‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, you know what they call the Caeanics, don’t you – clothes robots. This sort of gear gives me an odd feeling. There’s something un-Ziodean about them.’
‘Prejudice, prejudice. Typical Ziodean xenophobia!’
Mast shrugged. ‘Call it what you like. I simply have fixed ideas about what’s healthy. I believe one should stand on one’s own feet and walk without crutches.’
Inwardly Peder sighed. Poor Mast. Dressed in rags and tatters, imagining he was adequate. He had put his finger on the difference between Ziodean and Caeanic cultures, of course. The Ziodean ethos stressed individualism and self-dependence. It was diametrically opposed to the artificial augmentation of qualities and abilities such as occurred on Caean.
All of which, Peder now knew, implied a serious misunderstanding not only of the Caeanic sartorial art, but also of man’s psychological nature.
He turned to Castor and Grawn, who were standing grinning at him crookedly. ‘Well, goodbye then, chaps,’ he said.
‘Yeah, have fun,’ responded Castor, his reconstituted eyes glittering.
As he departed, Peder heard their muffled sniggers behind him.
‘Looks like Peder can pull himself together after all, when he has to,’ Castor sneered when the sartorial had gone.
‘You noticed it too, did you?’ Mast remarked. ‘His change of manner? There’s a word for that. It’s called mien. The Caeanic suit does that for him.’
He fell into thought. It had been on board the Costa that he had first begun to have second thoughts about the garments. Castor and Grawn, bedizened in their new finery, had suddenly started to adopt uncharacteristic mannerisms – nothing all that drastic, initially anyway, but enough to persuade him that Caeanic wear was as much a risk to one’s mental health as it was said to be. He had forbidden them to wear anything but Ziodean clothes ever since.
He looked up. ‘Take the rest of the stuff out to the van, fellows. We’ll move out anyway, just in case.’
He hoped the fence would soon take this junk off his hands.
The morning was now bright and full. Peder relaxed contentedly, gazing through the autocab window as Cadra went speeding past him.
How easy it was to solve problems!
But he would never have done it without the Frachonard suit – Mast, he believed, would not have allowed it. Peder would have dithered, would have felt impelled to go along with whatever Mast decided.
Even as he talked to Mast new horizons had opened up before him. Business possibilities which he had been too timid to spot until now became visible all around him. He would soon be moving out of Tarn Street. Zoide was his playground.
Which was as it should be, for a member of a galactic elite, one of the best-dressed men in the universe.
4
‘Well, how the hell was I to know?’ Amara Corl exclaimed in great irritation. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one can be expected to anticipate.’ She drummed her fingers on the desk, her brow creased. ‘What in Ziode shall we do now? What do you make of it, Estru?’
‘Have you called the medics?’ Estru asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ Amara snapped. Estru could see she was shaken by the incident, mostly because it reflected on her own judgement.
The business of opening the suit could, he felt, have been approached with more caution. ‘Impetuosity, Amara, is not a quality to be cultivated when in unknown regions,’ he thought – but the words merely floated wistfully in his mind. To have uttered them would have been to throw the female sociologist, his team leader, into a rage.
They were in an office adjoining the engineering service room where the outsize spacesuit had been laid on a workbench and cut open. When summoned, Amara had taken but a brief look at its contents and then swept out again, obviously unpleasantly affected.
‘Is he dead, do you think?’ she said. ‘He might have committed suicide.’
Estru, by means of a camera in the service room, still had a view of the suit on a vidplate, but Amara’s eyes studiously avoided this. ‘I reckon he’s just fainted.’
‘It’s weird, I have to admit that,’ Amara said distastefully, finally giving the screen the merest glance. ‘Just look at him, all connected up with wires, tubes and catheters. The muscles are so atrophied, too. If you ask me he was put in that suit years ago! Who would do such an awful thing?’
‘I’ll go further than that,’ Estru told her mildly. ‘I’d say he’s never been out of it. It’s not just the muscles that are atrophied. His limbs haven’t developed properly.’
‘You mean he’s been in it since birth?’
He nodded. Unlike Amara he had lingered with the technicians to inspect for a minute or so the workings of the suit. He had seen enough to indicate a permanent life support system supplying all aspects of biological existence. The man in the suit had been transformed into a new kind of creature: one able to inhabit space.
Suddenly Amara seemed to overcome her disgust. The scientist in her took over. She became thoughtful.
Two medical officers arrived. The sociologists accompanied them into the service room. They paused on seeing the suit and its contents.
One cast a reproving look around him. ‘This should have been done in a properly equipped theatre, not in a mechanic’s service shop.’ Estru shrugged.
The techs had cut, not just through the suit’s outer casing, but also through much of its interior equipment. Estru was worried that some of it might be vital to the health of the wearer. He watched anxiously while the medics made their examination, applying their probes and pick-ups. The figures and traces that appeared on the read-out plates of their instruments meant nothing to him, and their faces were professionally impassive.
Finally they closed up their cases and stepped out of earshot to confer, nodding in agreement.
‘He’s in shock, the catatonic kind,’ the older medic said when they returned. ‘Otherwise he’s in good health, if one leaves his unusual condition out of consideration.’
Estru gazed down at the worm-like pallor of the shrivelled human being encased in the works of the suit. ‘What would bring on that kind of shock?’
‘Trauma of an unexpected, unacceptable kind. Something the mind just wouldn’t be able to face up to.’
‘Well, that’s only a medical problem, isn’t it?’ Amara said hopefully. ‘You can bring him round, can’t you? We want to talk to him.’
The doctor hesitated. ‘That depends on whether the cause of trauma is still present. If it is, bringing him forcibly to consciousness could be contra-indicated. In such cases, a safer procedure is to remove the patient from the source of trauma, and apply psychomedications in an environment familiar to him.’
‘I get you,’ Estru said. ‘You mean put him back in the suit, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You’re saying we were wrong to break the suit open,’ Amara said heavily.
‘That’s not for us to comment on, madam.’
Estru screwed up his face in concentration. ‘Let’s get this straight. You’re suggesting the suit is the natural environment for the man inside it – that cutting it open sent him catatonic? How long do you think he’s been in it? Since birth?’
The medics glanced at one another, then at what lay on the bench. ‘That would be our guess,’ said the one who had remained silent up to now. ‘Not in this suit, of course, but in some comparable kind of container. You realize, of course, what that means.’
‘Yes,’ Amara answered firmly. ‘It means that his own body-image of himself doesn’t include anything we would recognize as a human being. When he thinks of himself as a person, the picture in his mind is that of the suit’s exterior. Probably he isn’t even conscious of his biological body, except as a sort of internal organ or essential core.’