The Garments of Caean

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.

Peder examined the other suit. In superficial style it might have been thought much like his own, but he knew that philosophically the two were radically apart. ‘A different paradigm,’ he thought to himself. The suit denoted a man of unbending will, a man who set his face in one direction and never retraced his steps. In keeping with this paradigm it had one accessory Peder’s lacked: a sinister hat with a wide brim, low and flat, in whose shadow the man’s eyes were cold, grey and hard.

Peder paced the length of the esplanade to meet him. ‘I am Peder Forbarth,’ he said.

‘I am Otis Weld,’ the other replied. His voice was deep and brusque, with a metallic timbre. ‘We have been waiting for you. But time is not important. A forest takes time to grow.’

Peder’s conversation was without any un-necessary verbiage. ‘You know where to find the others?’

‘One more resides already here in Quetzkol. We shall take ship to meet the others. A symposium will be arranged. When the petals of the flower are joined, the whole plant flourishes.’

They made their way through the city. The architecture of Quetzkol was quite unlike that of any other Caeanic city, being redolent of the style referred to as the Incan or Aztec. Flat, grey horizontal slabs slotted and criss-crossed to create a three-dimensional maze. Rakish tiers piled into one another, forming countless interstices that served as streets and passages. The unremittingly clean outlines, the lustrous grey of the building material, all gave an impression of decisiveness and willpower. Above, the sky reflected back a clear, watery blue.

Quetzkol’s idiosyncratic character was typical of this end of Caean. It was as if evolution had started anew in numerous local enclaves, using not biological forms but creatures of cloth and dye. There was Palco, whose people were robed in cool saffron and spent their lives placidly and calmly, reflecting on thoughts that could not have been conceived outside Palco. There was Farad, whose inhabitants wore only blue in all its shades and cognates and fought a ritualized war whose motives would have been incomprehensible to the Ziodean mind. There were the Cabsoloms, absorbed in a new type of sculpture equally enigmatic. And here in Quetzkol there was this stoic severity, exemplified par excellence by Weld himself. Nowhere was the carefree hedonism of Verrage to be found. There was passivity; there was also febrile activity which extended in unthought-of directions. But even there, a kind of inactivity reigned within the activity, a submission to action rather than an initiating of action.

Peder was close now to the very verge of Tzist.

‘I see that much Prossim is worn here in Quetzkol,’ he remarked as they walked. ‘Almost to the exclusion of anything else.’

‘True. Who would wish to wear other fabrics when perfection is available?’

‘How soon can I meet our other companion?’

‘I shall arrange for him to visit the sodality I own.’

Peder was puzzled. ‘One does not own sodalities,’ he said.

‘I do,’ Weld told him.

‘Are you then, by any chance, yourself an exponent of the sartorial art?’

‘Not professionally. Occasionally I make experiments for my own amusement.’

‘Your sodality is one of these?’

‘Yes.’

Weld took him to a cool, unpretentious building, a flat grey slab buried in a mass of flat grey slabs. The interior consisted of a single room having the same shape as the slab itself. Peder quickly learned not to touch any extrusion such as the doorframe with his bare hands. The edges were as sharp as a knife.

A few members of Weld’s sodality arrived and sat silently, making no greeting to Weld. To Peder’s eye their suits were cruder versions of Weld’s own, except that the fabric had a leaden sheen to it and seemed very substantial. Their faces, too, were stern and uncompromising, though unlike Weld they went bare-headed.

‘There is a unique character to my sodality,’ Weld said. ‘Let me show you.’ He beckoned one of his members forward, and bent back the cloth of the man’s sleeve.

‘Cutaneous raiment,’ he explained. ‘I have integrated garments into the cuticle, taking the place of the epidermis. They are part of the person – or more strictly, the person is the biological content of the raiment. They can not be removed.’

Peder felt the metallic texture of the Prossim, noting where it was joined to the skin of the member’s wrist, then let his hand fall. ‘It is an aberration,’ he said in a supercilious tone while the member stood there stony-faced. ‘The essence of the Art of Attire is that one is not bound to a single shape. Thousands of paradigms are offered to the individual by his sartorial. Your invention reverts to pre-Caeanic biological forms of evolution, where every creature had but a single nature.’

‘Quite right, it is an aberration,’ Weld agreed. ‘Yet it is an interesting diversion. It would have displeased me not to see this possibility explored.’ He waved the member away, then picked up an object lying on a nearby table. ‘You’re from the Verrage sector, aren’t you? Have you ever seen anything like this before?’

He handed Peder a circular mirror, which at first appeared perfectly ordinary except perhaps that its surface seemed to shimmer rather oddly, which could have been a trick of the light.

But as Peder looked into it, it seemed to flame with a pale effulgence. He gazed entranced at his face in the glass. His features were undergoing a subtle transformation. They were still his own, but evincing some indefinable alien cast.

And while he remained staring wide-eyed, the eyes of his reflection closed. The face settled into a sleeping repose.

He was inexplicably alarmed. ‘How is this done?’ he exclaimed.

Weld showed a rare hint of amusement. ‘Although it looks like an ordinary mirror it is not, quite, a mirror. The image is formed not by reflected light but is a reconstituted image produced by a micro-computer backing. The device is fully perceptive.’

Peder turned the mirror over. Beyond a few barely visible etched lines there was nothing to see, and it had only the thickness of a normal looking-glass. That meant little, of course. Micro-electronics could put the contents of an entire brain into an even smaller space.

‘A sentient mirror,’ he murmured.

‘Yes. Computer sentience, of course. Not quite as real as the human variety. But even so, perhaps it has a quality we lack. It is able to experience, nothing more. It doesn’t have to perform actions, as we do.’

‘It’s purely passive. A passive sentience. A strange thought.’

‘Yes. Yet sometimes the face that looks back as one gazes into it is not quite the face that an ordinary mirror would show. It’s really quite percipient.’

Peder laid down the mirror. Similar devices were becoming common in this part of space: electronic machines which did nothing but soak up influences from their surroundings devoid of any power of action. The phenomenon was symptomatic. The colonization of the latter half of Caean had apparently produced a sort of photographic negative to the earlier culture, the ebullience of Verrage and similar places being replaced by passive receptivity, as though – to continue the analogy – the human mind had decided to turn itself into a universal camera plate.

His gaze fell on Weld’s jacket. Although Prossim was of vegetable origin, the fibres were much too minute to be visible to the naked eye – yet suddenly, in his imagination, he seemed to be seeing them, and he entered into a green, microscopic forest of living fronds, fibrillous networks and clumps of tiny bracken-like folioles, a forest which spread and rustled all around him, filling his horizon. As if from a great distance, he heard Weld speaking.

‘Ah, here comes Famaxer now.’

In answer to Weld’s summons the third Frachonard suit to be seen by Peder entered the cutaneous sodality. Peder moved forward. He seemed to walk though the matted forest, brushing aside the fern fronds. Or was the forest instead moving through him, reaching with its fibrils into his nervous system, replacing his thoughts and perceptions?

The vertiginous hallucination vanished. ‘Good day, brother,’ Famaxer greeted in a dry, cynical voice. ‘I hope Otis has not been mistreating you.’

‘No, he has been most hospitable,’ Peder answered.

Famaxer’s suit had the apparent texture of forrel, a vellum-like parchment at one time used for covering books. It imparted to Famaxer a quality of dryness, of a dusty, wind-blown environment, of a man much weathered by sun and air. His stance signified leathery cynicism, sprightly confidence – and other qualities Peder could not readily define.

It gave Peder no cause for wonderment that the Frachonard Prossim suits could guide their wearers across hundreds of light years. Apart from a flickering curiosity as to what might be Frachonard’s master plan, he never asked himself why he did what he did, any more than a man waking in the morning asks why he wakes.

As if saluting the sun, his mind was filled with the glory of Frachonard’s genius.

The three came close together. Peder was dimly aware that subtle radiations were passing between the three suits, too rarefied to be detectable on any scientific apparatus, perhaps, but nonetheless real.

‘We must call together the others, and travel,’ Famaxer said.

‘Yes, we must travel,’ Peder agreed. ‘The time has come.’

‘Something is wrong,’ Amara announced. ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’

‘It has to make some kind of sense,’ Estru argued. ‘We just haven’t found out what it is yet.’

‘This type of calculation can’t be simply set aside, not if we are to be in any way scientific,’ she insisted. ‘Sociological decay-time is a fact, not a theory.’

They were in the late stages of an extended session in the department’s operations room. Amara was revelling in all the data she could handle. But that data simply did not tell her what she wanted to hear.

According to Amara, those regions of Caean farthest from Sovya should be relatively free from garment fetishism, and even those parts settled earliest should by now be discovering more normal ideas. Yet field reports, as well as the personal observations of anyone who cared to venture outside the ship during its frequent landfalls, made it perfectly clear that quite the opposite was the case. Caeanic culture was not phasing into normalcy. The farther one got from Sovya, the weirder and more aberrant it became.

The calculations on which Amara placed such stock made used of the sociological notion of ‘decay time’ – the time taken for cultural forces to lose their impetus and die. A passing fad or fashion might have a decay time of weeks or months. An obsession like the one ruling Caean could, at the other end of the scale, persist for centuries. Amara’s parameters, she believed, were solid. The ‘half-life’ of Caean was even shorter than she had at first supposed. By this time Caean should have grown out of its specific syndrome, should be a nation more nearly resembling Ziode.

‘This is a sick nation,’ she said. ‘But something is keeping it sick – making it sicker. We have to find out what.’

‘Maybe the computation is wrong?’ someone suggested bravely.

Amara scowled.

Estru took up the thread. ‘It could be we have underestimated the staying power of the Sovyan experience. Our equations don’t allow, for instance, for total erasure of body image.’

‘Total erasure?’ Amara came back at him indignantly.

‘The Sovyans clearly demonstrate that the normal body image – the image that exists in the mind for purposes of personal and species identify – can be overlaid with an alternative image,’ Estru said. ‘The Sovyans see themselves as big spacesuits. But suppose the original human body image has no instinctive or genetic component? What if it can be erased permanently? Then the Caeanic syndrome could be stable – not subject to decay.’

‘Plausible,’ Amara admitted. ‘The Caeanic phenomenon would then emerge as a form of accelerative evolution, analogous to biological evolution. Psychologically, in terms of outward image, the Caeanics could be diverging into countless new species.’

Estru felt encouraged. ‘That’s right. Especially if some of these images are archetypal, dragged from the subconscious as Matt-Helver believed. A Caeanic puts on a fox-type suit and it makes him into a foxy individual, because he feels like a fox. I recall that List had something to say along those lines in his Cultural Compendium.’

‘It’s plausible, but it’s wrong,’ Amara stated. ‘The natural body image is genetic. It can’t be permanently obliterated.’

‘Arms and legs are genetic, but Alexei Verednyev didn’t have any to speak of when we first found him,’ her staff chief said.

She waved a hand in exasperation. ‘Proliferation. Proliferation is the very thing that knocks Estru’s argument down. Caeanic sartorials are enterprising enough not to leave stones unturned. Even if the basic image had been erased, what’s to prevent it appearing again? How long before some sartorial whizz-kid discovered that the naked body is an exciting object in it own right? What’s to prevent garments becoming increasingly scanty until nakedness becomes acceptable, as it is with us? Yet in fact the naked body, where it is an erotic object, is such only as an unspeakable perversion.’

As she said this she blushed deeply, then to hide her embarrassment turned to study the display screens again. ‘There is something blocking the natural process of normalization,’ she said.

There was a silence in which they all stared at the screens. Suddenly Estru spoke up again.

‘Isn’t there something else we should be talking about, more important than this? What we have also failed to find is any aggressive intention towards Ziode.’

Everyone murmured. ‘Yes, that’s so,’ Amara said with a frown, almost reluctantly. ‘It seems Abrazhne Caldersk was telling the truth in that respect.’

‘Well, shouldn’t our first priority be to explain this to the Directorate? We ought to be giving some thought to it. After all it might not be as easy as it sounds.’

‘Oh? Why not?’

‘After gearing up for war, to some people it can seem a pity not to go to war,’ Estru said.

‘Yes, it is unnerving,’ Alexei said mildly, in reasonably intelligible Ziodean. ‘All the time.’

Mast responded feelingly. ‘You poor bastard. God, I thought I was a villain until I met some of these scientific types we’ve got here.’

‘I’m managing to cope,’ Alexei said. ‘They give me drugs to keep me moderately schizophrenic. That’s the only way to get through this type of experience, I’m told.’

As he spoke Alexei’s face was deadpan. He probably never would learn to use facial expression, even though all the requisite muscles had been revitalized.

Mast was aware that Alexei could tolerate human company only with difficulty. But, he told himself, the Sovyan must also be lonely.

They were walking along one of the belly passages that ran the curve of the Callan’s hull, Alexei stepping awkwardly and falteringly so that every now and then Mast automatically put out a hand to save him from falling, though in fact the Sovyan lost his balance only rarely. As they reached an observation window Alexei stopped, as if to regain breath. Mast stood by, embarrassed, while he gazed with homesick longing into the vacuum of space.

Then he hurried on. They turned aside from the belly corridor and came to Amara Corl’s sociology department, which Mast took care to visit at least once a day. A murmur of agitated talk was coming from behind the door of the conference room. No one took any notice as Mast rudely pushed the door open and went in, followed by his limping companion.

The team had drifted apart into two groups. One, bunched around Amara, was busy with some kind of calculation using a computer terminal at the other end of the room. The rest didn’t seem to be doing anything very much, except to talk aimlessly in the sort of crass jargon which Mast found irritating.

He listened patiently to their drivel for a minute or two until Estru, who had been gazing into a mirror, suddenly interrupted the discussion.

‘It’s wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this is the sort of clue we’re looking for,’ he announced.

Mast came closer. The mirror was oval, set in a frame of wrought gold. It seemed unremarkable, unless it was that its surface was a little too bright.

‘What, that mirror?’ someone asked.

Estru chuckled. ‘Yes, just a mirror, an ordinary silvered glass reflector. Only it isn’t. While you’re looking into the mirror, the mirror is looking back at you.’

He turned it over in his hands, explaining. ‘The glass isn’t ordinary silica glass; it’s hologram glass. Instead of being coated with mercury in the usual manner, it’s painted with a micro-computer backing of about the same thickness. The hologram glass digitizes the image that falls on it, absorbing all the incident light, and passes it into the computer, which then puts it through the perception process. Eventually – a few nanoseconds later – the reconstituted image bounces back into the hologram glass and is re-emitted by fluorescence.’

‘What in the galaxy is the point of all that?’

‘Yes,’ someone else joined in, ‘that’s a very complicated method for a simple convenience.’

‘The difference is that the mirror has machine sentience. Only in an extremely receptive, passive way, of course. It has no output leads whatsover; no outcome. It’s a mirror with a mind that reflects what it experiences. So you’re looking at yourself being looked at – the more you think about that, the less simple it seems.’ He chuckled again. ‘You could say it’s a mirror with an open mind.’

Mast peered at the artifact over Estru’s shoulder. ‘But what practical use is it?’

‘None at all. It’s an ornament, a typical Caeanic conceit. Though there’s a little more to it. Sometimes it modifies the “reflected” image, and occasionally quite drastically. The effect can be pretty scary if you don’t know how it’s done. But it still doesn’t invent or add anything. It brings out latent qualities, points out what the human eye might miss.’

The other speakers edged forward, staring at the mirror. ‘So what’s this got to do with Caean?’

Estru gripped the mirror, his eyes going dreamy. ‘What if Caean is trying to turn itself into such a mirror… trying to lose its specific human consciousness…’ He shook his head, aware that he was floundering.

Mast laughed mockingly.

At that moment Estru spotted Alexei Verednyev hovering nearby. A sudden ruthlessness flitted across his features.

‘Here, Alexei, take a look at yourself.’

‘No, I don’t like mirrors –’ Alexei, however, could not avoid the shimmering oval surface as it was thrust before his face. For a moment he stared, his expression still wooden, before he turned aside with an agonized cry.

‘What’s wrong, Alexei?’ Mast said with concern. But the Sovyan turned his back on them all and went stumbling through the door. Mast moved to follow him, then changed his mind.

‘Now that wasn’t very nice,’ he said accusingly to Estru.

‘Forget it, he needs these shocks as part of his treatment. Besides, it was an interesting result. I saw what showed in the mirror.’

‘Oh? And what did show in the mirror?’

‘A metal space helmet. Verednyev’s face wasn’t there at all.’

Estru’s co-workers, embarrassed by the incident, looked away and began to inspect some Caeanic garments that hung in a mobile rack. The clothes had been obtained during their last stop. By now the Callan had a big enough store of them to go into business, Mast thought.

‘Everything we pick up lately is made of Prossim,’ one of the sociologists said, fingering the cloth of a tabard. ‘The locals seem to scorn anything else.’

Unaware that it was his own conduct that had prompted the change of topic, Estru joined in. ‘Caeanics have always prized Prossim,’ he said. ‘It is a remarkable material.’

‘But further back in Tzist history fabrics are as varied as styles.’

‘A question of cost. Prossim is actually versatile enough to take on any texture, to serve as any other kind of material according to how it’s processed. But it costs a lot. Reputedly it’s grown on some secret planet whose location is known only to the merchants who supply it. Probably the reason why it’s prevalent hereabouts it simply that we are close to the source.’

He pulled out a suit of the type known as a suit of light. It was a close-fitting set of garments consisting of trousers, a zouave jacket and a pouch-like hat sporting two short horns, one on either side, like stumpy antennae. The suit was resplendent with synthetic gems and gold piping which seemed actually to shine and to cast out dazzling rays.

‘Why don’t you try this on, Blanco?’ Estru mused, offering it to the other. ‘Let’s see how it looks.’

Surprisingly the Ziodeans rarely tried on any of the garments they acquired. Blanco shrugged. ‘All right.’ He slipped out of his clothes and donned the suit with deft movements.

They all agreed he looked really smart. Immediately he was apparelled his back straightened and his shoulders squared as though of their own accord. His eyes cleared and seemed to sparkle.

‘It really does something for you,’ Estru told him thoughtfully. ‘I had no idea it would – you’ve got the right physique, somehow. How does it make you feel?’

‘All right,’ said Blanco in a new confident voice. ‘Fine. Like –’ His eyes took on a far-seeing, penetrating look. ‘Like nothing can be hidden from me–’

He took a few steps back, dancing away from them, his movements light and nimble. It was as if they saw him on a faulty vidplate which was giving after-image on the highlights. The glittering gems, the glowing goldwork seemed to leave traceries of light in the air, and as he moved he filled the space around him with radiance.

Amara came striding up from the back of the conference room, her helpers in tow. ‘I see you’ve dealt your own death-blow to your body-image theory, Estru,’ she boomed. ‘Notice how that suit clings to the shape of his body? Proving that the basic image is very much alive in Caean.’ She gave Blanco a sharp glance. ‘Get that rubbish off, Blanco. I’m not having you turn into a subversive.’

Obediently Blanco disrobed.

‘I guess you’re right,’ Estru conceded.

‘Of course I am. Behind all these garments is the tacit assumption of the naked human form. Any kind of adornment would be redundant without it. Here, I’ll prove it to you – I’ll bet those clothes exert no psychological effect on Verednyev. The basic image is dormant in him. Where is he? I thought I saw him with you just now.’

‘He left,’ Estru said. ‘But I’ve already explored that avenue, and you’re quite right about him. He doesn’t respond to Caeanic apparel, or to any kind of apparel – unless you give him a spacesuit.’ He sighed. ‘Well, how have you been getting on?’

‘Excellently!’

She beckoned to all present. ‘I’d like your attention, please. I want everyone to hear this.’

They crowded round as Amara took up a lecturing stance under the big terminal vidplate at the rear of conference room. Currently the plate showed the elongated curve of Tzist, dramatized so that the inhabited planets stood out as bright blue blobs while the rest was faded to a ghost-like glow.

‘On the evidence of the utterly reliable parameters we have adopted, we have already ascertained that the situation as we find it in Caean is theoretically impossible,’ she asserted. ‘Ergo, some other factor must be present of which we were unaware. So first, let’s set the problem up in structural terms.’

She inclined her head to the screen, her hand straying to the terminal console. Under her prompting the image began to transform. Arrowed pathways connected up the blue blobs, then these themselves began to shift position, many of them coalescing into one another, so that the whole display bunched itself up and the picture became simplified and formalized.

‘Right. This is Caean reduced to a network of cultural influences,’ Amara explained. ‘Now to identify those influences. The aberration coming from the direction of Sovya should have worked out in this fashion.’

The network had a lozenge shape. From its left-hand vertex a red stain appeared and spread through the connecting pathways. On reaching the middle of the network it began to fade, so that the lozenge’s right-hand quarter was left in its original white – the colour of sociological normalcy in the accepted code. Amara tapped this part of the graph with her baton to emphasize her point.

Then she turned to face them triumphantly. ‘Yet instead of cultural conditions returning to norm we find that the Art of Attire is even more thriving, with new unpredicted features developing. Only one circumstance can explain this. Our original appraisal of Caean can be only half right. The impetus coming from the direction of Sovya is being reinforced by a second impetus coming from the opposite direction. By using the same kind of cultural mapping we have just established roughly whereabouts the source of this impetus lies.’

Amara’s hand went again to the terminal. A green stain began at the lozenge’s right-hand vertex in complement to the red stain, spreading until it met and blended with it, producing a spectrum gradated from buff orange to a murky mauve. ‘There is even a likely candidate planet. Selene, the last Caeanic planet in Tzist and – as it happens – the farthermost from Ziode. So there it is. We repair full-speed to Selene.’

Those who had not helped Amara to arrive at this conclusion stared in fascination at the diagram. There could be little doubt of the cogency of her logic. Remarkable as it was, the thesis answered the facts.

‘What do you think we’re going to find on this planet?’ Estru asked. ‘Not another Sovya, surely? That would be stretching things a bit too far, wouldn’t it?’

‘No,’ Amara said seriously. ‘I think both source-points must have originated in Sovya. I imagine what probably happened is this. I think Sovya must have been responsible for two different planetary settlements, one close to Sovya and the other much farther away: Selene, or possibly a now-abandoned planet near Selene. Having no contact with one another they will each have developed in their own way. We all know that there can be a thousand reasons why societies diverge – perhaps they sprang from different strains within the Sovyan culture, or possibly climatic conditions were unusual on Selene at that time. At any rate, when they eventually met it was to produce a society with mutually reinforcing impulses.’

Blanco rose to speak. ‘This is all very interesting, but on the subject of going to Selene, haven’t we hung around for rather too long already? It’s some time since we established the most important fact – that Caean is not a military threat to Ziode. Shouldn’t we be heading home with that news?’

A murmur rose from the group. ‘Captain Wilce is of the same opinion,’ Estru said, raising his eyebrows enquiringly.

Amara could see before her the inception of one of those divisive quarrels which end by making team-work impossible. She licked her lips.

‘I am well aware that there are differences of opinion on board this ship,’ she said in a hard voice. ‘By virtue of the special authority invested in me by the Directorate, I have already overruled the view that says we should go directly home. We are not going home until we have completed our researches in an exhaustive manner. There will be no further discussion of the subject.’

That should shut them up, she thought to herself.

Estru tried to remember if Amara had ever looked into the computerized mirror. He wondered what it would show in her case.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, he thought, who is the fairest of us all?