The Garments of Caean

‘Most human beings would have seen no alternative but to die in such a hopeless situation. This system is not a fit abode for human life. There are no habitable worlds. There is only one planet where man can set foot at all – Shoji, a tiny world a short distance sunward of here. These old enemies, however, were both of them peoples possessed of an unusual tenacity. They both developed remarkable, though different, adaptations to their circumstances. And they both, after a fashion, survived.

‘The Russian survival tactic we have already seen in the society of the suit-people. The Japanese solution was something else again. They were already in possession of Shoji, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, arid, cold, with a thin unbreathable atmosphere, and totally inhospitable. To survive these horrid conditions the Japanese “cyborgated” themselves, that is to say, they redesigned the human body, blending it with artificial machine-organs.’

She played the cyborg pictures again. ‘Respiratory, vascular and homeostatic systems have all been entirely replaced, and there have been serious inroads also into the nervous and hormonal systems. Remarkable as it seems, these modifications can adapt the human organism to the most unlikely of environments, including the void, without any need of protective covering. The surface of Shoji is their natural habitat, but they make frequent forays into space, usually in order to attack the descendants of the Russians – that is to say, the suit-people.

‘Alexei Verednyev has not been too forthcoming about cyborg life, but what details I have gleaned from him are fascinating. The cyborg ethos would seem to be a fairly direct derivative of certain strains of Earth Japanese culture, going on what little we know of the latter. Here we have a yakusa bonze.’

She stopped the tape at the picture of the cowled figure on the space raft. ‘A bonze is a religious priest; yakusa originally meant gangster. Religion and gangsterism seem to have gone hand in hand in Japan; a yakusa organization led by a Buddhist abbot once forcibly took over the Japanese government. Though it’s rather hard to say whether the cyborgs still have religion, the individual in the cowl is doubtless by way of being a “warrior monk” wielding considerable power.

‘The cyborg culture is fanatical and aggressive. To a cyborg, death means nothing. Suicide missions against enemies – which necessarily means the suit-people, of course – are traditional. It’s a pity we can’t take time off to investigate them fully, but that would be too lengthy a digression from our main task. We lack so much of the starting data, anyway. We don’t even have a record of the Japanese language, for instance.’

Captain Wilce interrupted in surprise. ‘Why is that, Amara? After all, you can speak Russian well enough.’

Amara smiled indulgently. ‘Most aboriginal Earth cultures are a closed book to us, as it happens. Remember that cultures tend to be mutually exclusive; they don’t like being crowded together on one planet. When the expansion into the galaxy took place they demonstrated their natural magnetic repulsion for one another. They separated out on a large scale. Our knowledge of ancient Earth is confined mostly to the culture called the Euro-American, from which both Tzist and Ziode are descended. There must also be regions of the galaxy dominated by the Japanese, the Arabs, the Afros and so on – all peoples with whom we have no contact. The cyborgs are an oddity, a remnant of a war the Japanese lost.’

The screen died as she switched off the playback.

‘Now let’s see what we can deduce from these facts. Although we have no proof of it as yet, I think we can take it for granted that at some date in the past some of the suit-people escaped from this system and migrated farther along the Tzist Arm. Possibly they managed to build a relativistic drive, or perhaps Sovya was discovered by later explorers who took them along as passengers or captives. In time the suit-people abandoned their suits and colonized habitable planets, becoming human again. They became, in fact Caeanic civilization; there is little doubt that the Sovyan phenomenon is the source of the entire Caeanic aberration!’

Her words provoked a stir among the ship’s officers. ‘You mean the Caeanics are all descendants of these Sovyans?’ Navigator Hewerl asked.

‘No, not all by any means. The Sovyans were the first settlers, the cultural matrix to which later migrants had to conform. This is usually the case when new territories are opened up. The first culture to arrive pre-empts all options and absorbs later arrivals. In the process some watering-down of the original aberration occurs of course, but – God, you can imagine what it must have been like when the Sovyans first came out of their suits.