The Garments of Caean

2

Alexei Verednyev swept on through a familiar environment. Far down-range was the glowing light of the central sun. To all quarters, a pointillist background at the limit of vision, shone the unreachable stars, but he ignored those. Surrounding him, the medium in which he lived and moved, was the warm, cavernous dark of interplanetary space.

Playfully fleeing from him, Lana Armasova was some five hundred miles down-range. He could sense her metal body with his radars and his spirits mounted as he realized that soon she would let him catch her. Already they were a long way from the gas giant’s girdle of rocks and masses that, to them, was Homebase. If they chased one another much farther sunwards they would stand in danger of coming within range of Shoji, the small arid world where the evil cyborgs lived.

Lana was breaking her speed, now. He saw her glinting in the starlight, and he called to her. She turned lazily, transmitting incidental signals of sexual excitement. He beamed his urgent demand; she responded quickly with rapid, vibrating love feelings.

Already their exchanges had passed beyond the range of ordinary speech; now those exchanges moved up to UHF, the only frequencies on which pure emotion could be directly conveyed. On rich high-frequency harmonies, tender, mutual sensitivities which words could never have handled passed freely to and fro. Alexei and Lana thrilled to one another’s presence, and as the distance between them closed the delirious sensations increased. Alexei, for his part, felt faint with the impact of sheer femaleness which the UHF transmissions were bringing to him.

Then, when their bodies clinked together, a merging of magnetic fields heightened the delirium still further and a long, thin steel prong slid automatically out from Alexei. He grappled with Lana, jockeying her into position and finding the orifice into which that prong plunged. Instantly, ecstasy overcame them both and they clung together while the probe ejaculated his sperm into her.

With a gentle hiss of jets they drew apart. Neither said anything at first; but suddenly Lana broke the post-coital peacefulness with a cry of alarm. A shadow crossed them; something had come between them and the sun.

He turned to see a long, quite huge shape bearing down on them. He did not really have to pick out its features, for only the starlight illuminated this, its eclipsed side, and it did not seem to shine as metal did.

‘What is it?’ Lana screamed.

He did not know. He had never known cyborgs to build anything like this, in fact they did not come into space very often.

‘Flee, Lana, flee!’

But she scarcely needed to be told. Her main propulsors burst into action, as did his, and they hurtled uprange.

The home rings were far away, and there was no cover here. Alexei veered away from Lana, ordering her to change course. His hope that he could draw the pursuer off Lana was fulfilled; it followed him, and he saw that its speed far outpaced his.

Something shot from the bow of the big object. Despite all his twistings and manoeuvrings Alexei could not escape it. Though little more than a flat platform with a dome set upon it, it was able to pace him easily, and soon was almost touching him. Alexei cursed desperately as strong, lash-like cilia extruded to entrap him, imprisoning his arms and dragging him inexorably towards the menacing black shape.

‘Should we bring it aboard?’ Estru asked. ‘It might be dangerous. A robot bomb, perhaps?’

The middle-aged woman with purple tinted hair glanced up at him from the table, where she was watching the events on the vidscreen. ‘You’re too suspicious,’ she reproved in a mature, controlled voice. ‘We’ll deep-sensor it in the lock before we bring it in any farther, but I don’t think it’s a bomb. What I’d like to know is, what were the two of them doing when we came upon them?’

Estru bent to look over her shoulder at the screen. The object being brought in was apparently metallic. It had arms, a bulky, interestingly accoutred main body incorporating a drive unit, and what looked like a helmetlike head section with tubes and antennae that presumably were sensors.

‘What does it look like to you, then, Amara?’

She tilted her head. ‘Well, it looks like some elaborate kind of spacesuit.’

‘Who needs a spacesuit as big as that? Unless there’s a giant inside. And anyway where’s their vehicle? We’re miles from anywhere out here.’

Amara shrugged. ‘Well, we’ll soon know.’ She flicked a switch. ‘Aspar, did you say those things were transmitting when we interrupted them?’

A man’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Yes. Some form of UHF, very richly modulated. Can’t make anything of it; probably some kind of machine talk. Then there was a break, and then a fragment of spoken conversation.’

‘What language? Caeanic?’

‘Not Caeanic; I don’t recognize it at all.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

Amara held down the record key while the brief exchange came through. ‘Thanks, Aspar,’ she said, then cut him off. A frown on her face, she played back the scrap of tape several times: first a woman’s voice, then a man’s.

‘I don’t recognize it either,’ said Estru. ‘What is it?’

Her face took on a wondering look. ‘It sounds like – well, it is, as far as I can tell – some variant of Old Russian.’

‘Russian?’ Estru laughed disbelievingly, then recovered himself. ‘But Caeanic isn’t descended from Russian, is it?’

‘No, not particularly. There are traces of Russian in it, but there are in nearly all languages. Russian itself hasn’t been spoken as a living language for centuries.’

‘Well, they’re speaking it. What are they saying?’

‘Not much. They’re obviously referring to ourselves.’ She played the frightened, urgent voices again. ‘The girl says “What’s that?” She’s pretty startled. Then the man says something like “Run, run”. I think he uses the girl’s name; Lana.’

‘Hmm. Lana.’ Estru was thoughtful. ‘Maybe they’re spacesuits after all. I’d be more inclined to think they’re on remote. Anyway, there’s presumably some kind of civilization in this system, or at least nearby.’

‘“Presumably” is the operative word. There’s been precious little sign of it so far. You’d think we would have noticed.’

Estru nodded. As usual, Amara’s observations were acute; she was, as a general rule, right.

But of course, Amara’s knowledge was vast, as was evidenced by her unhesitatingly identifying a meagre four or five words as belonging to a long-dead language. She was, in fact, one of Ziode’s greatest authorities on cultural anthropology, and that was why she was here.

In consideration of the possibility of war with Caean, the Directorate had ordered a closer study of that little-understood civilization, of its aims and origins. The Callan was part of that study.

It was necessary to proceed cautiously; they were, in the strictest sense of the term, trespassing. They had begun outside Caeanic civilization proper, on that part of the Tzist Arm along which it was presumed mankind had migrated. They hoped to find early settlements, bypassed outposts, which might give them some clues as to how the peculiarities of Caeanic culture had developed.

The Captain’s voice interrupted them. ‘Well, Amara, do we continue on course?’

They both turned to the Captain’s face on a screen to their right. ‘If it pleases you, Captain,’ said Amara, ‘we would like to break our journey here pending investigations. This thing might be significant.’

The Captain nodded. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said sardonically. ‘But please keep me informed of your findings, Amara. It’s my job to assess possible dangers to the ship.’

‘Of course, Captain.’ The bearded face disappeared from the screen.

Another voice spoke from Amara’s table. ‘We’ve got him in the lab, Amara.’

‘Him? There’s a man inside it?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll be right down.’ She smiled at Estru, rising. ‘Maybe you’ll believe me next time.’

Sighing, Estru followed her down to the labs.

They had put the spacesuited man in a gravity-free vacuum chamber. Estru still couldn’t understand the reason for such a suit. It was twelve feet tall, even though it had no legs. The drive unit also seemed disproportionate. This, evidently, was a deep-space suit, capable of carrying its wearer over long distances.

Neither was there any face plate: the suit presented a totally mechanical, metallic exterior.

‘What have you got him in there for?’ Amara asked irritably. ‘How do you expect him to disrobe? Give him some air; give him some gravity.’

Slightly embarrassed, the techs obeyed. Air whistled into the chamber. The suit settled gently to the floor as the gravity phased in, then as it came full on toppled over on to its side. The massive suit made an attempt to lift itself on its arms, but then collapsed and lay like a stranded whale.

‘All right, skip the gravity,’ Amara said in annoyance, waving her hand. ‘Just fix it so he can come out of that suit and we can talk.’

The gravity was lifted. Amara got them to open the hatch to the chamber and addressed some words through it.

The spacesuit didn’t answer.

‘He probably can’t hear you,’ Estru suggested. ‘It must be like being in a spaceship inside that thing. You’d have to talk to him through his communicator.’

‘Just so.’ Amara called for a radio transceiver and, using the same frequency on which Aspar had picked up the conversation earlier, faltered out some Russian which she hoped was heard by the stranger.

After a pause a strong, sonorous voice emerged from the transceiver. Amara raised her eyebrows.

‘What does he say?’ Estru asked.

‘He says that we will answer for our crimes. He says that we may as well kill him quickly, because he will tell us nothing. He is, I might say, being brave and rather melodramatic about it. That was characteristic of the Russians, I believe.’

She spoke again, reassuring their prisoner and entreating him to divest himself of his suit. She was answered with florid curses. She turned to Estru.

‘This is ridiculous. We can’t talk to him under these conditions.’

‘If he wants to remain suited up…’ Estru shrugged. ‘Maybe we should let him.’

‘No, it won’t do!’ Amara was exasperated. ‘It’s… just so damned inconvenient! Besides, he might run amok or something.’

The last remark was perhaps, the most convincing. At Amara’s insistence the prisoner was held under restraint again and, while he was clamped and lashed inside the chamber, the techs strove to unfasten the suit.

‘This is very odd, Amara. There are no movable plates; no seams. The suit is completely sealed.’

‘There is a way to open it, obviously,’ retorted Estru. ‘You just can’t find it.’

Amara pushed the transceiver away from her. For the past few minutes she had been trying to reason with the prisoner on the point of his spacesuit, and it was as if he didn’t understand her at all. Perhaps, she thought guiltily, her Russian was more fragmentary than she had believed, or else the dialect had drifted too far.

‘I’ve lost patience with all this,’ she announced. ‘Get that suit open. If it won’t open by itself, cut it open.’

She stormed out of the lab, heading for her library.

From the moment when they had dragged him inside the big space-cave, Alexei Verednyev had been certain that he was in the hands of the hated cyborgs. He had once seen some cyborg prisoners, so he knew how to recognize the soft, repellent little things. True, these cyborgs did not look quite like the ones he had seen in Homebase. Some of their organs seemed to be missing, such as the turrets in their heads and the metal boxes embedded in their chests.

But as these organs had actually been the most human-looking things about the cyborgs, the ones who had captured him were by comparison even more repulsive. He supposed that, being able to adapt themselves to different conditions to a limited extent, the cyborgs were able to change and modify their organs. Perhaps the fact that they had now taken to travelling in a space-cave had something to do with their altered appearance.

They had spoken to him in a garbled version of his own language, but little of what they said made sense to him. Vaguely he hoped they would kill him soon; their cruelty was renowned. And now the full extent of that cruelty was to be brought home to him. He was put in bonds again and taken to another part of the cave where he was laid down on a steel plate, still helpless. Several cyborgs were there, and there was a big mirror where he could see a reflection of himself. The cyborgs had instruments which they brought to bear on him.

They were cutting into his body! Alexei struggled and screamed, but these creatures were remorseless. Soon they had sliced through his outer skin and he saw his innards revealed. His consciousness reeled. And then they cut him open to reveal the inmost innards, and in the final moment of trauma in which he finally passed out, he saw in the mirror the pale worm-thing which he had never seen before, as unprotected as when he had first been born.