The Garments of Caean

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.