Not Moss

"The Night Face," III.

"The girl came walking at an easy pace over the velvet-like pseudomoss which carpeted the diketop." (p. 568)

This sounds familiar because we have recently read about pseudo-moss on Nike and red pseudo-grasses on Lokon. We also saw that Gwydion, unusually, has native green ground cover. Poul Anderson is consistent. He could have just written that the Gwydiona dike was covered with moss. However, he never forgets and never lets his readers forget that he is describing a scene on an extra-solar planet where the native vegetation is not "moss" or "grass" although it might resemble it. Natural selection will probably find a way to let some kind of vegetation cover the ground, then let mobile organisms graze such "pseudo-grass" down to ground level without pulling it out. Or, if there is some other way for life to evolve, then maybe we will find out.