The Garments of Caean

Peder located a hidden square in the floor and lifted it. In a space beneath were the pass keys Grashnik had manufactured so painstakingly over the years. Peder took them out, briefly inspecting each one and placing them in various pockets. Then he pulled away a section of wall on the opposite side of the chamber. The roughly cut sheeting came loose easily, revealing a gap between the floor of this level and the ceiling of the level below them.

Grashnik had stopped breathing by the time Peder beckoned to Mast to follow him, and they set forth on the lifer’s slow, persistent project: a route to the surface.

It took them nearly three hours of crawling, dodging and ducking, of fiddling with Grashnik’s sometimes faulty pass keys, before they came to the hatchway he had built into the outer perimeter wall. Nearby, in an improvised locker, they found the breathing set.

‘One of us will have to go first, and return for the other,’ Mast said.

Peder paused. He filled his lungs, breathing deeply as if experimenting with his respiratory system. ‘It may not be necessary,’ he murmured. ‘Ledlide’s atmosphere contains some oxygen. Not enough to sustain one normally … but I may be able to manage. You don’t mind if I lean on you to save my energy? Occasionally I may ask for a lungful of air from your mouthpiece. If I should collapse, carry me the rest of the way to the ship …’

‘But you can’t live out there,’ Mast objected.

‘Do as I say.’

‘How long will it take us to get to this ship?’

‘I don’t know.’

Thinking him mad, Mast donned the breathing set. The Frachonard suit slowed down Peder’s metabolism to a minimum as they went through the tiny airlock Grashnick had built. Ledlide’s young atmosphere was thick and cloying, filled with unpleasant gases. By the light of a torch, also supplied by courtesy of Grashnik, they found a low-roofed tunnel, and then the fissure, made scalable by metal ladders hammered into the rock.

Steadily, foot by foot, they began to climb.

11

Casting off one’s body and assuming larval form was, after all, something the human mind could not be expected to take without strain. Amara admitted this as she peered anxiously through the window of Alexei Verednyev’s chamber. Alexei, sans suit, filled to the eyeballs with de-sensitizing drugs, was tottering about his prison in a daze.

The surgical revamping given him by the Callan’s medical section had left him seriously ill. His limbs were new, grown in a gene tank since his original ones had been too atrophied to be of use. Some of the torso and neck muscles had also been replaced, while others had been coaxed to work against the pull of normal gravity by an extensive course of massage and protein injection. His present digestive system would probably never be able to absorb normal food, and therefore there was talk of replacing that also with a new alimentary canal.

But the physical problems were nothing to the psychological ones. Alexei’s rebirth would not have been endurable at all had he not been subjected to a process known as ‘neutralized effect’. This technique, accomplished by a combination of hypnosis and a whole battery of psyche-controlling drugs, robbed all experience of emotive content, so that anything, however bizarre or traumatic, was viewed with the same complacent equanimity. The drug dosages were supposed to be decreased by stages as Alexei grew accustomed to his condition, but in practice the withdrawal simply could not be carried out at the planned rate without his quickly regressing into what Estru flippantly termed ‘the horror syndrome’.

In deciding to undertake the experiment Amara had acted from mixed motives, not all of which could be subsumed under the heading of scientific curiosity. When speaking to her team she had reasoned that it would be a useful exercise in researching ‘the mentality of encasement’. Possibly it would give them a line on how to decondition the Caeanic aberration. But she was also prompted by a genuine compassion for the hulking metalloid, who was cut off for ever from his own kind and could not even negotiate the ship without help, – or so she had told herself; she had also conceived an aggravation with him, an exasperated feeling that he would not really co-operate until he had been cut down to size.

In one corner of the chamber stood a mock-up of the suit Verednyev had once possessed, into which he was permitted to retreat in moments of stress. With old-man weariness he leaned briefly against a wall, then made for this refuge. Amara spoke to him quickly, using the outside microphone.

‘You’re looking well today, Alexei. How are you feeling?’

As she had intended, he halted his retreat to the mock-up. ‘As well as could be expected, Amara,’ he said dully, keeping his face averted. Even his own voice, vibrating directly on the air without the mediation of radio transducers, sounded alien to him.

‘Good,’ she responded briskly. ‘I’d like to come in so we can talk face to face. How about it?’