The Garments of Caean

They did not, however, eat the Frachonard suit.

Over the past year it had gained much experience in the monitoring of sentient activity. It had reached the point where it could, if need be, control living systems directly, wherever they stood on the evolutionary scale. What was more, the primitive nervous systems of the flies offered no problems of incompatibility, as had the advanced human one possessed by Castor. The suit, despite its setback, had not abandoned its mission and was in no way faltering or reticent.

It did not collapse or even become slack when Castor disappeared. Instead, it filled itself up with flies, organizing them into a collective pseudo-body which powered it in a stiff mimicry of human action. Falteringly it turned to the closed hatch of the ejector port, and directed the combined efforts of thousands of flies to push loose the dogs. That done, it floated from the ground, entering the chamber and allowing in only as many flies as suited its purpose, leaving the rest to cover the open hatch like a black wall.

Behind it the hatch closed automatically prior to takeoff. The Little Planet swayed into the air to rise rapidly above the fly layer. Minutes later, after opening the inner door of the package ejector port with difficulty, the suit was free and walking the passages of the ship by means of its humming pseudo-body.

In the long corridor beneath the level of the bridge it encountered Gadzha’s girl. She stopped and stood stock-still with a petrified snarl of fear on her face, staring at the apparition: at the suit recently worn by her rapist Castor, but worn now by a body of flies. The head, hands and feet were each composed of a black fuzzy mass. The legs, even though they floated a foot above the floor, persisted in striding slowly in walking fashion as the monster came slowly towards her.

A breathy sound from the girl’s throat signalled her vain attempt to scream. Then, recovering her power of movement, she turned and fled in the direction of the bridge.

The Frachonard suit arrived there scarcely half a minute behind her. Gadzha, Raincoat and Rabbish all froze to see this phantom return, as, for the second time, did the girl.

In the seconds remaining to them only Raincoat had the presence of mind to reach for his gun, a futile gesture he did not even complete.

He did not complete it because the suit released its hold on the flies, sending them exploding in all directions to fill the interior of the bridge. While it collapsed neatly on the floor, the flies began to feast on their victims; but shortly, with the bodies only partly devoured, the suit recalled them again. They streamed back, causing the suit to rise up from the floor as if lifted by a string.

It floated over to the guidance board. The pseudo-hands hovered over the controls; clumsily, exerting all their puny force, the flies began to manipulate them.

The Little Planet changed course and went hurtling obliquely through the Gulf.

The Frachonard suit was in search of its property.

And that property was Peder Forbarth.

10

Ledlide, in terms of geological time, was but recently accreted, a slagheap of a planet still drifting through a miasma of gas, dust and rubble that was the detritus of sister planets yet to form. It orbited a primary which was itself no more than a dimly glowing cloud of gas, more a proto-star than a star in the true sense, yet providing a modicum of heat and gloomy light.

To the Ziodean mind such a remote and dismal spot made an ideal prison site. Ziodeans did not view the social offender as a candidate for reform or rehabilitation. Responsibility for misdeeds was seen as personal and absolute: the criminal got his deserts, and the logical punishment, short of death, was for him to be removed from society, the farther the better.

Accordingly the convict, on his journey to Ledlide, looked back through the prison ship’s viewports and saw the Ziode Cluster receding into the distance. Thus he was made to feel how decidedly he had been rejected.

The Frachonard suit experienced considerable difficulty in locating this six-thousand-mile heap of cosmic garbage. Finding the partially condensed cloud that was Ledlide’s solar system was not so hard, but once within the cloud it was unable to use the ship’s instruments and so had to rely on its own growing powers of apprehension. Guiding the ship at this stage was even more difficult, for the flies having fed on the remains of the bridge’s previous occupants until nothing was left of them, were unused to a human-type atmosphere and were dying off despite the suit’s strict control over their vitality.

Out of Ledlide’s smog-like sky, the Little Planet descended towards the vicinity of the leaden prison roof, which jutted a few feet above the gravelly surface. Drifting northwards, the ship landed just beyond the horizon, behind a low ridge.