The Garments of Caean

A private ear on the radiations that came to it from all quarters, during untold aeons the Prossim growth had basked in the impressions it received. It recorded the movements of heavenly bodies, the tumultuous energies of suns, the faint traffic of radio-using civilizations, the dancing sleet of particles which, though invisible to the human senses, on another level brings space to life. It was receptive to the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, to cosmic rays, to relativistic electrons, in lesser measure to the neutrino flux, the tachyon flux, and to even subtler radiations little-known to man and which carried charges of a near-mental nature.

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.