The Garments of Caean

14

One person who was equivocal on the desirability of returning to Ziode was Realto Mast. During a harrowing interview Amara had dragged his story out of him and he had told her all about his sentence to Ledlide, his subsequent escape and the amazing qualities he had witnessed in the Caeanic suit worn by Peder Forbarth. She had listened superciliously, obviously believing only about half of it, and disdaining to make any comment.

Ever since he had been coquettishly trying to court Amara with a view to getting her to intercede on his behalf with the authorities in Ziode, convinced that she could arrange a pardon for him, or at least obtain a drastic reduction of sentence on the grounds of ‘patriotic services rendered’. She had offhandedly encouraged him in this belief, but was far from magnanimous when it came to keeping the score.

‘But you haven’t actually done very much, have you?’ she said severely when he taxed her on the subject, as they were about to land on Selene.

‘Well, there was that time I cleared up the data for you on Kurdoc,’ Mast suggested tentatively. ‘When your interpreters couldn’t understand idiom.’

‘Hm. That hardly adds up to getting out of twenty years on Ledlide.’

He became peevish. ‘Stop reminding me of that savagery. Instead of looking at the sentence all the time, you should measure my services against the offence, which was comparatively trivial.’

‘The degree of guilt has already been settled by a court of law,’ she told him primly. ‘I’m not prepared to discuss it. You’re in the market for remission, not a retrial.’

The bitch, Mast thought to himself as he went away. I’d like to… His thoughts tailed off, unable to imagine anything horrific enough to befall the research ship’s de facto matriarch.

Displaying by vidcast the ‘unfettered freedom’ status conferred on her by the Minister of Harmonic Relations on Verrage, the Callan settled on to a landing compound within the city of Yomondo. Within an hour Amara’s people were preparing for a sojourn into the city, and Mast disconsolately wandered down to the disembarkation bay, hoping to make himself useful.

No one took any notice of him. It was the same old story; he was not a trained sociologist. ‘Leave this sort of thing to the professionals, old man,’ a staffman had told him once, with infuriating condescension, when he had tried to attach himself to one of the team projects.

As soon as the bay doors were opened Mast went off to explore Yomondo by himself. As usual in Caean, there were no formalities at the spaceport, and no officials. The egress roads led directly into the city proper.

If Selene had initially presented any climatic or geological problems, then the planet must long since have been tamed. The air was warm and balmy. Yet there was an ambience to the place, a kind of lulled calm, that was offbeat and disturbing. The atmosphere was invested with a clear, purple twilight. The breeze wafted the scent of lavender. Odd twittering sounds came from all around, echoing from twisted towers and crazy air-ramps which made up the city’s skyline.

Mast searched for Selene’s sun. He found it – or rather, them – low over the southern horizon. A double star, the large one mauve, the smaller blue-white, both of them soft and fuzzy in outline. Which meant that Selene, in all probability, had seasons lasting centuries. The habitable planets of double stars nearly always had large orbits.

What was the season now? Spring? Summer? Autumn? Probably not winter, Mast decided.

Beyond the fringe of the city a forest grew. Mast could see the olive-green fronds waving like dark seaspray behind the twisted towers. Birds with glorious plumage of silver and lilac, gold and mulberry, shot out of that forest to go soaring, sweeping and hovering all over Yomondo, giving the city the impression of being a vast open-air aviary. The birds were of all sizes. Some were very big – Mast peered closely to see if any of them were human – and the smallest were tiny purple and pink humming birds, darting hesitantly hither and thither, their long curved beaks, made to dip into the nectar of orchids, craning forward as if pointing out mysterious messages.

Yomondo had a single flat floor of a pale lilac colour. Above it the twisted towers, the air-ramps, the tortuous corridors hanging in the air seemingly without proper support, made an open-plan framework. The nearest comparison Mast could find was that the city resembled a huge fairground, with helter-skelters, roller coasters, barkers and innumerable stage-shows taking place in the open air. The impact on the eye was indeed unexpected and bewildering. He could make no sense of the multifarious and apparently disjointed activities taking place. Was a festival in progress? Or was this, fantastic as it seemed, normal business?

An individual whose broad, snub-nosed face bore an idiot grin stepped from behind a blockhouse and approached Mast. Of the young man’s rig-out, Mast noticed clumpy steel-shod boots and flared pink trousers, held up by broad blue braces worn over the top of a chemise, or tunic, which fluffed and frothed all around his torso and arms. The impression of bucolic brutality was made complete by a crude, broken hat made of straw.

He walked with an ungainly stomp, body bent forward, thumbs thrust into his braces. Moving to block Mast’s path, he stood flexing his knees.

‘Har! A dude, eh? Come on then! Put up yer dukes!’ Even to Mast’s ears, his dialect was uncouth. He began to buffet the Ziodean with ham-like fists, in a manner both playful and aggressive, and Mast, surprised and alarmed, put his arms before his face to ward off the blows.

But suddenly the ruffian ceased his assault and looked sidelong at something to Mast’s left. Mast followed his gaze. A woman was walking the floor of the city, making for a twisted tower some distance off. Her movements were swaying and willowy, and her long graceful robe, with its streaming pagoda sleeves, made her seem as if she were being bent by the wind. Gauzy veils were blowing away from her face, which was dreamy and distant.

The ruffian reached up and removed his straw hat, stuffing it into a pocket in the seat of his trousers, from which he drew another piece of headgear. This was an abbreviated cloth casque, or galea, boasting a modest panache and decorated with ornate ribwork of gold. As he placed the casque on his head, adjusting it carefully, an amazing transformation came over him. No longer was he gormless and belligerent. The light of intelligence came to his eye. His back straightened, and his features moulded themselves into a different countenance. He was a new man.

At the same time he was tugging at the frills of his chemise, altering it into a different type of garment entirely. Gone from sight were the braggart braces, the insolent cut of the trousers waistband. The chemise became a sleek doublet, striped heliotrope and cyan, niched at the hem, the body purled with twisted cord of silver and cobalt. In proximity to these new colours the pink of the trousers took on a mauve tint; their cut seemed no longer boorish but elegant.

Now the essence of courtliness, and with perfect comportment, the erstwhile tough stepped to accost the fresh object of his interest, introducing himself with a bow and a flourish. He seemed to have forgotten Mast entirely.

Mast moved on, mingling with the sparse throng that was abroad in Yomondo, and pausing to watch what was happening on a raised platform. To pounding music young men performed a jerky, ritualistic dance. Their tight-fitting cladding blazed with baroque curlicues, arabesques of gold and silver glitter-work and glowing art-gems. Suddenly they stopped of one accord, clapping their hands over their heads. The platform – really the floor of a box skeleton – rose from the ground and swept vertically upwards, gathering speed. Mast now noticed many such aerial boxes gliding through Yomondo’s sky, guided by force-beams between the towers and air-ramps in seemingly meaningless, maze-like patterns. In each box a different but equally mysterious scene was taking place.

Not far from him a woman in the red and gold plumage of a tropical bird uttered a joyous shriek and took to the air, trailing fire behind her. He watched her trajectory as she went hurtling like a rocket right over the city, coming down on the far side. He found himself hoping she had made it safely.

At the centre of Yomondo was a great open square. Mast arrived there in time to witness the sudden evanescent crystallization of a crowd phenomenon. All present began to surge together, all turning to face the same direction. All faces, men’s and women’s, momentarily presented one identical face. A tribe-like dance step took hold of the mass of people. Forward… back… forward… back…

Then, as inexplicably as it had come, the spell dissipated. Everyone went his separate way, or undertook unfathomable activities with smaller groups.

Mast became aware that here, more than on any other Caeanic world he had visited, human nature had gone over the top; had taken a turn in a new, irrevocable direction. People no longer seemed to be human beings in the Ziodean sense of the word. They were loose collections of roles, play-actors switching parts at random, no longer having any visible conscious direction in their lives.

Clothes robots, he thought.

He wondered what Amara would make of this.

Peder could not quite plumb the psychological system by which Frachonard had designed his five Prossim suits. It was not a system a conventional psychologist would have devised had he wished to delineate the qualities of the human race – for such a delineation, complete within its own terms, was what the set of five undoubtedly comprised.

There was Peder himself, with his urbanity; there was the unbreakable will of Otis Weld, the caustic dryness and irony of Famaxer; there was Cy Amoroza Carendor and his athletic sprightliness, and the retiring imperturbability of Poloche Tam Trice. Yet these were only the most obtrusive characteristics. There were others. Each suit was itself a symphony of indefinable qualities, chosen according to concepts of humanity foreign to conventional thought, and all of which when taken together added up to an equally off-beat definition of human ability.

In a room where lilac light shone through turquoise windows, the five stood facing one another formally, as if arranged on the limbs of a pentagram. Peder could sense a communion between them; it was as if they were the various organs of one single man.

‘Only one more journey now,’ said Trice.

‘Then the bright new universe will begin.’

‘How shall we travel?’

‘I have met a harvester,’ Otis Weld said. ‘He will take us. He knows the location.’

‘Such people practise their trade in greatest secrecy. They can never be persuaded to accept passengers,’ Peder pointed out.

‘Us he cannot refuse. I know where his ship is. He will take us.’

‘Why delay?’ Carendor said lightly. ‘Let us embark on this ship now.’

They all concurred. ‘Yes. Let us go now.’

They left the building, Otis Weld leading the way.

Realto Mast had stopped for refreshment when he spotted Peder walking with four others dressed, as far as he could see, in identical suits.

At a gilt-bedecked booth he had bought a chunk of sweetened goldbread, washing it down with purple blackcurrant juice. The vendor, rigged out in a piratical costume and an eye-patch, had doubled the price on handing over the viands, speaking an archaic dialect and making good his demand by flourishing a fancy force-pistol, but Mast had paid up without argument.

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.