The Garments of Caean

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.