The Garments of Caean

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.

‘A thousand years ago Earth was still the focus of political power for the whole of mankind. By that time there had already been a great spread of activity throughout the galaxy, and there was a great rivalry between various nations, but all those nations were Earth nations. This seems odd to us, of course. We are used to thinking of a nation as something consisting of many planets, hundreds of planets as likely as not, and for a number of autonomous cultures to coexist on the same globe strikes us as contradictory. Yet this was the case on Earth, not only prior to the galactic expansion but for some decades afterwards. And despite their small base many of these Earth-rooted nations managed to retain their power during the initial years of galactic exploitation, and not only that but actually to increase it.

‘Two such national powers were the USSR – also called Russia – and Japan. There had always been a traditional feud between these two countries. At the time we are speaking of they had managed to be at war with one another in various parts of the galaxy for nearly a hundred years – including, for a brief time, in the Tzist Arm. Perhaps they felt themselves to be over-extended here, for apparently they withdrew. But it seems certain that in the process both sides left behind them sizeable pockets of personnel and equipment, cut off and marooned, with no way of getting home, right here where we are now. How did this happen? We’ll never know. Perhaps this tiny system was simply overlooked in the drama and confusion of the withdrawal. Perhaps the task forces fighting here were thought to have been destroyed.

‘Most human beings would have seen no alternative but to die in such a hopeless situation. This system is not a fit abode for human life. There are no habitable worlds. There is only one planet where man can set foot at all – Shoji, a tiny world a short distance sunward of here. These old enemies, however, were both of them peoples possessed of an unusual tenacity. They both developed remarkable, though different, adaptations to their circumstances. And they both, after a fashion, survived.

‘The Russian survival tactic we have already seen in the society of the suit-people. The Japanese solution was something else again. They were already in possession of Shoji, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, arid, cold, with a thin unbreathable atmosphere, and totally inhospitable. To survive these horrid conditions the Japanese “cyborgated” themselves, that is to say, they redesigned the human body, blending it with artificial machine-organs.’

She played the cyborg pictures again. ‘Respiratory, vascular and homeostatic systems have all been entirely replaced, and there have been serious inroads also into the nervous and hormonal systems. Remarkable as it seems, these modifications can adapt the human organism to the most unlikely of environments, including the void, without any need of protective covering. The surface of Shoji is their natural habitat, but they make frequent forays into space, usually in order to attack the descendants of the Russians – that is to say, the suit-people.

‘Alexei Verednyev has not been too forthcoming about cyborg life, but what details I have gleaned from him are fascinating. The cyborg ethos would seem to be a fairly direct derivative of certain strains of Earth Japanese culture, going on what little we know of the latter. Here we have a yakusa bonze.’

She stopped the tape at the picture of the cowled figure on the space raft. ‘A bonze is a religious priest; yakusa originally meant gangster. Religion and gangsterism seem to have gone hand in hand in Japan; a yakusa organization led by a Buddhist abbot once forcibly took over the Japanese government. Though it’s rather hard to say whether the cyborgs still have religion, the individual in the cowl is doubtless by way of being a “warrior monk” wielding considerable power.

‘The cyborg culture is fanatical and aggressive. To a cyborg, death means nothing. Suicide missions against enemies – which necessarily means the suit-people, of course – are traditional. It’s a pity we can’t take time off to investigate them fully, but that would be too lengthy a digression from our main task. We lack so much of the starting data, anyway. We don’t even have a record of the Japanese language, for instance.’

Captain Wilce interrupted in surprise. ‘Why is that, Amara? After all, you can speak Russian well enough.’

Amara smiled indulgently. ‘Most aboriginal Earth cultures are a closed book to us, as it happens. Remember that cultures tend to be mutually exclusive; they don’t like being crowded together on one planet. When the expansion into the galaxy took place they demonstrated their natural magnetic repulsion for one another. They separated out on a large scale. Our knowledge of ancient Earth is confined mostly to the culture called the Euro-American, from which both Tzist and Ziode are descended. There must also be regions of the galaxy dominated by the Japanese, the Arabs, the Afros and so on – all peoples with whom we have no contact. The cyborgs are an oddity, a remnant of a war the Japanese lost.’

The screen died as she switched off the playback.

‘Now let’s see what we can deduce from these facts. Although we have no proof of it as yet, I think we can take it for granted that at some date in the past some of the suit-people escaped from this system and migrated farther along the Tzist Arm. Possibly they managed to build a relativistic drive, or perhaps Sovya was discovered by later explorers who took them along as passengers or captives. In time the suit-people abandoned their suits and colonized habitable planets, becoming human again. They became, in fact Caeanic civilization; there is little doubt that the Sovyan phenomenon is the source of the entire Caeanic aberration!’

Her words provoked a stir among the ship’s officers. ‘You mean the Caeanics are all descendants of these Sovyans?’ Navigator Hewerl asked.

‘No, not all by any means. The Sovyans were the first settlers, the cultural matrix to which later migrants had to conform. This is usually the case when new territories are opened up. The first culture to arrive pre-empts all options and absorbs later arrivals. In the process some watering-down of the original aberration occurs of course, but – God, you can imagine what it must have been like when the Sovyans first came out of their suits.

‘Well, there it is. Everything we find bizarre and exaggerated in Caeanic mentality can be traced back to the time when their Sovyan forebears, the prototype Caeanics, buried themselves in their space canisters. The correspondence really is quite remarkable in all details. The Sovyans replaced the natural body form with an artificial exterior – ergo the Caeanics are obsessed with bodily covering. To the Sovyans the natural body is physically repulsive – as repulsive, in fact, as we find our own intestines – ergo the Caeanics have a horror of nudity.’

She paused. ‘Another aspect of this business is also quite interesting. Although the Sovyans have conditioned themselves to see their machine-nature as beautiful, and have arrogated to the human body the distaste we would feel for our internal organs, it’s doubtful if the brain’s instinctive levels can ever really forget what a human being should look like. It’s worth nothing that, for the sake of his sanity, a suit-man must avoid looking at his organic body. The danger is probably that he will subconsciously recognize the body as his real body, repulsive as it is. Along with this would come the repressed knowledge of what was done to that body in the collective past. So we have self-disgust, and for another reason, racial guilt all in the same emotional charge. I needn’t enlarge on the implications of that.’

‘A version of original sin, as it were?’ Captain Wilce said.

She nodded to him, politely amused.

‘Is that why the suit-people hate the cyborgs so much?’ someone else asked. ‘Because the cyborg body stimulates this subconscious memory?’

‘They have good practical reasons for hating them, also. But it explains the totally irrational element in that hatred, yes.’

‘Do you think the Caeanics themselves know how they originated?’

‘I’m quite confident that they don’t know, which already gives us an advantage over them – an advantage we must learn to exploit. So unless there are further questions we can now discuss our future programme. First we must investigate Sovyan society as thoroughly as we can, then we must travel farther along the Tzist Arm and try to trace out the pattern of the early settlements. I have no doubt that as we research the worlds stretched out between here and central Caean we shall unearth the cultural bones and fossils – the customs, mores and mythologies – that will show us how the mentality of the suit-people evolved into the Art of Attire.’

She frowned. ‘But first we have a little problem. We have to gain the co-operation of the suit-people in Domashnabaza – that’s what they call the ring system encircling Sovya. It’s proving a difficult enough job to win the trust of Verednyev, though I’m slowly bringing him round. In view of our closer resemblance to the cyborgs, our reception there is likely to be anything but friendly.’

There was silence for a while. Suddenly Estru’s lined face puckered with amusement. ‘There isn’t any problem, Armara. We’ll go out to meet them in spacesuits – those big jobs, self-propelled with plenty of armour and opaque face-plates. Provided we don’t let them see the interior of the Callan, the Sovyans will take us for a species cognate to themselves, not to the cyborgs.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Amara replied slowly. ‘All we have to do is keep them out of the Callan and represent ourselves as “metalloids” like them. But it means we won’t be able to use Verednyev as a liaison, as I had intended. We’ll have to keep him under wraps or he’ll blow the gaff on us.’

‘So we are to keep him prisoner,’ Captain Wilce said gravely.

‘It’s better we retain control of him for a while. I’ve put in a lot of work on him.’

‘Presumably we are going to let him go eventually,’ Navigator Hewerl added uneasily.

‘Any more questions?’ Amara snapped.

But Hewerl would not let go. ‘What do we say to his people about him? They must know we have him – there was a witness to his capture. They’ll want to know where he is.’

‘The cyborgs…’ Amara began, then checked herself. She disliked this kind of interrogation. ‘I’ll handle that point when we come to it. Doubtless Verednyev will still be able to play some sort of role in our dealings. Right, then, everything’s settled. If Captain Wilce is agreeable we can make the move at the beginning of the next shift.’ She raised her eyebrows to Wilce, obtaining his nod. ‘So get a good night’s sleep, everyone. We have a busy day tomorrow.’

Abruptly she turned and departed through a door to her left. The briefing was over.

You had to hand it to Amara, Estru thought. She was overbearing, but she brought results.

There had been a time when he had privately scorned the whole idea of searching for pre-Caeanic origins. Yet here they were, right on target, suited up and smack in the middle of the Caeanic prototype – a prototype that was as unsuspected as it was incredible.

He and Amara emerged from the mouth of a caverned-out asteroid where they had been inspecting a food factory. Accompanying them was Sarkisov, their Sovyan guide. His bulking metal form waited patiently on the threshold while they paused to take in the view once more.

It was quite a sight. All around them were the spreading fields of rock and ice chunks, a seemingly limitless labyrinth that shifted and slid together as the rings orbited, creating the illusion of grottoes and deep canyons constantly merging and melting into one another. It was the constant motion that made the perfect silence so eerie, Estru thought. And then there was the light – a limpid, soft, lucid radiance which made the fragmented rock and ice glow, which was sent endlessly spearing and reflecting through the apparent infinity of slowly dissolving grottoes.

Sovya, the gas giant, filled more than a third of the sky, her vast globe glimmering, glinting and flashing with the storms exploding deep within her atmosphere. Compared with that angry, raging world the airless realm of the rocks was calm and idyllic, a paradise that was to the suit-people what meadows, forests and lush watered valleys were to planet dwellers.

What Estru thought of as the eternal silence of the rings was in one sense spurious, however. It did not extend to the world of human intercourse: on the radio wavebands Domashnabaza was alive with talk. Yet a casually traversing eye might have failed to notice the Sovyan civilization at all, given the rings’ span of two hundred thousand miles. Only if one knew exactly what to look for did the miracle make itself evident. Estru, turning up his helmet’s vid magnification, could pick out the larger, asteroid-sized rocks that had been converted into permanent caves, platforms and casemates, many of them sculpted into elegant shapes. Some maintained group formations by automatic course adjustment. Others were linked together by chains. Many carried powerful steel buffers to absorb the shock of the collisions that frequently occurred, albeit gently, as the rocks drifted along. Also visible were metallic glints that were crowds of suit-men on the move. A large glint, intermittently visible as the rocks shifted, was the Callan.

Amara, encased like himself in a brass-coloured, heavily armoured spacesuit, spoke to their metalloid guide.

‘Ochen interesno. Nu, mozhete nam pokazat dyetkiye sady?’

With difficulty Estru followed her Sovyan Russian: ‘Very interesting, but how about letting us see the nurseries?’

Sarkisov’s reply was deep-bellied and indignant. ‘Takiye lichnye veshchi nye ochen piyatno smotret!’ ‘Such matters are not pleasant to see, or for our eyes!’

Estru sighed. Determined to keep treading on taboos, Amara had persisted in her impudent demands throughout their stay in Domashnabaza (literally, Homebase). She had even pressed to be shown the hospitals – a suggestion which to the Sovyans was nauseating.

She just didn’t seem to appreciate, either, that her metalloid disguise was far from perfect and that to the Sovyans she was a far from reassuring sight. The Ziodean suits measured only seven feet in height as compared with the Sovyans’ twelve, so that they must have resembled fantastic little goblins in Sovyan eyes. There were other physical differences, too. The Ziodean helmet was quite different from the Sovyan head, which was a robotic type of structure lacking any organic content. Even more discerning, from the Sovyans’ point of view, must have been the fact that the Ziodean spacesuits possessed legs, which were quite redundant in a purely spatial environment.

Estru did not blame them for becoming both exasperated and suspicious. Several times they had asked to see Alexei Verednyev, and were far from satisfied with Amara’s evasive explanations as to why he did not appear.

Peremptorily the huge suit-man motioned them along the lip of the food asteroid’s slot-like opening. While Amara continued to argue, Estru taped in his recorder and added notes to his running commentary.

‘Life in the rings is highly mobile. Although there is no weather, leaving aside bursts of solar radioactivity, and therefore no proper need of shelter, the Sovyans maintain private dwellings which have propulsors and can move about the rings at will, each emitting a coded radio address by which it can be located at any time, thanks to a public triangulation service.

‘The economy of the rings is centrally directed and rests on communal decisions alone. Food, fuel, artifacts and services are distributed free, every individual sharing in their production as a matter of obligation. This unusual arrangement possibly springs from the early Russian economy, which also prized group activity above individual enterprise. On the other hand it could have arisen as the best answer to the difficulties of wresting survival from extra-planetary surroundings.

‘We have found out why it is that the metalloids frequently emit UHF. It seems that these emissions are emotional, non-verbal communications. The Sovyans, of course, are unable to communicate by facial expression, possessing nothing you would care to own as a face. We surmise that these UHF transmissions compensate for this deficiency.’

He broke off as Amara suddenly spoke to him. ‘Sarkisov is getting hostile,’ she said. ‘Do you think I’ve pushed him too far?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘He’s been going on about Verednyev again. Claims we’ve got him in a Faraday cage!’ She sounded annoyed.

‘We have got him in a Faraday cage,’ Estru said resignedly. ‘If you think we’re in danger I’ll call Captain Wilce.’

She seemed not to have heard him. ‘There’s something going on,’ she said excitedly. ‘I think he’s talking to someone a long way off. See if you can pick it up, Estru.’

Obediently he tuned his receiver, more elaborate than hers, up and down the scale, trying to find the wavelength Sarkisov was using. Whistlings and hummings, together with momentary babbles of Sovyan Russian, the living background of the rings, assailed his ears. Finally he pin-pointed a transmission which appeared to be beamed directly this way. Several voices were speaking on it, but from the rapid talk he picked out one repeated word.

Kiborg – Kiborg – Kiborg.

Cyborg!

Abruptly the voices stopped. Sarkisov’s head section rotated slightly, as though searching the sky.

Amara spoke up brightly in Sovyan. ‘Well then, we’d be interested in seeing some more public utility installations. What about—’ But Sarkisov cut her off.

‘Instead I would like to see the inside of your installations, the Callan,’ he said brusquely.

‘Well, it’s difficult…’ she said slowly.

‘Where is the difficulty? Our comrade Alexei Verednyev is already there – as a prisoner!’

‘No, no, not a prisoner,’ objected Amara. ‘He is with us by choice. You have spoken to him!’

‘He speaks only when you take him out of the Faraday cage. The rest of the time you keep him in the cage so we cannot hear him. What would you tell us if he could speak freely?’

‘He is not in a Faraday cage,’ Amara lied.

‘I will tell you what I think,’ the Sovyan said calmly. ‘You have told us you are our cousins, creatures like us from a far star. We have accepted your word and answered your questions, expecting to learn of your people in return. But perhaps you have deceived us. It is possible you are cyborgs wearing body-masks, seeking to trick information on Domashnabaza out of us.’

‘Your surmise is completely unjustified,’ she told him. Then she made an aside to Estru. ‘Better call Captain Wilce.’

But before he could do anything Wilce’s own voice came through his earphones. ‘Is anything happening out there? We are being surrounded by Sovyan militia. They have some heavy equipment.’

Sarkisov spoke again. ‘Well, in any case we must take you to a place of safety. There has been a large cyborg attack and there is fighting nearby.’

‘We are sorry to hear it. But we would prefer to withdraw to our ship,’ Amara said coldly.

‘Out of the question. Follow me, please.’

Estru replied to Wilce, ‘We have trouble too, Captain. I think we are being arrested on suspicion of being cyborg spies. We need a rescue party.’

‘Very well.’ Wilce’s tone was clipped and efficient. ‘We’ll pull you out.’

With astonishing speed, four more Sovyans now jetted in to assist Sarkisov. It was useless to try to escape the towering metalloids; compliantly Amara and Estru obeyed Sarkisov’s order and rose from the surface of the asteroid, to be escorted at high velocity on a winding path through the shining rubble.

The journey lasted several minutes, until finally there loomed ahead of them one of the few wholly artificial structures Estru had seen in the rings. It was a huge metal dodecahedron, drifting among the rocks like a giant shimmering diatom, all of two hundred yards in diameter. Suit-men flitted through a single huge portal, reminding Estru of the entrance to a beehive.

He heard Captain Wilce again. ‘I’m sorry, but we’re having trouble getting a party to you. We are under attack ourselves. What’s your situation?’

‘We are approaching a big artificial asteroid,’ Estru told him. ‘Can you see it?’

‘Yes, we have been tracking you. Are you in any immediate danger?’

‘It’s hard to say how decided the Sovyans’ conclusions about us are. It seems the rings have just come under cyborg attack, which has made them edgy.’

‘Understandable. Keep me informed.’

They passed into the dodecahedron. Estru examined the interior with some interest. It was constructed on some complicated open-plan system. From the peripheral walls jutted a maze of metal screens, but the central space, across which Sovyans soared to and fro, was left undivided apart from being criss-crossed by slender retaining girders. Estru found the place impressive.

Now their guards were herding them through the peripheral maze until they arrived at a meshed and gridded cage. For a moment Estru heard Captain Wilce beginning to speak to him again, then he and Amara were both pushed roughly into the cage and the gate closed behind.

He became aware of a sudden deadness in his transceiver.

They were in a Faraday cage, blocking them off from all radio communication.

Up until now Estru had not really been able to think of the Sovyans as anything more than truncated, rather pathetic human beings huddling inside their protective metal encasements. When he had coined the word ‘metalloid’ it had been as a disparaging joke. But the suit-men’s swift and unhesitating actions had changed all that. Suddenly they seemed more capable and intelligent than his prejudices had formerly allowed him to admit. They had become what Amara had always said they were: a new species, wholly at harmony with their own nature.

One small detail during the journey to the dodecahedron had struck him with particular force – the way the antennae arrays surrounding the suit-men’s heads and shoulders automatically shifted and turned as they darted unerringly through the rock fields. It was such a natural movement, yet completely non-human. The Sovyans really had adopted a new form of physical existence.

Yet in a purely technical sense the suits were not even particularly sophisticated. Ziodean technicians could have produced a version half the size and twice as efficient. Still, for their purpose they were fully effective. The biological and the technical parts of the new entity functioned as a unit. Oxygen was required to be imbibed only once every thirty hours, and then only to top up the reserve tank since the suit was able to split exhaled carbon dioxide. ‘Biofood’, a thick fluid whose waste content was minimal, was taken once in ten hours. ‘Technofood’ consisted of a small amount of lubricating oil and energy for the electrical systems, which came from an isotope battery replaced every fifty days and a solar cell back-up.

For the next half-hour Estru and Amara kept themselves busy, adding notes to their running commentaries on everything they saw. The scene put Estru more and more in mind of a beehive – and the Sovyans reminded him particularly of the bullet-bees found on his home planet of Migrat.

He could not deduce the purpose of the dodecahedral building. It contained a great deal of machinery which was being evacuated through the exit as time went on, and the numbers of suit-men in it also decreased. It could, he thought, be a military centre. He reflected that the Sovyans had suffered these attacks for centuries, and presumably knew how to deal with them. The assault would no doubt be followed by a retaliatory raid on Shoji – though the suit-men, being unable to land on the enemy planet, could do little more than bombard its surface.

At length Estru and Amara ran out of remarks to put on record, and still no rescue party arrived from the Callan. They looked at one another. Estru knew that, though she tried not to show it, Amara was even more scared than he was.

‘What do you think’s happened?’ she said hesitantly.

‘I dread to think.’

‘Could the Callan…’

‘Have been captured? It’s possible. But don’t write us off too soon. We haven’t been waiting all that long. Maybe it’s taking Wilce a bit of time to extricate himself.’

‘It will be really awful if—’ she began, and then a gasp of shock caused Estru to look the way her helmet was facing.

One of the dodecahedron’s pentagonal walls was bursting inwards. Through the imploding rent, accompanied by the icy light of the rings, floated a dozen space-rafts crammed with cyborg warriors.

What followed was horrifying. Only a few Sovyans remained in the dodecahedron. The cyborgs swarmed throughout the structure, hunting them down and slaughtering them in a frenetic orgy. The suit-men were shot, burned, battered to junk with huge hammers. They fought back as best they could, occasionally blowing pale bodies to shreds with rocket-driven shells, but they were outnumbered and their situation was hopeless.

The ferocity of it all terrified the two Ziodeans, floating in their cage in frozen fascination. Then a moan of fright escaped Amara as one of the rafts drifted slowly by them only a few yards away.

The gowned figure they had encountered a week earlier stood on the raft. Leisurely the cyborg gangster abbot turned his body to look them over, his cowl thrown back, his face, with its bizarre mouth and black eyes, appearing cruel, supercilious, amused. Estru felt like a hypnotized rabbit.

The yakusa bonze was gross. The loose gown was open and drawn aside so that he could rest his puffy hands on the pommels of two huge curved swords which were thrust into a sash-like belt, to which also were clipped dozens of appurtenances. Swelling over the belt was a vast belly, corrugated and metal-studded.

A semi-circular plate of gold apparently bisected his brain and jutted out from the skull, each half of which sported its own control turret. The psychological implications of that division intrigued Estru, but he had no time to think about it. He felt only relief when the warrior abbot turned away from them, his attention taken by something else.

A captured Sovyan was being goaded across the dodecahedron by jerking cyborgs. The bonze floated up from his raft and went out to his meet his enemy, drawing the two great swords with a swift, vigorous motion.

His divided brain clearly did not detract from his physical prowess. A normal man, in normal gravity, would have needed two hands to control just one of those unwieldy blades, but the bonze, a sword in each hand, executed a dazzling series of movements, using each weapon to counterbalance the torque of the other. Then the shimmering blades whirled like propellers as he fell to destroying the suit-man, slicing through the metal body with astonishing ease. In less than a minute the Sovyan had been hacked to pieces and his gruesome wreckage drifted through the void.

It was impossible not to feel the tribal energy of the exulting cyborgs as the abbot turned his back on the scene, his twin swords smeared with blood and oil, and again approached the Faraday cage.

In panic Amara and Estru retreated to the far side of their prison. The incredible swordblades flashed, hacking their way through the meshed gridwork. A tumult of Japanese babble burst through the Ziodeans’ earphones the instant the wires were scythed away. Then more of the creatures joined in, tearing the cage apart and reaching for its contents. The hysterical babble became deafening.

Then, at that moment, the whole dodecahedron seemed to implode. A great gap was riven in the side of the building. Shrieking hoarsely, the cyborgs turned to face the new threat.

The bulky shape of the Callan was visible hovering beyond the shattered wall. Driveboats were steering themselves into the dodecahedron, firing on the cyborgs and picking them off in dozens. Captain Wilce’s promised rescue party had arrived at last.

Amara patted her frizzled, purple-dyed hair into place. Though badly shaken, she was rapidly recovering her composure.

‘You certainly took your time,’ she chided in a carefully controlled voice.

Knowing how close a thing it had been, Captain Wilce was not inclined to take the reproof as a joke. ‘It was the best we could do,’ he said gravely. ‘We had some nasty moments. The Sovyans managed to do us a bit of damage, I’m afraid. As a matter of fact the arrival of the cyborgs took them off our backs and enabled us to get to you.’

The explorer ship had withdrawn from Domashnabaza. Through the bridge’s observation dome they could see the ring system a couple of million miles away, arcing through space like a rainbow. Wilce, his back to the view, was stuffing herbs into a smoking tube. ‘We’ve spoiled our welcome all round one way and another, I reckon,’ he said equably. ‘It might even be our brush with the cyborg raft that brought on this onslaught. What are your ideas now, Amara?’

‘We’ll move on,’ she said shortly. ‘We’ve collected enough data here to be going on with. It wouldn’t be very easy getting more, anyway. The defence problem, as you point out, Captain.’

She laughed nervously. As they had left she had seen the cyborgs sacking what might have been a nursery or a hospital.

Estru had been gazing at the rings. He turned to her. ‘Before we move shall I release Verednyev?’

Amara frowned. ‘Eh? What for?’

He shrugged. ‘I presume it was our intention eventually.’

‘Well you presume wrong,’ she snapped. ‘These people are nothing but savages, cyborg and Sovyans alike. We’ve right to collect specimens where it bears on the security of Ziode. I want him for study, do you hear? He stays with us!’ She barely refrained from stamping her foot.

Resigned, Estru shrugged again.

Captain Wilce issued orders. The Callan moved into the interstellar velocity bracket. In minutes they had left behind the tiny, dark, forsaken planetary system where, against all the odds, man had survived, and set themselves to go probing yet farther along the Tzist Arm.