The Garments of Caean

Peder was just disappearing through a magenta arcade. Mast, gulping down the last of the goldbread, ran after him, calling his name in astonishment.

‘What are you doing here, Peder?’

Peder stopped, glancing after the retreating backs of his companions. He did not seem at all surprised to see Mast. ‘I am glad that you are broadening your mind by travel, Realto,’ he said, ‘but you really must get yourself some decent clothes.’

‘What? But this is the frock-coat you made for me, Peder. Don’t you remember? The trews are your work, too.’ He held his arms akimbo, displaying the garments.

‘Tawdry rags. You deserve better. You should dress like a Frachonard. And so you shall. I must go now, Realto. We have business to attend to. When I return I shall have something better for you to wear.’

‘You have business here, Peder? Where are you going?’ He paused, trying to think of some topic to detain the other. ‘Amara Corl thinks this planet is Caean’s wellspring.’

Peder smiled. ‘Not so, Realto. The wellspring is farther off. A secret, holy place.’

‘Oh?’ Mast opened his eyes wide in excitement. ‘Tell me more!’

But Peder padded away, ignoring Mast’s further questions.

Mast stood dazed and perplexed. The strangeness of this twittering city, with its crystalline purple atmosphere, its mass psychosis, struck him anew. Something was going on here. But what?

Cautiously, keeping his distance, he began to follow the five sartorial brothers.

‘You’re sure about this?’ frowned Amara, looking suspiciously at Mast.

By now she had been able to confirm for herself, from her probes’ first tentative talk-back, that Yomondo was an insane city.

‘I’ve told you what Forbarth said,’ Mast replied. ‘It agrees so perfectly with your theory. Besides, what’s Forbarth doing here? What’s he up to? I’ve already said there’s something special about that suit he wears. Why did the Caeanics try to recover it from Kyre? I’m pretty confident that’s what they were after. And here are five of them, all together in a bunch.’

He was still out of breath from running nearly all the way back to the Callan. He had followed Peder and his group out of the city to a rendezvous in the forest, where they had entered a battered space freighter hidden beneath the cover of the huge ferns. Nearby Mast had found a camouflaged warehouse filled with stringy plant fibre. To his mind it all fitted together. He felt positive that Peder had been doomed to pursue his enigmatic quest from the very moment he had first put on the suit.

‘It could be possible,’ Amara mused. ‘Other cultures have had holy places – holy groves, holy cities, holy continents even, whose locations were secret and which ordinary people were never allowed to visit, and certainly not foreigners. So why not a secret holy planet?’

‘Peder said something else odd, too.’

‘What was that?’

‘He said when he came back he would dress me like a Frachonard. That’s a historic figure. Their greatest-ever sartorial.’

‘This suit must be some sort of totem-figure,’ Estru said. ‘Perhaps if you wear it you can visit the secret grove.’

Amara nodded. ‘Possibly the suit is part of some quasi-religious rite that takes place on the secret planet. We were so close, and we missed it!’ She brought to mind her brief meeting with Forbarth on Verrage, and tried to recollect if she had noticed anything unusual about his suit. It had looked comparatively ordinary, she recalled.

‘If nothing else you might discover the source of Prossim,’ Mast said. ‘But if you’re going to discover anything at all you’ll have to move now. I nearly broke my guts getting back here in a hurry. Leave it any longer and you won’t be able to pick up Forbarth’s ship.’

Amara snapped her fingers at Estru. ‘He’s right. Get on to Captain Wilce. And call in the probes immediately.’

Within minutes the Callan took off again, its sensors searching surrounding space until they found the ancient freighter that had recently departed. The ship’s baffles came full on. Locked on the Caeanic merchantman, keeping it just within sensor range, the Ziodeans followed their prey.

15

The owner-captain of the harvester ship was a brooding man who spoke but seldom. His Prossim garments covered him like a protective shell, whorl patterns in their purple-and-heliotrope stripe generating intense moiré effects. The eye was befuddled whenever he moved; he seemed at times to disappear, to leave the ship with an impression of emptiness, of lack of pilotage.

The journey occupied two days and took them well beyond the bounds of inhabited space. During that time the five men in Frachonard suits either wandered separately through the rusty, echoing freighter, or else sat silently together around a table. It was a period of introspection, confused daydreams vying with vacancy of mind, each keeping his mental state locked away from the others. The captain kept to the bridge, only occasionally venturing into the saloon to sit in the presence of his passengers, looking like a glowing purple lobster, awed and unspeaking.