‘Will you have some syllabub?’ offered Caldersk, providing her with a dollop of aromatic jelly. She tasted it, and unfamiliar flavours melted in her mouth. Then she turned to him challengingly.
‘I wish you always maintained such a friendly attitude towards Ziodeans,’ she said in a suspicious tone.
Caldersk chuckled. ‘That is exactly what I want to set straight between us – these ridiculous notions you have about us. You think we are “clothes robots”, having no individuality. You think we want to invade Ziode and enslave you all.’ He laughed. ‘It has its comic aspect, I must admit.’
‘Do you actually claim that you have no aggressive claim on Ziode?’ Amara snapped sharply.
‘Absolutely none!’ Caldersk’s laughter nearly punctured her eardrums. ‘Caean has neither the intention nor the desire to embark upon a career of conquest. It would be contrary to our way of life.’
She reflected for a moment, taken aback. ‘Well, do you claim that you have never had such ambitions?’
‘Again, absolutely.’
‘Oh, I know better than that!’ Amara flared.
Noting that she had rejected the syllabub, Caldersk reached across the table and drew close a succulent meat dish. ‘Try this.’
Amara waved it away.
He shrugged, raising his eyebrows with an air of deliberation. ‘Remember that we see the Art of Attire as being the essence of civilized life,’ he said. ‘It is true that, in the past, idealists among us have wished to spread Caean’s unquestionable superiority in this field to the rest of mankind. But their plans were of a missionary, rather than a military, nature, and took the form of loading up fleets of giant spaceships with sumptuous apparel with which to bombard the barbarian planets. Even this scheme was abandoned, owing to the hostility of other nations, chiefly Ziode – though for a fact many of the ships still lie in their hangars, fully laden. I expect it is stories of these efforts that have produced the fears prevalent among your people.’
Amara became aware that by her side her assistant was listening intently. ‘So you do admit that you have expansionist leanings,’ Estru remarked drily.
Trupp answered him from farther up the table. ‘That is so, but only in a cultural sense. The urge to propagate one’s cultural values is nowhere regarded as reprehensible.’
‘It is where those values are inimical to one’s own – which is our case.’
Caldersk made a jovial, explosive gesture. ‘Come, come. We no longer think of swamping Ziodean culture beneath our own – until, that is, the superiority of Caeanic attire becomes evident to the Ziodeans themselves. I have just explained that the missionary zeal of an earlier generation has abated. You have nothing to fear from us – nothing but your own ignorance of our nature.’
‘So you say,’ Second Officer Borg put in. ‘But if I may put matters bluntly – how can we confirm this? The Ziodean Directorate will take a lot of convincing.’
‘Exactly!’ Caldersk agreed with satisfaction. ‘I am glad you asked that. We would ask you to confirm for yourselves that our society is peaceful, our natures unaggressive. To demonstrate our good faith we give you liberty to travel about Caean at will, without let or hindrance, to carry out your sociological investigations.’
Amara glanced wildly at Estru, unable to conceal her amazement. ‘You will let us take the Callan anywhere? Survey any planet? Talk to anyone – obtain information from universities, cultural scientists, military establishments? Without supervision?’
‘You may regard yourselves as free agents,’ Caldersk said, ‘though I must draw the line at giving you carte blanche with the military – that will have to depend on the local commanders.’
‘But that’s wonderful – that’s just what we need.’
‘There was never any need to go sneaking about the fringes,’ Caldersk told her. ‘All you needed to do was come and ask. We are a much more easy-going society than you are in Ziode.’
‘One thing needs to be said,’ Estru put in. ‘You are trying hard to represent yourselves as reasonable and harmless. If that’s the case how could our people be so wrong about you, even to the extent of preparing for war? Our people at home think of you as being far from harmless.’
He was answered by Svete Trupp. ‘As sociologists, you must be aware of the theory of cultural repulsion. Disparate cultures repel one another, is that not how the theorem goes? In fact the bad relations between us are solely the result of mistrust and misconception. We are probably not as unalike as you have always imagined. You believe, for instance, that we have some kind of obsession with clothing. This is not true.’
Amara raised her eyebrows and seemed about to laugh.
‘I am sure your coming researches will show you that you have exaggerated our preoccupation with costume,’ Caldersk took up, seeing her expression. ‘Very few Ziodeans have studied Caean, after all. What reference sources do you use?’
‘Matt-Helver’s Travels in the Tzist Arm is the standard text,’ Amara told him defensively.
‘Ah yes, Matt-Helver. Full of inaccuracies – a very amusing book! Yet in the end Matt-Helver settled here himself and came to know us better, I believe.’
‘You mean he was wrong about the place of sartorialism in Caeanic society?’
‘Every civilization has typical artforms, does it not? Ours is dress. It has nothing to do with religion, as some foreigners have supposed. It is a matter of practical psychology, that is all. We have found that our science of adornment has the power to lend life a positive, forward-looking aspect. To us it is you who are obsessed – obsessed with man’s evolutionary past, unable to escape from the single shape arbitrarily imposed on man by nature.’
It did not escape the Ziodeans that despite his disclaimers Caldersk was already interpreting the significance of dress in terms that to them were bizarre. ‘Let’s examine this business of obsession,’ Amara suggested. ‘To be obsessed is to be unnaturally preoccupied with one thing to the exclusion of others. Now, we in Ziode have no objection to imaginative dress. But likewise we have no objection to nakedness either. Both are a matter of indifference to us. So who is obsessed?’ She was tickled to see both Caldersk and Trupp blush deeply at her mention of nudity.
‘But you disparage raiment and let your minds dwell on… vulgar biology. That way lies decadence.’
‘We are not decadent,’ Amara said indignantly.
Caldersk drank a deep draught from a tankard of fizzy yellow liquid. Trupp once again took up the thread.
‘What is man when he is born? He is nothing; his mind is in neutral; not switched on. Only when he begins to interact with his environment does his life burgeon. Such interaction means that he must have an effective interface; he must clothe himself with suitable psychological instruments. Thus it is the lot of the shabbily clothed to sink into morbid introspection, to take on a depressing uniformity. The skill of our sartorialists, by contrast, ensures that we maintain a healthy contact with external reality.’
‘Yes, we of Caean enjoy life, thanks to the Art of Attire,’ Caldersk agreed. He turned to Amara with a smile. ‘And you say we have no individuality! Do I look like a “clothes robot” to you?’
‘No, you do not,’ she admitted.
He leaned closer, his eyes roving over her. ‘Let me send a sartorial to you. Experience for yourself the benefits of our art. A rich houppelande, perhaps? A graceful pelisse? You will soon notice the difference.’
‘No, thank you,’ she said primly.
Estru looked about him at the picturesquely garbed people feasting at the table, and wondered if there could be any truth in what Trupp and Caldersk had just said. Was Caean indeed a case of exotic social insanity, as he had always believed, or was it merely that Ziode had lost some quality Caean had retained? His gaze came to rest on two women sitting on the other side of the table a little farther down. One wore a dress which consisted of interlocking diamond-shaped panels, making her torso look like a crystalline explosion, while on her head she wore a fontange, a tall, fan-like headdress. The other wore a polonaise, a simpler willowy dress made of a cream-coloured material decorated with wandering lines of pearls. Her headdress, however, was an extravagant vision from the past: a full-blown model of a three-masted sailing ship, complete in every detail, proud and tall with sails and rigging, and apparently being buffeted by the complicated waves and curls into which her hair was set.