' Flor agreed.

They rested on a bare peak, where the air was thin and even the giant creepers had not climbed. The turbulent green stretched away below them, almost as if they were on Earth – although here it was continually checked by the circular formations of rock.

'This world is smaller,' Lily-yo said, trying again to make Flor know what was in her head. 'Here we are bigger. We do not need to fight so much.'

'Soon we must fight.'

'Then we can come back here again. This is a good place, with nothing so savage and without so many enemies. Here the groups could live without so much fear. Veggy and Toy and May and Gren and the other little ones would like it here."

"They would miss the trees.'

'We shall soon miss the trees no longer. We have wings instead. Everything is a matter of custom.'

This idle talk took place beneath the unmoving shadow of a rock. Overhead, silver blobs against a purple sky, the traversers drifted, walking their networks, descending only occasionally to celeries far below. As Lily-yo fell to watching these creatures, she thought in her mind of the grand plan the Captives had hatched, she flicked it over in a series of vivid pictures.

Yes, the Captives knew. They could see ahead as she could not. She and those about her had lived like plants, doing what came to hand. The Captives were not plants. From their cells they saw more than those outside.

This, the Captives saw. That the few humans who reached the True World bore few children, because they were old, or because the rays that made their wings grow made their seed die. That it was good here, and would be better still with more humans. That one way to get more humans here was to bring babies and children from the Heavy World.

For countless time, this had been done. Brave flymen had travelled back to that other world and stolen children. The flymen who had once attacked Lily-yo's group on their climb to the Tips had been on that mission. They had taken Bain to bring her to the True World in burnurns – and had not been heard of since.

Many perils and mischances lay in that long double journey. Of those who set out, few returned.

Now the Captives had thought of a better and more daring scheme.

'Here comes a traverser,' Band Appa Bondi said, rousing Lily-yo from her thoughts. 'Let us be ready to move.'

He walked before the pack of twelve flyers who had been chosen for this new attempt. He was the leader of them. Lily-yo, Flor, and Haris were in support of him, together with eight others, three male, five female. Only one of them, Band Appa Bondi himself, had been carried to the True World as a boy; the rest had arrived here in the same manner as Lily-yo.

Slowly the pack stood up, stretching their wings. The moment of their great adventure was here. Yet they felt little fear; they could not look ahead as the Captives did, except perhaps for Band Appa Bondi and Lily-yo. She strengthened her will by saying 'It is the Way'. Then they all spread their arms wide and soared off to meet the traverser.

The traverser had eaten.

It had caught one of its most tasty enemies, a tigerfly, in a web and sucked it till only the shell was left. Now it sank down into a bed of celeries, crushing them under its great bulk. Gently, it began to bud; then it could be heading out for the great black gulfs, where heat and radiance called it. It had been born on this world. Being young, it had never yet made that dreaded and desired journey to the other world.

Its buds burst up from its back, hung over, popped, fell to the ground, and scurried away to bury themselves in the pulp and dirt where they might begin their ten thousand years' growth in peace.

Young though it was, the traverser was sick. It did not know this. The enemy tigerfly had been at it, but it did not know this either. Its vast bulk held little sensation.

The twelve humans glided over and landed on its back, low down on the abdomen in a position hidden from the creature's cluster of eyes. They sank among the tough shoulder-high fibres that served the traverser as hair, and looked about them. A ray-plane swooped overhead and disappeared. A trio of tumbleweeds skittered into the fibres and were seen no more. All was as quiet as if they lay on a small deserted hill.

At length they spread out and moved along in line, heads down, eyes searching, Band Appa Bondi at one end, Lily-yo at the other. The great body was streaked and pitted and scarred, so that progress down the slope was not easy. The fibre grew in patterns of different shades, green, yellow, black, breaking up the traverser's bulk when seen from the air, serving it as natural camouflage. In many places, tough parasitic plants had rooted themselves, drawing their nourishment entirely from their host; most of them would die when the traverser launched itself out between worlds.

The humans worked hard. Once they were thrown flat when the traverser changed position. As the slope down which they moved grew steeper, so progress became more slow.

'Here!' cried Y Coyin, one of the women.

At last they had found what they sought, what the Captives sent them to seek.

Clustering round Y Coyin with their knives out, the pack looked down at a place where the fibres had been neatly champed away in swathes, leaving a bare patch as far across as a human was long. In this patch was a round scab. Lily-yo stooped and felt it. It was immensely hard.

Lo Jint put his ear to it. Silence.

They looked at each other.

No signal was needed, none given.

Together they knelt, prising with their knives round the scab. Once the traverser moved, and they threw themselves flat. A bud rose nearby, popped, rolled down the slope and fell to the distant ground. A thinpin devoured it as it ran. The humans continued prising.

The scab moved. They lifted it off. A dark and sticky tunnel was revealed to them.

'I go first,' Band Appa Bondi said.

He lowered himself into the hole. The others followed. Dark sky showed roundly above them until the twelfth human was in the tunnel. Then the scab was drawn back into place. A soft slobber of sound came from it, as it began to heal back into position again.

They crouched where they were for a long time, in a cavity that pulsed slightly. They crouched, their knives ready, their wings folded round them, their human hearts beating strongly.

In more than one sense they were in enemy territory. At the best of tunes, traversers were only allies by accident; they ate humans as readily as they devoured anything else. But this burrow was the work of that yellow and black destroyer, the tigerfly. One of the last true insects to survive, the tough and resourceful tigerflies had instinctively made the most invincible of all living things its prey.

The female tigerfly alights and bores her tunnel into the traverser. Burrowing away, she stops at last and prepares a natal chamber, hollowing it from the living traverser, paralysing its flesh with her needletail to prevent it healing again. There she lays her store of eggs before climbing back to daylight. When the eggs hatch, the larvae have fresh and living stuff to nourish them.

After a while, Band Appa Bondi gave a sign and the pack moved forward, climbing awkwardly down the tunnel. A faint luminescence guided their eyes. The air lay heavy and green in their chests. Very slowly, very quietly, they moved – for they heard movement ahead.

Suddenly the movement was on them.

'Look out!' Band Appa Bondi cried.

From the terrible dark, something launched itself at them.

Before they realized it, the tunnel had curved and widened into the natal chamber. The tigerfly's eggs had hatched. An uncountable number of larvae with jaws as wide as a man's reach turned on the intruders, snapping in fury and fear.

Even as Band Appa Bondi sliced his first attacker, another had his head off. He fell, and his companions launched themselves over him in the dark. Pressing forward, they dodged those clicking jaws.

Behind their hard heads, the larvae were soft and plump. One slash of a sword and they burst, their entrails flowing out. They fought, but knew not how to fight. Savagely the humans stabbed, ducked and stabbed. No other human died. With backs to the wall they cut and thrust, breaking jaws, ripping flimsy stomachs. They killed unceasingly with neither hate nor mercy until they stood knee deep in slush. The larvae snapped and writhed and died. Uttering a grunt of satisfaction, Haris slew the last of them.

Wearily then, eleven humans crawled back to the tunnel, there to wait until the mess drained away – and then to wait a longer while.

The traverser stirred in its bed of celeries. Vague impulses drifted through its being. Things it had done. Things it had to do. The things it had done had been done before, the things it had to do were still to do. Blowing off oxygen, it heaved itself up.

Slowly at first, it swung up a cable, climbing to the network where the air thinned. Always, always before in the eternal afternoon it had stopped here. This time there seemed no reason for stopping. Air was nothing, heat was all, the heat that blistered and prodded and chafed and coaxed increasingly with height-

It blew a jet of cable from a spinneret. Gaining speed, gaining intention, it rocketed its mighty vegetable self out and away from the place where the tigerflies flew. Ahead of it at an unjudgeable distance floated a semicircle of light, white and blue and green, that was a useful thing to head towards.

For this was a lonely place for a young traverser, a terrible-wonderful bright-dark place, so full of nothing. Turn as you speed and you fry well on all sides... nothing to trouble you...

... Except that deep in your core a little pack of humans use you as an ark for their own purposes. You carry them unknowingly back to a world that once – so staggeringly long ago – belonged to their kind.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THROUGHOUT most of the forest, silence ruled. The silence seemed to carry as much weight as that deep mass of foliage which covered all the land on the day side of the planet. It was a silence built of millions upon millions of years, intensifying as the sun overhead poured forth more and more energy in the first stages of its decline. Not that the silence signified lack of life. Life was everywhere, life on a formidable scale. But the increased solar radiation that had brought the extinction of most of the animal kingdom had spelt the triumph of plant life. Everywhere, in a thousand forms and guises, the plants ruled. And vegetables have no voices.

The new group with Toy leading moved along the numberless branches, disturbing that deep silence not at all. They travelled high in the Tips, patterns of light and shade falling across their green skins. Continually alert for danger, they sped along with all possible discretion. Fear drove them with apparent purpose, although in fact they had no destination. Travel gave them a needful illusion of safety, so they travelled.

A white tongue made them halt.

The tongue lowered itself gradually down to one side of them, keeping close to a sheltering trunk. Noiselessly it sank, pointing down from the Tips whence it had come towards the distant Ground, a fibrous cylindrical thing like a snake, tough and naked. The group watched it go, watched its tip sink out of sight through the foliage towards the dark floor of the forest, watched its visible length paying out.

'A suckerbird!' Toy said to the others. Although her leadership was still unsure, most of the other children – all of them but Gren – clustered round her and looked anxiously from her to the moving tongue.

'Will it harm us?' Fay asked. She was five, and the youngest by a year.

'We will kill it,' Veggy said. He was a man child. He jumped up and down on the branch so that his soul rattled. 'I know how to kill it, I will kill it!'

' I will kill it,' Toy said, firmly asserting her leadership. She stepped forward, unwinding a fibre rope from her waist as she did so.

The others watched in alarm, not yet trusting to Toy's skill. Most of them were already young adults, with the broad shoulders, strong arms, and long fingers of their kind. Three of them – a generous proportion – were men children: the clever Gren, the self-assertive Veggy, the quiet Poas. Gren was the oldest of the three. He stepped forward now.

'I also know how to trap the suckerbird,' he told Toy, eyeing the long white tube that still lowered itself into the depths. 'I will hold you to keep you safe. Toy. You need help.'

Toy turned to him. She smiled because he was beautiful and because one day he would mate with her. Then she frowned because she was leader.

'Gren, you are man now. It is tabu to touch you, except during the courtship seasons. I will trap the bird. Then we will all go to the Tips to kill and eat it. It shall be a great feast for us, to celebrate that I now lead.'

Gren's and Toy's gaze met challengingly. But just as she had not yet settled into her role as leader, so he had hardly assumed – and was indeed reluctant to assume – the role of rebel. He disagreed with her ideas, but tried as yet not to show it. He fell back, fingering the soul that dangled from his belt, the little wooden image of himself that gave him confidence.

'Do as you please,' he said – but Toy had already turned away.

On the topmost branches of the forest perched the sucker-bird. Being of vegetable origin, it had little intelligence and only a rudimentary nervous system. What it lacked in this respect, it made up for in bulk and longevity.

Shaped like a mighty two-winged seed, the suckerbird could never fold its wings. They were capable of little movement, although the sensitive flexible fibres with which they were covered, and their overall span of some two hundred metres, made them masters of the breezes that stirred their hothouse world.

So the suckerbird perched, paying out that incredible tongue from its pouch down to the nourishment it needed in the obscure depths of the forest. At last the tender buds on its tip hit Ground.

Cautiously, slowly, the sensitive feelers of the tongue explored, ready to shrink from any of the many dangers of that gloomy region. Deftly, it avoided giant mildews and funguses. It found a patch of naked earth, soggy and heavy and full of nourishment. It bored down. It began to suck.

'Right!' Toy said when she was ready. She felt the excitement of the others behind her. 'Nobody make a sound.'

Her rope was knotted to her knife. Now she leant forward and slipped the loose end about the white hose, knotting it in a slip knot. She sank her blade into the tree, thus securing the arrangement. After a moment, the tongue bulged and expanded up its length as soil was sucked up inside it to the suckerbird's 'stomach'. The noose tightened. Though the suckerbird did not realize it, it was now a prisoner, and could not fly from its perch.

'That's well done!' Poyly said admiringly. She was Toy's closest friend, emulating her in everything.

'Quick, to the Tips!' Toy called. 'We can kill the bird now it cannot get away.'

They all began climbing the nearest trunk, to get to the suckerbird – all except Gren. Though not disobedient by nature, he knew there were easier ways than climbing to get to the Tips. As he had learnt to do from some of his elders in the old group, from Lily-yo and Haris the man, he whistled from the corner of his lips.

'Come on, Gren!' Poas called back to him. When Gren shook his head, Poas shrugged and climbed on up the tree after the others.

A dumbler came floating to Gren's command, twirling laconically down through the foliage. Its vanes spun, and on the end of each spoke of its flight umbrella grew the curiously-shaped seeds.

Gren climbed on to his dumbler, clinging tightly to its shaft, and whistled his instructions. Obeying him sluggishly, it carried him upwards, so that he arrived in the Tips just after the rest of the group, unruffled when they were panting.

'You should not have done that,' Toy told him angrily. 'You were in danger.'

'Nothing ate me,' Gren replied. Yet suddenly he felt a chill, for he knew Toy was right. Climbing a tree was laborious but safe. Floating among the leaves, where hideous creatures might momentarily appear and drag one down into the green depths, was both easy and wildly dangerous. Still, he was safe now. They would see his cleverness soon enough.

The cylindrical white tongue of the suckerbird still pulsed nearby. The bird itself squatted just above them, keeping its immense crude eyes swivelled for enemies. It was headless. Slung between the stiffly extended wings was a heavy bag of body, peppered with the corneal protuberances of its eyes and its bud corms; among these latter hung the pouch from which the tongue now extended. By deploying her forces, Toy had her party attacking this monstrous creature from several sides at once.

'Kill it!' Toy cried. 'Now, jump! Quick, my children!'

They leapt on it where it lay gracelessly among the upper branches, yelping in excitement in a way that would have earnt Lily-yo's fury.

The suckerbird's body heaved, its wings fluttered in a vegetal parody of fright. Eight humans – all but Gren – hurled themselves among the feathery leafage on its back, stabbing deep into the epicarp to wound its rudimentary nervous system. Among that leafage lay other dangers. Disturbed from its slumbers, a tigerfly crawled from under the low-lying growth and came almost face to face with Poas.

Confronted with a yellow and black enemy as big as himself, the man child fell back squealing. On this later-day Earth, drowsing through the late afternoon of its existence, only a few families of the old orders of hymenoptera and diptera survived in mutated form: most dreadful of these were the tigerflies.

Veggy dashed to his friend's aid. Too late! Poas sprawled over on his back: the tigerfly was on to him. As the circular plates of its body arched, a ginger-tipped sabre of sting flashed out, burying itself into Poas's defenceless stomach. Its legs and arms gripped the boy, and with a hurried whirr of wings the tigerfly was bearing its paralysed burden away. Veggy hurled his sword uselessly after it.

No time could be spared for bemoaning this accident. As the equivalents of pain filtered through to it, the suckerbird strove to fly away. Only Toy's frail noose held it down, and that might soon pull free.

Still crouching under the creature's belly, Gren heard Poas's cry and knew something was amiss. He saw the shaggy body heave, heard the wings creak in their frames as they beat the air. Twigs showered down on him, small branches snapped, leaves flew. The limb to which he clung vibrated.

Panic filled Gren's mind. All he knew was that the sucker-bird might escape, that it must die as soon as possible. Inexperienced, he stabbed out blindly at the sucker tongue that now threshed against the tree trunk in its efforts to break free.

He sliced with his knife again and again. A gash appeared in the living white hose. Earth and mud, sucked from the Ground and intended for the vegbird's nourishment, spurted out of it, plastering Gren with filth. The vegbird heaved convulsively and the wound widened.

For all his fear, Gren saw what was about to happen. He flung himself up, his long arms outstretched, grasped one of the bird's bud protuberances, and clung to it shaking. Anything was better than to be left alone in the mazes of the forest – where he might wander for half a lifetime without coming on another group of humans.

The suckerbird fought to release itself. In its struggles, it enlarged the gash Gren had made, tugging until it pulled its tongue off. Free at last, it sailed into the air.

In mortal terror, hugging fibres and leafage, Gren crawled on its great back, where seven other frightened humans crouched. He joined them without a word.

The suckerbird swung upwards into the blinding sky. There blazed the sun, slowly building up towards the day when it would turn nova and burn itself and its planets out. And beneath the suckerbird, which was twirling like the sycamore seed it resembled, swung endless vegetation that rose, rose as remorselessly as boiling milk to greet its life-source.

Toy was shouting to the group.

'Slay the bird!' she called at them, rising on her knees, waving her sword. 'Slay it fast! Chop it to bits. Kill it, or we shall never get back to the jungle.'

With the sun bronze on her green skin, she looked wonderful. Gren slashed for her sake. Veggy and May worked together, carving a great hole through the tough rind of the bird, kicking away chunks of it. As the chunks fell they were snapped up by predators before hitting the forest.

For a long while the suckerbird flew on unperturbed. The humans tired before it did. Yet even semi-sentience has its limits of endurance; when the suckerbird was leaking sap from many gashes, its wings faltered in their broad sweeping movement. It began to sink down.

'Toy! Toy! Living shades, look what we are coming to!' Driff cried. She pointed ahead at the shining entanglements towards which they were falling.

None of the young humans had seen the sea; intuition, and a marrow-deep knowledge of the hazards of their planet, told them that they were being carried towards grave dangers.

A stretch of coast rose up to meet them – and here was waged the most savage of all battles for survival, where the things of the land met the things of the ocean.

Clinging to the suckerbird's leafage, Gren worked his way over to where Toy and Poyly lay. He realized that he was much to blame for their present predicament, and longed to be helpful.

'We can call dumblers and fly to safety with them,' he said. 'They will carry us safely home.'

"That's a good idea, Gren,' Poyly said encouragingly, but Toy looked blankly at him.

'You try and call a dumbler, Gren,' she said.

He did as he was bidden, distorting his face to whistle. The air rushing past them carried the sound away. They were in any case travelling too high for the whistlethistle seeds. Sulk-

ily, Gren lapsed into silence, turning away from the others to see where they were getting to.

'I'd have thought of that idea if it had been any good,' Toy told Poyly. She was a fool, thought Gren, and he ignored her.

The suckerbird was now losing height more slowly; it had reached a warm updraught of air and drifted along in it. Its lame and late efforts to turn inlands again only carried it parallel with the coast, so that the humans had the doubtful privilege of seeing what awaited them there.

Highly organized destruction was in progress, a battle without generals waged for uncounted thousands of years. Or perhaps one side had a general, for the land was covered with that one inexhaustible tree which had grown and spread and sprawled and swallowed everything from shore to shore. Its neighbours had been starved, its enemies overgrown. It had conquered the whole continent as far as the terminator that divided Earth's day from its night side; it had almost conquered time, for its numberless trunks afforded it a life-span the end of which could not be foreseen; but the sea it could not conquer. At the sea's edge, the mighty tree stopped and drew back.

At this point, away among the rocks, sands, and swamps of the coast, species of tree defeated by the banyan had made their last stand. The shore was their inhospitable home. Withered, deformed, defiant, they grew as they could. Where they grew was called Nomansland, for they were besieged on both sides by enemies.

On their land side, the silent force of the tree opposed them. On their other side they had to face poisonous seaweeds and other antagonists that assailed them perpetually.

Over everything, indifferent begetter of all this carnage, shone the sun.

Now the wounded suckerbird dropped more rapidly, until the humans could hear the slap of the seaweeds below. They all gathered close, waiting helplessly to see what would happen.

More steeply fell the bird, slipping sideways. It veered over the sea, all the fringes of which were dappled by the vegetation growing in its tideless waters. Labouring, it swerved towards a narrow and stony peninsula that jutted into the sea.

'Look! There's a castle below!' cried Toy.

The castle stood out on the peninsula, tall, thin, and grey, seeming to tilt crazily as the suckerbird flapped towards it. They swerved down. They were going to hit it. Evidently the dying creature had sighted the clear space at the base of the castle, had marked it as the only nearby place of safety, and was heading there.

But now its creaking wings like old sails in a storm paid no heed to their controls. The great body lumbered earthwards, Nomansland and sea lurched up to meet it, castle and peninsula jarred towards it.

'Hold tightly, all!' Veggy yelled.

Next moment they crashed into the spire of the castle, the impact flinging them all forward. One wing split and tore as the suckerbird clung to a soaring buttress.

Toy saw what would happen next: the suckerbird must fall, taking the humans with it. Agile as a cat, she jumped down to one side, into a depression formed between the irregular tops of two buttresses and the main bulk of the castle. Then she called to the others to join her.

One by one they leapt across to her narrow platform, were caught and steadied. May was the last across. Clutching her wooden soul, she jumped to safety.

Helplessly, the suckerbird swivelled a striated eye at them. Toy had time to notice that the recent violent impact had split it clean across the great bulb of its body. Then it began to slip.

Its crippled wing slithered across the castle wall. Its grip relaxed. It fell.

They leant over the natural rampart and watched it go.

The suckerbird hit the clear ground by the base of the castle and rolled over. With the tenacity to life of its kind, it was far from dead; it pulled itself up and staggered away from the grey pile, moving in a drunken semicircle, trailing its wings as it went.

One wing brushed over the stony edge of the peninsula, reflecting its tip in the motionless sea.

The face of the water puckered and from it emerged great leathery strands of seaweed. The strands were punctuated along their length by bladder-like excrescences. Almost hesitantly, they began to lash at the wing of the suckerbird.

Although the lashing was at first lethargic, it quickly worked up to a faster tempo. More and more of the sea, up to a quarter of a mile out, became covered with the flailing seaweed that punished and struck at the water repeatedly in idiot hatred of all life but its own.

Directly it was struck, the suckerbird attempted to drag itself out of the way. But the reach of the seaweed once it became active was surprisingly long, and the suckerbird's attempts to lurch to safety were of no avail, struggle though it might under the battery of blows.

Some of the bladder-like protrusions that flogged the luckless being landed so hard that they burst. A dark iodine-like liquid sprayed up from them, foaming and gushing into the air.

Where the poison landed on the suckerbird, it gave off a rank brown steam.

The suckerbird could utter no cries to relieve its promptings of pain. At something between flight and a hobble, it set off along the peninsula, heading for the shore, bounding into the air when it could to escape the seaweed. Its wings smouldered.

More than one kind of seaweed fringed that macabre coast. The frenzied bludgeoning stopped and the bladder weeds sank below the waves, their autotrophic beings temporarily exhausted.

In their stead, a long-toothed weed leapt out of the waters, raking the peninsula with its thorny teeth. Several fragments of rind were torn from the fleeing bird by these flails, but it almost gained the shore before it was properly hooked.

The teeth had it. More and more seaweed put out wavering arms and tugged at the suckerbird's wing. By now it could fight only feebly. It heeled over and hit the confused water. The whole sea developed mouths to meet it.

Eight frightened humans watched all this from the top of the castle.

'We can never get back to the safety of the trees,' Fay whimpered. She was the youngest; she began to cry.

The seaweed had earned but not yet won its prey, for the plants of Nomansland had scented the prize. Squeezed as they were between jungle and sea, some of them, mangrove-like in form, had long ago waded out boldly into the water. Others, more parasitic by nature, grew on their neighbours and sent out great stiff brambles that hung down towards the water like fishing rods.

These two species, with others rapidly joining them, put forth claim to the victim, trying to snatch it from their marine enemies. From under the sea they threw up gnarled roots like the limbs of some antidiluvian squid. They seized the sucker-bird, and battle was joined.

At once the whole coastline came alive. A fearful array of flails and barbs burst into action. Everything writhed deliriously. The sea was whipped into a spray that added to the horror by partially concealing it. Flying creatures, leather-feathers and rayplanes, soared overhead out of the forest to pick their own advantage from the fray.

In the mindless carnage, the suckerbird was pulverized and forgotten. Its flesh was tossed and lost in spume.

Toy stood up, full of decision.

'We must go now,' she said. 'This is the time for us to get to the shore.'

Seven agonized faces regarded her as if she were mad.

'We shall die down there," Poyly said.

'No,' Toy said fiercely. Now we shall not die. Those things fight each other, so they will be too busy to hurt us. Later may be too late.'

Toy's authority was not absolute. The group was unsure of itself. When she saw them beginning to argue, Toy fell into a rage and boxed Fay and Shree on the ears. But her chief opponents were Veggy and May.

'We shall be killed there at any time,' Veggy said. 'There is no way to safety. Haven't we just seen what happened to the suckerbird that was so strong?'

'We cannot stay here and die,' Toy said angrily.

'We can stay and wait till something happens,' May said. 'Please let's stay!'

'Nothing will happen,' Poyly said, taking her friend Toy's part. 'Only bad things. It is the way. We must look after ourselves.'

'We shall be killed,' Veggy repeated stubbornly.

In despair, Toy turned to Gren, the senior man child.

'What do you say?' she asked.

Gren had watched all the destruction with a set face. It did not relax as he turned it towards Toy.

'You lead the group, Toy. Those who can obey you must do it. That is law.'

Toy stood up.

'Poyly, Veggy, May, you others – follow me! We will go now while the things are too busy to see us. We must get back to the forest.'

Without hesitation she swung a leg over the domed top of the buttress and began sliding down its steep side. Sudden panic filled the others in case they were left behind. They followed Toy. They swarmed over the top, slipping and scrambling down after her.

At the bottom, dwarfed by the grey height of the castle, they stood momentarily in a silent group. Awe held them there.

Their world held an aspect of flat unreality. Because the great sun burnt overhead, their shadows lay like disregarded dirt below their feet. Everywhere was this same lack of shadow, lending the landscape its flat look. It was as dead as a poor painting.

The coastal battle raged like a fever. There was in this era (as in a sense there had always been) only Nature. Nature was supreme mistress of everything; and in the end it was as if she had laid a curse on her handiwork.

Overcoming her fears, Toy moved forward.

As they ran after Toy and away from that mysterious castle, their feet tingled; the stones beneath their feet were stained with brown poison. In the heat it had dried to harmlessness.

Noise of battle filled their ears. Spume drenched them – but the combatants paid them no attention, so absorbed were they in their mindless antagonism. Frequent explosions now ploughed the sea's face. Some of the Nomansland trees, beleaguered for century after century in their narrow strip of territory, had plunged their roots down into the meagre sands to find not only nourishment but a way of defence against their enemies. They had discovered charcoal, they had drawn up sulphur, they had mined potassium nitrate. In their knotty entrails they had refined and mixed them.

The gunpowder that resulted had been carried up through sappy veins to nut cases in the topmost branches. These branches now hurled their explosive weapons at the seaweeds. The torpid sea writhed under the bombardment.

Toy's plan was not a good one: it succeeded through luck rather than judgment. To one side of the land end of the peninsula, a great mass of seaweed had threshed itself far out of the water and covered a gunpowder tree. By sheer weight, it was pulling the tree down, and a fight to the death raged about it. The little humans burst past, and fled into the shelter of tall couch grass.

Only then did they realize Gren was not with them.

CHAPTER EIGHT

GREN still lay in the blinding sun, hunched behind the ramparts of the castle.

Fear had been the chief but not the only cause for his remaining behind. He had felt, as he had told Toy, that obedience was important. Yet he was by nature hard put to it to obey. Particularly so in this case, when the plan Toy offered seemed to hold such slight hope for survival. Also, he had an idea of his own, though he found it impossible to express verbally.

'Oh, how can anyone speak!' he said to himself. "There seem so few words. Once there must have been more words!'

His idea concerned the castle.

The rest of the group were less thoughtful than Gren. Directly they had landed on it, their attention had been directed elsewhere. Not so Gren's; he realized that the castle was not of rock. It had been built with intelligence. Only one species could have built it and that species would have a safe way from the castle to the coast.

So in a little while, after Gren had watched his companions run down the stony path, he rapped with his knife handle on the wall beside him.

At first the knock went unanswered.

Without warning, a section of the tower behind Gren swung open. He turned at the faint sound, to face eight termights emerging from darkness.

Once declared enemies, now termight and human faced each other almost in kinship, as though the teeming millennia of change had wrought a bond between them. Now that men were outcasts rather than the inheritors of Earth, they met the insects on equal terms.

The termights surrounded Gren and inspected him, their mandibles working. He stood still, motionless as their white bodies brushed round him. They were nearly as big as he was. He could smell their smell, acrid but not unpleasant.

When they had satisfied themselves that Gren was harmless, the termights marched to the ramparts. Whether they could see or not in glaring daylight Gren did not know, but at least they could hear the sounds of the sea struggle clearly enough.

Tentatively, Gren moved over to the opening in the tower. A strange cool odour drifted from it.

Two of the termights came rapidly across and barred his way, their jaws level with his throat.

'I want to go down,' he told them. 'I will be no trouble. Let me come inside."

One of the creatures disappeared down the hole. In a minute it returned with another termight. Gren shrank back. The new termight had a gigantic growth on its head.

The growth was a leprous brown in colour, spongy in texture, and pitted like the honeycomb the treebees made. It proliferated over the termight's cranium, growing round its neck in a ruff. Despite this fearsome burden, the termight seemed active enough. It came forward and the others made way for it. It seemed to stare at Gren, then turned away.

Scratching in the grit underfoot, it began to draw. Crudely but clearly, it sketched a tower and a line, and connected the two by a narrow strip formed with two parallel lines. The single line was evidently intended to represent the coast, the strip the peninsula.

Gren was completely surprised by this. He had never heard of such artistic abilities in insects before. He walked round gazing at the lines.

The termight stepped back and seemed to regard Gren. Obviously something was expected of him. Pulling himself together, he stooped down and falteringly added to the sketch. He drew a line from the top of the tower down the middle of it, through the middle of the strip and to the coast. Then he pointed to himself.

Whether the creatures understood this or not was hard to say. They simply turned and hurried back into the tower. Deciding there was nothing else for it, Gren followed them. This time they did not stop him; evidently his request had been understood.

That strange sunless smell enveloped him.

It was nerve-wracking in the tower when the entrance closed above them. After the sun-flooded brilliance outside, everything here was pitch dark.

Descending the tower was easy for one as agile as Gren, since it was much like climbing down a natural chimney, with plenty of protrusions on all sides to cling on to. He swarmed down hand over fist with growing confidence.

As his eyes accustomed themselves to the dark, Gren saw that a faint luminescence clung to the bodies of the termights, giving them ghostly shape. Many of them were present in the tower, utterly silent. Like phantoms they seemed to move on every side, noiseless rows of them trundling up into the dark, noiseless rows of them trundling down. He could not guess what they were busy at.

Eventually he and his guides reached the bottom of the castle and stood on level ground. According to Gren's estimation, they must now be below the level of the sea. The atmosphere was moist and heavy.

Only the termight with the growth accompanied Gren now; the others moved off in military order without looking back. Gren noted a curious green light composed as much of shadow as of illumination; at first he could not detect its source. He was hard put to it to follow his guide. The corridor they traversed was uneven and full of traffic. Termights were everywhere, moving purposefully: there were also other small creatures about, herded along by the hosts, sometimes singly, sometimes in flocks.

'Not so fast,' Gren cried, but his guide kept to its steady pace, paying him no attention.

The green light was stronger now. It lay mistily on either side of their route. Gren saw it filtered through irregular mica sheets evidently there by the creative genius of the tunnelling insects. These mica sheets formed windows looking out into the sea, through which the activities of the menacing seaweed could be viewed.

The industry of this underground place amazed him. At least the denizens were so busy that they kept to themselves; not one paused to inspect him, until one of the creatures belonging to the termights approached. Four-legged and furry, it possessed a tail and luminous yellow eyes and stood almost as high as Gren. Eyeing him through its glowing pupils, the creature cried 'Miaow!' and tried to rub against him. Its whiskers brushed his arm. Shuddering, he dodged it and pressed on.

The furry creature looked back at him almost with a quality of regret. Then it turned to follow some termights, the species that now tolerated and fed it. A moment later Gren saw several more of these mewing things! some of them were infected with and almost covered by the fungus growth.

Gren and his guide came at last to where the broad tunnel divided into several lesser ones. Unhesitatingly, the guide chose a fork that sloped upwards into darkness. The darkness was broken suddenly as the termight pushed up a flat stone that covered the tunnel mouth and crawled into daylight.

'You've been very kind,' Gren said as he crawled out too. He kept as much distance as possible between himself and the brown growth.

The termight scurried back into the hole, pulling the stone into place with never a backward glance.

Nobody needed to tell Gren that he was now in Nomansland.

He could smell the smell of the sullen sea. He could hear the sound of the battle between the seaweeds and the land plants, though the noise was intermittent now, as both sides tired. He could sense a tension round him that never existed in the gentle middle layers of the forest where the human group had been born. Above all, he could see the sun glaring through the matted leaves over his head.

Underfoot, the ground was sour and pasty, a mixture of clay and sand with rocks frequently outcropping. It was infertile stuff, and the trees growing from it showed their sickness. Their trunks were distorted, their foliage meagre. Many of them had intertwined in an attempt to support each other; and where this attempt had failed, they lay spilled over the ground in horrible distortions. Moreover, some of them through the long centuries had evolved such curious ways of defending themselves that they hardly resembled tree forms at all.

Gren decided that his best policy was to creep to the land end of the peninsula and try and pick up the tracks of Toy and the others from there. Once he got to the sea's edge, it should not be hard to see the peninsula; it would make a prominent landmark.

He had no doubt in which direction the sea lay, for he was able to look through the distorted trees and see the landward border of Nomansland. That was clearly designated.

Along a line that marked the end of good soil, the great banyan had established its outer perimeter. It stood unshakeably, though its boughs were scarred by innumerable assaults from bramble and claw. And to assist it, to help it repel the banished species of Nomansland, the creatures that used its shelter had gathered: trappersnappers, wiltmilts, berrywishes, pluggyrugs, and others, stood ready to scourge the slightest movement along its perimeter.

Keeping this formidable barrier at his back, Gren moved cautiously forward.

His progress was slow. Every sound made him jump. At one point he flung himself flat as a cloud of long deadly needles was launched at him from a thicket. Lifting his head, he saw a cactus shaking itself and rearranging its defences. He had never seen a cactus before; his stomach was like water to think of all the unknown perils about him.

A little later he met something stranger.

He stepped through a tree whose trunk had contorted itself into a loop. As he did so, the loop snapped together. Gren escaped constriction by the skin of his teeth and lost the skin of his legs. As he lay panting, an animal slid past almost near enough to touch.

It was a reptile, long and armoured, with a mirthless grin that revealed many teeth. Once (in the vanished days when humans had a name for everything) it had been called an alligator. It peered through goat's eyes at Gren, then scuttled under a log.

Almost all animals had died out millennia ago. The sheer weight of vegetable growth, as the sun favoured green things, had crushed and extinguished them. Yet as the last of the old trees were beaten back to the swamps and the fringes of the ocean, a few animals had retreated with them. Here they protracted their existence in Nomansland, enjoying the heat and the savour of life while life lasted.

Going more cautiously now, Gren moved forward again.

By now, the hubbub from the sea had abated and he travelled in dead quiet. Everything was silent, as if waiting, as if under a curse.

The ground began to shelve gradually towards the water. Shingle rasped underfoot. The trees which had grown more sparsely clustered together again to withstand possible attacks from the sea.

Gren halted. Anxiety still moved in his heart. He longed to be back with the others. Yet his feeling was not that he had behaved stubbornly in remaining behind on the termight castle, but that they had behaved foolishly in not offering to accept his lead.

Looking round him cautiously, he let out a whistle. No answer came. A sudden stillness settled, as if even those things that had no ears were listening.

Panic seized Gren.

'Toy!' he cried. 'Veggy! Poyly! Where are you?'

As he was calling, a cage descended from the foliage above him and pinned him to the ground.

When Toy led her six fellows to the shore, they flung themselves into long grass and hid their eyes to recover from their fright.Their bodies were foam-drenched from the vegetable battle.

At last they sat up and discussed Gren's absence. Since he was a man child, he was valuable; though they could not go back for him, they could wait for him. It remained only to find a place where they could wait in comparative safety.

'We will not wait long,' Veggy said. 'Gren had no need to stay behind. Let us leave him and forget him.'

'We need him for mating,' Toy said simply.

'I will mate with you,' Veggy said. 'I am a man child with a big mater to stick into you. Look, you cannot wear this one out! I will mate with all you women before the figs come again! I am riper than the figs.'

And in his excitement he stood up and danced, showing off his body to the women, who were not averse to it. He was now their only man child; was he not desirable therefore?

May jumped up to dance with him. Veggy ran at her. Ducking lithely, she shot away. He capered after. She was laughing, he shouting.

'Come back!' Toy and Poyly called furiously.

Unheeding, May and Veggy ran from the grass on to sloping sand and shingle. Almost at once a great arm shot up from the sand and grasped May's ankle. As she screamed, another arm came up, then another, fastening on her. May fell on her face, kicking in terror. Veggy flung himself savagely into the attack, pulling out his knife as he did so. Other arms came up from the sand and grasped him too.

When plant life had conquered the Earth, the animals least affected had been those of the sea. Theirs was an environment less susceptible to change than land. Nevertheless, alterations in size and distribution of the marine algae had forced many of them to change their habits or habitat.

The new monster seaweeds had proved expert at catching crabs, at wrapping them in a greedy frond as they scuttled over the ocean bed, or at trapping them beneath stones at that vulnerable time when the crabs were growing new shells. In a few million years, the brachyura were all but extinct.

Meanwhile, the octopuses were already in trouble with the seaweeds. Their extinction of the crabs deprived them of a chief item of their diet. These factors and others forced them into an entirely new mode of life. Compelled both to avoid seaweeds and to seek food, many of them left the oceans. They became shore-dwellers – and the sand octopus evolved.

Toy and the other humans ran to Veggy's rescue, terrified by this threat to their only remaining man child. Sand flew as they hurled themselves into the fight. But the sand octopus had arms enough to deal with all seven of them. Without raising its body from where it was hidden, it took them all in its tentacles, fight how they might.

Their knives were of little use against that rubbery embrace. One by one, their faces were pressed down into the slithering sand and their shouts stifled.

For all that they had finally triumphed, the vegetables had triumphed as much by weight of numbers as by inventiveness. Time and again, they succeeded simply by imitating some device used long since – perhaps on a smaller scale – in the animal kingdom, as the traverser, that mightiest of all plant-creatures, flourished simply by adopting the way of life chosen by the humble spider back in the Carboniferous Age.

In Nomansland, where the struggle to survive was at its most intense, this process of imitation was particularly noticeable. The willows were a living example of it; they had copied the sand octopus, and by so doing had become the most invincible beings along that dreadful coast.

Killerwillows now lived submerged under the sand and shingle, only their foliage occasionally showing. Their roots had acquired a steely flexibility and become tentacles. To one of these brutes the group now owed its lives.

A sand octopus was obliged to stifle its prey as soon as possible. Too long a struggle attracted its rivals, the killerwillows; for those that imitated it had become its deadliest enemies. They moved up on it now, two of them, heaving themselves along under the sand with only their leaves showing like innocent bushes, and a furrow of disturbed dirt behind them.

They attacked without hesitation or warning.

Their roots were long and sinewy and fearfully tough. One from one side, one from the other, they took a hold on the tentacles of the sand octopus. It knew that deadly grip, it recognized that obscene strength. Relinquishing its hold on the humans, it turned to fight the killerwillows for its life.

With a heave that sent the group scattering, it emerged from the sand, its beak agape, its pale eyes round with fright. Giving a sudden twist, one of the killerwillows sent it sprawling upside down. The sand octopus twisted back into position, managing to free all its tentacles but one as it did so. Angrily, it pecked off the offending tentacle with one savage bite, as if its own flesh were the enemy.

Close at hand lay the sullen sea. Its impulse was to retreat there in an emergency. But even as it began its frantic scuttle, the tentacular roots of the killerwillows thrashed blindly about, seeking for it. They found it! The octopus whipped up a curtain of sand and pebble in its fury as its retreat was checked.

But the killerwillows had it – and between them they commanded some thirty-five knotty legs.

Forgetting themselves, the humans stared fascinated at this unequal duel. Then the blindly waving arms flashed in their direction.

'Run!' Toy cried, picking herself up as sand spurted near her.

'It's got Fay!' Driff screamed.

The smallest of the group had been caught. Searching for a hold, one of those thin white tentacles of roots had wrapped Fay round the chest. She could not even cry out. Her face and arms went purple. Next second she was lifted up and dashed brutally against the trunk of a nearby tree. They saw her half-severed body roll bloodily over into the sand. 'It is the way,' Poyly said sickly. 'Let's move!' They fled into the nearest thicket and lay gasping there. As they mourned the loss of their youngest companion, the sounds came to them of the sand octopus being shredded to pieces.

CHAPTER NINE

FOR a long while after the horrible noises had stopped, the six members of the group lay where they were. At last Toy sat up and spoke to them.

'You see what has happened because you do not let me lead you,' she said. 'Gren is lost. Now Fay is dead. Soon we will all be dead and our souls rotting.'

'We must get out of Nomansland,' said Veggy sulkily. 'This is all the suckerbird's fault.' He was aware that he was to blame for the incident with the sand octopus.

'We shall get nowhere,' Toy snapped, 'until you obey me. Do you have to die before you know that? After this, you do what I say. Do you understand, Veggy?'

'Yes.'

'May?'

'Yes.'

'And you, Driff and Shree?'

'Yes,' they said, and Shree added, 'I'm hungry.'

'Follow me quietly,' Toy said, tucking her soul more securely into her belt.

She led them, testing every step she took.

By now, the din of the sea battle was abating. Several trees had been dragged down into the water. At the same time, much seaweed had been fished out of the sea. This was now being eagerly tossed among the victor trees, anxious as they were for nourishment in that barren soil.

As the group crept forward, a soft-pelted thing rushed past on four legs and was gone before they had their wits about them.

'We could have eaten that,' Shree said grumpily. Toy promised us the suckerbird to eat and we never got it.'

The thing had scarcely disappeared before there was a scuffle in the direction it had taken, a squeal, a hasty gobbling sound, and then silence.

'Something else ate it," Toy whispered. 'Spread out and we'll stalk it. Knives ready!'

They fanned out and slid through the long grass, happy to engage in positive action. This part of the business of living they understood.

To track down the source of that quick gobbling sound was easy. The source was in captivity and could not move away.

From a particularly gnarled tree a pole hung; attached to the bottom of the pole was a crude cage consisting of only a dozen wooden bars. The bars dug down into the ground. Contained in the cage, its snout protruding one way, its tail another, was a young alligator. Some scattered pieces of pelt lay by its jaws, the remains of the furry thing the group had seen alive five minutes before.

The alligator stared at the humans as they emerged from the long grass and they stared back at it.

'We can kill it. It cannot move,' May said.

'We can eat it,' Shree said. 'Even my soul is hungry."

The alligator, thanks to its armour, proved difficult to kill. Right at the onset, its tail sent Driff spinning into a pile of shingle, where she cut her face badly. But by stabbing at it from all sides, and by blinding it, they at last exhausted it enough for Toy to thrust her hand bravely into the cage and cut the creature's throat.

As the reptile threshed about in its death agony, a curious thing happened. The bars of the cage lifted upwards so that their pronged ends emerged from the ground, and the whole contraption clenched together like a hand. The straight pole above it twisted into several loops; it and the cage vanished up into the green boughs of the tree.

With exclamations of awe, the group seized their alligator and ran.

Winding their way though tight-packed tree trunks, they came on a bare outcrop of rock. It looked like a safe refuge, particularly as it was fringed by a spiky local variant of the whistlethistle.

Crouching on the rock, they began their unlovely meal. Even Driff joined in, though her face still bled from where she had grazed it on the shingle.

Scarcely were their jaws in motion than they heard Gren calling for help near at hand.

'Wait here and guard the food,' Toy commanded. 'Poyly will come with me. We will go and find Gren and bring him back here.'

Her command was a good one. To travel with food was never wise; travelling alone was dangerous enough.

As she and Poyly skirted the thistles, Gren's cry came again to guide them. The two girls moved round a bank of mauve cactus, and there he lay. He sprawled face downwards under a tree similar to the one beneath which they had killed the alligator, penned in a cage similar to the alligator's.

'Oh, Gren!' cried Poyly. 'How we missed you!'

Even as they ran towards him, a trailer creeper swung at him from the limb of a nearby tree, a creeper with a wet red mouth at its extremity, bright as a flower, poisonous-looking as a dripper-lip. It swooped for Gren's head.

Poyly's feelings for Gren went deep. Without thought, she flung herself at the creeper, meeting it as it swung forward, catching it as high as possible to avoid those pulpy lips. Drawing a new knife, she severed the stem that pulsed beneath her fingers. Then she dropped back lightly to the ground. It was easy to avoid the mouth that now writhed there, ineffectually pursing and opening.

'Above you, Poyly!' Toy cried in warning, darting forward. The parasite, alerted now to danger, uncurled a full dozen of its trailing mouths. Gay and deadly, they swung about Poyly's head. But Toy was beside her. Expertly they lopped away, till milk spurted from the creeper's wounds, till the mouths lay gasping at their feet. Vegetable reaction time is not the fastest thing in the universe, perhaps because it is rarely prompted by pain.

Breathing hard, the two girls turned their attention to Gren, who still lay pinned beneath the cage.

'Can you get me out?' he asked, looking up helplessly at them.

'I am leader. Of course I can get you out,' Toy said. Using some of the knowledge she had gained from dealing with the alligator, she said, 'This cage is a part of the tree. We will make it move and let you go.'

She knelt down and began to saw at the bars of the cage with her knife.

Over the land where the banyan ruled, covering everything with its layers of green, the chief problem for lesser breeds was to propagate their kind. With plants like the whistlethistle that had developed the curious dumblers, and the burnurn that had turned its seedcases into weapons, the solution of this problem was ingenious.

No less ingenious were some of the solutions of the flora of Nomansland to their particular problem. Here the main problem was less one of propagation than of sustenance; this accounted for the radical difference between these outcasts of the beaches and their cousins inland.

Some trees like the mangroves waded into the sea and fished deadly seaweeds for mulch. Other like the killerwillows took on the habits of animals, hunting in the manner of carnivores and nourishing themselves on decomposed flesh. But the oak, as one million-year stretch of sunlight succeeded another, shaped some of its extremities into cages and caught animals alive, letting their dung feed its starving roots. Or if they eventually starved to death, in decomposing they would still feed the tree.

Nothing of this Toy knew. She knew only that Gren's cage should move, just as the one enclosing the alligator had done. Grimly, with Poyly helping, she hacked at the bars. The two girls worked at each of the twelve bars in turn. Perhaps the oak assumed the damage being done was greater in fact than it was; the bars were suddenly pulled from the ground and the whole contraption sprang up into the boughs above them.

Ignoring tabu, the girls grabbed Gren and ran with him back to the rest of the party.

When they were reunited, they devoured the alligator meat, keeping guard as they did so.

Not without a certain amount of boasting, Gren told them what he had seen inside the termight's nest. They were unbelieving.

'Termights have not enough sense to do all that you say,' Veggy said.

'You all saw the castle they made. You sat on it."

'In the forest, termights have not so much sense,' May said, backing Veggy up as usual.

'This is not the forest,' Gren said. 'New things happen here. Terrible things.'

'Only in your head they happen,' May teased. 'You tell us about these funny things so that we will forget you did wrong to disobey Toy. How could there be windows underground to look out on to the sea?'

'I tell you only what I saw," Gren said. He was angry now. 'In Nomansland, things are different. It is the way. Many ter-

mights also had a bad fungus growth on them such as I have not seen before. I have seen this fungus again since then. It looks bad.'

'Where did you see it?' Shree asked.

Gren threw a curiously-shaped piece of glass into the air and caught it, perhaps pausing to create suspense, perhaps because he was not too keen to mention his recent fright.

'When I was caught by the snaptrap tree,' he said, 'I looked up into its branches. There among the leaves I saw a fearful thing. I could not make out what it was until the leaves stirred. Then I saw one of the fungi that grew on the termights, all shining like an eye and growing on the tree.'

'Too many things bring death here,' she said. 'Now we must move back to the forest where we can live happily. Get up, all of you.'

'Let me finish this bone off,' Shree said.

'Let Gren finish his story,' Veggy said.

'Get up, all of you. Tuck your souls in your belts, and do as I order.'

Gren slipped his curious glass under his belt and jumped up first to show he was anxious to obey. As the others stood up too, a dark shadow passed overhead; two rayplanes fluttered by, locked in combat.

Over the disputed strip called Nomansland many sorts of veg-bird passed, both those that fed at sea and those that fed on land. They passed without alighting, knowing well the dangers that lurked there. Their shadows sped and dappled over the outcast plants without pause.

The rayplanes were so mortally engaged they did not know where they went. With a crash they sprawled among the upper branches near the group.

At once Nomansland sprang to life.

The famished angry trees spread up and lashed their branches. Toothed briars uncurled. Gigantic nettles shook their bearded heads. Moving cactus crawled and launched its spikes. Climbers hurled sticky bolas at the enemy. Cat-like creatures, such as Gren had seen in the termight's nest, bounded past and swarmed up the trees to get to the attack. Everything that could move did so, prodded on by hunger. On the instant, Nomansland turned itself into a war machine.

Those plants that possessed no sort of mobility came alert for secondary spoils. The thicket of whistlethistles near which the group now lay trembling shook its thorns in anticipation. Harmless enough in its normal habitat, here the need to feed its roots had goaded the whistlethistle into a more offensive role. It would impale any passer-by it could. Similarly, a hundred other plants, small and stationary and armed, prepared to ignore the doomed rayplanes but to feed on those who – returning from their feed – blundered into their path.

A great killerwillow appeared, heaving itself into view with root-tentacles waving. Sand and grit poured off its pollarded head as it struggled up. Soon it too was grappling with the luckless rayplanes, with the snaptrap trees, and indeed with any living thing whose existence offended it.

The scene was chaos. The rayplanes never had a chance.

'Look – there's some of the fungus!' Gren exclaimed, pointing.

In among the short snake-like branches that formed the head of the killerwillow grew the deadly fungus. Nor was this the first time Gren had seen it since the rayplanes crashed. Several of the plants lumbering past had borne traces of it. Gren shuddered at the sight, but the others were less impressed. Death, after all, had many shapes; everyone knew it: it was the way.

Twigs showered on them from the target area. The rayplanes were shredded by now; the fight was among the feasters.

'We are too close to the trouble,' Poyly said. 'Let's move.'

'I was about to order it myself,' Toy said stiffly.

They scrambled up and made their way as best they could. All were armed now with long poles which they thrust out before them to test the ground for danger. The fearful remorselessness of the killerwillows had struck caution into their hearts.

For a long while they moved, overcoming obstacle after obstacle and frequently avoiding death. Finally they were overcome – by sleep.

They found a fallen trunk of a tree that was hollow. They beat out the poisonous leafy creature that lived in it, and slept there, curled up together and feeling secure. When they awoke, they were prisoners. Both ends of the tree trunk were sealed.

Driff, who was the first to rouse and discover this, set up a howl that quickly brought the others to investigate. No doubt of it, they were now sealed in and liable to suffocation. The walls of the tree that previously had felt dry and rotten were now tacky, dripping a sweetish syrup on to them. In fact, they were about to be digested!

The fallen trunk was nothing more than an abdomen into which they had thoughtlessly climbed.

After eons of time, the bellyelm had entirely abandoned its earlier attempts to draw nourishment from the inhospitable shores of Nomansland. Retracting all form of root structure, it had adopted its present horizontal mode of living. It camouflaged itself as a dead log. Its branch and leaf system had become separate, evolving into the symbiotic leafy creature the group had beaten off – a symbiotic creature that acted as a useful decoy to lure other beings into the open stomach of its partner.

Though the bellyelm normally attracted only vegetal creatures into its maw, flesh also satisfied its nutritive requirements. Seven little humans were very welcome.

The seven little humans fought savagely, slithering in the dirty dark as they attacked the strange plant with knives. Nothing they did had any effect. The syrupy rain came down faster, as the bellyelm worked up an appetite.

'It's no good,' Toy gasped. 'Rest for a little while and try to think what we can do.'

Close together, they squatted on their haunches. Baffled, frightened, numbed by the dark, they could only squat.

Gren tried to make a useful picture come into his head. He concentrated, ignoring the muck trickling down his back.

He tried to remember what the trunk had looked like outside. They were seeking somewhere to sleep when they came to it. They had climbed up a slope, skirting a suspicious patch of bare sand, and found the bellyelm lying at the top of the incline in short grass. Externally, it had been smooth...

'Ha!' he exclaimed in the dark.

'What is it?' Veggy asked. 'What are you ha-ing about?' He was angry with them all; was he not a man, who should have been protected from this danger and indignity?

'We will all throw ourselves against this wall together,' Gren said. "That way we may be able to make the tree roll.'

Veggy snorted in the dark.

'How will that help us?' she asked.

'Do what he says, you little worm!' Toy's voice was savage. They all jumped at its lash. She, as much as Veggy, could not guess what Gren had in mind, but she had to keep authority... 'All push at this wall, quickly.'

In the gummy mess they scrambled together, touching each other to discover whether they were all facing the same way.

'All ready?'Toy asked.'Push! And again! Push! Push!'

Their toes slithered in the tacky sap, but they pushed. Toy called encouragement.

The bellyelm rolled.

Now they were all caught in excitement. They heaved gladly, shouting in unison. And the bellyelm rolled again. And again. And then continuously.

Suddenly there was no further need to push. As Gren had hoped, the trunk began to roll down the slope of its own accord. Seven humans found themselves somersaulting at increasing speed.

'Get ready to run as soon as you get the chance,' Gren called. ' If you get the chance. The tree may split at the bottom of the slope.'

When it hit sand, the bellyelm slowed its pace and, as the incline flattened out, it stopped. Its partner, the leafy creature, which had been pursuing it meanwhile, now caught up. It jumped on top of the trunk and plugged its lower appendages firmly into the runnels of the trunk; but it had no time to preen.

Something moved beneath the sand.

A white root-like tentacle appeared, then another. They waved blindly and grasped the belly-elm round the middle. As the leafy thing scuttled for its life, a killerwillow heaved itself up into view. Still trapped inside the trunk, the humans heard the bellyelm groan.

'Get ready to jump clear," Gren whispered.

Few things could resist the clutches of a killerwillow. Its present victim was utterly defenceless. Beneath the grip of those hawser-like tentacles, it cracked with a sound of snapping ribs. Hopelessly, tugged from more than one direction, it broke apart like a cracker.

As daylight splintered into being about them, the group jumped for safety.

Only Driff could not jump. She was trapped at one end of the trunk as it caved in. Frantically she cried and straggled, but could not get loose. The others – bounding for long grass – halted and looked back.

Toy and Poyly glanced at each other, then ran to the rescue.

'Come back, you fools!' Gren cried. 'It will get you too!'

Unheeding, they ran back to Driff, plunging into the patch of sand. In a panic, Gren rushed after them.

'Come away!' he shouted.

Three yards from them rose the great body of the killer-willow. In its poll fungus glistened, the dark crinkled fungus they had seen before. It was terrible to behold – Gren could not understand how the others dared to stay. He pulled at Toy, hitting her and screaming at her to come away and save her soul.

Toy took no notice. Within inches of those strangulating white roots, she and Poyly struggled to set Driff free. The latter's leg was caught between two sandwiching slabs of wood. At last one of these shifted, so that she could be dragged away. Seizing her between them, Poyly and Toy ran for the long grass where the others crouched, and Gren ran with them.

For minutes they all lay panting. They were covered in stickiness and filth and nearly unrecognizable.

Toy was the first to sit up. She turned to Gren and said in a voice cold with rage, 'Gren, I dismiss you from the group. You are an outcast from now on.'

Gren jumped up, tears in his eyes, conscious of their stares. Banishment was the most terrible punishment that could be used against anyone. It was rarely invoked against females; to invoke it against a male was almost unheard of.

'You can't do this!' he cried. 'Why should you do this? You have no reason.'

'You hit me,' Toy said. 'I am your leader but you hit me. You tried to stop Driff from being rescued, you would have let her die. And always you want your own way. I cannot lead you, so you must go.'

The others, all but Driff, were standing now, open-mouthed and anxious.

'It's lies, lies!'

'No, it is true.' Then she weakened and turned to the five faces anxiously regarding her. 'Isn't it true?'

Driff, clutching her hurt leg, agreed heartily that it was. Shree, being Drift's friend, also agreed. Veggy and May merely nodded their heads without speaking; they were feeling guilty because they had not also gone to the rescue of Driff, and compensated for it by breaking up Toy now. The only note of dissent came unexpectedly from Toy's dearest friend, Poyly.

'Never mind if what you say is true or not,' Poyly declared. 'But for Gren we would now be dead inside that bellyelm. He saved us there, and we should be grateful.'

'No, the killerwillow saved us,' Toy said.

'If it had not been for Gren -'

'Keep out of this Poyly. You saw him hit me. He must go from the group. I say he must be outcast.'

The two women faced each other angrily, hands on knives, their cheeks red.

'He is our man. We cannot let him go!' Poyly said. 'You talk rubbish, Toy.'

'We have Veggy still, or have you forgotten?'

"Veggy is only a man child, and you know it!'

Angrily Veggy jumped up.

'I'm old enough to do it to you, Poyly, you fat thing,' he cried, hopping about and exposing himself. 'Look how I'm made – just as good as Gren!'

But they cuffed him down and went on quarrelling. Benefiting by this example, the others also began to quarrel. Only when Gren burst into angry tears did they fall silent.

'You are all fools,' he cried between his sobs. 'I know how to get out of Nomansland but you don't. How can you do it without me?'

'We can do anything without you,' Toy said, but she added, 'What is your plan?'

Gren laughed bitterly.

'You are a fine leader, Toy! You don't even know where we are. You don't even realize that we are on the edge of Nomansland. Look, you can see our forest from here.'

He pointed dramatically with outstretched finger.

CHAPTER TEN

IN their hurried escape from the bellyelm, they had hardly taken in their new surroundings. There was little room for doubt that Gren was right. As he said, they stood on the fringe of Nomansland.

Beyond them, the gnarled and stunted trees of the region grew more closely, as if tightening their ranks. Among them were spiky soldier trees, thorn and bamboo, as well as tall grasses with edges sharp enough to lop off a human arm. All were woven together by an absolute barricade of brambles. It was a thicket impossible to penetrate, suicide to enter. Every plant stood at guard like troops facing a common enemy.

Nor was the common enemy a reassuring sight.

The great banyan, pushing outwards as far as its nutritional requirements would allow, loomed high and black over the outcasts of Nomansland. Its outermost branches bore an abnormally dense thatch of leaves; they reached out as far as possible over the enemy like a wave ever about to break, cutting off as much sunlight as possible.

Aiding the banyan were the creatures that lived in its forest aisles, the trappersnappers, the jack-in-the-box wiltmilts, the berrywishes, the deadly dripperlips and others. They patrolled the perimeters of the mighty tree like eternal watchdogs.

The forest, so welcoming to the humans in theory, presented only its claws to them from where they now stood.

Gren watched their faces as the others regarded that double wall of hostile vegetation. Nothing moved; the lightest breeze slinking in from the sea hardly shifted one armoured leaf; only their bowels stirred in dread.

'You see,' Gren said. 'Leave me here! Let me watch you walk through the barrier! I want to see you do it.'

He had the initiative now and gloried in it.

They looked at him, at the barrier, back at him.

'You don't know how to get through,' Veggy said uneasily.

Gren sneered.

'I know a way,' he said flatly.

'Do you think the termights will help you?' Poyly asked him.

'No.'

'What then?'

He stared at them defiantly. Then he faced Toy.

'I will show you the way if you follow me. Toy has no brains. I have brains. I will not be outcast. I will lead you instead of Toy. Make me your leader and I will get you to safety.'

'Pah, you man child,' Toy said. 'You talk too much. You boast all the time.' But round her the others were muttering.

'Women are leaders, not men,' Shree said, with doubt in her voice.

'Toy is a bad leader,' Gren shouted.

'No, she's not,' said Drift, 'she's braver than you,' and the others murmured agreement with this, even Poyly. Though their faith in Toy was not unbounded, their trust in Gren was small. Poyly went to him and said quietly, 'You know the law and the way of humans. They will outcast you if you do not tell them a good way to safety.'

'And if I do tell them?' His truculence faded, because Poyly was fair to look upon.

'Then you can stay with us as is right. But you must not expect to lead in Toy's place. That is not right.'

'I will say what is right or not.'

'That is not right either.'

He pulled a face at her.

'You are a right person, Poyly. Make no argument with me.'

'I do not want to see you outcast. I am on your side."

'Look, then!' And Gren turned towards the rest of them. From his belt he produced the curiously-shaped piece of glass he had handled earlier. He held it out in his open palm.

'This I picked up when I was trapped by the snaptrap tree,' he told them. 'It is called mica or glass. Perhaps it came from the sea. Perhaps it is what the termights use for their windows on to the sea.'

Toy made to examine it, but he pulled his hand back.

'Hold it in the sun and it makes a little sun beneath it. When I was trapped, I burned my hand with it. I could have burnt my way out of the trap if you had not come along. So we can burn our way out of Nomansland. Light some sticks and grass here and the flame will grow. The little breeze will tickle it towards the forest. Nothing likes fire – and where the fire has been we can follow, safely back into the forest.'

They all stared at each other.

'Gren is very clever,' 'Poyly said. 'His idea can save us.'

'It won't work,' Toy said stubbornly.

In a sudden rage, Gren hurled the crude lens at her.

'You stupid girl! Your head is full of toads. You're the one who should be outcast! You should be driven off!'

She caught the lens and backed away.

'Gren, you are mad! You don't know what you say. Go away,' she shouted, 'before we have to kill you.'

Gren turned savagely to Veggy.

'You see how she treats me, Veggy! We cannot have her for leader. We two must go or she must.'

'Toy never hurt me,' Veggy said sullenly, anxious to avoid quarrelling. I'm not going to be outcast.'

Toy caught their mood and used it quickly.

'There can be no arguing in the group or the group will die. It is the way. Gren or I must go, and you all must decide which it is to be. Cast your vote now. Speak, anyone who would turn me away rather than Gren.'

'Unfair!' Poyly cried. Then an uneasy silence fell. Nobody spoke.

'Gren must go,' Driff whispered.

Gren pulled out a knife. Veggy at once jumped up and drew his. May behind him did the same. Soon they all stood armed against Gren. Only Poyly did not move.

Gren's face was thin with bitterness.

'Give me back my glass," he said, holding out his hand to Toy.

'It is ours,' Toy said. 'We can make a small sun without your help. Go away before we kill you."

He scanned their faces for the last time. Then he turned on his heel and walked silently away.

He was blind with defeat. No possible future lay open to him. To be on one's own in the forest was dangerous; here it was doubly dangerous. If he could get back to the middle layers of the forest, he might be able to find other human groups; but those groups were scarce and shy; even supposing they accepted him, the idea of fitting in with strangers did not appeal to Gren.

Nomansland was not the best place in which to walk about blind with defeat. Within five minutes of being outcast, he had fallen victim to a hostile plant.

The ground beneath his feet shelved down raggedly to a small water course along which water no longer flowed. Boulders taller than Gren lay thickly about, with shingle and the littered small change of pebbles underfoot. Few plants grew here except razor-sharp grasses.

As Gren wandered regardlessly on, something fell on to his head – something light and painless.

Several times, Gren had seen and been worried by the dark brain-like fungus that attached itself to other creatures. This discomycete plant form was a mutated morel. Over the ages it had learnt new ways of nourishing and propagating itself.

For some while Gren stood quite still, trembling a little beneath the touch of the thing. Once he raised his hand only to drop it again. His head felt cool, almost numb.

At last he sat down by the nearest boulder, his backbone firm against it, staring in the direction he had come. He was in deep shade, in a clammy place; at the top of the watercourse bank lay a brilliant bar of sunlight, behind which a backdrop of foliage seemed painted in indifferent greens and whites. Gren stared at it listlessly, trying to bring meaning out of the pattern.

Dimly he knew that it would all be there when he was dead – that it would even be a little richer for his death, as the phosphates of his body were reabsorbed by other things: for it seemed unlikely that he would Go Up in the manner approved and practised by his ancestors; he had no one to look after his soul. Life was short, and after all, what was he? Nothing!

'You are human,' said a voice. It was a ghost of a voice, an unspoken voice, a voice that had no business with vocal chords. Like a dusty harp, it seemed to twang in some lost attic of his head.

In his present state, Gren felt no surprise. His back was against stone; the shade about him covered not only him; his body was of common material; why should there not be silent voices to match his thoughts?

'Who is that speaking?' he asked idly.

'You call me morel. I shall not leave you. I can help you.'

He had a detached suspicion that morel had never used words before, so slowly did they come.

'I need help,' he said. 'I'm an outcast.'

'So I see. I have attached myself to you to help you. I shall always be with you.'

Gren felt very dull, but he managed to ask, 'How will you help me?'

'As I have helped other beings,' said morel. 'Once I am with them I never leave them. Many beings have no brain; I am brain. I collect thoughts. I and those of my kind act as brains, so that the creatures we attach ourselves to are more cunning and able than the others.'

'Will I be more cunning than other humans?' Gren asked. The sunlight at the top of the watercourse never changed. Everything was mixed in his mind. It was as though he spoke with the gods.

'We have never caught a human before,' said the voice, choosing its words more rapidly now. 'We morels live only in the margins of Nomansland. You live only in the forests. You are a good find. I will make you powerful. You shall go everywhere, taking me with you.'

Giving no answer, Gren rested against the cool stone. He was drained of energy and content to let time pass. At length the voice twanged in his head again.

'I know much about humans. Time has been terribly long on this world, and on the worlds in space. Once in a very distant time, before the sun was hot, your two-legged kind ruled this world. You were large beings then, five times as tall as you are now. You shrank to meet new conditions, to survive in whatever way you could. In those days, my ancestors were small, but change is always taking place, though so slowly as to go unnoticed. Now you are little creatures in the undergrowth, while I am capable of consuming you.'

After listening and thinking, Gren asked. 'How can you know all this, morel, if you have not met a human till now?'

'By exploring the structure of your mind. Many of your memories and thoughts are inherited from the far past and buried so that you cannot reach them. But I can reach them. Through them I read the history of your kind's past. My kind could be as great as your kind was... '

"Then would I be great too?'

'It would probably have to be that way... '

All at once a wave of sleep came over Gren. The sleep was fathomless, but full of strange fish – dreams he could not afterwards grasp by their flickering tails.

He woke suddenly. Something had moved nearby.

On the top of the bank, where the bright sun would always shine, stood Poyly.

'Gren, my sweet!' she said, when his slight movement revealed him. 'I have left the others to be with you and be your mate."

His brain was clear now, clear and sharp as spring water. Many things were plain to him that had been hidden before. He jumped up.

Poyly looked down at him in the shade. With horror she saw the dark fungus growing from him as it had from the snaptrap trees and the killerwillows. It protruded from his hair, it formed a ridge down the nape of his neck, it stood like a ruff half way round his collarbone. It glistened darkly in its intricate patterns.

'Gren! The fungus!' she cried in horror, backing away. 'It's all over you!'

He climbed out rapidly and caught her by the hand.

'It's all right, Poyly, there's no cause for alarm. The fungus is called morel. It will not hurt us. It can help us.'

At first Poyly did not answer. She knew the way in the forest, and in Nomansland. Things looked after themselves, not after others. Dimly she guessed that the real purpose of the morel was to feed on others and to propagate itself as widely as possible; and that to this end it might be clever enough to kill its hosts as slowly as possible.

'The fungus is bad, Gren,' she said. 'How can it be anything but bad?'

Gren fell on his knee and pulled her down with him, murmuringly reassuring as he did so.

He stroked her russet hair.

'Morel can teach us many things,' he said. 'We can be so much better than we are. We are poor creasures; surely there's no harm in being better creatures?'

'How can the fungus make us better?'

In Gren's head, morel spoke.

'She surely shall not die. Two heads are better than one. Your eyes shall be opened. Why – you'll be like gods!'

Almost word for word, Gren repeated to Poyly what morel had said.

'Perhaps you know best, Gren,' she said falteringly. 'You were always very clever.'

'You can be clever, too,' he whispered.

Reluctantly she lay back in his arms, nestling against him.

A slab of fungus fell from Gren's neck on to her forehead. She stirred and struggled, made as if to protest, then closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were very clear.

Like another Eve, she drew Gren to her. They made love in the warm sunlight, letting their wooden souls fall as they undid their belts.

At last they stood up, smiling at each other.

Gren glanced down at their feet. 'We've dropped our souls,' he said.

She made a careless gesture. 'Leave them, Gren. They're only a nuisance. We don't need them any more.'

They kissed and stretched and began to think of other things, already completely accustomed to the crown of fungus on their heads.

'We don't have to worry about Toy and the others,' Poyly said. 'They have left us open a way back to the forest. Look!'

She led him round a tall tree. A wall of smoke drifted gently inland where flame had bitten a path back to the banyan. Hand in hand, they walked together towards that way out of Nomansland, their dangerous Eden.