‘You have business here, Peder? Where are you going?’ He paused, trying to think of some topic to detain the other. ‘Amara Corl thinks this planet is Caean’s wellspring.’
Peder smiled. ‘Not so, Realto. The wellspring is farther off. A secret, holy place.’
‘Oh?’ Mast opened his eyes wide in excitement. ‘Tell me more!’
But Peder padded away, ignoring Mast’s further questions.
Mast stood dazed and perplexed. The strangeness of this twittering city, with its crystalline purple atmosphere, its mass psychosis, struck him anew. Something was going on here. But what?
Cautiously, keeping his distance, he began to follow the five sartorial brothers.
‘You’re sure about this?’ frowned Amara, looking suspiciously at Mast.
By now she had been able to confirm for herself, from her probes’ first tentative talk-back, that Yomondo was an insane city.
‘I’ve told you what Forbarth said,’ Mast replied. ‘It agrees so perfectly with your theory. Besides, what’s Forbarth doing here? What’s he up to? I’ve already said there’s something special about that suit he wears. Why did the Caeanics try to recover it from Kyre? I’m pretty confident that’s what they were after. And here are five of them, all together in a bunch.’
He was still out of breath from running nearly all the way back to the Callan. He had followed Peder and his group out of the city to a rendezvous in the forest, where they had entered a battered space freighter hidden beneath the cover of the huge ferns. Nearby Mast had found a camouflaged warehouse filled with stringy plant fibre. To his mind it all fitted together. He felt positive that Peder had been doomed to pursue his enigmatic quest from the very moment he had first put on the suit.
‘It could be possible,’ Amara mused. ‘Other cultures have had holy places – holy groves, holy cities, holy continents even, whose locations were secret and which ordinary people were never allowed to visit, and certainly not foreigners. So why not a secret holy planet?’
‘Peder said something else odd, too.’
‘What was that?’
‘He said when he came back he would dress me like a Frachonard. That’s a historic figure. Their greatest-ever sartorial.’
‘This suit must be some sort of totem-figure,’ Estru said. ‘Perhaps if you wear it you can visit the secret grove.’
Amara nodded. ‘Possibly the suit is part of some quasi-religious rite that takes place on the secret planet. We were so close, and we missed it!’ She brought to mind her brief meeting with Forbarth on Verrage, and tried to recollect if she had noticed anything unusual about his suit. It had looked comparatively ordinary, she recalled.
‘If nothing else you might discover the source of Prossim,’ Mast said. ‘But if you’re going to discover anything at all you’ll have to move now. I nearly broke my guts getting back here in a hurry. Leave it any longer and you won’t be able to pick up Forbarth’s ship.’
Amara snapped her fingers at Estru. ‘He’s right. Get on to Captain Wilce. And call in the probes immediately.’
Within minutes the Callan took off again, its sensors searching surrounding space until they found the ancient freighter that had recently departed. The ship’s baffles came full on. Locked on the Caeanic merchantman, keeping it just within sensor range, the Ziodeans followed their prey.
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.