‘No. It is impossible.’
She seemed exasperated by his obstinacy. ‘Don’t you realize that we saved your life?’ She said angrily. ‘If we hadn’t picked you up when we did the cyborgs would have got you – there was a raft loaded with warriors on its way to you. And haven’t we given you all your biological requirements, both oxygen and liquid nutrient? Would the cyborgs have bothered to do that?’
‘Not until now.’
But eventually he had begun to believe her. Her patience wore down his brave tirades and he found himself following her arguments.
She did not try to wheedle any military information out of him, but in the end she did ask him to describe his life in Homebase. And so he began to talk of home, that happy Eden of rocky islets girdling gassy Sovya…
For many years Amara Corl had cherished a scientific ambition: to transform sociology, her chosen subject, into a branch of knowledge as exact as the sciences of chemistry and physics, able to calculate the social forces acting on an individual as precisely as the forces of gravity or nuclear energy could be calculated.
All that was needed, she believed, was to find the underlying principles by which these forces operated. But her search for such principles had so far been frustrating. Ziodean civilization was too capricious for one to be able to pin individual characteristics to a graph-board as neatly as she would have liked. For that reason she had turned to the study of aberrant cultures, such as the Caeanic – though even that did not go far enough for her purposes, her reasoning being that the major signposts of social consciousness would best show themselves at the limits of extremity and bizarreness. She had even toyed with the idea of creating a suitable culture artificially, perhaps taking over an orphanage for the purpose, but unfortunately the government had declined to co-operate in such a scheme. Sociology was not officially regarded as a practical science, and the Directorate always wanted change out of any projects it financed.
Nevertheless Amara’s approach to the subject had given her a useful reputation for toughness. She flourished in the study theme set up to make an appraisal of the Caeanic menace. When the Callan expedition had been mooted, she had grabbed at the opportunity with both hands.
‘We are going to have to fight a war with Caean,’ she began when, shortly after her sessions with Alexei Verednyev, she addressed the ship’s company of officers and social scientists for an important orientation meeting. ‘That is Fact Number One. All reputable psychologists are agreed that the Caeanics will not, in the long run, be able to control their quasi-religious conviction that their way of life is the only one for mankind. When their desire to convert their neighbours becomes irresistible, as we believe is now happening, they will launch their crusade.
‘That is why we are here – to try to find weaknesses in the Caeanic aberration that can be used to our advantage. Ladies and gentlemen, we can now claim to have solved the essential mystery of Caean. We have discovered the historical origin of the Cult of Attire!’
Her eyes gleamed with triumph as she delivered this news, which though already known to most of her staff was a bomb-shell to many of the ship’s officers. After a pause to let it sink in, she resumed.
‘As you all know, three weeks ago we hauled aboard a metal object which turned out to contain a man in a much atrophied state. The metal “suit” in which he was encased proved to be his habitat. He thinks of it, in fact, as his “body”.’ She operated the playback, taping pictures of their ‘suit-man’ – the metalloid, as Estru had dubbed him – to the demonstration screen. The edited sequence showed him jetting through space, then being pulled through the lock. Briefly she let them see him in the engineering service room, the suit cut open to show its organic cargo.
‘The subject’s name is Alexei Verednyev, and he speaks a variant of Russian, an ancient Earth language which was thought to be extinct. I have now talked to him extensively and have learned a great deal about his life and the society he comes from. It is a life spent completely in space – indeed his countrymen imagine no other kind of life – during which he never consciously leaves his suit. After birth a child lives in a nursery canister until he can be fitted with his first space-suit, which occurs at the age of three months. At intervals the suit is changed until the child grows to full size, at which time he is fitted with his final suit. During each change-over he is anaesthetized. He never in his whole life sees his organic body.
‘The suits are elaborate machines supplying every need. The man – or woman – as we know him has vanished into the suit. He has no consciousness or memory of his organic body; the suit has become his body. Its systems are his systems in just the same way that his native biological systems are. The data-processing unit that regulates these systems could logically be regarded as an adjunct to the motor and autonomic functions of his organic brain.
‘So complete is the identification that the recipient has even been persuaded to accept the exterior of a spacesuit as an erotic stimulus. Watch this.’
With a wry smile Amara rolled the playback to show their first sighting of Alexei with Lana. The two suits were grappling, jockeying for position, thrusting together.
‘Copulation between male and female suits.’
The gathering watched the brief exhibition in fascination. One of Wilce’s officers uttered a sigh. ‘Imagine living your life cased up like that. It must be awful.’
‘You’re looking at it the wrong way. This is not a man in a suit. It’s a new kind of creature: a metal space-creature with an organic core. In fact the suit-people are no longer capable of descending to a planetary surface: they are space-dwellers in the fullest sense of the word. Their home is in a Saturn ring system belonging to a nearby gas giant they call Sovya. The rocks comprising the rings provide all the materials they need. They also hollow out some of them for various purposes, such as to make protected nurseries.
‘The Sovyan suit-people also have enemies, and here they are.’
She showed them the pictures of the cyborgs. First the prisoner strapped to the board like a specimen awaiting dissection. Then the scene aboard the raft. She panned in on the cowled figure in the middle.
Then she showed them the giant suit butchering the captured cyborg. ‘We’ll come on to those in a moment.’
She licked her lips. ‘You’ll want to know how this extraordinary situation arose. That’s something Alexei Verednyev wasn’t able to tell me. As far as he knows things have always been that way. I had to resort to the ship’s library to put the picture together. So prepare for a little history lesson.
‘A thousand years ago Earth was still the focus of political power for the whole of mankind. By that time there had already been a great spread of activity throughout the galaxy, and there was a great rivalry between various nations, but all those nations were Earth nations. This seems odd to us, of course. We are used to thinking of a nation as something consisting of many planets, hundreds of planets as likely as not, and for a number of autonomous cultures to coexist on the same globe strikes us as contradictory. Yet this was the case on Earth, not only prior to the galactic expansion but for some decades afterwards. And despite their small base many of these Earth-rooted nations managed to retain their power during the initial years of galactic exploitation, and not only that but actually to increase it.
‘Two such national powers were the USSR – also called Russia – and Japan. There had always been a traditional feud between these two countries. At the time we are speaking of they had managed to be at war with one another in various parts of the galaxy for nearly a hundred years – including, for a brief time, in the Tzist Arm. Perhaps they felt themselves to be over-extended here, for apparently they withdrew. But it seems certain that in the process both sides left behind them sizeable pockets of personnel and equipment, cut off and marooned, with no way of getting home, right here where we are now. How did this happen? We’ll never know. Perhaps this tiny system was simply overlooked in the drama and confusion of the withdrawal. Perhaps the task forces fighting here were thought to have been destroyed.