The Lotus Caves

by John Christopher

  “They have to come from somewhere. And go somewhere. What’s that down there at the bottom?”

  “It looks like a tunnel mouth.”

  Steve clicked his fingers. It was something which he did well and which Marty, despite hours of trying, could not do at all.

  “That’s it!” he said. “Of course. A tunnel. With an air current blowing through.”

  “Blowing which way?” Marty asked. “The leaves came and now they seem to have gone. And I can’t feel a breeze, can you?”

  The air was still and heavy and scented. Marty tried to think what the scent was like, but he had very little experience to go by. The Bubble was almost odorless, a place where the nose had very limited scope. This scent was not cloying but light, and subtly shifting like the colors.

  The ground dipped sharply and they could see the tunnel. It went down at an angle of almost forty-­five degrees. It was quite wide and had plenty of headroom. But for the slope it would have been easy to walk down.

  “Maybe an intermittently varying air flow,” Steve said.

  “Caused by what?”

  Steve stared into the tunnel. “I don’t know. But the answer is down there. It has to be. There’s nowhere else the leaves could have come from or gone to.”

  Uneasily Marty said: “I suppose you’re right.”

  “So the obvious thing is to go and look.”

  “You don’t know what’s there.”

  “Leaves, I hope. And trees as well, I should think. Maybe Moon-birds nesting in them!”

  “What I meant was, there could be a precipice or something. You won’t get much purchase on the moss, on a slope like that. If you slipped . . .”

  “I won’t.”

  One could see a few yards into the tunnel, after which it twisted to the left. There was no way of knowing what lay past the bend.

  Steve said: “No point in our both going down. You hang on up here.”

  Marty was not sure whether Steve had read the reluctance in his voice. He said angrily: “I’m going down if you are. I just thought . . .”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Steve said. “Get a rope from the crawler. One goes down and one stays as anchor man. My idea, so I have the choice. Fair enough?”

  It was obviously sensible. Marty went back to the crawler and fetched a coil of rope. Steve fastened it around his waist, pulling hard to check the knot.

  “We’re off, then. Take a strain.”

  He sat down and slid feet first into the tunnel. His body left a trail of phosphorescence on the moss. Marty stood with his feet apart and paid out rope. He saw Steve reach the bend and go around it. The rope came hard over against the wall on that side, cutting into the moss and disappearing beneath the shimmer. Marty hoped there wasn’t a sharp edge under there.

  Steve’s voice came back, echoing: “All right from here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. The tunnel levels. I can walk.”

  “I’ll keep paying out.”

  “Right.”

  Marty stared about him as he let the rope through his hands. Against the pervasive glimmer the squat hulk of the crawler looked hard and yet unreal. Their refuge, he supposed. There was food for a few weeks. After that . . . He thought of being alone here, with the spheroid that shook on its vast black trunk, the leaves that came and went like ghosts or messengers . . .

  How long since Steve had gone? Thirty seconds, a minute, five minutes? He had no idea. He looked at his finger-watch and saw that it was one-thirty. One-thirty a.m. that would be. Earth-time, Bubble-time. Time meant nothing in this glowing cave. Could it have been more than five minutes? The rope was no longer under tension but lying slack. Did that just mean that Steve had stopped going forward, or . . .

  Steve’s voice came up, muffled and very distant. So thin he could only just make out the words.

  “Marty, come on down.”

  “Where are you?”

  “It’s all right. Come and see . . . It’s fantastic.”

  He was still not keen on facing the tunnel but delaying would not help. He made the rope secure by knotting the end around one of the crawler tracks. Then he flung himself down the slope, sliding. The moss here was not actually wet, but damp and very springy. He got around the bend and found, as Steve had said, that the floor turned into an easy downward incline. The tunnel was very big; it would have taken the crawler with room to spare. He walked along toward another bend, to the right this time, and saw as he approached it that there was brighter light beyond. When he turned the corner he saw Steve sitting silhouetted against it. As Marty reached him, he said: “Look. It’s unbelievable.”

  The tunnel emerged onto a ledge. They were near the top of a second cave, much bigger than the first, and there was an arch at the far end which provided a glimpse of a third. This cave was well over a hundred feet across, and they were perched at the top of a sixty- or seventy-degree slope, at least fifty feet above the floor. Walls and ceiling were covered with the moss but here it glowed with a steadier, whiter light. Down below . . .

  Marty supposed you could call them trees, though they resembled no tree he had ever seen in books or on television. A tangle of trunks and stems and branches, ending in a riot of leaves of different shapes and colors. All brilliant—and all in motion! The trunks swayed, branches lifted and tossed, leaves shook as though in a gale. Yet up here the air was still. Perhaps not down there? He saw, though, that the movements were not uniform, not in any one direction. Two of the larger trees, as he watched, leaned in toward each other, their branches touching and mingling. And leaves from both detached themselves, lifted fluttering into the air, danced and spun in a wide fanning movement before settling down again.

  He said: “The leaves . . . they went back onto the branches.”

  Steve said: “I know. Watch that!”

  He pointed toward the far side of the cave, where there were no trees but a fuzzy greenish-­purple stuff covered the ground. Part swelled up from the rest, became a prominence and then a ball that rose and hovered, bobbing, a dozen feet in the air. Others appeared and behaved in similar ways. After a few minutes it was possible to count five of them, dancing as the leaves had done, over and under and around each other, faster and faster until they seemed to blur into one.

  “What are they?”

  “I don’t know. Look, they’re changing.”

  The balls had ceased to spin and were sinking back toward the ground. One of them, though, did not. Instead it changed shape, becoming what looked like a pair of wings with no connecting body. The wings beat and it soared up until it was almost on a level with the ledge. Automatically Marty drew back, but it did not approach them. It flapped its way several times around the cave, then swooped down to the spot from which it had come. Purple-green ran into purple-green. There was a lump, a dissolving mound, finally the same flat surface there had been in the beginning.

  They watched, fascinated but uncomprehending, for a long time. There was always something happening, some movement or eruption, brilliant and meaningless. Then Steve said he was hungry.

  “You could try eating the moss,” Marty suggested.

  “I don’t fancy it. It’s probably poisonous, anyway. Let’s go back to the crawler and get some food. We can come here again afterward.”

  He led the way up the tunnel, reeling in the rope. When they reached the bottom of the slope, Marty said: “Better not take a strain on it unless you have to. I tied it to the crawler. We don’t know how firmly anchored it is. We might pull it down on us.”

  “Good point. We should be able to jump it fairly easily.”

  He did not make it the first time, but Marty did. He stood at the top and gave Steve a hand to get up. The crawler was in the same place, but something else was different. There was no snake-like coil. The black trunk ran straight up from floor to ceiling, where t
he glowing moss closed tightly around it. So the spheroid must be outside.

  Marty pointed to it. “Do you know what I think?”

  Steve said it for him: “Thurgood’s flower! It was in bud before. Now it’s up there somewhere—probably opened out.”

  “But what for?” Marty asked. “To attract inter-planetary bees?”

  “It’s probably not a flower really. It could be absorbing sunlight. Plants live on solar energy. A chlorophyll conversion, or something similar. I wonder . . . could this all be part of one organism, one plant? And yet they’re all separate—the leaves, the fuzz-balls, the bird-thing . . .”

  Marty was looking past the black column at the moss-covered outcropping of rock he had noticed the first time he emerged from the crawler. He saw now how regular in shape it was, and that it did not actually join on to the wall. On the Moon’s surface rocks sometimes had shapes that from a distance, in a certain light, could look artificial. It was probably no more than that, but he felt a new prickle of uneasiness. Thurgood’s flower . . . which seventy years ago he had lost his life searching for.

  He walked across the cave, and Steve followed him. The shape was more regular as they drew near, not less. A shape that beneath the blurring mask of moss was familiar. Standing by one corner, Marty reached down and pulled out a tuft. Light gleamed on metal, a section of crawler track.

  They stared in silence for a few moments. Steve said at last: “So he found it, after all. He must have fallen through, the way we did.”

  “And then?”

  Steve said slowly: “I suppose he’s still inside. We were very lucky not to break our necks.”

  Flesh did not decay in the lifeless vacuum of the surface, but there was air here and life. A skeleton, hunched over the controls—the only skeleton the Moon had ever known. Marty turned away, feeling sick. And frightened, because if Thurgood had not died in the crash then he had died later, more slowly and agonizingly, when his food gave out. They might be envying him yet. As they went back to their crawler, he said: “Do you think we ought to ration ourselves on supplies?”

  Steve said gloomily: “I suppose so. Not that it’s going to make much difference. It isn’t as though anyone is likely to come looking for us. Even if the radio is still working, we can’t transmit through rock.”

  They went into the crawler. The air felt musty and thin after the thick, sweet-smelling air of the cave. Marty kept his eyes away from the mossy wreck, but he was very much aware of it. He could not help wondering how long it would be before their own crawler looked like that.

  7

  A Face in a Dream

  THEY HAD BROUGHT A STEEL spike and a hammer from the crawler, and Marty hammered the spike into the ledge to provide a holding point for the rope. When that was done and checked and the rope firmly secured, he watched Steve edge his way down the slope into the second cave. The trees swayed and waved as before, and he had a feeling that their branches were clutching upward toward the descending figure. He remembered the leaf that had brushed his cheek, and was afraid. Being plants they were mindless, of course, but that did not mean they could not be a menace. There were plants on Earth that could trap and eat insects, and Earth plants did not have this fantastic ability to move.

  But he had not opposed Steve’s suggestion that they should explore the rest of the cave system. It was plainly something that had to be done. There was no hope of finding a way out from the top cave. Even if it were possible to locate the spot through which the crawler had crashed, they could not get at it. It was up in the roof of the cave, completely out of reach. They had to explore—the alternative was to sit and wait until their food supplies ran out, until they starved to death.

  Steve was below treetop level. Marty watched as a nearby branch curled toward him, seemed to touch and stroke him, then drew back. Steve scrambled down the last few yards, and cast the rope free. He called up: “Everything O.K. Come on down.”

  Marty went down backward, bracing himself at each step, hanging onto the rope. He did not look around at the trees, but soon could hear the swishing of their branches through the heavy air. He told himself that since Steve had got down safely there was nothing to worry about. Except that the trees might be waiting to get both of them within reach before attacking them? That was silly, of course, because it implied thinking and trees could not think. All the same, his hair bristled.

  He dropped the last few feet, and stood beside Steve. The branches tossed and twisted above their heads but did not come near them. The leaf touching him, the branch that stroked against Steve—they had probably been accidents. They must have been since plants could not see, either. But he still felt uneasy. Steve was examining the trunk of one of the trees. He said: “It’s very smooth. Not bark, I think.” He moved to unclip his belt-knife. “I wonder if it will cut easily.”

  Marty said: “No!” Steve looked at him. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

  Steve looked up thoughtfully at the moving branches. “No, perhaps not. Let’s head for that arch which seems to open into the next cave.”

  It was an eerie sensation walking under the threshing branches of the trees, and Marty was ­anxious to get to more open ground. When they reached it, though, he paused. This was the expanse of greenish-­purple fuzz from which the flying balls and the flapping wings had emerged. He put out a tentative foot and found it different from the moss: softer, more deeply resilient. It even seemed to pulsate slightly, but that could have been an illusion. There was no sign of the surface swelling up, but he had the feeling it might happen at any moment. Steve led the way across, walking toward the arch, and Marty followed him.

  They heard it first when they were almost across the fuzz, but so faint and distant that this, too, could have been something in the mind. He stopped. Steve said: “You hear that? It can’t be.”

  They listened, straining their ears. More like the ghost of music than music itself, thin and far away. Marty said: “It’s coming from somewhere ahead.”

  “I know.”

  It was more clearly audible as they went under the arch into the next cave. Something like an organ, Marty thought. And strangely familiar . . . Steve halted again. He said, in shocked disbelief: “I know that tune!”

  Marty said: “I think I do, but I can’t place it.”

  “It’s one of those late twentieth-century things. A comic opera.” He whistled a few bars in accompaniment. “But that’s crazy, isn’t it? It can’t be real.”

  There had been a downward slope in both of the first two caves which was accentuated in this one. Most of the floor was covered with the fuzz, but strange-looking plants grew in places. There was a thicket of cactus-like things, spiked and eccentrically branched, in different shades of blue, and in another place a cluster of small bushes, almost perfectly spherical, gray streaked with splashes of brighter colors.

  The rock wall on the right showed an uninterrupted glow of moss. On the left, though, and at the bottom there were openings. It was from one of these that the music must be coming. Several of the openings were above floor level, one of them halfway up to the roof. But they were not inaccessible. Looking closely, Marty saw that there were plants there as well. It was difficult to decide whether they were bushes or trees: what was important about them was that their branches, gnarled and twisted, rose up against the rock face, forming a natural ladder by which one could climb to the galleries.

  Steve said: “I think the music is coming from the second one along.”

  He moved in that direction. Marty said: “Wait a minute.”

  “What for?”

  “Those trees growing up the side of the cave toward the holes—they’re almost like ladders.”

  “Well, yes. We can climb up quite easily.”

  “But they only grow under the holes, as though they’re there just to act as stairways.”

  “True,” Steve said. “I h
adn’t realized that.”

  “For us to climb up?”

  “I see what you mean. There may be other things here as well as plants. Moon-men? Giant spiders? More likely to be humanoid, if they climb ladders.”

  “That doesn’t explain why the ladder trees should be there and only there.”

  “The Moon-men could have planted them and trained them. Maybe they’re great gardeners.”

  “And the music? Earth music?”

  “They probably listen in on our radio.”

  Steve put one foot on the lowest crook of the tree. Marty said: “If there are Moon-men up there . . . they may not be friendly.”

  “That’s also true,” Steve said. “In which case we’re unlucky. But I don’t suppose we can go on dodging them indefinitely. We might as well find out the worst.”

  He climbed the tree and Marty followed him. The surface was rougher than that of the trees in the other cave, but seemed to be worn smooth in places—places, he realized, which were at roughly the right intervals to have been made by climbing feet. The music was louder. It changed, in mid-bar almost, to another tune which was vaguely familiar. He came up to the tunnel mouth and could hear it very plainly. Some kind of march.

  This tunnel was much smaller. It was possible to walk in it but there was not a lot of room on either side, and at times it was necessary to stoop. The rock surface, as everywhere, was covered with the luminous moss. They walked through a tunnel of flickering light toward the sound of music. Then they were around a corner, and the new cave lay ahead.

  It took Marty a moment or two to realize what was wrong. He had been expecting to see plants and trees similar to the ones they had already encountered, or perhaps even more exotic. There were trees and plants here, but they were wildly out of keeping with the others, or with anything he could have imagined. To start with, there was grass; lush green, calf high, extending almost to the tunnel mouth. He walked into it, bent down and held it in his hands. The only grass he had ever touched had been that in the park back in the Bubble, close-mown to a quarter of an inch. This was wild, riotous, luxuriant. He picked a blade and smelt a different scent, the smell of grass itself.