The Garments of Caean

10

Ledlide, in terms of geological time, was but recently accreted, a slagheap of a planet still drifting through a miasma of gas, dust and rubble that was the detritus of sister planets yet to form. It orbited a primary which was itself no more than a dimly glowing cloud of gas, more a proto-star than a star in the true sense, yet providing a modicum of heat and gloomy light.

To the Ziodean mind such a remote and dismal spot made an ideal prison site. Ziodeans did not view the social offender as a candidate for reform or rehabilitation. Responsibility for misdeeds was seen as personal and absolute: the criminal got his deserts, and the logical punishment, short of death, was for him to be removed from society, the farther the better.

Accordingly the convict, on his journey to Ledlide, looked back through the prison ship’s viewports and saw the Ziode Cluster receding into the distance. Thus he was made to feel how decidedly he had been rejected.

The Frachonard suit experienced considerable difficulty in locating this six-thousand-mile heap of cosmic garbage. Finding the partially condensed cloud that was Ledlide’s solar system was not so hard, but once within the cloud it was unable to use the ship’s instruments and so had to rely on its own growing powers of apprehension. Guiding the ship at this stage was even more difficult, for the flies having fed on the remains of the bridge’s previous occupants until nothing was left of them, were unused to a human-type atmosphere and were dying off despite the suit’s strict control over their vitality.

Out of Ledlide’s smog-like sky, the Little Planet descended towards the vicinity of the leaden prison roof, which jutted a few feet above the gravelly surface. Drifting northwards, the ship landed just beyond the horizon, behind a low ridge.

Once the ship was down, the depleted swarm of flies finally died, and the now-flaccid suit collapsed to the floor in a neat pile. The stench of decomposing flies filled the bridge.

After a while a door opened in the prison roof, and a man wearing a breathing mask appeared. Pausing once to orient himself, he trudged the mile or so to the ship. After a brief inspection he opened one of the hatches and went inside, exploring all sections of the ship and calling out to announce his presence.

When he reached the bridge the brittle bodies of the flies crunched under his feet. He still wore his breathing mask and did not notice the stench, or he would instantly have vomited. Otherwise the only sign of occupancy was the suit heaped on the floor near the guidance board. For some moments the man gazed at the suit. Then he bent down and carefully picked it up, straightening the folds and draping it over his arm.

After one last look round he retraced his steps and left the ship to trudge back to the prison. He reported that the ship was empty and appeared to have landed on automatic, but to make sure the governor ordered an air search of the surrounding terrain. The possibility of that unheard-of-thing – an escape attempt – was raised, but the governor quickly dropped it, secure in the knowledge that Ledlide was deemed escape-proof. The crew of the Little Planet must have suffered some accident, he decided. The craft must have flown itself here. He would ask for it to be taken to Ziode with the next supply ship.

For no apparent reason the suit was placed in a cupboard in the staff common quarters. Patiently, it waited.

Peder never discovered quite how large the prison was or how many inmates it contained. The population might, he conjectured, be as much as a million. It certainly could not be less than a hundred thousand, for Ledlide was a successful prison and had become a general dumping ground for Ziode’s undesirables.

In view of such large numbers, tightly confined and marshalled by a relatively nugatory warder force, the chance of a revolt was surprisingly small, almost nonexistent. The reason was simple. Should a revolt occur, no more food would be sent from Ziode and the prisoners would starve. The fact that they earned their food anyway, by working in the prison factories, was usually enough to keep them quiet.

The entire establishment was underground. Day by day Peder’s consciousness became submerged into the environment of grey galleries, grey cells, the smell of men (he had heard there was also a women’s segment somewhere), grey factories and workshops, and black-uniformed warders. He particularly hated the prison uniform, which was grey and baggy and humiliating. He had become shrunken and shrivelled since losing the Frachonard suit, and his flesh cringed away from the coarse hard fabric of his new clothes. He lived, moved and worked in a perpetual daze.

Once or twice, in the endless routine processions along interminable galleries and ubiquitous ramps, he had glimpsed Realto Mast, who had arrived in the same intake as himself, but he felt no desire to seek him out. He wished only to huddle in himself and die a little more each day.

So it caused him no pleasure when one evening during the association period, when Peder was sitting in his cell ignoring the murmur of talk on the landing, that the figure of Mast appeared in his open doorway. Framed in the yellow-grey light from the gallery, Realto looked much reduced in stature in his shapeless uniform and cropped hair. Peder turned away and hunched his shoulders sullenly, trying to rebuff him, but unabashed, Mast stepped into the cell, invading the tiny cubicle that was Peder’s only privacy.

‘Hello, Peder, how are you?’ he said, the gaiety of his tone quite out of keeping with their circumstances. ‘How long a sentence did you get?’

‘What are you doing on this landing?’ Peder grumbled.

‘I’ve been moved to the end of your gallery – for the time being, at any rate. People get shifted around pretty often in this place, you know – that’s to stop them forming permanent attachments, you see. So let’s not quarrel. We might not be together for long.’

‘Good,’ Peder said in a stubborn, accusing mutter. ‘You informed on me.’

‘How can you be sure?’ Mast asked him with a small, apologetic sound. ‘It could have been Grawn.’

‘Was it?’

‘As a matter of fact it was me – but I had every excuse, Peder. You see, it was poor old Grawn I was thinking of. I would have kept you out of it, but they would have dragged everything out of poor Grawn, the defenceless old thing, and he would have suffered in the process. So I blabbed to spare him that. After all it makes no difference from your point of view – does it?’ Mast adopted the frank, open-eyed camaraderie Peder had learned to mistrust.

‘Very altruistic!’ Peder sneered. ‘But no doubt you collected your due reward!’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Grawn came off much better, in the event. He only got five years. I managed to convince the court that his part in the affair was minimal – they realized he was too dim to be an instigator, I think. But it worries me to think I won’t be around to look after him when he’s released. I don’t know what will become of him, he’s quite hopeless.’

‘Oh, yes, you’re good at looking after people, all right.’

Mast seemed genuinely disappointed by Peder’s bitterness. He smiled painfully. ‘Come come, now. Circumstances do occasionally get out of hand. Risk is proportionate to the potential reward, and so forth.’ But Peder remembered Mast’s smoothness on previous occasions, and remained unrelenting.

Mast hummed meditatively to himself, looking out on to the landing where the other prisoners were playing with improvised cards. He essayed one or two further remarks, to which Peder made no reply, and after a while wandered off.

Several nights later the humming of the lock on his cell door woke him from his sleep. He raised his head from his pillow. The cell was in darkness, the infra-red bulb, which allowed any passing warder to survey the cell through the sensitized peephole, being invisible to him. But normal yellow-grey light from the landing was filtering through the outlines of the door as it swung open. Peder became aware of a presence moving into the narrow cell.

The interior light came on. A warder stood there, though Peder knew him as a warder only because he recognized his face. He was not wearing his usual black serge uniform. He was wearing the Frachonard Prossim suit.

A chilling thrill of fright and shock ran through Peder. He shrank to the farther end of the bunk, his eyes wide with terror, trembling with anticipation. The warder’s expression was glassy and unseeing. Without a word he undressed, neatly laying out the Frachonard suit on the bunk.

Then both face and body crumpled. The warder collapsed on to the floor.

How the suit had found its way here was too large a concept for Peder even to think about. But he knew now, accepting the fact with a dumb, animal-like resignation, that he could never be free of it. Slipping from the bunk, he stood up. With deft movements he removed his sack-like sleeping garb, took undergarments from his locker – hesitating at the thought of bringing Prossim in contact with their rough, churlishly cut cloth – and drew them on.

As he donned the suit its field of influence settled on him once more. There was the usual instant change of outlook, but this time in a way that was different from before. Impressions of a hitherto unknown order crowded into his brain, as though the whole prison around him was open to his inner gaze.

Nor was that all. Never before had the suit buried his ego almost completely beneath the thoughts and actions it suggested. It had always allowed him some independent consciousness. Now this changed. It was still his own brain that formed his thoughts, but that brain took its cue from something that was outside of him, something that surrounded him and supported him.

In the face of this invasion his ego at first struggled feebly but it had time for only one complete thought of its own.

Clothes robot.

Then it gave up as an entity on its own account, collapsing into a pale reflection of what went on around it.

And Peder the New Man, creature of Prossim, emerged. He went through the pockets of his suit and found several electronic pass keys. Kneeling, he inspected the unconscious warder. The man’s breathing was light. He was in a deep coma.

He straightened. The beat of Ledlide prison was all around him. He became aware of facts, details, names that the unaided senses could never have told him, all interlocking throughout the huge ramification. The sleeping shifts, the working shifts, the rest-and-association shifts.

And he realized that escape from Ledlide was possible.

Leaving his cell, he padded the length of the silent landing. Men snored and muttered in their sleep behind the locked doors. On his left-hand side was a railing. The gallery well, screened at regular intervals by safety nets, dropped down for a thousand feet. On the opposite side of the well Peder could see the standard historical pattern of large-scale prisons: tier upon tier of landings and cells, a giant honeycomb of prisoners.

At the end of the gallery he halted. Using one of his electronic keys, he opened the door to Mast’s cell. Quietly he went inside.

Mast was a light sleeper. He awoke immediately the light came on. He greeted Peder with a befuddled frown, then climbed from his bunk and stood staring at him.

‘Peder… how did you do it? They are letting you wear your suit!’

‘I’m leaving here,’ Peder announced. ‘You may come with me. It will be convenient.’

‘Leaving where? Ledlide?’ Mast chuckled softly, still puzzled, and shook his head. ‘That isn’t possible, Peder. You have to stay here. Better just to accept it.’

‘I can get us out. To Caean. That is better than Ledlide, even for you.’

‘Caean?…’ Mast frowned. ‘But there just isn’t any way out.’

‘I know a way. A ship is waiting for me on the surface. But it is difficult for someone like myself to man it alone. Better if you come with me. Caean is a long way.’

Mast took a step back. ‘No,’ he said in alarm. ‘It’s an automatic extension of sentence if you do anything…’

He trailed off. Peder leaned against the door jamb, the lines of his jacket falling away in a codicil of grace and perfection.

‘Twenty years,’ he reminded Mast. ‘Twenty years of this grey routine, of never seeing outside. Come with me and you’ll be freeeee…’ His voice soared and caressed. ‘Free on new worlds.’

Mast gave a cynical quirk of his lips. ‘Free?’

He sighed.

‘All right, Peder,’ he said, ‘I’ll try you out.’

He reached for his prison clothes. Together they left the cell. At the end of the gallery one of Peder’s pass keys gained them entry to a door which opened on a tiny station where waited a bullet-shaped vehicle containing two seats, side by side. The shuttle service was normally never used by prisoners unless accompanied by a warder, but at a gesture from Peder they took their places in the seats and the shuttle moved forward on its guide rails, coursing along the efficient transport system. They traversed the sleeping silence of their own segment and entered others which, though identical, were like foreign territory to them. Here men were awake and working, for the rotation of shifts was designed never to leave a machine idle.

Other shuttles swept past them in a blur of motion. Peder steered the vehicle unhesitatingly. When they eventually came to a stop it was in a factory area where the hum of machinery mingled with the bustling of prisoners shuffling to the canteens, to the sleeping galleries, or to the baths and the recreation halls.

Peder’s stride was unhesitating as he led Mast along the outside wall of one of the factory workshops. Mast was becoming increasingly nervous to see so many warders about, and he stiffened as one approached them. But the officer strolled on with only a passing nod to Peder.

‘Relax,’ Peder murmured. ‘I am a warder; you are a prisoner I am taking to the medical room.’

‘But you’re wearing civilian clothes!’

Peder smiled. ‘I’m in disguise,’ he said.

‘It’s some kind of hypnotism?’ Mast asked after a pause. ‘People see what you want them to see?’

Peder did not answer. The truth was not quite as Mast had stated, but in a sense it was close to it. The suit could make itself inconspicuous; it could cause its wearer to adopt a role so convincingly that a detail like the absence of the correct uniform went unnoticed. The warder’s mind had been subliminally tricked, distracted.

He had considered tricking his way in this manner through the official portals in the prison roof, but had decided it was impossible. Even if he could get through the cage that separated the prisoner compound from the outer administrative shell, he still would not be able to leave the prison without setting off the automatic alarms.

Besides, the suit had a better way. Peder turned into a narrow down-sloping passage ending in a metal door which needed no pass key. They stepped into an engine room filled with row upon row of power units.

The high-pitched whine the machines gave off made a din in which hearing was difficult. As they passed by, the prisoners tending the power units looked up once, then took no further notice. Peder made his way to the far corner of the room and moved aside one of a series of what looked like filing cabinets or store cupboards. He beckoned to Mast, then began testing the wall behind the cabinet.

The cabinets were cleverly arranged so that the two men were screened from view, enclosed in a triangular space in the corner. At first nothing happened. Then, with a click, a section of wall slid aside.

Feet first, Peder dropped through the hatch-like opening to a floor about four feet below. As Mast followed, the concealed entrance sprang automatically back into place behind them, and the noise of the machinery faded somewhat.

They stood in a dimly lit chamber, or cellar, that appeared to have been hammered together from sheets of scrap metal. Its only occupant was a grey-clad prisoner who was hunched over a glowing screen. The figure whirled round to glare at them in fear.

This, as Peder knew, was Grashnik, a lifer like himself. Grashnik was almost unique among the inmates of Ledlide, however, in that he refused to accept that escape was impossible. He had always clung steadfastly to the belief that he could – and would – break out.

The first reward of his optimism had come twenty years ago, when, on a working party that had been extending the prison a few hundred yards farther into the rock, he had discovered a fissure leading to the surface.

He had kept this knowledge to himself, watching dumbly as access to the fissure was sealed off with the building of the prison’s new outer wall. He had spent the next twelve years regaining that access. The route he had finally established was tortuous. First he had located a small hole in the sensor field that surrounded the prison. Over a period of seven years he had manufactured pass keys for twenty-three different doors and hatches so as to take him up to, through and beyond this gap in the electrostatic web, always by little-frequented passages. Then had come the laborious business of boring a hole through the wall itself, bringing him to the fissure.

The enterprise had taken genius, care and much patience. Grashnik had worked always in secret, always alone, making use of his training as an engineer and his position of trust in the factory where he had been made a permanent overseer.

He calculated that, given another twenty years, he could have got this far without ever having discovered the fissure; that was how long it would have taken him to burrow up to the surface. It was plain why no one had ever embarked upon such a scheme, for Grashnik’s own motivation rested on stubborn faith. The chief problem was not to gain the surface, but to leave Ledlide once that was done. Grashnik had racked his brain to try to think of a way of getting aboard the regular supply ship, but since it did not even touch down but offloaded its cargo from a mile in the air, the idea seemed impossible. And so he relied on hope. Grashnik’s whole scheme was redundant unless some day, for some reason, a ship – any ship – landed in the dirt near to Ledlide prison. Then the route to the surface would make sense, even if he had to wait another thirty years for that ship.

At the entrance to the route Grashnik had built this hide-hole, and equipped it with a low-output scanning set that could surreptitiously survey the terrain around the prison, without interfering with any of the official equipment. Once a week he slipped in here and used the set for half an hour or so, a practice he had kept up now for eight years.

All this Peder knew through the Frachonard suit, just as he seemed, looking at Grashnik now, to be able to read his mind. The criminal rose slowly and backed away from the two intruders. Peder glanced at the screen of the scanning set. It bore the blurred image of a spaceship parked on uneven, gravel-like ground.

‘Whassamarrerdoinhere…’ Grashnik whispered hoarsely, unable to formulate coherent speech in his confusion.

Peder waved a hand at the screen. ‘All things come to those who wait, it seems.’

Grashnik found his voice. ‘How long have you known? Who are you guys, anyway?’

‘Unfortunates like yourself, Grashnik.’

‘Well get out of here and keep your mouths shut, or I’ll kill you.’ In his excitement Grashnik began to stutter. ‘There’s a ship out there! There’s a ship out there! It worked! I’m free!’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Get out of here or I’ll kill you.’

‘The ship landed in order to take me off,’ Peder informed him. ‘I’m afraid you will have to wait your turn until another ship chances to call. Meantime I shall need to use your route to the surface.’ He spoke equably but with chilling self-confidence.

Grashnik glared, spittle forming at his lips. ‘This is my route and nobody’s taking it from me. I’ve spent twenty years setting it up!’ He whipped a hand-ground knife from inside his baggy tunic and crouched low, shifting his weight uncertainly from foot to foot.

Mast interrupted, pointing to the screen. ‘One moment. Is that the ship you’re talking about? It looks big enough to take us all. What is there to quarrel over?’

Peder shrugged. ‘Grashnik has only one set of breathing apparatus to take us to the surface. Even with the two of us, that presents difficulties. Still, if you insist…’

But Grashnik was in no mood to be reasonable. ‘Nobody uses the route but me. Nobody! I spent twenty years setting it up!’ His eyes went glassy and he edged towards Peder.

From the way he held his blade it was plain he was not one of Ledlide’s most skilful knife fighters. Peder did not even try to meet him on his own terms. He held up a hand commandingly, bringing Grashnik to a halt.

‘You can escape from Ledlide,’ he said softly. ‘I know a way out. A much better way than this.’ He stepped forward. Grashnik’s lined, tired face stared up wonderingly at the sartorialist, the knife limp in his fingers, and Peder had time for fugitive feelings of pity and admiration as he put his hands on the prisoner’s brow, the tips of his fingers touching the greyed hair.

Grashnik gave a barely audible gasp. Peder stepped back. The lifer’s face had gone slack and dreamy, his eyes vague. He was reliving the happier times of his life; all awareness of his presence in Ledlide prison was gone. With a faint moan he slumped to the floor.

Peder located a hidden square in the floor and lifted it. In a space beneath were the pass keys Grashnik had manufactured so painstakingly over the years. Peder took them out, briefly inspecting each one and placing them in various pockets. Then he pulled away a section of wall on the opposite side of the chamber. The roughly cut sheeting came loose easily, revealing a gap between the floor of this level and the ceiling of the level below them.

Grashnik had stopped breathing by the time Peder beckoned to Mast to follow him, and they set forth on the lifer’s slow, persistent project: a route to the surface.

It took them nearly three hours of crawling, dodging and ducking, of fiddling with Grashnik’s sometimes faulty pass keys, before they came to the hatchway he had built into the outer perimeter wall. Nearby, in an improvised locker, they found the breathing set.

‘One of us will have to go first, and return for the other,’ Mast said.

Peder paused. He filled his lungs, breathing deeply as if experimenting with his respiratory system. ‘It may not be necessary,’ he murmured. ‘Ledlide’s atmosphere contains some oxygen. Not enough to sustain one normally… but I may be able to manage. You don’t mind if I lean on you to save my energy? Occasionally I may ask for a lungful of air from your mouthpiece. If I should collapse, carry me the rest of the way to the ship…’

‘But you can’t live out there,’ Mast objected.

‘Do as I say.’

‘How long will it take us to get to this ship?’

‘I don’t know.’

Thinking him mad, Mast donned the breathing set. The Frachonard suit slowed down Peder’s metabolism to a minimum as they went through the tiny airlock Grashnick had built. Ledlide’s young atmosphere was thick and cloying, filled with unpleasant gases. By the light of a torch, also supplied by courtesy of Grashnik, they found a low-roofed tunnel, and then the fissure, made scalable by metal ladders hammered into the rock.

Steadily, foot by foot, they began to climb.