The Garments of Caean

Castor backed to the door. Unwisely, Peder lunged forward, grappling with him in an attempt to get the suit off him. To his surprise Castor turned the knife aside to avoid doing him any harm. The thief began to utter outraged grunts.

The jacket was half off when Peder suddenly broke away from the tussle and flung himself sobbing to the other side of the room.

‘Take it,’ he groaned. ‘Take it from me! Let me be free of it! It won’t own me any more. Ohhh …’

Agonized, he fought the urge to retrieve the suit, but he knew he couldn’t hold out for long. Seeing it there before him was like being a junkie on withdrawal.

‘Take it! Go!’

‘Sure,’ mumbled Castor, and he edged to the door, opened it and slipped through. The door closed again. He was gone. The suit was gone.

Peder collapsed on to the palliasse. An arid desolation overtook him. He was free, and empty, and dead.

He couldn’t really understand why the suit had let it happen. Why hadn’t it immediately induced Castor to discard it? He would have expected the suit to have rejected Castor straight away.

Then he understood. In the first place the suit did not make decisions on its own account. It merely mobilized the faculties of the wearer. Secondly its influence over Castor would be weak until he had worn it for a while. How it would ultimately affect Castor, a person for whom it was totally unfitted, he did not like to think.

After a while Peder tried to leave the room. The door was locked. Castor had trapped him.

He went back to the palliasse, sat down and waited.

9

Castor, immediately on waking, jumped out of bed and pulled on the suit with savage speed. It was always that way now. The suit didn’t like him to be awake and not wearing it; sometimes he was even obliged to sleep in it.

But Castor didn’t mind. He didn’t care what the suit did, as long as it helped him to get the one thing he really wanted above all.

As long as it got him to Caean.

He sat on the edge of his bed, stretching his greasy face into a yawn. Then he jumped up and began to jerk his body in an awkward parody of physical exercise. That done, he wiped his face with a wet cloth, got rid of his stubble with some shaving cream, and devoured a scanty breakfast of blue milk and germ bread.

Feeling better, he stepped from the shack where he had been living for the past week. The shack stood on waste ground at the edge of Kass, a ragged town on Vence, a tattered planet on the fringe of Ziode where the star cluster straggled off into the Tzist Gulf. To one side of him were the domes and humps of Kass. To the other the flat terrain was punctuated by spear trees: tall, straight masts, lacking branch or leaf, that stood out against the whorl-like, bluish-tinted sunrise.

Castor had done a considerable amount of wandering since stealing the suit. But Vence was to be his last stop in Ziode. If all went well, today he would plunge into the Gulf towards Caean.

What he would do when he got to Caean was something his mind had not dwelled on with any clarity. The suit did not encourage that degree of deliberation. It amused him, though, to think that in traversing the Gulf he would be passing – at a distance of some light years, of course – the prison planet of Ledlide where both Peder Forbarth and Realto Mast were incarcerated. Castor smiled every time he recalled how neatly he had tricked Forbarth, locking him in the hideout and alerting the authorities as to his whereabouts. The one-time sartorial was on Ledlide for life, which in a way was surprising because Mast himself had only drawn twenty years.

Castor had to admit that his act was an unprincipled one, but tying up loose ends was a matter of simple prudence, after all.

He stumbled once or twice as he crossed the waste ground, as though his nervous system was not firing in proper sequence. The Frachonard suit fitted him badly. At first he had simply pinned it up to take out some of the slack and shorten the limbs, intending to have it tailored later. After a while he had been puzzled to find that the suit seemed to have shrunk; if he wasn’t fussy about his appearance (and Castor wasn’t fussy) he could wear it without pins, even though the suit still flopped and hung askew on him, making him look as if he was being moved like a puppet, on strings. Castor wasn’t fussy.

It had other strange effects on him, too. Made for a man of Peder Forbarth’s type, it was badly attuned to him – or he to it. It caused him to break into fits of nervous tics and twitches, and to undergo deranged mental episodes. Castor, accustomed to following his impulses without enquiring where they came from, scarcely noticed.