The Garments of Caean

And today, of course, was the day of the Frachonard Prossim suit.

The great occasion of trying on the suit should be approached with care and respect. He washed slowly and powdered himself, and ate a leisurely breakfast before choosing his accessories: a lemon-coloured shirt with ruffled front and piped cuffs, silk underpants with a flowered pattern in gold thread, hand-knitted socks of real lambswool, and shoes of soft black leather with gold buckles.

His heart pounding with anticipation, he descended to his workshop and donned the accessories there. Momentarily, his hands trembled.

Then he reached for the hanger and dressed himself in the Frachonard suit, feeling instantly its electrifying effect.

Wonderful, wonderful! It fitted as well as if Frachonard had measured him up for it personally. The waistcoat was a superb personality support, making him feel erect, strong and alert. The trousers were lank and only slightly flared, like the fairings of a transsonic rocket, and gave him the extraordinary feeling of being long-legged and energetic. Under the prompting of this feeling he strode from one side of the cellar to the other and back again, the jacket’s subtlety of line helping to control his movements, eliminating the slight awkwardness of gait that normally plagued him.

Stopping to view himself in the full-length mirror, he felt the suit appropriating his personality, taking it over and remedying its defects, forming his new interface with the exterior world. Here was a new Peder Forbarth, upright, rational and aware, the kind of Forbarth he liked to imagine, now in possession of his latent qualities. Even his face was artfully transformed. The same open, pleasant-enough expression was there, but the eyes held a new directness. The pliability and vacillation were gone, to be replaced by an unmistakable air of ability. Even the pudginess of jowl, which before had given an impression of weakness, now reappeared as the full-fleshed look of someone who had learned how to make his way in the world.

How could anyone attired in a Frachonard suit gainsay the tenets of Caeanic philosophy? Man’s naturally evolved form was adventitious, lumpy and incomplete, and it did not fit his creative inner powers. If he was to exteriorize these dormant inner powers then he must acquire the appropriate interfaces with reality. Only then could he confront the universe in his true garb, become the creature of effective thought and action he should be, and experience all possible realms of existence.

But the evolution of his physical form beyond the status of the hairless ape could not be left to blind biological forces. It had to be done by conscious art. In a word, it was to be accomplished by means of raiment.

As he gazed upon his image these ideas, which previously he had never taken seriously, carrying as they did the taint of foreign subversion, struck him with full force. With every glance he discovered dazzling new effects. He thought he saw in the mirror’s depths the foreshadowing of the future god-man, fearlessly apparelled, flashing through the galaxies, impinging by virtue of his glorious vesture on any circumstance. Who could compare such splendour with the sodden clay that was unclothed man?

An ecstatic thought came to him. He was now the best-dressed man in Ziode; and presumably, among the five best-dressed men in Ziode and Caean put together, Frachonard having made only five Prossim suits.

He was, therefore, one of the five best-dressed men in the universe.

He seemed to go dizzy, the room spinning and the harmonic colours of the suit becoming momentarily kaleidoscopic.

The delirium left him as he turned away from the mirror. All at once he realized that the problem that had plagued him minutes before was trivial. There was no need to make an issue of Mast’s scheming obliqueness. It would be a simple matter for Peder to take his cut of the proceeds in kind, disposing of it as he saw fit, and severing all connection with his partners. Mast could then do as he liked.

He went back upstairs and dialled for an autocab, taking out three large suitcases from his storeroom while he waited for it to arrive.

All would be well. He stood in front of his shop, looking up through the plate window. The sun had already risen, but on Harlos the stars remained visible until several hours after dawn. The Ziode Cluster covered nearly half the purplish-green sky, a giant fluorescent puff-ball with a hazy atmosphere of less closely-packed suns. Among the thousands of stars in that puff-ball, nearly a hundred inhabited planets made up the Ziode nation. Beyond it could be discerned the rainbow-like wisp of the Tzist Arm; beyond that, the rest of the galaxy made an even dimmer background to it all.