The Garments of Caean

‘You don’t need that. There’s a quicker method. Just take his clothes off him. Caeanics can’t stand to be naked. It reduces them to some kind of animal state and you can do anything you like with them – I’ve seen it before. I told you, they’re not like us.’

The chairman hesitated, then replaced the hypodermic in the drawer. He nodded to two of those who sat with him. They rose to their feet and approached Peder, their naked bodies, so pale and flabby, filling him with a purely physical revulsion.

The cellar oppressed him. He should have felt relief at his reprieve, but instead another, deeper terror had taken hold of him. The terror of being disrobed, of being made to go naked in front of these men. To stand naked, stripped of his Frachonard suit! No, no, he could not permit it, it was impossible, he could not!

‘The succinyl!’ he shouted desperately. ‘I’ll take the succinyl!’

They all laughed. Then, as they laid hands on him, something snapped. A feeling of gigantic orgasmic release ripped through every fibre of his body. It was like a sudden discharge between the electrodes of an arc light, an eruption of unsuspected power, and everything seemed to go dim, his perception to withdraw itself, to enter a far darkness. He was only aware, in a vague and incomplete manner, that blinding shocks of energy were vibrating through the room and creating turmoil.

He must briefly have lost consciousness. When he came to he was still standing, and was still unmolested. The cellar looked as if a small explosion had gone off in it. The backcloth bearing the Ziodean starburst was burning. The table and chairs had been overturned, the Zealots having been flung about the room like rag dolls. The air carried a strong acid smell of electrostatic discharge.

At first Peder was too nonplussed to know what to do. Then, quietly and carefully, he moved about the cellar, examining the forms of the unconscious Zealots.

The first two he looked at – the same two who had attempted to undress him – were apparently dead. He moved to a third, but at the same time heard a groan behind him.

He turned. Two other Zealots had been stunned, not killed. Now they lurched to their feet and staggered at Peder, their eyes feral with hatred.

Peder knew how to react without knowing why. He clamped a hand to each man’s forehead. He felt a vibration issuing from his palms, passing through skin, skull and brain.

They both fell back dead.

He took one last look round the cellar to make sure there were no more survivors. Then he left, closing the steel door behind him, and mounted the steps to the hallway on the ground floor.

Lieutenant Burdo and his colleague were surprised to see Peder. Wordlessly he beckoned them, his Prossim-sleeved arm moving in a smooth, repetitive arc. They obeyed him involuntarily, though their hands hovered nervously near their guns.

Again using the palms of his hands, Peder killed them.

He decided to leave the house by the front to avoid the chauffeur waiting at the back. There was no sound in the building as he walked softly through it; it appeared deserted. The front door opened on to a short flight of steps giving direct access to the street.

Calmly Peder closed the door behind him and walked towards the centre of Gridira.

It was now early morning and the street was light. Suddenly Peder felt utterly drained. He had never felt so feeble and exhausted. It took a superhuman effort just to put one foot in front of another.

Sugar! He had to have sugar!

He put a hand to his face. The skin hung loose, all the flesh gone from his cheeks. He knew he was the same all over. He was a gaunt travesty of himself, his chubbiness lost in the explosion of energy in the cellar.

For that energy had not come from the suit, as he had at first presumed, but from himself. Like some sea monster he had discharged a lethal wattage of electricity, and to gain that unnatural level of power his body had drawn on all its reserves of fat, instantly converting it – and a good deal of protein – into a controlled, momentary blast.

That the suit could manage his body in such a fashion was a startling development. Had it a mind of its own? Was it alive, inhabiting him like a parasitical creature – or rather, symbiote? Peder still did not think so. He did not believe that the suit was sentient or that it had any powers of its own. For all its incredible qualities it was only a work of art which aroused the dormant powers of its wearer. It was, he concluded, a psychological template: his abilities flowed into it and were shaped and adapted by it. In time, flowing more freely, they could bring about even such remarkable physical effects as he had just witnessed.

Such was his explanation. The suit sometimes seemed to rule him, he decided, because it aroused the powers of his unconscious, and as every psychiatrist knows, a man’s subconscious is a stranger to him.