Barrington Bayley - The Garments of Caean

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.