The Garments of Caean

Was his type common? Probably not – Amara’s guess was that it was very rare, and that such as there were kept the vice secret. News of a Ziodean woman would bring them running, of course.

Taking his courage in both hands, Holosk clutched at her skirt and began to mouth the Caeanic equivalent of obscene sex talk.

‘Unclothe me,’ he begged in a hot breathless voice. ‘Undrape me, disrobe me, leave me naked! Strip me, peel me, expose me! Unlace, untie, unbutton and undo me! Oh, take my clothes off!’

Giggling, she obliged him while he lay back shivering in a near-swoon. Then he whimpered in ecstasy while she helped him to do the same to her.

13

Every creature having a complex nervous system makes use of body image. Body image is self image: the creature’s knowledge of its own physical existence, a knowledge which hovers between conscious and pre-conscious perceptions. It has been a matter of argument as to whether body image has a genetic basis, or whether it results from conditioning. Experiments designed to resolve the question have subjected human volunteers to total amnesia and then attempted to induce them to accept alternative images, of animals or robot waldos, as their own. Results were never conclusive, due to the difficulty of occluding the volunteer’s own body with another body, and also to the mentally deranging effects of the drugs used. Some subjects reported that they had ‘dreamed’ they were the replacement body – a dog, a bear, in one case, even, a butterfly.

Pliability of body image is clearly of interest in the study of bodily adornment, a feature of all human cultures. In the case of Caean it would seem to be specially important. Is Caean a proliferation of divergent body images? Are the Caeanics dreamers, lost in a state of hypnotic sleep, imagining that they are exotic and arcane as suggested by their apparel? These questions remain to be answered by social science.

List’s Cultural Compendium

The Tzist Arm contained in excess of ten million suns. The section covered by Caean alone embraced one million. Among that million were about a hundred inhabited worlds, connected by threads of commerce and nationality: phantasmagoric sodalities, fantastic fetishes, cultural displays which bedecked planets like floral growths.

Peder made his way in Caeanic society with automatic ease. The suit he wore meant that he was treated with utmost respect everywhere he went. Whether people realized it was a Frachonard suit he was wearing, let alone the one that had gone missing, he did not know. Here, where style was understood, such questions were not asked. The suit had found its wearer; he was the acme, social man made perfect. That was all there was to it.

That was, indeed, all there was to it. As Peder sank deeper into Caeanic ways an inhuman detachment came over him. The suit, having indulged him for a while, sent him on his travels again, wandering from star to star, tending always, as if by chance, towards the other end of Caean.

In the city of Quetzkol he one day happend to stroll beneath a continuous stone awning that sheltered a long esplanade paved with hexagonal grey flagstones. The farther end of the esplanade broke into a cascade of descending ledges that resembled the slope of a ziggurat. It was here, standing staring at him, that he saw the first of his brothers: a wearer of one of the other four existing Frachonard suits.