The Garments of Caean

‘Not yet, Amara. I don’t think I’m ready for it. I still wouldn’t be able to bear it.’

‘All right,’ she said, making no attempt to hide her displeasure. ‘But just try to understand that you’ve got to make an effort. Before long we’ll be cutting down your medications to absolutely nothing. Then you’ll have to learn to face us. You’re got to live as we do.’

Maybe I’ll take his mock-up away altogether, she thought as she left. It’s time he did without a funk-hole.

Back in her section, she faced up brazenly to Estru’s scepticism. ‘He’ll adjust in the end,’ she assured him. ‘Learning to walk in only three months is pretty good going, if you think about it.’

‘But you said he’d be strolling through the ship by now and chatting to the crew,’ Estru reminded her.

‘He will. The important thing is that he’s realized there’s no other way out for him. He’s co-operating.’

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt he’ll make some sort of adjustment in the end. Then when we stop filling him with drugs he’ll be able to perceive his situation clearly for a change. A week later he’ll commit suicide. I doubt if lifelong conditioning can ever be permanently set aside.’

‘Then we won’t stop giving him drugs,’ Amara countered. ‘We’ll find a balance, whatever keeps him sane.’

She cut off any further talk on the subject. There were more important things to do than to argue over the Verednyev experiment. The latest field research report to be delivered by the ‘planetary probes’ (as she called her spies) lay on her desk. She leafed through it attentively before speaking on the vidcom to the head of her staff in the adjoining room.

‘Has this report been taped yet?’

‘All ready to roll, Amara.’

‘Right, run it through to me.’

She and Estru turned to their official terminal and watched a flow of symbols and diagrams (the specialized jargon of their trade) dance across the screen. ‘Leave it keyed in,’ Amara told her staffman. ‘I’ll integrate the results myself.’

Her hands moved over the keys, instructing the sociological computer (the department’s main piece of hardware) to integrate the report’s findings into all the rest of the data they had gathered so far. Then they both sat back and studied the emerging updated pattern.

‘Well, it’s shaping up as I had expected,’ Amara congratulated herself. She stopped at the summation diagram, a graph displaying various curves and coded figures. ‘See, the habit-cohesiveness index is down – less rigidity. The Ries-Hammond factor is down, too. The implication is quite clear – the “Sovyan effect” is beginning to abate.’

‘But the sartorial index is increasing,’ Estru commented. ‘Apparel is richer in variety and content.’

Amara nodded. ‘Of course it is. As the more restrictive consequences of the Sovyan experience fall away, the basic Sovyan mode manifests itself in a compensatory blossoming of sartorial techniques. Somewhere farther along the Tzist Arm – mid-way along it, perhaps – I think we shall see a culmination of Caeanic culture; clothes-consciousness will reach its peak. Then that, too, will decline as we proceed towards the farther end of the Arm. We can predict that the people at the extremity – those farthest from the seminal Sovyan event – will be almost normal. That’s what we can extrapolate from these figures, anyway.’

Estru grunted. ‘The Directorate will be interested to hear that.’

‘They will indeed,’ Amara nodded emphatically. ‘If the planets at the farther end of the Arm turn out to be closer to us in outlook than to more typical Caeanics – as I think they will – they will provide us with a lever for subversion.’

She sighed with satisfaction, feeling the excitement of expanding knowledge. Sovya had given her an anchor-point from which to forecast a whole range of Caeanic characteristics right along the Tzist Arm. It thrilled her to see her predictions being borne out by observation.

Privately Estru was more cautious. For the past few months, under heavy baffle to avoid detection, they had been scouting along the inner curve of the Tzist Arm, taking ‘cultural sounding samples’ from the more accessible inhabited planets. This they did by stealthily dropping trained observers, Caeanic-speaking and wearing Caean-made garments, who were supposed to index certain ‘cultural variables’ identified according to parameters chosen by Amara herself. Surprisingly, all the agents had so far returned safely. Amara swore that the method was reliable and objective, and Estru did not dare to contradict her, but sometimes he amused himself by imagining what sort of picture a similar operation carried out on Ziode would produce.

‘What’s the itinerary now?’ he said as Amara cancelled the summation diagram from the terminal. For an answer she keyed a map of the Tzist Arm on to the screen. Wandering along part of the inner curve ran a jagged line, each kink and angle marked by a symbol and denoting a planet they had surveyed.