‘And we forced him to look at himself,’ Estru breathed. ‘My God!’
‘Psychologically it’s a fascinating situation,’ Amara said. ‘An almost unique opportunity, in fact. It would be interesting to do some experiments – but that’s not our mission.’ She waved her hand dismissingly and her face became stern. ‘We’d better stick to our brief. If this is a cultural norm then we’re up against a pretty weird culture.’
A look of guarded relief had come over the older medic’s face. ‘I take it you have abandoned the idea of removing him completely from the suit?’
‘That would be some job of unscrambling. God, where does the suit end and the man begin?’ For the first time Amara stared without flinching at the bulky sawn-open cylinder and its unnerving contents. The inert flesh was, indeed, practically enmeshed in its surrounding web of transducers and catheters. ‘Imagine what it must be like to be this man,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He doesn’t have the use of the limbs he was born with; only of the suit’s devices and organs. I wonder if the suit is equipped with a kinesthetic sense? Probably so; in that case he’s able to sense it and feel it the same way we do our own bodies. It is his body, as far as he’s concerned.’
‘It’s so elaborate it’s a misnomer to call it a suit,’ Estru added. ‘It’s an integrated system in its own right: a space body-prosthetic.’
‘And from his point of view you’ve inflicted savage injury on him,’ the older doctor pointed out.
Amara turned to the techs. ‘What about that? Can you repair the damage?’
The chief technician stirred. ‘If I’d known you’d want us to make good we’d have been more careful. We invaded quite a few sub-systems by cutting into it in the way we did.’
‘How would you assess the suit, technically?’ Estru asked.
The other pursed his lips. ‘A good solid job, very durable. But judging by what we’ve seen so far there’s nothing too advanced for us to handle. Some of it’s pretty quaint, in fact. We can patch it up if you want.’
‘Good. Get on with it, then,’ Amara said.
‘It’s really more of a job for a doctor than an engineer,’ the medic said anxiously. ‘I’d be happier having him in surgery.’
‘Fair enough. You can all work on it together. Just before you seal him up give him whatever psycho-medications you think necessary.’ Amara made for the door, giving Estru a glance to follow.
As they walked back to their own section she tapped him on the arm. ‘There were two of them, remember? He called the other one Lana – in Old Russian that’s a feminine name.’ She screwed up her face in amusement. ‘I wonder what they were doing!’
In terms of the interstellar velocity of which it was capable, the exploratory ship Callan had been almost stationary when it spotted the deep-space suits. In fact it had been engaged on a moderately-paced sweep of the planetary system occupying the near-space of the small nondescript yellow star. This was the forty-third such unremarkable star they had visited at random, following Amara Corl’s theory that in this way they would uncover traces of the beginning of Caeanic civilization. Had their sensor scans not picked up the suits their stay would have been brief. The system contained no habitable planets. It was a bleak corner of the starry world, one among a million such bleak corners, and Estru, Amara’s first assistant, had been about to suggest that they abandon the search for ancient beings and move closer to Caeanic space proper.
Now, however, Amara was excited. It would probably take the techs a couple of hours to close up the suit again. Meanwhile there was the question of where it had come from.
Two nearby worlds offered themselves as candidates. The first and most unlikely was a gas giant surrounded by a system of Saturn rings but lacking any satellites. The second, a tiny arid planet quite unfit for human life, lay at present scarcely fifteen million miles sunward of the gas giant. The Callan had picked up its prisoner about mid-way between the two.
‘The small one, I think. Don’t you, Estru?’
‘Presumably. It’s not much of a world. Less than two thousand miles in diameter, a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and cold. But maybe there’s a protected outpost there or something.’ He reflected. ‘Shouldn’t we wait till we get a chance to talk to our specimen before going any farther? We might save some time that way in the end.’
She snorted. ‘We didn’t have much luck last time. He was raving.’
‘Maybe we didn’t try hard enough to meet him on his own terms? He seemed to be under a misapprehension regarding our nature, as well as we of his.’
‘Yes.’ She switched on the recording she had made, listening with a frown to the sonorous voice. “‘You will pay for all your barbarities,’” she translated slowly and with difficulty. “‘We have never submitted to you and we never shall. I shall tell you nothing…” As if we were an enemy he recognized, instead of complete strangers.’ She switched off.
‘I’d rather know more about his background before we go barging in.’
‘You can carry caution too far,’ she reproved. ‘What if we hadn’t opened the suit? We still wouldn’t know the truth about him. But all right. A few hours of library research can’t do any harm.’ She turned away and held down her memo key, which carried her voice to every section of her fifty-member team.
Minutes later she had alerted them to what was happening and had put the department on a crash project: investigate late Russian history, with special reference to any incursion into the Tzist Arm. She herself settled down to brush up her knowledge of the language.
She had been at it for a couple of hours when the vid chimed and the bearded face of Captain Wilce appeared.
‘I ought to tell you we’ve spotted another object heading our way, Amara. At a guess it’s come from the small planet up-sun of us. Any suggestions or preferences?’
‘Yes! Make contact!’ Amara replied immediately. ‘What is it, another deep-space suit?’
‘Something larger this time,’ Wilce relayed a blurred long-range sensor image to her. It was hard to make anything sensible out of the shape that emerged. The object could have been lozenge-shaped, or perhaps flat and rectangular. It was studded with smaller features which the scanner failed to define properly.
‘It has a length of about a hundred feet,’ the Captain explained. ‘We might have been better advised to proceed under baffle. They doubtless know we’re here by now.’
‘There’s no reason to think they’re hostile,’ Amara murmured as she studied the advancing space vehicle, ‘and we can’t stay under baffle all the time. How about meeting them half-way, Captain?’
‘If you’re in that much of a hurry.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Amara eagerly. ‘We have to get to the bottom of this thing just as soon as possible.’
‘Right. Keep your eyes peeled – we’ll be there in minutes.’
He went off-line. Amara turned to Estru as she tapped her vidboard. ‘I’ve a feeling we’re about to add a chapter to the annals of sociology.’
Carrifer, in charge of the information team, came on the screen. ‘Anything on the region yet?’ Amara asked him.
‘Yes, Amara. The Russians were active here. But there’s not much by way of details. Knowledge of that era is so scrappy.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said impatiently. ‘Well, I hope you can give us a précis pretty soon. Keep at it.’
She cleared the screen, then put it through to the Callan’s sensoring section, obtaining the same view that was being delivered to the bridge.