The Garments of Caean

‘All right.’ Mast offered his hand. ‘Then our association would appear to be at an end.’

Peder shook hands. ‘To our mutual benefit, I hope.’

‘Of course.’

But still Peder lingered. ‘You know,’ he said diffidently, ‘there are garments here that could work wonders for you. Why don’t you let me? … after all, you’ve never exactly been a mezzak.’ Mezzak was a Caeanic word meaning ‘one who dresses like a baboon’.

Smiling, Mast shook his head. ‘I’ll be frank, Peder. There’s another reason why I’d just as soon off-load. I’ve begun to feel uneasy about holding on to them for too long, though not from any legalistic angle.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, you know what they call the Caeanics, don’t you – clothes robots. This sort of gear gives me an odd feeling. There’s something un-Ziodean about them.’

‘Prejudice, prejudice. Typical Ziodean xenophobia!’

Mast shrugged. ‘Call it what you like. I simply have fixed ideas about what’s healthy. I believe one should stand on one’s own feet and walk without crutches.’

Inwardly Peder sighed. Poor Mast. Dressed in rags and tatters, imagining he was adequate. He had put his finger on the difference between Ziodean and Caeanic cultures, of course. The Ziodean ethos stressed individualism and self-dependence. It was diametrically opposed to the artificial augmentation of qualities and abilities such as occurred on Caean.

All of which, Peder now knew, implied a serious misunderstanding not only of the Caeanic sartorial art, but also of man’s psychological nature.

He turned to Castor and Grawn, who were standing grinning at him crookedly. ‘Well, goodbye then, chaps,’ he said.

‘Yeah, have fun,’ responded Castor, his reconstituted eyes glittering.

As he departed, Peder heard their muffled sniggers behind him.

‘Looks like Peder can pull himself together after all, when he has to,’ Castor sneered when the sartorial had gone.

‘You noticed it too, did you?’ Mast remarked. ‘His change of manner? There’s a word for that. It’s called mien. The Caeanic suit does that for him.’

He fell into thought. It had been on board the Costa that he had first begun to have second thoughts about the garments. Castor and Grawn, bedizened in their new finery, had suddenly started to adopt uncharacteristic mannerisms – nothing all that drastic, initially anyway, but enough to persuade him that Caeanic wear was as much a risk to one’s mental health as it was said to be. He had forbidden them to wear anything but Ziodean clothes ever since.

He looked up. ‘Take the rest of the stuff out to the van, fellows. We’ll move out anyway, just in case.’

He hoped the fence would soon take this junk off his hands.

The morning was now bright and full. Peder relaxed contentedly, gazing through the autocab window as Cadra went speeding past him.

How easy it was to solve problems!

But he would never have done it without the Frachonard suit – Mast, he believed, would not have allowed it. Peder would have dithered, would have felt impelled to go along with whatever Mast decided.

Even as he talked to Mast new horizons had opened up before him. Business possibilities which he had been too timid to spot until now became visible all around him. He would soon be moving out of Tarn Street. Zoide was his playground.

Which was as it should be, for a member of a galactic elite, one of the best-dressed men in the universe.

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?’