The Garments of Caean

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.’

Estru gazed down at the worm-like pallor of the shrivelled human being encased in the works of the suit. ‘What would bring on that kind of shock?’

‘Trauma of an unexpected, unacceptable kind. Something the mind just wouldn’t be able to face up to.’

‘Well, that’s only a medical problem, isn’t it?’ Amara said hopefully. ‘You can bring him round, can’t you? We want to talk to him.’

The doctor hesitated. ‘That depends on whether the cause of trauma is still present. If it is, bringing him forcibly to consciousness could be contra-indicated. In such cases, a safer procedure is to remove the patient from the source of trauma, and apply psychomedications in an environment familiar to him.’

‘I get you,’ Estru said. ‘You mean put him back in the suit, right?’

‘Right.’

‘You’re saying we were wrong to break the suit open,’ Amara said heavily.

‘That’s not for us to comment on, madam.’

Estru screwed up his face in concentration. ‘Let’s get this straight. You’re suggesting the suit is the natural environment for the man inside it – that cutting it open sent him catatonic? How long do you think he’s been in it? Since birth?’

The medics glanced at one another, then at what lay on the bench. ‘That would be our guess,’ said the one who had remained silent up to now. ‘Not in this suit, of course, but in some comparable kind of container. You realize, of course, what that means.’

‘Yes,’ Amara answered firmly. ‘It means that his own body-image of himself doesn’t include anything we would recognize as a human being. When he thinks of himself as a person, the picture in his mind is that of the suit’s exterior. Probably he isn’t even conscious of his biological body, except as a sort of internal organ or essential core.’

‘And we forced him to look at himself,’ Estru breathed. ‘My God!’

‘Psychologically it’s a fascinating situation,’ Amara said. ‘An almost unique opportunity, in fact. It would be interesting to do some experiments – but that’s not our mission.’ She waved her hand dismissingly and her face became stern. ‘We’d better stick to our brief. If this is a cultural norm then we’re up against a pretty weird culture.’

A look of guarded relief had come over the older medic’s face. ‘I take it you have abandoned the idea of removing him completely from the suit?’

‘That would be some job of unscrambling. God, where does the suit end and the man begin?’ For the first time Amara stared without flinching at the bulky sawn-open cylinder and its unnerving contents. The inert flesh was, indeed, practically enmeshed in its surrounding web of transducers and catheters. ‘Imagine what it must be like to be this man,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He doesn’t have the use of the limbs he was born with; only of the suit’s devices and organs. I wonder if the suit is equipped with a kinesthetic sense? Probably so; in that case he’s able to sense it and feel it the same way we do our own bodies. It is his body, as far as he’s concerned.’

‘It’s so elaborate it’s a misnomer to call it a suit,’ Estru added. ‘It’s an integrated system in its own right: a space body-prosthetic.’

‘And from his point of view you’ve inflicted savage injury on him,’ the older doctor pointed out.

Amara turned to the techs. ‘What about that? Can you repair the damage?’

The chief technician stirred. ‘If I’d known you’d want us to make good we’d have been more careful. We invaded quite a few sub-systems by cutting into it in the way we did.’

‘How would you assess the suit, technically?’ Estru asked.

The other pursed his lips. ‘A good solid job, very durable. But judging by what we’ve seen so far there’s nothing too advanced for us to handle. Some of it’s pretty quaint, in fact. We can patch it up if you want.’

‘Good. Get on with it, then,’ Amara said.

‘It’s really more of a job for a doctor than an engineer,’ the medic said anxiously. ‘I’d be happier having him in surgery.’

‘Fair enough. You can all work on it together. Just before you seal him up give him whatever psycho-medications you think necessary.’ Amara made for the door, giving Estru a glance to follow.

As they walked back to their own section she tapped him on the arm. ‘There were two of them, remember? He called the other one Lana – in Old Russian that’s a feminine name.’ She screwed up her face in amusement. ‘I wonder what they were doing!’

In terms of the interstellar velocity of which it was capable, the exploratory ship Callan had been almost stationary when it spotted the deep-space suits. In fact it had been engaged on a moderately-paced sweep of the planetary system occupying the near-space of the small nondescript yellow star. This was the forty-third such unremarkable star they had visited at random, following Amara Corl’s theory that in this way they would uncover traces of the beginning of Caeanic civilization. Had their sensor scans not picked up the suits their stay would have been brief. The system contained no habitable planets. It was a bleak corner of the starry world, one among a million such bleak corners, and Estru, Amara’s first assistant, had been about to suggest that they abandon the search for ancient beings and move closer to Caeanic space proper.

Now, however, Amara was excited. It would probably take the techs a couple of hours to close up the suit again. Meanwhile there was the question of where it had come from.

Two nearby worlds offered themselves as candidates. The first and most unlikely was a gas giant surrounded by a system of Saturn rings but lacking any satellites. The second, a tiny arid planet quite unfit for human life, lay at present scarcely fifteen million miles sunward of the gas giant. The Callan had picked up its prisoner about mid-way between the two.

‘The small one, I think. Don’t you, Estru?’

‘Presumably. It’s not much of a world. Less than two thousand miles in diameter, a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and cold. But maybe there’s a protected outpost there or something.’ He reflected. ‘Shouldn’t we wait till we get a chance to talk to our specimen before going any farther? We might save some time that way in the end.’

She snorted. ‘We didn’t have much luck last time. He was raving.’

‘Maybe we didn’t try hard enough to meet him on his own terms? He seemed to be under a misapprehension regarding our nature, as well as we of his.’

‘Yes.’ She switched on the recording she had made, listening with a frown to the sonorous voice. “‘You will pay for all your barbarities,’” she translated slowly and with difficulty. “‘We have never submitted to you and we never shall. I shall tell you nothing…” As if we were an enemy he recognized, instead of complete strangers.’ She switched off.

‘I’d rather know more about his background before we go barging in.’

‘You can carry caution too far,’ she reproved. ‘What if we hadn’t opened the suit? We still wouldn’t know the truth about him. But all right. A few hours of library research can’t do any harm.’ She turned away and held down her memo key, which carried her voice to every section of her fifty-member team.

Minutes later she had alerted them to what was happening and had put the department on a crash project: investigate late Russian history, with special reference to any incursion into the Tzist Arm. She herself settled down to brush up her knowledge of the language.

She had been at it for a couple of hours when the vid chimed and the bearded face of Captain Wilce appeared.

‘I ought to tell you we’ve spotted another object heading our way, Amara. At a guess it’s come from the small planet up-sun of us. Any suggestions or preferences?’

‘Yes! Make contact!’ Amara replied immediately. ‘What is it, another deep-space suit?’

‘Something larger this time,’ Wilce relayed a blurred long-range sensor image to her. It was hard to make anything sensible out of the shape that emerged. The object could have been lozenge-shaped, or perhaps flat and rectangular. It was studded with smaller features which the scanner failed to define properly.

‘It has a length of about a hundred feet,’ the Captain explained. ‘We might have been better advised to proceed under baffle. They doubtless know we’re here by now.’

‘There’s no reason to think they’re hostile,’ Amara murmured as she studied the advancing space vehicle, ‘and we can’t stay under baffle all the time. How about meeting them half-way, Captain?’

‘If you’re in that much of a hurry.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Amara eagerly. ‘We have to get to the bottom of this thing just as soon as possible.’

‘Right. Keep your eyes peeled – we’ll be there in minutes.’

He went off-line. Amara turned to Estru as she tapped her vidboard. ‘I’ve a feeling we’re about to add a chapter to the annals of sociology.’

Carrifer, in charge of the information team, came on the screen. ‘Anything on the region yet?’ Amara asked him.

‘Yes, Amara. The Russians were active here. But there’s not much by way of details. Knowledge of that era is so scrappy.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said impatiently. ‘Well, I hope you can give us a précis pretty soon. Keep at it.’

She cleared the screen, then put it through to the Callan’s sensoring section, obtaining the same view that was being delivered to the bridge.

With perfect ease the Callan swept through millions of miles of void to a meeting with the space object. At a distance of a few hundred yards the bridge crew nullified the ship’s motion. The object now showed itself to be a rectangular raft moving directly outward from the sun, propelling itself by means of two nozzles which emitted a bright blue discharge and looked like electrostatic impellers.

Clinging to the raft were about fifty passengers. Amara turned up the magnification and gasped. She had expected to see more examples like their captured specimen: men who had fitted themselves for life in space by burying their organic bodies in giant suits. But the people on the raft wore no spacesuits at all. Neither did they wear any kind of clothing, protective or decorative.

They were naked to the void.

But that was not all. So bizarre were the space travellers in appearance that it was some moments before Amara could confirm that they were in fact human. She focused the screen on one specimen to examine it closely. Like its brethren, it had been extensively modified by deep surgery and the incorporation of artificial organs. Embedded in its skull was a turret-like device which she guessed was connected directly to the brain. The eyes were hidden by the black goggles which seemed to be riveted into the eye-sockets. The nose had been removed.

She moved the screen’s cursor down to the torso. The chest had been replaced entirely by a metal box-like structure. Likewise the abdominal wall was substituted for by a flexible corrugated shield, making it resemble the abdomen of some type of grub. Amara could imagine the problems of pressure and temperature involved in adapting people to an interplanetary environment. Below the abdomen, however, hung an incongruous indication that the creature was fundamentally human, and male. The genitals had been left intact and floated flaccid and loose.

The mixing of man and machine continued. From limbs, backs and sides projected an assortment of devices and turrets. Amara swung the cursor to other parts of the raft. The modified men were far from being identical to one another. The machine-organs they incorporated varied from individual to individual, as though a division of function existed among them. Some torsos were transfixed by lateral shafts in an eerie travesty of crucifixion. Other specimens were made to seem even less human than their fellows by the elaboration of their cuirasses and metal pipes. As the raft jetted through space the modified men clung to handholds so as to avoid being thrown off by the weak gravity the acceleration generated.

And all were naked – all but one. The exception, a burly figure wrapped in a voluminous brown habit or gown, his head hidden by a deep cowl, stood in the centre of the vehicle while those around him kept a respectful distance.

On the raft, too, was additional equipment that might have been primitive artillery, radar and the like.

Finally Estru took a deep breath and let it out in a loud sigh. ‘Wow. How do you relate this?’

‘It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?’ Amara responded excitedly. ‘What we have here is a space culture in the real meaning of the term. People adapted to living in space, just as you and I live in an atmospheric medium. The giant suit was one answer. This is another. We’ll call it Type Two,’ she added, for the benefit of the recorder. ‘Modified men, rather than ensheathed, protected men.’

‘Evidently they’ve solved the breathing problem,’ Estru said sardonically, focusing on one of the modified men again. ‘They’ve fixed it so that they don’t have to breathe.’

‘To live in space biologically must require an entire systematic overhaul,’ Amara supplied. ‘Almost certainly the blood is replaced by a more suitable fluid that won’t form bubbles under zero pressure. Just where their tissues get their oxygen from I can’t fathom at the moment. As you can see the lungs have been excised in every case. Probably those chest boxes carry a store of oxygen, possibly in a solid state or locked in a compound, which they release into the bloodstream – or pseudo-bloodstream – at a regulated rate. I’ll ask the medics to write up a report on it. The idea seems strange to us, of course, but technically there’s nothing difficult in any of it. It’s just that – well, who would want to do that to themselves?’ She shuddered.

‘I’ll second that,’ Estru said fervidly. ‘I don’t know which is worse, the man in the suit or these fellows.’

Amara had been searching for a word. Now she found it. ‘Cyborgs,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Cyborgs. That’s what these are. I knew I’d heard of the phenomenon somewhere before. The word occurs in several dead languages – it stands for “cybernated organism” – but more as a legend than a fact. This is the first time I knew for certain that any had actually been made.’

From Amara’s board came the voice of Aspar, in sensor section. ‘I’m picking up transmitted speech, Amara. Want to listen to it?’

She smiled. ‘Yes. It will be interesting to hear what they have to say.’

But when the voices followed Aspar’s, several voices speaking at a time, her smile changed to a frown which deepened by the second. The voices were high-pitched, with odd, alien-sounding inflections. The language, as far as she could tell through the gabble, bore no relation either to Russian or to any known to her.

Estru looked at her with concern. ‘Well? What do they say?’

She shook her head. ‘It isn’t Russian. I don’t know what it is.’

There was a sudden quickening of activity on the raft. Several cyborgs leaped to a large device mounted on the nearside periphery. In their hands the machine swivelled and emitted a bright flash.

A muted buzz from Amara’s table informed her that the Callan was under attack. On the screen she was unable to see what kind of weapon the device on the raft was, but three more flashes followed in rapid succession.

Captain Wilce’s voice came through to her. ‘We have a decision to make, Amara,’ he said firmly. ‘They’re firing rocket missiles at us. The electrostatic deflectors have prevented any hits so far, but we can’t rely on that. I must insist that we either retaliate or withdraw.’

Amara bit her lip. She knew that Captain Wilce felt he had been given a slightly unfair brief for this mission. The Callan was only lightly armed, in recognition of the fact that they would be intruding into Caeanic space. Some attempt had been made to compensate for this with a purely defensive, non-aggressive measure in the form of electrostatic focusing, said to be able to lock on to and deflect any solid missile or non-radiant energy beam. The Captain did not believe in its efficacy, however, and exhibited some nervousness where the security of his ship was concerned.

‘I want to take one of those specimens alive,’ she said suddenly. ‘Do whatever’s necessary, Captain.’

‘Fair enough.’

The cyborgs appeared to be infuriated by their gun’s failure to damage the Callan. They began to quit the raft; about half their number surged towards the ship in an angry swarm, propelling themselves by means of cylinders with small, flaring nozzles. They carried a variety of hand weapons: ray-guns, recoilless rifles, big spiked hammers. One cyborg, a launching tube mounted on its back, lobbed a mortar bomb. Automatically the electrostatic deflector seized it and hurled it away into space.

At the same time the Callan was bearing down on the space raft. Narrow energy beams seethed harmlessly against the hull. Bullets, unnoticed by the electrostatic deflector, bounced off it.

The ship’s bulk scattered the cyborgs like chaff. Their cacophonous yelling swelled, almost deafening Amara and Estru; high-pitched, ranting sounds full of hatred. A whiplash tentacle snaked out from the ship and wound itself round one of the modified men, dragging him inboard.

Amara gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘That’s that, Captain. I think we can withdraw now.’

‘Good.’

The scene on the vidplate dwindled. The raft and its crew vanished into the endless void.

Instantly Amara switched to the airlock. The handling crew were not having an easy time with the cyborg. Although still restrained by the steel tentacle, it had tried to shoot one of them with its ray gun and had left molten metal running down the side of the chamber. It struggled wildly, almost manically, as they strove to disarm it.

‘Hmm, interesting,’ Amara murmured. ‘Both he and the suit-man exhibit responses on the barbaric level. They react to strangers with fear and hostility. Incongruous for a people whose entire existence depends on technology, don’t you think?’

‘They wouldn’t be the first technologically-minded barbarians in history,’ Estru said mildly.

‘No, of course not. And yet their hostility could be due to their… peculiar condition. Perhaps they carry a repressed group memory that originally they were human beings – a memory containing trauma, guilt and self-mutilation. The appearance of a ship from outside their system might stimulate this memory – unconsciously, of course – and it would express itself in unreasoning hostility.’

‘Maybe. It’s highly speculative.’

The cyborg had finally been subdued and disarmed. It was strapped to a board, its limbs immobilized. Now that their spell of emergency was over, the inboard crew were able to stand back and take a good look at what they had caught, and they found time to be appalled.

Amara got through to the medical section. ‘How is our Russian?’

‘The operation has been completed,’ the senior doctor told her. ‘As you’re always in a hurry, Amara, we gave him a combination of drugs designed to erase from his memory any recent event sufficiently charged to cause catatonia. In a sense we’ve replaced the catatonic effect with an amnesiac one. Not the most responsible way of dealing with psychic disorders, but…’ He trailed off. ‘We also gave him an arousal drug, and according to his brain reading he’s coming round. He should be functioning normally.’

‘Let me understand this. He won’t remember what we did to him?’

‘The memory isn’t expunged completely, but it’s not on complete recall. He might even be able to remember it vaguely, as if remembering a dream, but he won’t be sure it really happened. It will be robbed of significance. I thought you would prefer it that way,’ the doctor added drily, ‘because later we could reintroduce the incident to him slowly under controlled conditions.’

‘Ah! Excellent! Then we can discuss the business with him!’ she chuckled. ‘Congratulations, Doctor. Indirect methods of enquiry never were to my liking!’

She tapped her finger-tips on the table, thinking something over. ‘Put him back in the vacuum chamber, will you?’

‘He’s there already, for the sake of continuity. It’s the last thing he will remember clearly.’

‘Good, good,’ she murmured slowly. ‘I’ll get in touch later.’

As soon as the doctor went off-line the lock crew came in. ‘What shall we do with it now?’ the team leader asked, not hiding his distaste.

‘Put him in the vacuum chamber with our first specimen, and then stand by. And take those restraints off. I want him to have freedom of movement.’

‘Is that wise?’ said Estru in a low, worried voice. ‘It does seem precipitous, Amara. Our patient is only just recovering! Shouldn’t we give him more time?’

‘I reject the term “patient”,’ Amara replied icily. ‘What’s the matter with you, Estru? The Russian is going to be perfectly all right, you just heard medical section say so. Finding himself in the company of the cyborg will probably reassure him.’

‘We have no idea what relations are between the suit-people and the cyborgs,’ Estru pointed out guardedly.

‘But they belong to the same culture!’

Estru coughed politely. ‘That is an unwarranted assumption, if I may be permitted to say so. They speak different languages. And you were the one to observe that the Russian’s outbursts against us suggest he already has enemies.’

Amara waved her hand imperiously, annoyed at her assistant’s misgivings. ‘Such possibilities are not lost on me, I assure you. This is a scientific test. I want to see what Types One and Two have to say to each other.’

Minutes later the cyborg prisoner had been taken to the vacuum chamber. In the vestibule the lock crew freed it from the restraining board, protecting themselves with difficulty from its flailing attacks, and pushed it through the chamber lock.

In free fall it floated into the metal vault. Up to now the giant spacesuit, its surface barely scarred by the welds that had fastened it up, had been motionless on the opposite side. On the entry of the cyborg, however, its huge arms stirred.

The two space-adapted men confronted one another.

The suit advanced.

The cyborg’s gaze darted quickly here and there, as if seeking a way out. It drifted against a wall, and expertly jack-knifed its legs against it, leaping across the chamber and out of the path of the suit.

Unlike the cyborg, the suit had its own built-in propulsion. Its drive unit, which was capable of accelerating it to speeds in the order of hundreds of thousands of miles per hour given a sufficiently long period, needed only minimal activation for manoeuvres in this tiny enclosure. The suit flicked round in pursuit of the cyborg and zipped across the chamber, able to pre-empt any further evasive manoeuvre by its greater ease of motion.

Not a single word had passed between the two, although both species (as Estru thought it would be fair to call them) communicated by radio. Nevertheless the attitude of violence and implacable hatred which each displayed towards the other was unmistakable.

‘Better put a stop to it,’ Estru said tightly.

‘Get the cyborg out,’ Amara ordered.

Suit and cyborg had come together. The suit was incomparably the more powerful. The great metal arms flailed, smashing into the puny organic body. The cyborg’s skull-turret broke and seemed to become dislodged. A thin, pale blood began to strew itself across the chamber in swaying rivulets which broke up instantly into a haze of droplets.

Those watching through the windows had tried to save the situation by switching on the gravity. The suit dropped clanging to the floor, accompanied by the limp body of its enemy.

They rushed into the chamber, fending off the arms of the suit with prods and chains, and dragged away the broken mixture of metal, plastic, flesh, pink blood.

‘It’s dead, Amara.’

‘Oh well,’ said Estru wearily. ‘It all counts as data.’

Amara, too, after casting him a contemptuous glance for his sarcastic remark, took the news philosophically. ‘Get medical section to carry out an examination,’ she said with no trace of embarrassment. ‘The details of the cyborgation process should prove interesting.’

She turned to Estru. ‘Maybe we should go back and get another one?’

‘We’re being pretty free with other people’s lives, not to say their liberty,’ he objected.

‘People? These aren’t people, they’re – well, at best, they’re savages. If one wants to regard them as human at all.’

‘I only hope we aren’t going to behave in quite this fashion once we get to Caean.’

She snorted. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Well, I don’t think we should make any further contacts just yet,’ Estru continued. ‘We ought to try talking to the suit-man again. It’s easy to see now why he was so hostile towards us.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, think about it. He knows two kinds of beings, as far as we know. His own kind – outwardly a species of machine, or space-robot – and the cyborgs, whom he kills on sight. Look at it from his point of view. Which do we most resemble?’