The Garments of Caean

1

‘I tell you I don’t like it,’ Peder Forbarth said nervously.

‘Dammit, none of us can be expected to like it,’ replied Mast. ‘It’s a matter of guts.’

Realto Mast lounged full-length on an elegant couch which was sumptuously cushioned and quilted and burnished in gold and lavender resins. It was without doubt the most prepossessing of several items of arts nouveaux furnishing the main cabin of the star yacht Costa. Mast had, indeed, taken particular care over the outfitting of the cabin, since he liked at all times to live in style.

Sighing, he poured himself another measure of purple liqueur from a swan-necked decanter. ‘Now please stop moaning, Peder, and try to show a little spirit. You accepted this assignment, after all.’

‘Accepted!’ wailed Peder. ‘I’m wishing I hadn’t!’

‘Considering the price I paid for your services,’ murmured Mast, sipping his liqueur reflectively, ‘it’s disappointing to find you so eager to chicken out.’

Peder stopped his pacing of the cabin and sank down on a chair, the picture of a man defeated and frightened. The two other occupiers of the cabin, Mast’s sidekicks Castor and Grawn, chuckled mockingly in the background.

Mast had him there, of course. He had fallen in with Mast’s scheme lock, stock and barrel, hypnotized by the man’s charisma and no less by his glowing descriptions – descriptions which a full-blooded, professional sartorial could hardly ignore. To begin with he had hesitated, it was true, because of the dangers and risks involved, but those misgivings had vanished when Mast had offered, as an advance on Peder’s share, to pay off the debts that were about to ruin him.

Only now, thinking about it in retrospect, did Peder Forbarth reach the suspicion – rather, the certainty – that Mast had had a hand in calling in those debts. His creditors were not normally that pressing.

And only now, after locking up his shop The Sartorial Elegantor and journeying to within striking distance of the planet Kyre, did the full extent of his funk hit Peder. For one thing, Mast’s image of faultless ability and impeccable planning was beginning to wear thin at the edges. He had noticed how the self-styled entrepreneur’s (more accurately, racketeer’s) carefully cultivated nonchalance hid an occasional ineptness, and a definite tendency for things to go slightly wrong on him. Peder was afraid that Mast would somehow mishandle the affair, that they would be caught trying to dispose of their illegal cargo or even worse.

The chief fear that loomed in Peder’s mind, however, was of what lay in wait for him below. He no longer believed that Mast really appreciated what infra-sound could do. He was a calculating chancer, always ready to minimize the risks involved.

Suddenly Mast spilled a drop of liqueur on his green velvet waistcoat. ‘Damn!’ he mumbled, attempting to brush off the drop. He rose and swept out in search of stain remover.

A grin spread over Grawn’s broad, ugly face. ‘Don’t bug Mast so much,’ he told Peder good-humouredly. ‘You’re ruining the tone of the operation, for Chrissake.’

‘Yeah, you’ve got too little faith in Mast,’ Castor added. He was thin and below medium height, with square shoulders and a slight stoop. He had once suffered damage to his eyes, and the retinal function had been partially replaced by light-sensitive contact lenses which gave them an odd, metallic glitter. Castor exuded seediness: already the new suit Peder had given him – he had given them all new clothes as a gesture of good faith – looked grubby and crumpled.

‘We’ve been with him a long time, and we’ve done all right,’ Castor continued. ‘He works everything out before he starts, and having sunk half a million in this caper he’s not likely to go at it half-cocked.’

‘Though he likes to take the odd gamble,’ put in Grawn, his grin widening yet further.

‘Like the gamble he took with your eyes,’ snapped Peder to Castor, instantly regretting the words. Castor’s accident, he had gathered, had been due to a mistake of Mast’s.

Mast returned to the cabin, the stain only half eradicated and still spoiling the soft sheen of the velvet. ‘I’ve just taken a look in the cockpit,’ he said. ‘We’ve arrived; the yacht’s going into orbit now. Are you ready, Peder?’

‘Y-yes. I suppose so.’ Peder’s stomach tightened up into a knot and he began to tremble slightly.

‘Good.’ Mast looked eager. ‘No point in wasting time. Let’s get down to work!’

He led the way to the hold below the cabin. The space here was quite large; everything extraneous had been cleared out of the yacht for the sake of speed and to gain maximum room for their expected cargo. At the loading end stood a small planetary lighter for descending to and returning from Kyre: Mast had no intention of risking the Costa herself.

Near the lighter, in pride of place, hung the baffle suit, a bulky object covered all over with clustered, variously sized tubes resembling organ pipes. Peder felt somewhat like a condemned criminal entering the death chamber as they approached it. There were three layers of baffle-tubes so that the suit, though vaguely manlike, was so gross and grotesque that it looked more like something designed to trap and encase a man than to protect him.

Castor operated a winch, lowering the suit jerkily to the floor. Then he unlocked its front, swinging it open like an iron maiden, and with a sardonic smile made a gesture of invitation for Peder to step into the cavity thus revealed.

Peder swallowed. By now the Costa would be in orbit, the auto pilot swinging her along those co-ordinates which Mast had obtained; mysteriously, but nevertheless somehow obtained (by means of a lucky break, as he would have put it) and which had made the whole mission possible. This was it. Peder felt that unfriendly forces, invisible hands, were impelling him forward against his will.

He hesitated, then stepped back. ‘Why me?’ he said. ‘This is unfair. There are four of us.’

‘Come, come,’ said Mast, a look of complete reasonableness appearing on his lean, handsome face. ‘You are our expert. That’s why you’re here in the first place, to value the goods. How can you do that if you don’t go down?’

‘But that doesn’t go for the first trip down,’ Peder argued. ‘We haven’t found the wreck yet. Perhaps we won’t find it for two or three trips, so you don’t need my expert knowledge yet. You, Grawn, or Castor would probably be much better at looking for it than I would.’

Mast pursed his lips. ‘I think you are pessimistic… but perhaps you have a point. We will cast lots.’

He took a small randomizer from his pocket. ‘Choose your numbers. One to four.’

‘One,’ said Peder instantly.

Castor and Grawn semeed scarcely interested in the proceedings. Castor murmured a casual, indifferent ‘Two’, and Grawn followed with a grunted ‘Three’.

‘Then that leaves me with four,’ Mast said animatedly, apparently entering into the spirit of things. He inserted the appropriately numbered domino-like chips. They rattled about the slotted framework of the randomizer for several seconds, shuffling and rebounding. Then one was suddenly ejected. Peder bent to inspect it.

One.

So it was Peder after all.

‘Well, well,’ exclaimed Mast. He gave Peder a look of comradely concern. ‘I hope you feel happier about it now, Peder?’

Peder nodded dismally. He offered no resistance as they helped him into the suit and clamped it shut. He had worn it several times before, during their training sessions, and oddly, once he switched on the externals and began to communicate with his surroundings through them his panic abated and he began to consider the task before him more calmly. The motors came on; he turned and lumbered towards the lighter, negotiating the enlarged hatch awkwardly.

There was no question of sitting or lying down in the suit. Clamps reached out to hold him fast in the cockpit, so that the suit’s maniples, several feet outside the reach of his real hands, could manage the controls. There was little for him to do, in any case; the lighter was mostly on automatic.

Mast’s voice came to him through the suit intercom. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’ve just heard that the survey sensors have located a large metal object. That might be it. The lighter knows where to go. Good luck.’

‘Right,’ answered Peder. And then, as his mind ranged over the situation, still trying to fight down his fears, a realization came to him.

‘The lots!’ he gasped. ‘You rigged it!’

‘Well naturally, old man. I have to protect my investment, after all. We can’t have you chopping and changing plans at this stage. Good luck.’

‘Let me out!’ raged Peder impotently. ‘I demand that we cast the lots again!’

But it was no use. He felt the lighter moving under him. On the screen, he saw that it was trundling through the air-lock. Seconds later he had been launched into space and the lighter darted down towards the glowing atmosphere of Kyre.

The rustling of the air over the outside surfaces, the buzzing of the lighter’s mechanisms as it guided itself in, filled Peder’s consciousness for some minutes. Seen from the outside, Kyre was an unremarkable, hospitable-looking planet. The atmosphere expanded and brightened as he plunged in. Nearer the surface it would contain a fair proportion of oxygen. The white clouds were water vapour. It would be a world fit for colonization, if it weren’t for the habits of its denizens.

Once below the cloud layer, the features of the landscape began to take shape. There were mountains and plains, rivers and forests. All looked normal and innocuous. From a height, Kyre’s special feature was not discernible.

The lighter slowed down and winged over a plain broken into a series of gullies, many of them fringed and hidden by tree-like vegetation. The lighter stopped and hovered about uncertainly in the air.

Mast came through again. ‘You’re on our sensor spot,’ he said. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘No,’ said Peder, ‘but I get a reading too.’

He focused his attention on one of the tree-cloaked gullies. It could be down there, he thought.

Then he noticed that there was animal life on the plain. A big animal emerged from cover, looked around it, and trotted lumberingly towards a small body of water about a mile away. That reminded Peder of what a jam he would be in if the lighter was destroyed or damaged, and that he was asking for trouble by hovering about in the open. He would have to continue on foot – or on what, in the baffle suit, passed for feet.

He put the lighter down as close to the gorge as he could get. ‘I’m down. I’m going out,’ he said curtly. Mast’s reply came faint and thoughtful. ‘Right.’

Releasing the clamps, Peder backed himself to the hatch. Promptly it opened, and he backed straight out onto the ground. No sooner was he three or four feet away than the lighter took off again and went soaring skywards, back to the Costa. It was good strategy, but it still gave him the feeling of being alone and cut off.

For here he was at last, on the infra-sound planet.

Evolution on Kyre had reached a stage somewhat equivalent to the Jurassic. But the animal life here had developed a unique form of offensive and defensive armament: infra-sound, low-frequency vibrations that could, by hitting the right resonant note, shake to pieces any large object using very little power. Buildings, vehicles, machines, animals or men, all were equally vulnerable.

Several roving expeditions had landed on Kyre, and one of them had been lucky enough to get off sufficiently in one piece to report on the conditions there. The animals on Kyre attacked one another with infra-sound. Conversely, surviving species were those that had best learned to defend themselves against infra-sound. The use of infra-sound had developed biologically into a sophisticated spectrum of effects on Kyre. Even plants had been obliged to guard themselves against it and to generate it on their own account.

The baffle suit was Mast’s answer to this deadly environment. Constructed at great expense, the suit’s ranks of tubes were designed to deaden lethal frequencies before they reached the wearer. As a last-ditch defence the suit carried its own sound generator to try to cancel out or interfere with any attacking vibrations that got through.

‘Are you getting anything?’ Mast asked with interest.

Inside the suit, two screens confronted Peder. One gave a panoramic view of his surroundings: bright, clean air, a sky tinged with pale blue, a rocky foreground with boulders and trees in the farther distance. The second screen was an oscilloscope. Waggly traces ran across it. From a small speaker curious tones and squeals emerged; ranged-up analogues of infra-sounds the air outside was carrying.

‘There seems to be some of the stuff about,’ he replied. ‘Must be some animals somewhere around. Nothing’s coming through, though.’

‘There you are, then,’ Mast said reassuringly. ‘I told you you had nothing to worry about.’

Peder silently cursed Mast. It was all very well for him to talk, safely up there in orbit. And Peder hadn’t even encountered any of the infra-sound beasts yet.

Just the same he felt more confident. Curious stuff, this infra-sound, he thought. All it consisted of was sound waves of very low frequency, say five beats per second. Yet if it happened to hit any largish object’s naturally resonating frequency, then that object simply crumbled. The principle had once been used to create weapons capable of levelling cities, so Peder had read somewhere.

‘I’m moving towards a sort of gulch,’ he announced. Be ready to send the lighter down if I tell you.’

The suit moved rapidly over the uneven ground, its tube-clad legs aping the movements he made with his real legs farther up in the metal body. As he came closer to the trees hiding the gully he could see the regular fluting on their trunks, and took it to be some sort of anti-vibration device.

The oscilloscope went frantic and the speaker began to squeal urgently as he approached and then passed between the trees. He paused, and placed a waldo hand on one of the trunks – and in the same instant snatched it away again. A numbing, shuddering sensation had passed right through him.

Peder wondered if there was any form of life on Kyre that was not in the infra-sound racket.

Below him the ground descended in a series of steps. Finding a shallow slope, Peder began to negotiate the first step. He had almost reached the cover of a small copse when his attention was caught by a drama being enacted to his right.

A huge brontosaurus-like beast had emerged from behind a slab of rock. At least, a brontosaurus was the first resemblance Peder could find for it, for it was of comparable size and was massively armoured. But it differed in an important respect: its gigantic head was almost entirely taken up by an enormous snout taking the form of a permanently open square chute. Peder recognized this as the sounding-trumpet of its infra-sound roar.

He panicked momentarily, thinking that the beast was after him. He scooted as fast as his suit would take him towards the copse. But then he saw that he had passed unnoticed; the object of the great saurian’s attentions was a somewhat smaller creature that now turned to face its foe.

Peering from beneath tangled vegetation, Peder recalled some of the hasty pictures taken by the one surviving expedition to Kyre. The expedition had named the big bronto a ‘shouter’. He was fascinated, as it lumbered closer, to see that its armour incorporated the same open-ended tube arrangements as his own armoured suit. The tubes were particularly close-packed around the shoulders, making it look as if it spouted rank upon rank of gun barrels.

The smaller beast, however, Peder did not recall seeing. Instead of a single square funnel, its head sported three barrel-like projections. Its body was even more covered with vibration-baffling devices than its enemy’s; baffle-tubes, heavy movable flaps, thick masses of floss-like fur, as well as sharp spikes to ward off a more physical attack.

The two animals squared off, their baffle-tubes rising and arranging themselves. The shouter’s sounding-horn gaped.

And Peder was flung back among the trees by the shock wave that resulted.

The monitoring speaker inside his suit let out a rasping noise. A strong, steady succession of peaks and troughs marched across the oscilloscope. He heard the sound generator coming into action, desperately trying to counteract the deadly, regular waves of compression and rarefaction.

Peder felt that some of it was getting through. Something seemed to be seizing his guts and turning them inside out. But it was not altogether a painful experience and he was able to watch what was happening with full clarity of mind. The smaller animal had extended long bony flaps like a ruff about its neck and these ablated or broke off before the assault of lethal sound, carrying away the effect of it. Both animals, it seemed, simply stood their ground and shouted infra-sound at one another. Judging from the oscilloscoped trace and the sonic analogue (the speaker had recovered, now, and was giving him a regular ululating yowl), they constantly varied their pitch, each seeking the frequency that would shatter the other.

Then the smaller, three-trumpeted animal began to sag. Cracks appeared in its armour; it trembled like jelly.

And suddenly it collapsed to the ground, its skin rupturing and spilling blood and intestines through jagged rents in a dermal wall that must have been all of a foot thick.

‘What’s going on down there?’ came Mast’s insistent voice.

‘Quiet!’ hissed Peder, as though the shouter could hear them. He was, in fact, frightened out of his wits.

Looking around itself once more, the shouter pointed its square horn to the sky and gave vent to a great infrasound roar of victory. Then it stamped its feet up and down and turned about, as if affirming that the area was its own. Peder guessed that he had just witnessed a fight over territory.

Looking around itself once more, the shouter pointed its snout at a big boulder, perhaps ten feet high, some distance away. Its sound chute strained forward on its thick neck. Peder’s scope and speaker came through strong.

And the boulder exploded into dust. With that demonstration of its might, the shouter lumbered back to its lair.

As concisely as he could, Peder related what he had seen. ‘If I’m standing in the path of that sound beam,’ he concluded, ‘I’ve had it. You’ve chosen the wrong man for this caper, Mast. Send the lighter down. I want to come up!’

‘No lighter until you’ve finished the job,’ Mast answered firmly. ‘Take hold of yourself, now.’

A cold wind swept through Peder’s vitals. In the humming, clicking suit, he realized he was sweating – a cold, clammy sweat.

‘But what if the shouter sees me?’

‘You’ve got your gun, haven’t you? Just make sure you get your shot in before it opens its mouth.’

Peder’s hand moved unconsciously to the grip-hole that operated the heavy-duty energy rifle. He sighed.

A rustling sound made him turn. Shouldering its way through the ground-level shrubs came an animal about the size of a rabbit. He was fascinated to see that it reproduced on a small scale the same baffle-tube and head-trumpet arrangement of its more massive cousins. It made him realize that he had not yet made a real inspection of his surroundings at close quarters. He extended an arm and carefully pulled away some of the brush.

More small animals scurried away at his touch, some turning their heads momentarily to hurl at him beams of vibrations which were easily cancelled by his suit.

Looking overhead, he glimpsed a winged creature squatting on a branch, heavily rigged with scale-like feathers and bearing a conical trumpet in place of a beak. It peered down at Peder, then launched itself into the air and flapped clumsily away.

Peder’s gaze fastened on the bark of the tree itself; insects could be seen crawling about on it. Turning up the magnification he made out several varieties, many of them top-heavy with various devices for casting vibrations. The frequencies with which creatures of this size battled could scarcely be called infra-sound at all, of course; they would intrude into the sonic range.

He reminded himself that he had not yet exploited all the suit’s capabilities. He considered opening the direct audio link for a brief listen, but almost immediately cancelled the thought. The scene looked peaceful enough; but to let into the suit, even for a few seconds, any of the stray vibrations of infra-sound that he suspected pounded at all times through this woodland could prove fatal, or at least cause him serious internal injury.

Instead, he switched on the odour plate. Connected to a corresponding plate on the outside of the suit, it reproduced all the odours that struck that plate, automatically omitting any that could be poisonous. A resinous, fresh smell entered Peder’s nostrils. He was reminded vaguely of a pine forest, except that this was more tangy and contained many altogether foreign undertones, some sweet, some repugnant. It seemed odd that a world so lethal and alien could, at the same time, smell so natural and familiar.

He switched off the plate. The smell, he decided, would become too cloying after a time, and besides he was here for something more serious. He began to consider how to cross the territory that apparently was guarded by the shouter.

After some hesitation he decided that his best bet was to advance through the trees away from the beast’s lair, and make his way down the next step of the gorge behind the cover of some rocks. This he managed with only moderate difficulty, encountering some medium-sized animals which snarled low-frequency vibrations at him in a half-hearted manner, but desisted when he retreated. Only occasionally did he feel the protective capacity of his suit was being pressed to the limit, and he had no occasion to use the energy rifle.

It was impossible to move stealthily in the baffle suit. He crashed through brush and, once or twice as he careened down the slope, lurched into a tree. Then he broke through a screen of matted creeper-like vegetation and found himself on the lip of the gorge’s deepest crevasse.

And there it was.

The crashed Caeanic spaceship had, he guessed, first hit the farther edge of the gorge a glancing blow, and then had bounced full-length into the crevasse where it now rested, filling it almost entirely. His eyes raked over the unfamiliar, alien lines – insofar as he could ascertain them amid the damage – and discerned a domed, semi-transparent guidance section, drive section, and a long, amply curved cargo section.

The ship must have come down at least partly under its own power, for the damage from impact was not all that great. The fauna of Kyre had done all the rest. The whole structure of the vessel had been broken open, shattered and cracked, by infra-sound. Through the vents Peder could see its structured interior, also crumbled and broken. Its cargo, though, should be intact.

‘I’ve found it,’ he clipped tersely to the Costa. ‘It’s in the gorge, as I said. Pretty badly broken up. I’m going inside.’

‘That’s my boy,’ said Mast ingratiatingly. ‘I told you you could do it.’

He picked his way down the overgrown slope and clambered through a rip in the hull large enough to take him. To his mind came the sketch that Mast had shown him (obtained, again, by some devious, unspoken means) of a typical Caeanic transport’s layout. This section of corridor he was in must be one of those running the length of the ship just under its skin. He had entered close to the nose; opening a door to his left, he found himself looking into the main astrogation dome. The crystal canopy was in shreds, of course; reclining in semi-lounge control chairs were the decaying bodies of the ship’s officers. Probably they had lost consciousness at the moment of impact and had been killed by infrasound before recovering.

Peder cast an interested eye over their rakishly smart uniforms, so strange to him, and then withdrew. Decomposing human beings were not something his stomach could take too well.

He lumbered sternwards. Any minute now, he told himself. His heart began to thump with excitement as he thought of what lay so close.

He entered the first cargo section.

It was only a small hold, designed to store minor items. Its contents, now, had been thrown from their racks and were tumbled about in profusion. A little light entered through the broken roof. Peder switched on his suit lamp to provide more. His breath caught in his throat.

Hats!

Colours glowed; elegant shapes hypnotized his senses in the beam of the lamp. Hats of myriad descriptions: hats, caps, berets and bonnets; toques, trilbies and titfers; chaperons, chaplets, cornets and coifs.

Soft-crowned hats, stiff-crowned hats, low-crowned and high-crowned; feathered, plumed, winged and gauzed; bicorne and tricorne; boaters and bowlers, homburgs and turbans; gorgets, cowls and hoods; helmets, galeas and aegeas.

And these were just the hats!

Peder picked one up and held the sleek titfer at head level. He recognized the touch when he saw it. The cloth was like no other, the line, the design – the creativity – had the unmistakable flair found in only one part of the galaxy. This hat would do something for a man, would make him feel different, act different.

‘Send the lighter down,’ he said to the Costa. ‘I’m ready to start loading.’

Mast had been right. The ship was loaded to the roof with freight of inestimable value: the clothes of Caean.

At one time they had been called tailors. Peder’s father had been a tailor. And on Peder’s home world – Harlos – as indeed on many worlds of the Ziode Cluster they were still referred to as tailors. But that was because in Ziode vestments did not have the esteem that, in Peder’s view, they deserved. He, like others of his ilk, called himself a sartorial, and his was not a trade but a profession.

Twice before he had been privileged to handle garments from that strange, clothes-conscious civilization, Caean. They had been a brief, damasked gipon, and a simple flowered cravat, no more. But even then he had been captivated, entranced, and had realized that all the legends concerning Caean were true.

The Caeanic worlds occupied a section of a galactic spiral arm known as the Tzist Arm. It was a well-defined arm with a regular curve and nearly empty space on either side of it. The Ziode Cluster, looking like a sudden burst of sparks, was situated somewhere near the focus of this curve, but contact between the two political systems had been slight over the past few centuries and mostly confined to guarded hostility. The Cluster did not understand the ways of Caean; and Caean, for its part, was aloof and unyielding in its attitude towards raggedly dressed foreigners.

In Caean clothes were not merely an adornment but a philosophy, a way of life – the way of life. Even Peder Forbarth knew that he failed to grasp the fullness of this philosophy, try as he might; officially, in the Cluster, the covering of the body was of no importance and it was even sanctioned to go naked. But even there, despite any amount of official disapproval, the love of clothing – one of man’s oldest arts – flourished and Caeanic articles were recognized for the consummate, sublime treasures that they were. In point of fact it was illegal to import, sell, or even possess a garment from Caean, and very few of them had ever crossed the black gulf of light years; but those few fetched fabulous prices.

In crossing from one extremity to the other of Caeanic territory, trading vessels entered the gulf defined by the Tzist Arm and traced a chord between the two points. In doing so they were, at mid-point, about half-way to Ziode. And somewhere in that region, where one of these trading vessels had suffered some accident and elected to try for a planet-fall, the planet Kyre orbited its lonely primary.

And Mast had heard about it.

Legally the cargo still belonged to the Caeanic trading company that owned the ship, but none of them felt much concern over that. Peder pressed forward through the Hat Hold and nearly swooned at the delights that awaited him in the larger compartments: coats, trousers, breeches, shirts, shoes, and many garments that defied Peder’s vocabulary. Then Mast warned him that the lighter was on its way and he hurried outside to guide it down to a spot where he could most easily carry the merchandise aboard.

In his enthusiasm, Peder once more began to feel admiration for Mast. He had managed everything superbly. For one thing, bringing Peder along was a master stroke; they couldn’t possibly carry away the whole hoard and only someone of Peder Forbarth’s knowledge and experience – he flattered himself that, though little-known, he was perhaps the best sartorial on Harlos – could choose the best prizes from this feast of splendour.

Having guided down the lighter he began selecting garments from the racks, scurrying with armloads to the dumpy little craft and piling them neatly in the small hold. His brain was forced to work as quickly as his hands, discarding the merely superb and taking only the super-excellent. Raiment that otherwise would have had him gasping with pleasure was now carelessly thrust aside, making him feel almost as though he was despoiling something sacred.

He sent up three lighter loads and then entered a compartment that, after a brief examination, had him wishing that he had examined the whole cargo before beginning the selection. At first he doubted his judgement; but then, feeling the material, its texture that seemed to bring the nerves and blood more alive than before, the dazzling twills, damasks, displays and culverts into which it could be woven, he decided that there could be no other explanation. This was the fabled fabric which no one in Ziode was absolutely sure existed. Even of those who had heard of it, not all knew its name. Peder had heard it called ‘Prossim’.

If this was Prossim – Peder was sure now that it was – then he must take every scrap of it that the ship contained, even if it meant throwing out the loads he had already ferried up to the Costa. He didn’t think that would be necessary, though. This compartment probably held all there was. Even in Caean Prossim was reputed to be rare, fine and costly, the stuff of kings, of arcane, mystic dressers. An aura of Caeanic occultism surrounded it, although Peder was not sure why. He only knew that a garment made of Prossim, whoever the maker, was ten times the garment that was made of anything else.

He said nothing to Mast immediately, but got busy emptying out the compartment. Its contents made up barely one lighter load, but when he was gathering up the last armful he noticed a small door in one corner which was unlabelled. Thinking that it might be a cupboard with a few more small items, he opened it, and despite his haste stood stock still for at least five minutes.

The chamber semed, at first, out of proportion to its content. It was a largish chamber, almost a room, and hanging in it was a single suit.

And yet, as one gazed at it, the arrangement was not so disproportionate after all. The suit seemed to command the space around it, to require it, much as a person requires space for comfort. Peder chuckled to himself softly. Some personally valued set of apparel, perhaps, or the private attire of an exalted personage. There was no knowing what customs the Caeanics observed in such matters.

For some reason he did not merely take the suit but continued to stand gazing at it. To begin with it looked like an unpresumptuous suit, the colours muted, the cut consummate but modest. And yet, while he stood there, the impression it made upon him grew. He realized that the subtle flares in trousers and jacket were executed with genius and displayed, to those who could see it, an electric, confident élan. The coloration seemed no longer matt, but to be radiant with eye-defying patterns. The more he looked, the harder he found it to brush aside a stupefying possibility. Finally he stepped forward, extended a waldo arm reverently, and lifted the skirt of the jacket.

On the rich inner lining was woven an intricate design of loops and whirls. Peder snatched away the arm with a gasp. He knew that design; his suspicion was confirmed.

It was a Frachonard suit!

Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that he would ever behold, let alone possess such a suit. Frachonard, the crowning genius of Caean’s sartorial art!

The great master, so he heard, had died but recently. He had never been profligate in his creations, and he believed that since his death all items that had come from his hand were known, numbered and named, and viewed in the same light that great paintings had once been. But Peder’s good fortune was even more extraordinary; the use of the fabulous new cloth, Prossim, had but lately been perfected. Peder had been told, by a sartorial who claimed to have visited a planet within communicable distance of Caean, that Frachonard had completed five known suits in the new material.

‘Peder!’ Mast’s voice said fretfully. ‘What’s keeping you?’

Steeling himself, Peder took the suit off its hook. ‘Just finishing this batch,’ he said.

He stepped carefully out to the lighter and stowed the suit aboard, closing the hatch to the hold. He was about to return to the cargo ship when his speaker gave him a warning squawk and the sound generator warmed up ominously.

Turning, he saw that the shouter was easing itself down the slopes of the gorge.

‘Hold it,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve got trouble.’

The shouter seemed to have spotted him. Its long tail threshed the air for balance; its square sound-chute was aimed at the Caeanic ship, and suddenly Peder knew by the howl of his speaker that the chute was in operation. Frantically he reached for the hand-grip that operated the energy rifle. On the suit, baffle-tubes were fracturing and breaking off; something slow and rolling seemed to be grinding up his insides.

The energy rifle sent out a barely visible pale blue flame, like a wavering gas jet except that it went in a dead straight column to its target. It hit the shouter just below the snout. The beast squirmed to one side, injured but by no means dead, slithered farther down the slope and endeavoured once again to aim its beam of infra-sound towards Peder and the lighter. Peder fired again, taking more care over his aim this time. The energy column demolished the shouter’s chute, bored through its dermis and apparently struck a vital organ, for it rolled on to its side and wallowed in agony.

Peder was praying that the lighter was still capable of taking off. He stepped towards it, and as he did so everything inside him seemed to vibrate. He recognized that he had taken a good dose of infra-sound.

But he ignored all discomfort and forced himself into the cockpit of the lighter. ‘Take me up,’ he gasped to Mast. ‘I’m hurt.’

‘Right,’ said Mast, and the lighter rose. It creaked rather too much, but anyway it flew and did not appear to have any serious structural damage.

Fifteen minutes later he was back in the Costa and out of the crippled baffle suit. On the return journey, while standing still, he had felt all right, but as soon as he moved he got the same sensation of vibrations being let off inside him, and it was the same when he spoke. Castor, who had once flunked medical school, muttered something about ‘Not much; maybe a little minor haemorrhaging’, and, laying Peder down on Mast’s couch, gave him some injections and massage. After half an hour or so he felt better.

‘How much of the cargo did we get?’ Mast asked him.

‘About half, I’d say.’

Mast pursed his lips. ‘There’s still room in the hold…’

‘I’m not going down there again,’ Peder said quickly. ‘Anyway the suit’s damaged. If you want more get it yourself.’

Mast dropped the subject. They all went down to the hold to look over their merchandise, and for some time enjoyed themselves in picking items of finery for their personal use. Grawn and Castor bedecked themselves with gross indulgence. Mast, however, examined the clothes carefully but appeared to be uninterested in appropriating any for himself, choosing only a cravat of spider-silk, some handkerchiefs, and a small but jaunty titfer. Peder was surprised at this restraint, in view of Mast’s usual attention to his personal appearance. He himself sorted desultorily through the garments, put aside a quilted Prossim tabard with vandyked sleeves and collar, a pair of soft slippers of lavender suede with silver inlay, and a set of thigh-hose in chiaroscuroed textural. Hesitantly, trying to appear casual, he looked out the Frachonard suit.

‘One thing I must commandeer is this suit,’ he said.

Mast looked at it askance. ‘These people of Caean are pretty peculiar in their life-styles, so I’ve heard,’ he said noncommittally. ‘Don’t let the clothes master the man, the way they do.’

Peder scarcely heard the remark in his joy at being the possessor – and soon, he promised himself, the wearer – of a genuine Caeanic Frachonard suit.

Wearing their new clothes, the four repaired to the cockpit where Mast proposed to initiate their return to Harlos. But before he could do so a warning gong sounded. Bending over the slanting control board, Mast studied a display screen with puzzlement.

‘There’s a ship heading our way,’ he announced finally. ‘A Caeanic ship.’

‘Coincidence?’ suggested Castor. ‘We are close to one of their trade routes.’

‘I don’t think so. It appears to be heading directly for Kyre.’ Mast frowned pettishly. ‘I don’t get it. They must know what sort of a planet Kyre is, even if the crew of the wreck didn’t. You wouldn’t think it would be worth the expense of making a baffle suit just to recover that cargo, not on the Caeanic market, anyway.’

Peder did not mention anything about Prossim, or the Frachonard suit. ‘We’d better leave,’ he urged.

‘They would see us if we headed for home now,’ Mast mused. ‘Yet we can’t stay in the open. We’ll have to hide somewhere.’

‘Down on the surface, boss?’ Grawn gawped.

‘Dolt, the Costa wouldn’t last ten minutes down there. And besides, they could probably still trace us. Wait a minute… Kyre has a sister planet. There she is!’

A larger, closer trace appeared on the display plate. The second planet inscribed Kyre’s orbit only a few million miles closer to the primary. Mast tapped out instructions on a set of keys, adding a verbal to the voice pick-up: ‘Land on the planet if safe, orbit as closely as possible if not.’

The Costa swung out of its orbit, slipped into overdrive and arrowed for the inner planet. ‘They’re not expecting anybody to be here,’ Mast remarked. ‘I doubt if they’ll spot us yet. After they get to Kyre we can slide away using the planet and then the primary for cover.’

‘What sort of a planet is it?’ Peder asked.

‘Diameter, five thousand miles.’ Mast shrugged. ‘That’s all I know. The expedition that came home from Kyre called it the Planet of the Flies. Don’t ask me why.’

On overdrive, the Costa took little more than half an hour to cover the thirty million miles to the Planet of the Flies. As they dived into its atmosphere and descended almost to ground level the reason for the name became abundantly clear.

A type of fly lived on the planet. It was almost all that did live there – little else could have survived the environment the flies themselves had created. The atmosphere was jammed almost solid with them to a height of about a mile. Evidently they bred prodigiously; they had achieved a density of about three per cubic centimetre, and the Costa ploughed through this black buzzing mass as if through a wall of sludge. Briefly the yacht set down on solid ground, but those within, looking with horror at what surrounded them, ordered the auto pilot to take off again.

They crept into the upper reaches of the atmosphere and were able to observe the recently arrived Caeanic ship take up orbit about Kyre. Then they slid guiltily around to the other side of the second planet and departed, making straight for the Ziode Cluster, Harlos and (they hoped) riches.