The Garments of Caean

‘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.