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.
16
‘Now let’s go through this once more,’ ordered a pinch-lipped Amara. ‘You’re saying that the source of Prossim fabric – this flora growing outside – is a vegetable intelligence. That it can control people through the clothes they wear. Right?’
‘Right,’ muttered Peder.
He sat shivering in a chair, draped in nothing but a blanket. Half an hour earlier they had found him half out of his mind, stumbling ankle-deep in the Prossim.
Peder’s present experience of events was that he was slowly waking from a long, inescapable dream. His feverish explanations had confused and dumbfounded his rescuers, but it was not possible for them to dismiss his claims.
They were forced to take notice, because all around them was the spreading sea of Frachonard suits, a fact that was as undeniable as it was astonishing.
‘It has sentience,’ he repeated, ‘but a sentience that’s purely passive. One could never communicate with it, for instance. It’s like some of those gadgets you can find in Caean, mirrors and so forth, that have only passive functions. They exist because of its influence, in fact.’
Amara’s staff chief took up her recap. ‘And the suit you were wearing is a basic pattern, from which the plant can grow millions of copies organically. Right?’
‘Millions, trillions,’ Peder told him fatalistically. ‘The whole planet will become a never-ending crop of suits. Every human being in the galaxy will wear one eventually. It’s the end of the world.’
‘And the suit was using you as a wearer, so as to bring it to maturity?’
Peder nodded.
The staff chief glanced at Amara before continuing. ‘Why did you co-operate?’ he demanded. ‘Especially when you got down here on the surface – why didn’t you fight it, destroy the suit? You’re still a Ziodean, aren’t you? Do you like what you see happening?’
‘But you have to understand! I was the plant’s proxy! I didn’t have any ego, any will of my own!’
‘That’s just what I don’t understand,’ Amara said. ‘If this intelligence is purely passive, without the mental quality of action, how could it control minds like ours?’
Estru understood Peder’s meaning more clearly. ‘Like the mirror, Amara, remember? It only reflects – but sometimes it modifies the reflection.’
‘Well how can it do that if it doesn’t do anything?’ she retorted.
‘The Prossim mind works by comparing and collating, nothing more,’ Peder said. ‘It compares one impression with another. Think about it. You’ll see you can get a lot of interesting effects that way.’
Momentarily they fell silent. On the conference room’s biggest vidscreen the Caeanic freighter was visible, standing silent and unmoving while all around it stretched the green plain, speckled with the suits that were relentlessly growing. Estru gestured to the ship. ‘What will happen now?’ he asked Peder. ‘Is that ship going to harvest the suits, and take them back to Caean?’
‘The Captain doesn’t have the crew to do it. Not yet. He’ll have all he needs, though, in an hour or two.’
‘Where are they coming from?’
‘From the Callan,’ Peder said. ‘You will be the gatherers of the first crop.’ Suddenly he surged to his feet, the blanket falling from his naked body, his eyes blazing wildly. ‘You will be the first members of the new order. Man made perfect! Cosmic elegance! The galaxy ablaze with sartorial glory!’
Then he crumpled. The sociologists stepped forward, helping him back to his chair and draping the blanket around him.
Amara took Estru on one side. ‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked him. ‘Could this lunatic’s story have anything to it?’
Estru nodded slowly. ‘I think we should treat it with the utmost seriousness.’
‘But this – monster. Could there be such a thing?’