The Garments of Caean Page 12

  Peder, already aware that corruption and self-seeking were so cynically accepted that they had become an established instrument of administration, was not surprised to hear this rationalization. He had already heard it from Severon’s lips, in a indirect way, when the Minister had insinuated how much good they could do one another once Peder was installed in the E-Co-Net. He laughed suavely. ‘A realistic appraisal, Minister.’ He launched into his own animated version of Severon’s words, arguing that only a man who knew how to do himself some good could do his nation good, and illustrating the argument with countless anecdotes. Severon nodded sagely, his lips curling in amusement. ‘True, Peder, true.’

  ‘Enjoying the ball, Forbarth, huh?’

  Peder was startled to hear the rasping, commanding voice behind him. He turned. Baryonid Varl Vascha stood eyeing him with narrowed brows, as if weighing him up.

  He smiled and put on all his charm. ‘An unqualified success, Minister!’

  Vascha grunted and lumbered away.

  Peder did not allow the Third Minister’s apparent grumpiness to spoil his own enjoyment of the evening. There was plenty here for him to take advantage of. He talked, he drank, he danced, he won the infatuation of Aselle Klister. He did not utter a word or make a move that was not, from the point of view of the social graces, flawless. He moved through the gathering with all the elegance and panache of a gorgeously plumed cock through a barnyard full of hens.

  A press photographer moved in and took a shot of him with Aselle clinging to his arm. Directorate officials, including the Thirteenth Minister, and their wives framed the couple.

  ‘Oh, we’ll be on the newscast tomorrow!’ Aselle giggled.

  ‘If we’re lucky.’ The newscasts would publish few pictures that did not feature the Third Minister himself.

  It was still several hours before dawn when a footman approached Peder and coughed deferentially.

  ‘The Minister would appreciate a word with you, sir.’

  ‘With me?’ Peder gazed at him imperiously. ‘Which Minister?’

  ‘Why, Third Minister Vascha, sir. Would you care to follow me?’

  The footman’s face was professionally blank, but Peder was puzzled by his slight stiffness of demeanour, which seemed to betoken something wrong.

  He frowned and glanced to where Aselle was talking with her father. Leaving the footman to wait, he stepped over to her.

  ‘I have been called away for a short while, my dear,’ he said solicitously when he had caught her attention. ‘The Third Minister requests my presence. I hope he will not keep me too long.’

  He followed the footman down a broad, winding staircase. While they were leaving the ballroom one of the displays arranged for the evening burst into life. Canisters were opened to release clouds of coloured smoke which wafted through the hall, eventually taking on a semi-solid consistency and assuming the forms of fantastic dragons and imaginary beasts. The multi-hued phantoms went slithering and twisting through the ballroom, knocking over tables and chairs, grappling with the guests, and creating general pandemonium.

  Then the sounds of the ball were left behind. Peder descended into the deeper reaches of the palace where a calm, almost stifling silence prevailed. They entered a wing displaying a more modest style of architecture, the colour scheme consisting of harmonious blues and pale greens. Peder guessed that this was Vascha’s own private wing.

  The footman paused at a circular nexus of five radiating corridors. The flat ceiling bore a golden starburst. From one of the corridors emerged two dark-garbed men, and Peder was disconcerted to find that one of them was Lieutenant Burdo, his visitor of the previous morning.

  Burdo’s present companion waved a detector box down the length of Peder’s body, then frisked him expertly. ‘What is this?’ Peder protested.

  ‘You’re under arrest.’ Burdo’s face was closed, almost hurt.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You might be able to fool us,’ Burdo told him, ‘but you can’t fool Vascha.’ He nudged Peder forward. The two policemen fell in behind him.

  Peder was mystified. He followed the footman, who led them down a long corridor whose colours, seen in perspective, gave the impression of a box-shaped rainbow. As they walked by them the walls phased through purple, russet and gold, like a technicolor autumn, until finally the footman stopped at a door of carved wood.

  Peder was pushed into a room breathing luxury. The walls, painted delicate peach, were lent an odd impression of texture by embossed murals of the same colour. All the furniture was antique. If Peder was any judge one or two pieces dated from before the settlement of Ziode itself.

  Baryonid Varl Vascha stood before a huge open hearth in which timber logs blazed and threw out an enjoyable warmth. Peder was amazed. Never in his life had he seen an open fire inside a closed room before. Vascha wore a purple smoking jacket and was puffing at a curious smoking instrument of some ancient design. He nodded to the footman to leave; the security men arranged themselves by the door.

  Vascha looked at Peder hard with eyes nearly as black as his greased-down hair, pulling thoughtfully on the smoking-pipe. His face was square and pockmarked, making him look like a hoodlum. Peder shivered inwardly. For a Ziodean, he had to admit that the Third Minister had remarkable presence.

  ‘Sir, why have I been arrested?’ he asked.

  Vascha took the smoking instrument from his mouth and laid it on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. But he ignored Peder’s question. He looked past him to Lieutenant Burdo.

  ‘Do you know much about the Caeanics, Lieutenant? At first hand, I mean?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Burdo told him.

  ‘They are strange people,’ Vascha said slowly in a gruff, musing voice. ‘Not like us at all. It’s as if they don’t have souls. Take you or me, for instance. Our personality, our mien or whatever you like to call it, comes from our own inner qualities. Theirs comes from the clothes they wear, pure and simple. It’s a weird phenomenon. You don’t get to recognize it right away. Not for a long time, in fact. But when you do, you realize these people are no more human than a robot. It’s the same as if they were some alien kind of life-form.’

  ‘I guess there’s no accounting for foreigners, sir.’

  The Minister gave a short barking laugh. ‘You’re right there, Lieutenant! No accounting for foreigners! But unfortunately that’s not all there is to it. The Caeanics plan to conquer on a wide scale, spreading their perverse way of life everywhere. They’ll come here and turn you into a clothes-robot.’ He nodded with self-assurance. ‘Caean poses a terrible threat to Ziode, in fact to the whole inhabited galaxy. “Caeanic Tzist lies curved above Ziode like a threatening maw” – that’s from an official government pamphlet, and I wrote it.’

  He walked across to Peder and fingered the cloth of his suit. ‘Prossim, isn’t it? You must be highly placed.’

  ‘No, sir!’ Peder cried, shocked. ‘Crabsheep twill!’

  The Minister went back to the fireplace, leaned against the mantelpiece and warmed his hands in the heat of the flames. He laughed softly. ‘You made a real mistake in coming to this ball tonight. It so happens I once spent two years as ambassador to Caean! We had diplomatic contact in those days. By the time the two years were up, I had learned to recognize what it was made Caeanics different from real people. Almost as soon as I saw you tonight I knew you were Caeanic.’

  ‘No sir, I am Ziodean! I was born here in Gridira!’

  Vascha waved his hand.

  And Peder’s further denials faded away. He was almost totally bemused by everything the Minister had said. He had never really looked on Caean as an aggressive force, and not having taken the feud between the two nations seriously, had never expected to find himself in this invidious situation.

  ‘Well, you’ve brought me a real birthday present after all,’ Vascha said with evident gratification. ‘Yourself: our first captured Caeanic agent, and a person of some importance if I’m any judge.’ He glanced up at the security
men. ‘Bring him this way. ZZ want to take a look at him.’

  The rear of the room contained a second door giving access to an elevator. All four men entered it, and the elevator first descended, then travelled horizontally for a distance. They emerged into a garage containing a handsome Maxim car. Peder was bundled into the back, while Vascha climbed into the front compartment. The garage doors opened. They were driven down a ramp, along a shuttered drive, through an automatic gate and on to the streets of Gridira.

  The sky was beginning to lighten slightly. The car turned on to the North Axis and crossed the city. The Minister pulled a bandanna from his pocket, handing it to Burdo through a connecting window. Burdo blindfolded Peder.

  After a while Peder spoke out loud into the silence.

  ‘What’s ZZ?’

  Lieutenant Burdo’s voice came in reply. ‘You know all about them.’

  ‘No, I don’t. What are they?’

  There was a pause. ‘Zealots of Ziode. A secret patriotic society.’

  Peder asked no more questions. Twenty minutes later the blindfold was removed. The car was standing on gravel at the rear of a tall, old-fashioned house, close to a well-tended garden bounded by twelve-foot walls. The baroque outlines of other buildings thrust up beyond. This was an antique, well-heeled part of the city.

  After being taken from the car Peder was herded into the house and down some stone steps. They were in a small cellar, facing a steel door.

  The Minister turned to Burdo. ‘After we go inside, wait upstairs.’

  The door opened. Vascha entered, and Peder was nudged in behind him. At his back the door closed with a thump.

  In keeping with their rejection of artificial constraint on human individuality, the council of the Zealots of Ziode met stark naked. There were six of them sitting at the crescent-shaped table. Above and behind them, the starburst of the Ziode Cluster blazed on a dark backcloth. Above that, the initials ZZ were emblazoned. The walls of the room were draped with banners and flags.

  Looking into their set, determined faces, Peder recognized at once that he was facing rampant nationalism.

  Baryonid Varl Vascha divested himself of his clothing, piling his garments neatly on a nearby chair. Naked, looking flabbier and pudgier than he had appeared when dressed, he went and stood to one side of the crescent table.

  For the first time since he had begun wearing his suit, Peder felt a loss of confidence. He even wondered if he should confess the whole story of its acquisition. That might be better than to be arraigned as an enemy agent, he thought.

  No. These toughened fanatics would show him no mercy. He made an effort to call on the suit’s supernal elegance, performing slight, casual motions – extending one foot an inch or two, lifting his shoulders and turning them in a gesture that was almost effete in its ambiguity.

  His élan began to return. These near-subliminal manoeuvres were usually guaranteed to bring opponents to a state of fawning ingratiation. For a moment Peder saw the familiar semi-hypnotic look flicker over the faces of the Zealots, but they were plainly less susceptible than the average citizen to foreign wiles and their self-willed sternness soon returned.

  They began to fire questions at him.

  ‘How long have you been in Ziode?’

  ‘What kind of information have you passed back to Tzist?’

  ‘Who do you report to?’

  ‘How many agents does Caean have in Ziode?’

  Peder remained dumb before the barrage. ‘You’re on your own now,’ one of them reminded him. ‘No one can help you, you know that.’

  Another Zealot made a remark to Vascha. ‘I wonder if he knows the invasion date?’

  ‘Invasion?’ Peder echoed. ‘Who says Caean is going to invade?’

  ‘We say it,’ Vascha said gruffly.

  ‘You should look on Caean as a friend, not as an enemy,’ Peder replied in a clear voice. ‘Caean will do you nothing but good. We—’ The response had come out of Peder’s lips without any volition on his part. He stopped, realizing he was condemning himself out of his own mouth.

  But still the words came, prompted by some secret impulse in his brain. ‘We bring you a new life. Cast off your sleep, enter the new morning of revivifying apparel.’ He raised his arm in a strangely awkward, dramatic gesture, tilting his face towards the ceiling. Dimly he was aware that the suit had taken over his persona and was making him behave like this.

  ‘Watch out, he’s up to some kind of trick!’ Vascha said sharply. He stepped forward and shoved at Peder, delivering a mild rabbit punch to the side of his neck as he went down.

  ‘Don’t underestimate Caeanic garments,’ he told his fellow Zealots. ‘Some of them can exercise a kind of mesmeric influence.’

  Sullenly Peder climbed to his feet, rubbing his neck awkwardly. ‘I have no information for you,’ he muttered.

  The Zealot chairman grunted and opened a drawer under the table. ‘We’ve prevaricated enough. Let’s begin the interrogation. Succinyl will soon get him talking.’

  Peder shrank at mention of the interrogation torture drug. The chairman took a hypodermic from the drawer. But Vascha laughed without humour.

  ‘You don’t need that. There’s a quicker method. Just take his clothes off him. Caeanics can’t stand to be naked. It reduces them to some kind of animal state and you can do anything you like with them – I’ve seen it before. I told you, they’re not like us.’

  The chairman hesitated, then replaced the hypodermic in the drawer. He nodded to two of those who sat with him. They rose to their feet and approached Peder, their naked bodies, so pale and flabby, filling him with a purely physical revulsion.

  The cellar oppressed him. He should have felt relief at his reprieve, but instead another, deeper terror had taken hold of him. The terror of being disrobed, of being made to go naked in front of these men. To stand naked, stripped of his Frachonard suit! No, no, he could not permit it, it was impossible, he could not!

  ‘The succinyl!’ he shouted desperately. ‘I’ll take the succinyl!’

  They all laughed. Then, as they laid hands on him, something snapped. A feeling of gigantic orgasmic release ripped through every fibre of his body. It was like a sudden discharge between the electrodes of an arc light, an eruption of unsuspected power, and everything seemed to go dim, his perception to withdraw itself, to enter a far darkness. He was only aware, in a vague and incomplete manner, that blinding shocks of energy were vibrating through the room and creating turmoil.

  He must briefly have lost consciousness. When he came to he was still standing, and was still unmolested. The cellar looked as if a small explosion had gone off in it. The backcloth bearing the Ziodean starburst was burning. The table and chairs had been overturned, the Zealots having been flung about the room like rag dolls. The air carried a strong acid smell of electrostatic discharge.

  At first Peder was too nonplussed to know what to do. Then, quietly and carefully, he moved about the cellar, examining the forms of the unconscious Zealots.

  The first two he looked at – the same two who had attempted to undress him – were apparently dead. He moved to a third, but at the same time heard a groan behind him.

  He turned. Two other Zealots had been stunned, not killed. Now they lurched to their feet and staggered at Peder, their eyes feral with hatred.

  Peder knew how to react without knowing why. He clamped a hand to each man’s forehead. He felt a vibration issuing from his palms, passing through skin, skull and brain.

  They both fell back dead.

  He took one last look round the cellar to make sure there were no more survivors. Then he left, closing the steel door behind him, and mounted the steps to the hallway on the ground floor.

  Lieutenant Burdo and his colleague were surprised to see Peder. Wordlessly he beckoned them, his Prossim-sleeved arm moving in a smooth, repetitive arc. They obeyed him involuntarily, though their hands hovered nervously near their guns.

  Again using the palms of his hands
, Peder killed them.

  He decided to leave the house by the front to avoid the chauffeur waiting at the back. There was no sound in the building as he walked softly through it; it appeared deserted. The front door opened on to a short flight of steps giving direct access to the street.

  Calmly Peder closed the door behind him and walked towards the centre of Gridira.

  It was now early morning and the street was light. Suddenly Peder felt utterly drained. He had never felt so feeble and exhausted. It took a superhuman effort just to put one foot in front of another.

  Sugar! He had to have sugar!

  He put a hand to his face. The skin hung loose, all the flesh gone from his cheeks. He knew he was the same all over. He was a gaunt travesty of himself, his chubbiness lost in the explosion of energy in the cellar.

  For that energy had not come from the suit, as he had at first presumed, but from himself. Like some sea monster he had discharged a lethal wattage of electricity, and to gain that unnatural level of power his body had drawn on all its reserves of fat, instantly converting it – and a good deal of protein – into a controlled, momentary blast.

  That the suit could manage his body in such a fashion was a startling development. Had it a mind of its own? Was it alive, inhabiting him like a parasitical creature – or rather, symbiote? Peder still did not think so. He did not believe that the suit was sentient or that it had any powers of its own. For all its incredible qualities it was only a work of art which aroused the dormant powers of its wearer. It was, he concluded, a psychological template: his abilities flowed into it and were shaped and adapted by it. In time, flowing more freely, they could bring about even such remarkable physical effects as he had just witnessed.

  Such was his explanation. The suit sometimes seemed to rule him, he decided, because it aroused the powers of his unconscious, and as every psychiatrist knows, a man’s subconscious is a stranger to him.