The Garments of Caean

16

‘Now let’s go through this once more,’ ordered a pinch-lipped Amara. ‘You’re saying that the source of Prossim fabric – this flora growing outside – is a vegetable intelligence. That it can control people through the clothes they wear. Right?’

‘Right,’ muttered Peder.

He sat shivering in a chair, draped in nothing but a blanket. Half an hour earlier they had found him half out of his mind, stumbling ankle-deep in the Prossim.

Peder’s present experience of events was that he was slowly waking from a long, inescapable dream. His feverish explanations had confused and dumbfounded his rescuers, but it was not possible for them to dismiss his claims.

They were forced to take notice, because all around them was the spreading sea of Frachonard suits, a fact that was as undeniable as it was astonishing.

‘It has sentience,’ he repeated, ‘but a sentience that’s purely passive. One could never communicate with it, for instance. It’s like some of those gadgets you can find in Caean, mirrors and so forth, that have only passive functions. They exist because of its influence, in fact.’

Amara’s staff chief took up her recap. ‘And the suit you were wearing is a basic pattern, from which the plant can grow millions of copies organically. Right?’

‘Millions, trillions,’ Peder told him fatalistically. ‘The whole planet will become a never-ending crop of suits. Every human being in the galaxy will wear one eventually. It’s the end of the world.’

‘And the suit was using you as a wearer, so as to bring it to maturity?’

Peder nodded.

The staff chief glanced at Amara before continuing. ‘Why did you co-operate?’ he demanded. ‘Especially when you got down here on the surface – why didn’t you fight it, destroy the suit? You’re still a Ziodean, aren’t you? Do you like what you see happening?’

‘But you have to understand! I was the plant’s proxy! I didn’t have any ego, any will of my own!’

‘That’s just what I don’t understand,’ Amara said. ‘If this intelligence is purely passive, without the mental quality of action, how could it control minds like ours?’

Estru understood Peder’s meaning more clearly. ‘Like the mirror, Amara, remember? It only reflects – but sometimes it modifies the reflection.’

‘Well how can it do that if it doesn’t do anything?’ she retorted.

‘The Prossim mind works by comparing and collating, nothing more,’ Peder said. ‘It compares one impression with another. Think about it. You’ll see you can get a lot of interesting effects that way.’

Momentarily they fell silent. On the conference room’s biggest vidscreen the Caeanic freighter was visible, standing silent and unmoving while all around it stretched the green plain, speckled with the suits that were relentlessly growing. Estru gestured to the ship. ‘What will happen now?’ he asked Peder. ‘Is that ship going to harvest the suits, and take them back to Caean?’

‘The Captain doesn’t have the crew to do it. Not yet. He’ll have all he needs, though, in an hour or two.’

‘Where are they coming from?’

‘From the Callan,’ Peder said. ‘You will be the gatherers of the first crop.’ Suddenly he surged to his feet, the blanket falling from his naked body, his eyes blazing wildly. ‘You will be the first members of the new order. Man made perfect! Cosmic elegance! The galaxy ablaze with sartorial glory!’

Then he crumpled. The sociologists stepped forward, helping him back to his chair and draping the blanket around him.

Amara took Estru on one side. ‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked him. ‘Could this lunatic’s story have anything to it?’

Estru nodded slowly. ‘I think we should treat it with the utmost seriousness.’

‘But this – monster. Could there be such a thing?’

Estru screwed up his face in thought. ‘Remember Bourdon’s Imaginary Numbers of the Mind? He pointed out that every act of perception, every mental intention, resembles a positive vector in physical space. By applying the square root of minus one as an operator he produced theoretical descriptions of negative mental vectors. He claimed that the negative dimension was implicit in mentality as a whole, that the positive component couldn’t exist unless it had its own mirror image. It’s an idea that’s close to the notion of passive sentience.’

‘Could Forbarth have read Bourdon?’

‘No. He’d have to be both a mathematician and a trained psychologist. But I don’t think he could have invented what he’s told us either.’

‘His mind might be warped enough to accept some kind of mythical interpretation, or analogy, as the literal truth,’ she suggested dubiously.

‘And the suits?’

‘A new Caeanic enterprise – tailoring by genetic manipulation, perhaps?’

‘But there are four dead bodies out there.’

Amara’s staff chief, having sidled close, joined in the discussion. ‘I agree we should act on the assumption that Forbarth is telling the truth,’ he said. There’s something very logical about his story. It explains a great deal about what we’ve seen in this neck of Caean.’

He broke off as Peder started rambling, speaking to nobody in particular. ‘It will be irresistible. An alien culture on the move, clothes-robots in Frachonard suits, sweeping across the Gulf in their millions…’

‘What’s he talking about?’ Amara demanded.

‘He’s talking about the invasion of Ziode,’ Estru answered in a flat, dry voice. ‘We’ve all been fooled – the Caeanics themselves have been fooled. An invasion is afoot, or shortly will be – an invasion which will appear to be the work of the Caeanics, whereas in fact they’ll only be proxies. You heard what Forbarth said. The Prossim intelligence plans to clothe the whole of mankind.’

‘I knew we should never have trusted foreigners,’ Amara grunted in disgust.

‘There’s an awful kind of grandeur about it in a way,’ Estru said meditatively. ‘We are familiar with the idea of physical invasion, or of invasion by disease in the form of epidemics. But this is a psychological invasion. The total remaking of mankind.’

‘I like my mind as it is, thank you.’

He smiled with ironic humour. ‘Be objective about it, Amara. Cross-fertilizing is usually a good thing. This is mental crosss-breeding between lifeforms literally poles apart. Something quite unbelievable ought to come out of that. Perhaps the Caeanics know what they’re about.’

Amara cast him a look of withering scorn before turning her gaze to the vidscreen. ‘You’re being flippant. Luckily we are in a position to nip this horror in the bud. We can hardly destroy the entire Prossim species, of course, since it grows all over the planet, but if I understand Forbarth aright the scheme depends on those suits it’s growing. This is the only patch of them so far. Destroy it and Ziode is safe – for the time being, anyway.’

‘We don’t have any external armament to speak of.’

‘It can be done manually. We have portable atomic flamethrowers.’

Overhearing them from where he sat, Peder Forbarth began to laugh weakly. ‘But you won’t be able to! You won’t be able to!’

They found out what Forbarth meant almost as soon as Captain Wilce sent out a pair of his crewmen to burn up the Prossim growth.

The two went out on a disc-shaped grav platform that skimmed over the surface of the plain. One steered the platform, while the other handled the flamethrower, a telescope-like affair he held under one arm, supporting its weight with a harness that went over his shoulders. Both wore protective suits of a silvery heat-resistant light metal, complete with visors.

The sociological team, watching while they glided some distance away from the Callan, waited to see the flamethrower come into action. Nothing of the kind occurred, however. After a puzzling delay the grav disc settled on the plain. The two men divested themselves of their protective clothing until they stood naked on the green Prossim.

‘What in space are they doing?’ Amara squeaked in alarm. ‘Have they gone mad?’

Peder was giggling like an idiot. Now they saw the two crewmen, ignoring all orders that came through their headsets from Captain Wilce, bend down and detach something from the growing greenery. For a minute or two they were busy, probing and poking in the leafy tangle. Soon they had picked an assortment of newly-ripened garments: underpants, shirts, jackets, waistcoats, trousers, ties and cravats. Then, apparently absorbed in what they were doing, they carefully dressed themselves.

Finally, fully attired, they stood upright on the verdant plain. At a nod to one another they remounted the grav platform, leaving the flamethrower where it had been thrown, and headed back towards the ship, landing in full view of the external scanner.

They were transformed men. They stood before the Callan, flexing their limbs, exhibiting themselves to those within, stepping back and forth and pirouetting as if in a fashion show.

‘I told you you couldn’t do it,’ Peder gasped, gurgling with laughter. ‘Go on, give in – you’ve got to eventually. Don’t you feel it getting to you?’

Estru felt like hitting the renegade Ziodean in the face. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Those suits create a field of mental force. It’ll get to you soon, even through the walls of the ship.’

‘I don’t feel anything.’

‘Not even when you look at your men in those suits?’

Estru stared at the disporting pair on the vidscreen. ‘I’m not sure…’

‘All right, focus the screen out on the plain. Let’s see a close-up of all those suits growing out there. Then you’ll know…’ He stood up, staggering to the screen controls. The image zoomed, blurred and sped until, with dazzling clarity, it showed an enlarged spread of garments.

Suddenly Realto Mast sprang forward. He pushed Peder away from the controls and hastily refocused the screen. ‘Don’t let him do that,’ he warned.

Peder sniggered. ‘See, he knows, don’t you, Realto? There’s no defence against those garments. They just call out to be worn – and they are so perfect that the human mind can’t resist that call. The Prossim plant can conquer humanity by sheer mental force, simply by displaying the garments it has created.’

‘I definitely felt something then,’ Estru declared, looking around at the others for confirmation.

‘And Ziodeans say the sartorial art is a delusion!’ Peder derided.

Blanco came forward and leaned over him belligerently. ‘Whose side are you on?’ he shouted. Then he turned to Amara. ‘What about you, madam? Perhaps the garments are ineffective against a woman.’

‘I felt something too,’ Amara admitted quietly.

‘The Prossim plant is something of a male chauvinist,’ Peder told them in a sarcastic voice. ‘Male qualities are more active than female ones, so it elected to delineate mankind by using masculine garments only. It views female garments as accessories. But it isn’t oblivious to sex – far from it. Stand up in one of those suits and no woman can resist you.’

Silence reigned in the conference room.

‘Well?’ Amara said grimly. ‘Has anybody got any ideas?’

‘You can do it, Alexei,’ Mast said earnestly. ‘You’re the only one who can.’

‘I simply don’t understand what you are asking of me,’ the Sovyan replied. ‘I don’t understand why simply anyone cannot do it.’

Mast sighed. ‘No, I don’t suppose you could understand. But you can understand that the growths are menacing us.’

‘If you say so.’

‘We can’t leave until the growths are destroyed.’

Mast was in Alexei Verednyev’s cramped private cabin. Alexei had painted the walls a metallic grey. There were only three items of furniture: a table, a hard chair on which the Sovyan was now seated, and a pallet on which he slept. His face, as always, was dour and immobile.

Mast had slipped away unnoticed from Amara Corl’s section. He was sure she was too insensitive to be able to persuade her victim to help her.

‘On this whole ship, you are the only one who has been a friend to me,’ Alexei said at last, emotion entering his accented voice. ‘I will do what you ask, since it is you who is asking.’

He rose, his arms moving in a waving motion reminiscent of the typical arm movements of a Sovyan metalloid. Mast led him out of the room. They went down to the exit bay where he explained to him what had to be done.

The doors opened. Alexei, armed with a handgun Mast had given him, ventured out.

The breeze that swept over Alexei’s skin as he emerged from the Callan was an entirely new phenomenon to him. It frightened him at first. Realto Mast had not warned him of this.

He stood on the Prossim mats, which were depressed into a shallow bowl by the ship’s weight, and gazed about him. He had seen planetary landscapes before, but only on the Callan’s external screens when she landed on some world or other. With the flowing of air on his skin, assaulting his intimate feelings, it took on a completely different aspect. The spaciousness of the land, the colour of space seen through an atmosphere – not black, but with a purple tint in this case – made him appreciate all the more the alienness of such an environment.

The cyborg world must be much like this, he thought.

The exit bay port closed with a thump behind him. The two crewmen who had preceded him were standing out of the shadow of the ship, where they had been looking up at its bulk and shouting to be let in.

On seeing Alexei they stopped shouting. His feet unsteady on the yielding surface, he made his way towards them, and they responded by moving to meet him. Their mouths were stretched in what he had been told was a facial signal called a smile. But the grace of their movements, the display of manly beauty by which Mast had explained they would try to hypnotize him, all that was lost on him. The human body was a hated object to him. It was easy to imagine that he was killing repulsive cyborgs as he let them get near enough for him to take steady aim, then kill them both with his hand beamer.

He walked on to the grav platform. Although the dead men had been crewmen on the ship which was now his own home, he felt no compunction over killing them, knowing that they had been enslaved by the malevolent force within the green vegetation. Such sacrifices came naturally to him. Sovyan society made every individual understand that he was expendable in terms of group survival.

Flying the grav platform was easy. He sent it skimming over the ground at a height of about twenty feet, until he came to where the crewmen had discarded the flamethrower. Stepping down from the flying disc, he collected together the components of one of the protective suits. Immediately upon donning it, with clumsy, unaccustomed movements, he felt a little better. To be clad in metal always brought him a slight relief from his personal agony of mind.

He picked up the flamethrower, pulling the harness over his shoulders. Feeling it in his possession also brought a marginal improvement in his spirits. He was in his element when handling pure instrumentalities, machines and the like – a fact of which the hideous female and supposed mind technician, Amara Corl, had never made any use, if it had occurred to her at all.

After outfitting himself Alexei paused, staring down at the vegetable fabric structures which comprised the blossoms of this surplanetary growth. What did his captors find to fear in these rags? He bent down, stretching out a hand to feel the front of a jacket.

His hand twitched, entirely of its own volition. Peculiar thoughts passed through his brain, a series of extraordinary images.

Quickly he pulled the hand away. It was not his own hand, he reminded himself. It was a grafted hand. A space-cave hand.

Standing erect, he triggered the flamethrower.

Atomic fire gouted from the nozzle. The roaring lateral column reached almost to the horizon, incinerating everything in its path. Alexei swivelled the long tube, cutting a blackened quadrant out of the landscape and extending it into a near-circle.

Smoke rose in masses and obscured the sky. Alexei mounted the grav platform again and flew a short distance away, surveying the ground below him. The crop of garments had by now spread to cover a patch about five miles across.

Handling the flamethrower was too awkward when controlling the grav disc as well. Alexei worked by choosing a new area for destruction and landing in the centre of it. The air shimmered and heat smote at him through the protective suit.

Barely fifteen minutes later the task was almost done. Alexei paused, standing by the platform after having employed the flamethrower yet again. He was in a fog of smoke and crackling heat, through which the shapes of the two spaceships, standing a mile apart and so far ignoring one another, bulked shiftingly like slumbering beasts.

Suddenly Alexei saw that one of those beasts had stirred to life. It had lifted itself off the ground and was surging towards him. He immediately guessed its intent. It meant to crush him, in defence of the vegetable mats.

He adjusted the nozzle of the flamethrower to its narrowest aperture. The space-cave – it was the other one, not the Callan – was approaching fast. Instinctively he backed away, stumbling in the black dust that had been Prossim, and sent a narrow jet of atomic fire hissing at the ship. The flame splashed against the hull, melting the metal and causing it to run in glowing streams down the curved side.

In a second or two the flame jet had lunged through the hull and was busy devouring the interior of the ship. But by then the hull was blotting out everything, expanding and descending on him with terrifying swiftness. For a moment the metal monster seemed almost friendly. He imagined it as a righteous Sovyan weapon that was crushing an evil cyborg – the cyborg being himself – then it was all over.

The harvester ship had come down like an avenging fist on Alexei Verednyev, with such determined force that it broke its own back in the process and lay crippled on the plain. Amara, watching from within the Callan, viewed the whole affair with satisfaction.

‘We should have thought of this ourselves,’ Estru said. ‘It’s this business of body image again. Alexei’s mind lacks a human body image. So the Prossim suits couldn’t get to him.’

‘They would have eventually,’ Peder told them. ‘If put to it those suits can control the nervous system of animals and even insects.’

‘And to think you wanted to leave Verednyev behind in the Sovyan Rings, Estru!’ Amara crowed. ‘Sometimes I think I’m the only one around here who makes the right decisions. By the way, remind me to put in a good word for Mast when we get back to Ziode. Where’s he got to?’

Mast had returned to the section to explain his ploy, but had left again following the death of the Sovyan. ‘Probably gone to sulk,’ Estru said. ‘He was quite friendly with Verednyev.’

‘Really? Well, you can’t expect a layman to have any objectivity.’ Amara was manipulating the screen controls, searching the great carpet of soot that had once been the Prossim plant’s garment beds. There were still a few garments left here and there, mostly charred or partly burned, passed over by the main force of the flamethrower’s flood. Those remnants would have to be cleared up.

Suddenly she switched off the screen and turned to face Estru and those of her team who were still in the room. Her face recovered its former grimness.

‘The most immediate peril has been averted, but the Prossim intelligence remains as a continuing threat,’ she declared. ‘It will not relinquish its ambitions. Sooner or later it will find another Frachonard, or it will continue to extend its control by means of lesser garments. Now, we have two options. We can make our way back to one of the Caeanic capitals, preferably Verrage, apprise the government there of what Prossim really is. Personally, I rule that out immediately. They would never trust us. They would be insulted by what would seem to be foreign criticism of their life-style.

‘Or we can return to Ziode and inform the Directorate of the facts, leaving the decision to them. I have little doubt as to what that decision will be. They will order an expeditionary force to this part of Tzist to annihilate this planet utterly.’

‘The Caeanics simply aren’t going to accept such an action on our part. There will be war,’ the staff chief said.

She nodded solemnly. ‘That’s so. But we have to face up to it. The Prossim flora must be wiped out. There isn’t any alternative – and we can’t trust the Caeanics to do it for us.’

She leaned back against a table, gripping its edges with her hands. ‘As a matter of fact I doubt very much if Captain Wilce would permit us to go for the first option. The Caeanics would be too likely to impound the Callan and kill us all just to suppress our story. But on an issue as important as this I’m prepared to record the feeling of the department. Who’s for going straight to Ziode?’

Slowly, aware that they were voting for war with Caean, they all raised their hands in the air.

The last people were coming back into the ship, trudging over the soot beds. It was time to be lifting off; Caeanic harvesters no doubt arrived here with regularity.

Amara’s team had taken cuttings of the Prossim plant to be conveyed, under sterilized biokiller seal, for study in Ziode; and they had gathered up the remaining pathetic scraps of the garment crop, also for study. Peder stood on the lip of the exit bay port, looking out over the scene for the last time. He wore plain garments given him by Estru. Though pale and shattered in spirit he had recovered his composure and was no longer mentally unbalanced. He even managed to nod in friendly fashion to Estru when he joined him at the port.

Together they shared the view. In one direction a rim of green could be discerned where the unburnt Prossim began again. The wrecked freighter was slumped in the middle of the dead area like a slaughtered mammoth, black dust piling up against it in the breeze.

Estru sighed, shaking his head, then chuckled cynically. ‘You know, I’m wondering if they’re going to believe any of this back in Ziode. How many other intelligences of this type do you think there are? It’s odd we haven’t come across any before.’

‘I don’t think it’s very common,’ Peder said slowly. ‘It’s too anomalous. The universe is a place of motion and conflict where passive sentience can’t easily get a hold. Perhaps it’s an evolutionary counterpart of anti-matter – equivalent to normal matter and just as probable in theory, but scarcely ever encountered in fact.’

They moved aside as the last man came aboard and the port was closed. Together they made their way up the ramp and into the belly corridor. As they were about to part, Estru paused reflectively.

‘By the way, we shall want to carry out some investigative psychoanalysis on you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been through a unique experience, you know. Don’t worry, though, it isn’t painful – well, a little stressful occasionally, perhaps. We should have finished by the time we get home.’

Peder felt the ship lifting off as he made his way alone to his cabin; which not altogether by chance happened to be the one so recently vacated by Alexei Verednyev. In a way it was decent of Estru to be so friendly. Very few on the Callan felt any sympathy for him at all, and it was by no means clear what his eventual fate would be. Still, he believed he had a fair chance of being given parole and of being allowed to live as a private citizen. Even in a Ziodean court of law one could justifiably plead alien mental interference as a mitigating circumstance, he would have thought. And if Mast was to get off, why shouldn’t he?

Perhaps he could even become a sartorial again.

He entered his tiny cabin, locked the door and sat down with a thankful sigh.

It was good to have all the pressure off.

He opened the buttoned pocket of his crumpled work jacket and took out its precious cargo.

His little memento: a tie, of a captivating magenta colour. He ran it through his fingers, feeling its gorgeous silky texture, caressing his cheek with it. Marvellous! It was like something alive!

Carefully he draped it under his collar and tied a loose knot in it, peering into the cabin mirror and admiring its effect even on the grubby shirt he was wearing. He was grateful now that they had let him out to poke among the ashes with the others, before the place had been given one final burning to eradicate all trace of the Frachonard crop. They had seemed glad to have someone to help them gather up all the bits and pieces – the fragments of cloth, even one or two whole garments. It had been easy to filch this one little item.

There was something else. He opened a handkerchief in which something soft and fleecy was carefully wrapped: a spore pod. Like the tie he had found near it, it had escaped the searing heat of the flamethrower – or almost. It was a little singed round the edges, as indeed was the tie. It was hard to say whether it would still be viable.

Peder would never really be able to forget his Frachonard suit, despite all the hard times it had put him through. His reasoning was that the spores in the burned patch of Prossim might already have been imprinted with the genetic information to grow Frachonard suits. If he let a spore germinate, it might grow him one. Just one – that was all he would allow. With the main mass destroyed by the Ziodean Navy, it wouldn’t be able to control him as the first one had.

He couldn’t see any risk. He would be the plant’s gardener. It would be cultured. He would be able to restrict its growth.

He would only allow it to grow one suit. To begin with, anyway. It would be wonderful to have such a suit that was his helpmate, not his master.

Only one suit.