The Garments of Caean Read online

  Again he waved his hand, making magic passes in the air. It was hard to see exactly what took place. The air shimmered and there were countless little rainbows, as if the sunlight was striking sprays of water. In seconds a small pavilion took shape, seeming to coalesce out of nothing. It had a façade of what looked like carved, painted wood, complete with arched windows and a brief veranda.

  ‘Come inside,’ Jadper invited.

  ‘How do you do it?’ Mast asked as they mounted the steps and passed to the shaded interior. He received no answer. The pavilion was unfurnished, and had a hurriedly erected, half-finished look. But it was solid. The floor sounded hollow beneath his tread. He tapped a wall with his knuckle. It was like matt plastic or fibrewood.

  ‘A pleasant place to sit and drink with friends, perhaps,’ Jadper suggested. ‘What do you think? A better view of the garden might be in order.’ He pointed with his finger and invisibly cut out large windows in the rear of the building, making available a view of the rest of the lawn and the flowers and trees beyond.

  Jadper turned to him, his face bland. ‘Well. How about the day after tomorrow, then? Where do you have your goods?’

  ‘Tell your evaluator to meet me in the middle of town,’ Mast said stubbornly. ‘I’ll take him to them.’

  ‘Aha! Caution, caution!’ Jadper tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘All right, then. Afterwards you can come back here and we’ll talk money.’

  ‘I’d rather it was somewhere outside, preferably in public,’ Mast said.

  ‘Oh, come, come! Don’t insult my hospitality!’

  They sauntered back to the villa. From his manner one would think Jadper had ceased playing his jokes now. Mast pressed him once again to reveal how he was able to invoke clothing and buildings out of thin air.

  ‘It’s perfectly simple, really,’ Jadper said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  As they went into the vestibule Mast glanced back and saw that the pavilion had already begun to collapse and dissolve, the panels of the walls curling up like paper in a fire. Jadper disappeared through a side door and returned a few moments later carrying a cylinder with a handgrip and an array of nozzles.

  ‘See.’ He pointed the nozzles and pressed a grip. A set of furniture shimmered into being across the floor: a dining table, chairs, and a sideboard.

  ‘There’s an aerosol for everything these days,’ Jadper chuckled. He opened the side of the cylinder and explained to Mast how the gadget worked. It was a programmed extrusion process controlled by insertable templates. Liquid plastic from a reservoir sprayed out in an atomized mist, hardening on contact with the air to form whatever structures the templates dictated.

  The reservoir held an amazingly small volume of liquid. ‘It mixes with the air to make practically any bulk you like,’ Jadper told him. ‘And those solid objects are ninety nine point nine per cent air.’

  ‘Hence their lack of permanence,’ Mast commented.

  ‘Oh, they could be as durable as you like. But that would be in awful nuisance, don’t you think? I use a mixture with an ingredient that makes them instantly degradable.’

  ‘Ingenious,’ admitted Mast, ‘but I didn’t see you use an aerosol in the garden.’

  For an answer Jadper laid the gadget down on an occasional table and, using his right hand, disconnected his left hand at the wrist. ‘I lost my real hand some years ago. Just making a virtue of necessity. Very handy, as you might say, for an amateur conjuror, eh?’

  ‘Is that what you call yourself?’ Mast responded drily. ‘It’s all very interesting.’ He watched the dining table, the sideboard and the chairs suddenly lose strength and cave in on themselves, gradually dissolving to tatters and then to dust. It would make a good epitaph for the quality of Jadper’s mind, he thought.

  ‘There’s an eating house called Mona’s at the corner of Engraft Street,’ he said. I’ll be there at three after noon, the day after tomorrow. Can I look forward to seeing your man?’

  Jadper fastened his left hand back on with a click. ‘I’ll let you know if he can’t make it.’

  ‘How many more gadgets have you got in that hand?’ Mast asked, idly curious. ‘No – don’t show me. It doesn’t matter. As our business seems to be concluded for the moment I’ll be on my way.’

  Hesitantly he stepped towards the door. Jadper raised the prosthetic hand in farewell.

  ‘Good luck attend you!’ he grinned.

  As Mast passed through the doorway a bag of flour emptied over him from above. Jets of coloured fluid attacked him from several directions and he heard Jadper giggling and snorting behind him.

  The step on the threshold gave way beneath his feet. He hurtled down a chute, where he felt metal fingers picking and tugging at him in the confused darkness. Seconds later he popped up again and found himself standing on the pathway some yards from the villa. He was wearing enormous pink pantaloons with purple spots, and an oversize baby’s bib.

  He tore the foolery from him, wiped his face free of flour and mush, and after a last acrimonious glance at the villa, dodged the flailing arms of the jack-in-the-box and fled towards the gate.

  *

  Peder braced his legs against the acceleration of the slim private elevator as it raced up the shaft to the summit of the 300-storey Ravier Building. The elevator was his very own now that he had rented the penthouse on the skyscraper’s roof. It was one of several private shafts which served various levels of the tower.

  The elevator slowed, giving him a momentary feeling of free fall, then slid smoothly to a stop. He stepped into the spacious main room of his apartment.

  The view through the great curved window was still novel enough to cause him to pause to take it in. Gridira lay spread out below, sparkling in the sun. The River Laker curved round the south side of the city in the distance, glinting here and there where it became visible between buildings.

  Definitely an improvement on Tarn Street!

  He crossed the lounge to his desk. The vid had received a number of messages in his absence, mostly relating to his new business ventures. He replied to a few of these, giving instructions to his broker, to the manager of the new store he was opening in Gridira’s main shopping avenue, and to his financier.

  That done, he poured himself a glass of chilled mango liqueur and sauntered back and forth before the view window, his feet falling silently on the deep pile of the glowing carpet. It seemed to him as if he could fly through that window and wing over the cityscape, so perfect was his new-found sense of freedom and space.

  A few months ago it would have seemed unbelievable that he could have made such swift progress. Yet facts were facts. Doors opened for him wherever he went. Possibilities became actualities. Bank managers offered credit. High-class social clubs did not refuse him membership out of hand.

  He stopped to admire himself in the full-length mirror. ‘No hesitation,’ he murmured, repeating a private litany. ‘No self-doubt, no solecisms.’ It was true what he had read once in a book on practical psychology. If you maintained a positive attitude to the world it heaped benefits upon you.

  The vid chimed. A red-lipped, violet-eyed face appeared on the plate, smiling at him. ‘Hi.’

  He drank in the curly black hair and curvy soft neck. In his imagination her perfume was practically wafting to him out of the picture plate. ‘Hi.’

  ‘I had no luck after you left the club last night,’ she pouted. ‘You took it all with you.’

  ‘Well, it was my luck, wasn’t it?’ He recalled giving her his vid number when playing at the Coton, one of Gridira’s most distinguished gambling clubs.

  He had been learning to gamble with skill lately. It reminded him anew of how much things had changed for him, that he could now look forward to possessing so poised a creature and regard it as normal. Only weeks before he would have considered her quite unattainable.

  Half an hour later she arrived in the penthouse. Peder offered her mango liqueur, and some smooth small-talk. It was not long befo
re he fell on that delicious neck, nuzzling towards the source of her heady perfume.

  In the bedroom he hesitated when it came to undressing. This is always the moment of uncertainty. Without the suit his old feeling of lumpish inadequacy came back, at the very time when he most needed confidence in himself.

  But he flung his clothes from him and dived on to the big bed. ‘No hesitation, no self-doubt, no solecisms,’ he breathed in a private prayer, before his limbs entwined with hers.

  Later, when the light had faded somewhat, they awoke from a drowsy sleep and she began to tease him. His body responded, but by this time he felt somehow unequal to her kittenish repartee.

  On the ottoman, his Frachonard suit glowed softly in the dusk, as if calling to him.

  6

  Events perplexed Alexei Verednyev. They perplexed him not least of all because he was still alive. By now he should certainly be dead, killed by the cyborgs in some hideous and fiendish manner.

  He must have slept, because there had been confused, horrible dreams. Then, when the cyborg had entered his prison, he had determined to sell his life dearly and had attacked and destroyed the monster. But the aftermath had not been what he had expected, because he was now being asked to believe that the other cyborgs, the new type with the missing organs, did not wish him any harm at all. Or at least, so the voice said. The female voice, which spoke his own language, but with odd pronunciation and strange words. The new cyborgs, she insisted, did not even come from Shoji; the cyborg he had killed had been their prisoner, just as he was. They had put it in his chamber just to see what the two of them would do. In fact, she said, the cyborgs of the space-cave were not the cyborgs at all. They were more akin to his own people, and had come from the distant stars.

  ‘You are cyborgs.’ Alexei had contradicted. ‘I have eyes, I can see. You have altered yourselves a little, that is all. You have altered yourselves, as cyborgs are able to do, and have learned the Sovyan language, so as to trick me into giving you information about Homebase.’ The more he thought about this the more obvious it seemed. The cyborgs were apt to roam uprange at this time, when Shoji and Sovya were in conjunction, and he should have been more careful.

  Besides, it was common knowledge that cyborgs had no feelings and the female, like all other types of cyborg, was deaf and dumb on the emotional wavebands. His radio sense registered nothing at all from her in that respect, so her understanding of how Sovyans communicated was seriously deficient. She did not even respond to the insulting feelings of revulsion, disgust and defiance he was beaming at her.

  Apart from that, these denizens of the space-cave were even more physically repulsive, if anything, than the usual vermin that came crawling up out of Shoji, were even more squishy, and resembled nothing so much as big mobile foetuses or internal core-organs. They were nauseating.

  She showed him a picture of a new-born infant. ‘You recognize this as a baby, don’t you?’ she challenged.

  He turned away from the sight. He was squeamish about such things. They were only for doctors and nurses to see.

  ‘This is how my own kind look at birth, too,’ she said. ‘It’s certain the cyborgs look the same.’

  ‘You are wrong. The young cyborg resembles the adult. The cyborgs cut their females open and operate on the foetuses.’

  ‘Really? That’s fascinating. But doesn’t it all go to prove what I’ve been trying to tell you – that you, we and the cyborgs all belong to the same biological species?’

  ‘No. It is impossible.’

  She seemed exasperated by his obstinacy. ‘Don’t you realize that we saved your life?’ She said angrily. ‘If we hadn’t picked you up when we did the cyborgs would have got you – there was a raft loaded with warriors on its way to you. And haven’t we given you all your biological requirements, both oxygen and liquid nutrient? Would the cyborgs have bothered to do that?’

  ‘Not until now.’

  But eventually he had begun to believe her. Her patience wore down his brave tirades and he found himself following her arguments.

  She did not try to wheedle any military information out of him, but in the end she did ask him to describe his life in Homebase. And so he began to talk of home, that happy Eden of rocky islets girdling gassy Sovya …

  For many years Amara Corl had cherished a scientific ambition: to transform sociology, her chosen subject, into a branch of knowledge as exact as the sciences of chemistry and physics, able to calculate the social forces acting on an individual as precisely as the forces of gravity or nuclear energy could be calculated.

  All that was needed, she believed, was to find the underlying principles by which these forces operated. But her search for such principles had so far been frustrating. Ziodean civilization was too capricious for one to be able to pin individual characteristics to a graph-board as neatly as she would have liked. For that reason she had turned to the study of aberrant cultures, such as the Caeanic – though even that did not go far enough for her purposes, her reasoning being that the major signposts of social consciousness would best show themselves at the limits of extremity and bizarreness. She had even toyed with the idea of creating a suitable culture artificially, perhaps taking over an orphanage for the purpose, but unfortunately the government had declined to co-operate in such a scheme. Sociology was not officially regarded as a practical science, and the Directorate always wanted change out of any projects it financed.

  Nevertheless Amara’s approach to the subject had given her a useful reputation for toughness. She flourished in the study theme set up to make an appraisal of the Caeanic menace. When the Callan expedition had been mooted, she had grabbed at the opportunity with both hands.

  ‘We are going to have to fight a war with Caean,’ she began when, shortly after her sessions with Alexei Verednyev, she addressed the ship’s company of officers and social scientists for an important orientation meeting. ‘That is Fact Number One. All reputable psychologists are agreed that the Caeanics will not, in the long run, be able to control their quasi-religious conviction that their way of life is the only one for mankind. When their desire to convert their neighbours becomes irresistible, as we believe is now happening, they will launch their crusade.

  ‘That is why we are here – to try to find weaknesses in the Caeanic aberration that can be used to our advantage. Ladies and gentlemen, we can now claim to have solved the essential mystery of Caean. We have discovered the historical origin of the Cult of Attire!’

  Her eyes gleamed with triumph as she delivered this news, which though already known to most of her staff was a bomb-shell to many of the ship’s officers. After a pause to let it sink in, she resumed.

  ‘As you all know, three weeks ago we hauled aboard a metal object which turned out to contain a man in a much atrophied state. The metal “suit” in which he was encased proved to be his habitat. He thinks of it, in fact, as his “body”.’ She operated the playback, taping pictures of their ‘suit-man’ – the metalloid, as Estru had dubbed him – to the demonstration screen. The edited sequence showed him jetting through space, then being pulled through the lock. Briefly she let them see him in the engineering service room, the suit cut open to show its organic cargo.

  ‘The subject’s name is Alexei Verednyev, and he speaks a variant of Russian, an ancient Earth language which was thought to be extinct. I have now talked to him extensively and have learned a great deal about his life and the society he comes from. It is a life spent completely in space – indeed his countrymen imagine no other kind of life – during which he never consciously leaves his suit. After birth a child lives in a nursery canister until he can be fitted with his first space-suit, which occurs at the age of three months. At intervals the suit is changed until the child grows to full size, at which time he is fitted with his final suit. During each change-over he is anaesthetized. He never in his whole life sees his organic body.

  ‘The suits are elaborate machines supplying every need. The man – or woman – as we know
him has vanished into the suit. He has no consciousness or memory of his organic body; the suit has become his body. Its systems are his systems in just the same way that his native biological systems are. The data-processing unit that regulates these systems could logically be regarded as an adjunct to the motor and autonomic functions of his organic brain.

  ‘So complete is the identification that the recipient has even been persuaded to accept the exterior of a spacesuit as an erotic stimulus. Watch this.’

  With a wry smile Amara rolled the playback to show their first sighting of Alexei with Lana. The two suits were grappling, jockeying for position, thrusting together.

  ‘Copulation between male and female suits.’

  The gathering watched the brief exhibition in fascination. One of Wilce’s officers uttered a sigh. ‘Imagine living your life cased up like that. It must be awful.’

  ‘You’re looking at it the wrong way. This is not a man in a suit. It’s a new kind of creature: a metal space-creature with an organic core. In fact the suit-people are no longer capable of descending to a planetary surface: they are space-dwellers in the fullest sense of the word. Their home is in a Saturn ring system belonging to a nearby gas giant they call Sovya. The rocks comprising the rings provide all the materials they need. They also hollow out some of them for various purposes, such as to make protected nurseries.

  ‘The Sovyan suit-people also have enemies, and here they are.’

  She showed them the pictures of the cyborgs. First the prisoner strapped to the board like a specimen awaiting dissection. Then the scene aboard the raft. She panned in on the cowled figure in the middle.

  Then she showed them the giant suit butchering the captured cyborg. ‘We’ll come on to those in a moment.’

  She licked her lips. ‘You’ll want to know how this extraordinary situation arose. That’s something Alexei Verednyev wasn’t able to tell me. As far as he knows things have always been that way. I had to resort to the ship’s library to put the picture together. So prepare for a little history lesson.