The Garments of Caean Read online

  He jerked to his feet, angular, lithe and saturnine. ‘Now don’t be so unreasonable, Peder. Everything is going splendidly! Try to snap out of this silly mood. I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep now. I’ll call on you again this afternoon and we’ll go to the storehouse together.’

  Sick with frustration, Peder watched them leave.

  Mast hummed softly to himself as his Cauredon saloon car, chauffeured by Castor, slid away from the kerb and whispered through the nearly empty streets.

  Grawn, in the back of the car with him, spoke in a gruff voice. ‘Why are you bothering with that creep, Realto? Heave him over the side, that’s what I say. He’s a comedown.’

  ‘Hmm, maybe,’ Mast replied patiently. ‘But we need him for the evaluation. Never sell anything until you know what it’s worth.’

  ‘So? He’s not the only goddam tailor in town, for Chrissake. Buy another.’

  ‘There is the question of secrecy … but you have a point, Grawn. It might be as well to remove the merchandise from Forbarth’s reach. That, at least, should secure his co-operation!’

  He tapped on the window separating them from Castor. ‘A change of plan, Castor! Drive to the warehouse!’

  Castor pulled on the steering rod. The car swerved round a corner, then proceeded south.

  Mast leaned back in satisfaction. ‘He’ll soon realize he’s been bucking the wrong league,’ he said confidently.

  Unable to return to his bed, Peder paced the room in an agony of vacillation. He didn’t know what to do!

  Eventually he sat down despairingly, his head on his hand. In the end he would give in to Mast, he supposed. But where would that lead him?

  To Ledlide, the prison planet, most likely.

  For half an hour he must have sat there, until eventually the Frachonard suit began to come into his thoughts. It was getting light outside, and he might as well make a start to the day.

  And today, of course, was the day of the Frachonard Prossim suit.

  The great occasion of trying on the suit should be approached with care and respect. He washed slowly and powdered himself, and ate a leisurely breakfast before choosing his accessories: a lemon-coloured shirt with ruffled front and piped cuffs, silk underpants with a flowered pattern in gold thread, hand-knitted socks of real lambswool, and shoes of soft black leather with gold buckles.

  His heart pounding with anticipation, he descended to his workshop and donned the accessories there. Momentarily, his hands trembled.

  Then he reached for the hanger and dressed himself in the Frachonard suit, feeling instantly its electrifying effect.

  Wonderful, wonderful! It fitted as well as if Frachonard had measured him up for it personally. The waistcoat was a superb personality support, making him feel erect, strong and alert. The trousers were lank and only slightly flared, like the fairings of a transsonic rocket, and gave him the extraordinary feeling of being long-legged and energetic. Under the prompting of this feeling he strode from one side of the cellar to the other and back again, the jacket’s subtlety of line helping to control his movements, eliminating the slight awkwardness of gait that normally plagued him.

  Stopping to view himself in the full-length mirror, he felt the suit appropriating his personality, taking it over and remedying its defects, forming his new interface with the exterior world. Here was a new Peder Forbarth, upright, rational and aware, the kind of Forbarth he liked to imagine, now in possession of his latent qualities. Even his face was artfully transformed. The same open, pleasant-enough expression was there, but the eyes held a new directness. The pliability and vacillation were gone, to be replaced by an unmistakable air of ability. Even the pudginess of jowl, which before had given an impression of weakness, now reappeared as the full-fleshed look of someone who had learned how to make his way in the world.

  How could anyone attired in a Frachonard suit gainsay the tenets of Caeanic philosophy? Man’s naturally evolved form was adventitious, lumpy and incomplete, and it did not fit his creative inner powers. If he was to exteriorize these dormant inner powers then he must acquire the appropriate interfaces with reality. Only then could he confront the universe in his true garb, become the creature of effective thought and action he should be, and experience all possible realms of existence.

  But the evolution of his physical form beyond the status of the hairless ape could not be left to blind biological forces. It had to be done by conscious art. In a word, it was to be accomplished by means of raiment.

  As he gazed upon his image these ideas, which previously he had never taken seriously, carrying as they did the taint of foreign subversion, struck him with full force. With every glance he discovered dazzling new effects. He thought he saw in the mirror’s depths the foreshadowing of the future god-man, fearlessly apparelled, flashing through the galaxies, impinging by virtue of his glorious vesture on any circumstance. Who could compare such splendour with the sodden clay that was unclothed man?

  An ecstatic thought came to him. He was now the best-dressed man in Ziode; and presumably, among the five best-dressed men in Ziode and Caean put together, Frachonard having made only five Prossim suits.

  He was, therefore, one of the five best-dressed men in the universe.

  He seemed to go dizzy, the room spinning and the harmonic colours of the suit becoming momentarily kaleidoscopic.

  The delirium left him as he turned away from the mirror. All at once he realized that the problem that had plagued him minutes before was trivial. There was no need to make an issue of Mast’s scheming obliqueness. It would be a simple matter for Peder to take his cut of the proceeds in kind, disposing of it as he saw fit, and severing all connection with his partners. Mast could then do as he liked.

  He went back upstairs and dialled for an autocab, taking out three large suitcases from his storeroom while he waited for it to arrive.

  All would be well. He stood in front of his shop, looking up through the plate window. The sun had already risen, but on Harlos the stars remained visible until several hours after dawn. The Ziode Cluster covered nearly half the purplish-green sky, a giant fluorescent puff-ball with a hazy atmosphere of less closely-packed suns. Among the thousands of stars in that puff-ball, nearly a hundred inhabited planets made up the Ziode nation. Beyond it could be discerned the rainbow-like wisp of the Tzist Arm; beyond that, the rest of the galaxy made an even dimmer background to it all.

  He thought of the future man, transformed by raiment, who would one day rule that galaxy. The evolution of the transformed man would take a long time – thousands of years, even – but one thing was certain. He would spring from Caean, not Ziode.

  The autocab drew up outside. Minutes later he was riding southwards through Gridira’s still nearly-silent streets.

  The sleek commercial buildings fled by. Soon the cab entered an outer ring of high-rise habitat tenements where the sky disappeared intermittently behind the criss-cross of overhead dwellings. After half an hour he was in the garden suburb of Cadra, whose streets were shaded by willow and bouquet trees.

  He wound down the window, bringing the perfume of the trees clean and fresh on the morning air. But he frowned as the autocab came to a stop at the maisonette rented by Mast. A manual-control Cauredon – Mast’s car – was parked outside. The door to the side garage was raised, and inside he could see someone loading bundles into the van kept there.

  He left the autocab and padded down the driveway. ‘So!’ he exclaimed in a ringing voice. ‘A fine trustworthy accomplice I teamed up with!’

  Unabashed, with slow careful movements, Mast emptied the armful of garments he held into the back of the van. ‘I too, it seems, have made a bad choice of partner,’ he said pensively. ‘What are you doing here, Peder?’

  Peder spluttered. ‘I guessed what you were up to and came to put a stop to it!’

  ‘Remarkable foresight,’ Mast commented. ‘What are those suitcases I see on your luggage rack?’

  Their arms filled with clothing, Castor an
d Grawn emerged through a side door leading from the house. ‘Put those garments back at once!’ Peder stormed. Poker-faced, they ignored him and dumped their burdens unceremoniously in the van.

  Peder followed all three of them into the house. The Caeanic apparel lay neatly stacked against the walls of the storeroom, or hung in racks Peder had erected. While Castor and Grawn continued their hurried transfer of the hoard, Mast looked Peder coolly up and down.

  ‘I see you’re wearing your new suit, Peder. It makes a new man of you. A new man altogether.’ Mast seemed thoughtful.

  Peder in turn regarded Mast, appraising the Ziodean suit he wore. At one time his stylish taste had impressed him. Now all his clothes – apart from the Caeanic titfer, of course – seemed unbelievably grubby. His dress was merely a shabby form of self-advertising; it had nothing in common with the true Art of Attire as it was understood in Caean.

  He was sure Mast’s tendency to meddle with plans already well-laid was a basic flaw in his character. Imagining he was looking through the eyes of a Caeanic sartorial, he began to speculate how he would repair the deficiency. He would prescribe garments making for care and caution, as a counterbalance to the initiative and enterprise Mast already possessed in abundance.

  An idea came to him. What if he could select the appropriate items from among their haul? … but the idea was unfeasible. Mast would never co-operate. And Peder, for his part, was not a Caeanic sartorial and lacked the necessary insight.

  He found his voice again. ‘May I ask what is the meaning of all this?’ he demanded. ‘I’d like to know what excuse you can offer for trying to rob me of everything!’

  ‘A precautionary measure only, Peder,’ Mast replied easily. ‘I wished to remove the merchandise to a safe place so as to forestall the possibility of theft. I can now, it seems, congratulate myself on my wisdom.’

  ‘You are mistaken – I came to steal nothing,’ Peder claimed. ‘I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t like the way you are handling things. I want to take my share in kind, to sell on my own account. The rest can be yours.’ He paused. ‘I’ll be satisfied with sufficient to bring me in, say, a hundred thousand units. A modest enough demand, all things considered.’

  ‘Very well, Peder,’ Mast said slowly, ‘I agree. On one condition. Give me a valuation of the remainder, even if only a rough one. I have to have some idea of what I’m offering Jadper.’

  Peder hesitated, stroking his chin and looking around him. ‘They are worth whatever one can get for them,’ he said dubiously. ‘That’s why I was anxious to dole them out one by one. Jadper himself probably won’t get as good a total price as I would, in the long run …’

  Mast snapped his fingers to Grawn who had just reentered. ‘Grawn, go and get Peder’s cases from the autocab standing outside, will you?’

  Peder began looking through the store, selecting a garment here and there.

  ‘I’m putting a lot of trust in you,’ Mast murmured. ‘Only you know the worth of the items you’re taking.’

  ‘I am an honest man,’ Peder declared. ‘I keep my bargains.’

  Carrying the bulky suitcases, Grawn ambled back into the room. Peder packed away his choices carefully, snapping each case shut as it was filled.

  Finally he was satisfied and stood up. ‘Don’t accept less than five million,’ he told Mast quietly. ‘Better if you can get six.’

  ‘All right.’ Mast offered his hand. ‘Then our association would appear to be at an end.’

  Peder shook hands. ‘To our mutual benefit, I hope.’

  ‘Of course.’

  But still Peder lingered. ‘You know,’ he said diffidently, ‘there are garments here that could work wonders for you. Why don’t you let me? … after all, you’ve never exactly been a mezzak.’ Mezzak was a Caeanic word meaning ‘one who dresses like a baboon’.

  Smiling, Mast shook his head. ‘I’ll be frank, Peder. There’s another reason why I’d just as soon off-load. I’ve begun to feel uneasy about holding on to them for too long, though not from any legalistic angle.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, you know what they call the Caeanics, don’t you – clothes robots. This sort of gear gives me an odd feeling. There’s something un-Ziodean about them.’

  ‘Prejudice, prejudice. Typical Ziodean xenophobia!’

  Mast shrugged. ‘Call it what you like. I simply have fixed ideas about what’s healthy. I believe one should stand on one’s own feet and walk without crutches.’

  Inwardly Peder sighed. Poor Mast. Dressed in rags and tatters, imagining he was adequate. He had put his finger on the difference between Ziodean and Caeanic cultures, of course. The Ziodean ethos stressed individualism and self-dependence. It was diametrically opposed to the artificial augmentation of qualities and abilities such as occurred on Caean.

  All of which, Peder now knew, implied a serious misunderstanding not only of the Caeanic sartorial art, but also of man’s psychological nature.

  He turned to Castor and Grawn, who were standing grinning at him crookedly. ‘Well, goodbye then, chaps,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, have fun,’ responded Castor, his reconstituted eyes glittering.

  As he departed, Peder heard their muffled sniggers behind him.

  ‘Looks like Peder can pull himself together after all, when he has to,’ Castor sneered when the sartorial had gone.

  ‘You noticed it too, did you?’ Mast remarked. ‘His change of manner? There’s a word for that. It’s called mien. The Caeanic suit does that for him.’

  He fell into thought. It had been on board the Costa that he had first begun to have second thoughts about the garments. Castor and Grawn, bedizened in their new finery, had suddenly started to adopt uncharacteristic mannerisms – nothing all that drastic, initially anyway, but enough to persuade him that Caeanic wear was as much a risk to one’s mental health as it was said to be. He had forbidden them to wear anything but Ziodean clothes ever since.

  He looked up. ‘Take the rest of the stuff out to the van, fellows. We’ll move out anyway, just in case.’

  He hoped the fence would soon take this junk off his hands.

  The morning was now bright and full. Peder relaxed contentedly, gazing through the autocab window as Cadra went speeding past him.

  How easy it was to solve problems!

  But he would never have done it without the Frachonard suit – Mast, he believed, would not have allowed it. Peder would have dithered, would have felt impelled to go along with whatever Mast decided.

  Even as he talked to Mast new horizons had opened up before him. Business possibilities which he had been too timid to spot until now became visible all around him. He would soon be moving out of Tarn Street. Zoide was his playground.

  Which was as it should be, for a member of a galactic elite, one of the best-dressed men in the universe.

  4

  ‘Well, how the hell was I to know?’ Amara Corl exclaimed in great irritation. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one can be expected to anticipate.’ She drummed her fingers on the desk, her brow creased. ‘What in Ziode shall we do now? What do you make of it, Estru?’

  ‘Have you called the medics?’ Estru asked.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Amara snapped. Estru could see she was shaken by the incident, mostly because it reflected on her own judgement.

  The business of opening the suit could, he felt, have been approached with more caution. ‘Impetuosity, Amara, is not a quality to be cultivated when in unknown regions,’ he thought – but the words merely floated wistfully in his mind. To have uttered them would have been to throw the female sociologist, his team leader, into a rage.

  They were in an office adjoining the engineering service room where the outsize spacesuit had been laid on a workbench and cut open. When summoned, Amara had taken but a brief look at its contents and then swept out again, obviously unpleasantly affected.

  ‘Is he dead, do you think?’ she said. ‘He might have committed suicide.’


  Estru, by means of a camera in the service room, still had a view of the suit on a vidplate, but Amara’s eyes studiously avoided this. ‘I reckon he’s just fainted.’

  ‘It’s weird, I have to admit that,’ Amara said distastefully, finally giving the screen the merest glance. ‘Just look at him, all connected up with wires, tubes and catheters. The muscles are so atrophied, too. If you ask me he was put in that suit years ago! Who would do such an awful thing?’

  ‘I’ll go further than that,’ Estru told her mildly. ‘I’d say he’s never been out of it. It’s not just the muscles that are atrophied. His limbs haven’t developed properly.’

  ‘You mean he’s been in it since birth?’

  He nodded. Unlike Amara he had lingered with the technicians to inspect for a minute or so the workings of the suit. He had seen enough to indicate a permanent life support system supplying all aspects of biological existence. The man in the suit had been transformed into a new kind of creature: one able to inhabit space.

  Suddenly Amara seemed to overcome her disgust. The scientist in her took over. She became thoughtful.

  Two medical officers arrived. The sociologists accompanied them into the service room. They paused on seeing the suit and its contents.

  One cast a reproving look around him. ‘This should have been done in a properly equipped theatre, not in a mechanic’s service shop.’ Estru shrugged.

  The techs had cut, not just through the suit’s outer casing, but also through much of its interior equipment. Estru was worried that some of it might be vital to the health of the wearer. He watched anxiously while the medics made their examination, applying their probes and pick-ups. The figures and traces that appeared on the read-out plates of their instruments meant nothing to him, and their faces were professionally impassive.

  Finally they closed up their cases and stepped out of earshot to confer, nodding in agreement.

  ‘He’s in shock, the catatonic kind,’ the older medic said when they returned. ‘Otherwise he’s in good health, if one leaves his unusual condition out of consideration.’