The Garments of Caean

‘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.