The Garments of Caean

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.