The Garments of Caean

15

The owner-captain of the harvester ship was a brooding man who spoke but seldom. His Prossim garments covered him like a protective shell, whorl patterns in their purple-and-heliotrope stripe generating intense moiré effects. The eye was befuddled whenever he moved; he seemed at times to disappear, to leave the ship with an impression of emptiness, of lack of pilotage.

The journey occupied two days and took them well beyond the bounds of inhabited space. During that time the five men in Frachonard suits either wandered separately through the rusty, echoing freighter, or else sat silently together around a table. It was a period of introspection, confused daydreams vying with vacancy of mind, each keeping his mental state locked away from the others. The captain kept to the bridge, only occasionally venturing into the saloon to sit in the presence of his passengers, looking like a glowing purple lobster, awed and unspeaking.

No one apart from the six of them was on board. The harvesting machinery lay in the cavernous hold below, but the crew that usually operated it had been left behind. The captain did not even know why these men wanted to visit the source of the Guild’s wealth. Somehow he did not think it was in order to poach on that wealth – why should men clothed in perfection desire anything else? When word of his treachery got out, as was bound to happen, he was a dead man, but he had found that he simply did not have the will to resist their wishes, even though it meant betraying the supreme secret of the Harvester’s Guild.

The freighter slipped through a cloudbank of glowing suns, finding hidden behind it a region of waste raddled with trails of concentrated dust, sporting a scattering of flickering stars but few planets that consisted of much more than amorphous masses of rubble. The area was too out-of-the-way, too poverty-stricken, normally to attract interest. But even here, as in many unlikely places, the universe did not fail to surprise. The harvester ship homed on a small lone planet circling a dim sun. Better-favoured systems might have incorporated it as a moon; it had little water, a calm atmosphere and a bland geology. Yet in its billions of years of solitary existence the forces of evolution had not left it entirely untouched.

Peder Forbarth had received in a flash from the brain of Realto Mast, at their passing meeting in Yomondo, knowledge of the theories and discoveries of Amara Corl. The encounter had given him his first intimation that Caean’s uniqueness sprang originally from a planet called Sovya and the peculiar culture existing there. He had learned, too, of her belief that at Caean’s opposite extremity there existed an additional cultural source complementing the first. He smiled now to think of the woman’s cleverness. She had come so close to the truth. Caean was, indeed, stretched as if between the poles of a magnetic field between two nearly equal forces: Sovya the ancient prototype and ancestor, the home of the space-dwelling people in their huge suits, and the gloomy, poorly endowed world towards whose surface they were now decelerating. But on one important point Amara was wrong. Never at any time had this planet had any contact with Sovya. It was, purely and simply, the source of the wonder cloth, Prossim.

The freighter descended gently into the calm, quiet light that bathed the surface of the plain, its drivers on retroactive phase. Standing in the observation blister, Peder could see the mats and fronds of the Prossim plant stretching for mile after mile over the plain like a tatty fibrous carpet, dull green in colour, worn through here and there where the bare rock showed.

Looking at the unprepossessing green mats, it was hard to realize that the growth was sentient.

A strange form of sentience, perhaps. Not sentience at all in the accepted sense. Yet – sentient.

Nature habitually cast her creations in two opposite forms. Positive and negative electricity, north and south magnetic poles, matter and anti-matter, forces of attraction and repulsion, male and female sexes.

And of sentience, after the same pattern, she had made two basic types: active and passive.

Human consciousness was active. Man was a thinking, doing, imagining being. Perception itself, as it took place in the human brain, was an act: to perceive meant to put some sort of mental construction on what was seen. Man could be forgiven for presuming his own consciousness to be the only kind the forces of nature would permit, for the animal nervous system had a compelling logic to it; an intelligence that lacked this type of nervous system, that lacked any power of thought or action, would have seemed a contradiction in terms. What properties could it possess that would compensate for its incomprehensible deficiencies? Man would almost certainly fail to recognize a passive sentience should he encounter one, just as he had in fact failed to perceive that the vegetable growth from which Prossim was woven comprised such a sentience.

Prossim had no power of action. It had no faculty of conceptualization, even. Its fibrous floral mentality perceived not by performing acts of recognition but by a totally different type of chemical and mental reaction whose nature allowed only the passive acceptance of incoming data, unselectively and unmodified. It did not think further on anything it perceived; it simply experienced the universe, a dreaming mirror, without alteration, without further constructive process.

A private ear on the radiations that came to it from all quarters, during untold aeons the Prossim growth had basked in the impressions it received. It recorded the movements of heavenly bodies, the tumultuous energies of suns, the faint traffic of radio-using civilizations, the dancing sleet of particles which, though invisible to the human senses, on another level brings space to life. It was receptive to the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, to cosmic rays, to relativistic electrons, in lesser measure to the neutrino flux, the tachyon flux, and to even subtler radiations little-known to man and which carried charges of a near-mental nature.

It knew almost nothing of other biological lifeforms except for the related flora and bacteria on its own planet. It had never formed a thought. It had a memory, in which some form of selective ordering did occur, but here it was the impressions themselves that provided the ordering principle, and the experiencing sentience, as always, retained its negative polarity. It could not make the crucial breakthrough to imagined concepts. Still less could it arrive at the idea of intentional actions.

And yet this idea, by a rare coincidence, had come.

It was a billion-to-one chance that might never again in the history of creation be offered to a passive sentience, and it had begun with the landing of Caeanic explorers on the Prossim growth’s planet. The clothes-conscious Caeanics quickly recognized the sartorial potentialities of the new material. Within years Prossim cloth had been fashioned into millions of garments and was being worn all over the inhabited Tzist Arm.

Nothing else than to be worn by this clothes-fetishist people could, perhaps, have forced the Prossim plant to comprehend the presence of active intelligences in the universe. Although it had no individuality – personal consciousness being unique to the active mode of sentience – the microscopic fibres composing its structure were good mental conductors. Even when harvested and transported hundreds of light years away, they could still experience; processed and woven into garments, they behaved as silent mirrors to the nervous systems of their wearers, remaining en rapport with the parent mass behind the screening star bank.

As it increasingly clothed the doings of human beings, the Prossim forest became more and more drawn into those doings. Willy-nilly it experienced the nature of doing, thinking, striving, even if at a distance. Dimly, it began to understand that evolution had sold it short.

A revolution, a quantum jump, occurred in the Prossim growth’s perceptions.

It formed a project.

The new world of sentient activity attracted it magnetically. Automatically it accepted the main aim of Caeanic philosophy: to open up every possible area of conscious life. There was nothing, to the Prossim plant’s mode of being, that was not material for experience. Life was experience, undifferentiated experience of everything that chanced to arrive within its field. It undertook to enter into every nook and cranny of this amazing novel universe that had been opened up to it.

But it could only ever achieve the new sentience vicariously, by sharing it with human beings, by clothing them and eventually controlling them – just as, in the first place, it had come to this realization by vicarious use of human reasoning powers. It decided it must create a dual sentience; one that was active and passive together, humanity and the Prossim plant forming opposite poles of a complementary system.

Of which, in short order, Prossim would become the dominant partner.

To do this it had to become the garment of all humanity. But simple garments were not enough. What was needed was a whole suit, made with such artistry that it encompassed the whole of man. Five such suits, the Prossim plant judged, would give the gamut of human potential for the entire species.

Only one more preliminary was required: the suits would need to mature by ‘growing on to’ suitable wearers, so as to fix the qualities that were to be brought to the Prossim plant. They would need to move through society, to interact in innumerable situations, before, fully charged, they returned to source.

This, then, was the strategy that was enacted through the agency of the greatest genius in tailoring ever to live, the inestimable Frachonard.

The weirdest fate ever to befall an intelligent species was nearing culmination. As the ship sank to its destination the picture became clearer and clearer to Peder, emanating from the electromagnetic mental field surrounding the Prossim jungle, relayed into his mind by the Frachonard suit. The freighter settled into the green Prossim, creaking slightly and transferring its weight to the tough mats. There was a long pause before he heard a whining and a clanking from below, signifying that the hold doors were being opened.

The blister’s inner port irised apart. The others were standing on the gallery, waiting for him to join them: Weld, Famaxer, Cy Amoroza Carendor, Poloche Tam Trice, their faces appearing one behind the other. He even glimpsed the captain, staring with a stricken, intensely dour look from beneath his purple morion, eager to see what was to befall, though he had little intimation of what was afoot.

‘We must go outside now,’ Otis Weld told Peder.

‘Of course.’

Peder walked with them along the encircling gallery, down the iron steps to the hold.

The ramp-like doors had been let down directly on to the green verbiage. They moved past the harvesting machines that were ranked on either side in the hold’s spacious cavity and stood for some moments on the lip of the port. The landscape was bathed in a gloomy, though oddly translucent light. The fronds, ferns and tangles that comprised the Prossim mats could be seen extending to the horizon. There was scarcely any undulation in the ground. The plain was level and flat, and vegetable green – cabbage green. Peder raised his eyes to the sky, which was dark purple in colour and glistened with stars. The star bank that cut off this sparse region from Caean would also be seen, glowing like a silvery cloud far off in the mid-heaven.

The harvester captain stayed behind, peering out over the landscape from the port’s rim, as the five elegantors set forth from the ship. The Prossim mats, growing to a depth of several yards, their roots deep in a rocky soil, made a springy carpet underfoot. Peder looked down to where his slim shoes of lavender Prossim leather trod the bracken-like surface. He had the impression he was looking from an immense height on to a gigantic forest. The rustling fronds were titanic trees, the ferns and stems, with their myriad tiny flowers, hid a million minute countries bedecked with greenery, containing endless forested depths.

For several minutes they walked in silence, until they were some distance from the ship. Then they stopped of one accord. With dream-like motions they laid themselves down on the mat-like masses. For a fleeting instant Peder had the feeling that he was stretching himself out on a grassy meadow on a sunny afternoon.

Then the Prossim growth seemed almost to open up to receive him. He was sinking into it, though probably by his own weight, since he knew it was incapable of voluntary physical movement.

He turned his head, finding himself shaded by overhanging ferns. Viewed from close up, the green of the Prossim plant took on an oily sheen, breaking up prismatically into mother-of-pearl colours, while the tiny flowers that covered the stems glowed like point-sized jewels. He saw now that the plant, of unremarkable appearance when observed from a distance of a few feet, actually contained an amazing variety of structures. There were countless bolls from which the Prossim fibre itself was spun. There were little mushroom-like spore propagators. And each fern and frond was made up of thousands of leaves and spikes of an astonishing diversity of delicate antennae-like shapes: spirals, whirls, ingeniously reticulated arrays.

Antennae. That, thought Peder dimly, was what they were. But very few thoughts were occurring to him by now. He was removing his garments, his hands moving by no will of his own. Jerkily, hastily, he was divesting himself of his suit and, as though by nervous momentum, of his underclothing as well.

Naked, he pulled himself free from the miniature Prossim forest. He climbed to his feet. Dotted around him on the verdant plain, standing some tens of yards apart, the other four elegantors were likewise coming to their feet. They gazed around them like bewildered children, staring at their naked forms, their faces expressing total horror.

One by one they keeled over again in a dead faint, flopping back on to the vegetable mats. A Caeanic could not remain functioning if denuded – it was too unacceptable, too unthinkable a rape. Peder also tottered, his senses swaying. But he was not, after all, a native Caeanic, and he stayed conscious. He stumbled over to the nearest of his companions, Poloche Tam Trice, and knelt by the naked body to examine his pulse. The man was dead. Traumatic cardiac arrest, Peder guessed.

He went in turn to each of the others. Otis Weld and Cy Amoroza Carendor were likewise dead. Famaxer was breathing faintly when he first went to him, but shortly he, too, expired.

A breeze swept over the Prossim plain, causing the fronds to shiver, sending waves rippling across the surface of the jade-coloured crop. In a daze Peder began to walk disconsolately hither and thither, scarcely knowing where he was. It did not even occur to him to return to the harvester ship, or to try to recover his suit, which in any case had entirely disappeared beneath the interlocking ocean of Prossim. He had no idea how long he wandered about in this manner, except that the dull sun seemed scarcely to move in the sky: but it was long enough for him to discover that in one respect the Prossim growth had learned to be adaptable.

In genetic terms, at least, it was no longer completely helpless.

It could control its growth, and the manner of it.

Using the five Frachonard suits as a pattern, the new harvest was appearing with astonishing rapidity. The bolls had already broken open to add their fibres to the plant in the accustomed way. But they were being incorporated into the Prossim growth in accordance with new templates. Suits. Hundreds, thousands of suits, accompanied by matching undergarments and accessories, were growing all over the plain by an accelerated building up of the basic Prossim fibre. Already Peder’s practised eyes could discern, even though the suits were as yet but partially formed, the five basic types that in the planet’s view made up the complete glyph of humanity.

It was all over.

Everything – the whole world Peder had known before meeting the suit – was over. The new world had begun.

A shadow fell on him, blotting out the coolly shining sun. He looked up, to see a ship falling out of the sky towards the plain.

A ship of Ziodean design.