The Garments of Caean

by Barrington J. Bayley

‘We’re in orbit,’ Raincoat announced. ‘Kyre’s below.’

  ‘Big deal,’ Castor grunted. He hunched himself to his feet, pushed Raincoat aside and made for the bridge.

  His arrival there was greeted with excitement, if also with ill-concealed revulsion. Kyre was spread out on the main vidplate, a fair-looking world of blue oceans and fluffy white clouds. He took one glance at it and walked to the guidance board.

  ‘Do you know exactly where to find the freighter?’ Leecher asked anxiously, following him. ‘Which continent is it on?’

  ‘I know where it is,’ Castor said. ‘I’ve been here before, remember?’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s on the pear-shaped continent.’

  Castor’s hands moved over the board. But instead of descending towards the planet’s atmosphere the Little Planet gathered velocity and left orbit, heading even deeper into the Gulf.

  Castor turned and looked at his companions with a sneer of triumph.

  ‘What are you doing?’ screeched Leecher in alarm. ‘We’re leaving Kyre!’

  Gadzha sprang forward and examined the controls. ‘Where are you taking us?’ he demanded angrily.

  Hatred shone from Castor’s face. ‘I’m taking you to Caean, you fools!’ he screeched, mimicking Leecher. Then he spat. ‘Caean!’

  This turn of events perplexed them. They looked at one another.

  ‘But why?’ Gadzha asked. ‘What about the freighter?’

  Castor smiled malevolently. ‘Bait, you poor pigeons! I needed a ship to take me to Caean. I could have off-loaded you all on Vence, but I thought I’d enjoy seeing your faces when the crunch comes.’ Contemptuously he turned to the board again, leaving his back undefended.

  But this time they were not overawed. Gadzha shouldered him away from the guidance board. The ship lurched as he cancelled some of its acceleration. Guided by the instructions he fed into its computer, it entered a flat, fast ellipse that once again orbited the planet below them.

  Castor, however, ignored this and turned to face the others, who were edging menacingly towards him. He had been looking forward to this moment. His gimmicked eyes blazed and glittered. His lips jutted out with maniacal ferocity. He flung out his arms in a gesture of repulse, and at the same time imagined himself to be swelling up to an enormous size. It was a technique he had used before, and one which apparently involved some deformation of the senses, for he seemed in reality to expand, the bridge and its occupants dwindling to toy-like insignificance. The phenomenon, whatever it was, affected the others, too; after only a couple of steps they halted and stared at him as if at a vision.

  ‘Quieten down, scum, I’m taking over this ship,’ he said in a rasping voice. ‘Just accept the fact that you’re dirt. If you want to live –’

  Castor had always been confident of his power at this point. He had believed that no matter how much his victims detested him he could always turn them into frightened rabbits as long as he wore his suit. But now the unexpected happened. The bubble of his mental expansion suddenly seemed to burst. He staggered. His arms flapped wildly. A convulsive tic seized one side of his face and he grimaced and jerked.

  His partnership with the Frachonard suit, fragile at the best of times, was breaking down. His nervous system had been interfered with too much, and for too long.

  ‘Ugh,’ he grunted. ‘Ugh – ugh – ugh –’

  A pathetic, helpless object, he cringed and twitched in front of the men he had tricked.

  ‘He’s flipped!’ Rabbish said, amazed.

  ‘He’s a Caeanic agent,’ Leecher grated. ‘That has to be it.’

  ‘That would explain it all right,’ Raincoat muttered. ‘Him being so weird, I mean.’

  This interpretation of events was cause for added disgust. They forced the helpless Castor into a chair. Gadzha stood over him, legs apart. Castor breathed deeply, in gasps.

  ‘So there never was a Caeanic ship on Kyre.’

  ‘There’s a ship there all right. We already took one load from it.’

  Gadzha spoke to Raincoat. ‘We’ll give it a try. Take us down.’

  ‘Hold it!’ Castor giggled weakly. ‘You can’t go down there. Kyre’s an infra-sound planet. The atmosphere’s full of subsonic.’

  ‘Subsonic?’

  ‘Low-frequency vibrations. You’ve heard of infrasound, haven’t you? Put a ship down there and she breaks up in minutes.’

  Gadzha paused uncertainly. ‘What are you trying to sell us? I never heard of any infra-sound planet.’

  Briefly Castor tried to explain about Kyre’s unique fauna and flora. ‘What do you think happened to the Caeanic ship in the first place? Try going down there if you like. See what the hell I care.’

  ‘You’ve already been there, you told us. How did you do it, if we can’t?’

  ‘We had a special suit. A baffle suit, to cancel out the infra-sound. Mast had it made. It cost a fortune.’ Castor sighed deeply. He felt abandoned, shrivelled.

  ‘Mast?’

  ‘My boss.’

  Gadzha glanced at his companions. ‘Looks like we teamed up with the wrong partner. Where’s this Mast now?’

  ‘On Ledlide.’ Castor attempted to grin, but failed.

  There was a long silence. Leecher snorted. ‘This is ridiculous. We’ve been gulled by this Caeanic spy, might as well face up to it. Nothing for it now but to go home.’

  Raincoat gestured to Castor. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Leave him on Kyre.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Castor insisted. ‘The ship will break up if you go down there.’

  ‘Do what you like with him,’ Leecher said. ‘But let’s not hang around here any longer. I’ll set course for Ziode.’

  He moved to the guidance board. The Little Planet swung away from Kyre and began to traverse the tiny solar system.

  The others sat down and glared at Castor with hatred.

  ‘Let’s just shove him through the lock into space,’ Rabbish said.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ Castor said with a smile. ‘There was nothing for you down on Kyre anyway. The ship’s probably still there, but with the cargo gone. Last time we were here we saw a Caeanic salvage ship making for it.’

  They ignored him, making further suggestions for the disposal of his person.

  After a while Leecher joined them. ‘Why don’t we give him a shot of something?’ he suggested. ‘Something that would leave him conscious and suffering for a long time. Like succinyl.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’re fully conscious but you can feel yourself dying of pain and suffocation. They reckon there’s nothing like it. It’s an interrogation drug. I don’t like people who mess me around the way this creep has.’

  Castor had been spending the last quarter of an hour trying to get his charismatic powers back, knowing that if he did he would be able to command the situation again. But the suit seemed quiescent, and he began to grow worried that his verve would not return.

  When Leecher made his malignant suggestion he acted on his own initiative. Surreptitiously he eased a sliver-knife from inside his jacket and jumped up, the knife waving in the air, to make a dash for the door.

  It was Leecher who stepped into his path, unaware of the extremely thin, near-invisible blade. Castor’s lips jutted out again in determined savagery. The sliver-knife sliced through cloth, bone and lung tissue. Leecher coughed, a choked, barely audible sound, blood foaming from his chest, and slid to the floor.

  Castor gestured triumphantly with the knife, easily visible now as a shining line of blood. His eyes blazed and sparkled. ‘Get out of it! Get out of it! Get out of it!—’

  Gadzha was on him. He clamped an immensely strong hand on Castor’s wrist, forcing the fist down until the fingers opened. The sliver-knife hit the floor and broke into a dozen fragments.

  He flung Castor back in the chair. ‘That does it,’ he rumbled. ‘That just does it. Have we got any of that succinyl, Raincoat?’

  Rabb
ish was bending over the blood-soaked Leecher, who was barely conscious but was giving out tortured moaning sounds. ‘What’ll we do?’ he appealed helplessly. ‘He’s in a bad way.’

  Gadzha looked down at the injured man. ‘Give him a shot from the medikit,’ he said briefly, then turned back to Raincoat.

  Raincoat seemed uninterested in the fate of his comrade. He had stepped to the guidance board and was studying it.

  ‘No, we wouldn’t have any succinyl,’ he said after a moment. ‘Anyway, a dose of poetic justice is what’s in order. He’s brought us all this way for nothing – let’s just leave him here.’

  ‘We’ve already left Kyre. You mean push him into space?’

  ‘No. There’s a second planet; we’re close to it now.’ He peered at the chart. ‘“The Planet of the Flies”. Peculiar name. Let’s see if it makes a suitable place to dump our friend.’

  He killed the overdrive, turned the ship and instructed the auto pilot to land on the inner planet. Castor was appalled. He shivered.

  Then, at long last, he felt the suit’s guiding influence beginning to return slightly. He let the support flow into him, soothing his disharmonized nerves.

  When he spoke it was the voice of a smoother, suaver persona that came through his mouth. He laughed in almost friendly fashion.

  ‘You won’t maroon me here, you know – that would be simply too inhuman. You don’t know why they call it “the Planet of the Flies”, do you?’

  They all ignored him. Gadzha watched while Rabbish inexpertly gave Leecher a spray injection.

  Soon Leecher stopped breathing. ‘What was it, a metabolic stop shot?’ Gadzha asked.

  Rabbish checked the words on the capsule. ‘No, it was a death shot,’ he explained.

  ‘You damned fool, why did you do that?’ Gadzha shouted hoarsely. ‘We might have got him to a doctor!’

  Rabbish looked hurt. ‘Well, he shouldn’t have got stabbed,’ he complained peevishly. ‘It was you who told me to give him a shot.’

  ‘Flies,’ Castor interrupted desperately. ‘Flies.’

  The ship descended through the planet’s atmosphere. At a height of a mile it began to settle into the black sludge of flies, sinking as if into a swamp. From the hull came a faint thrumming noise.

  They all stared in fascination at the main vidplate as the ship found a solid surface.

  Gadzha spoke in a choked voice. ‘God!’

  ‘Awful, isn’t it?’ Castor commented lightly. He looked about him hopefully, with raised eyebrows. ‘Oh well, let’s be up and on our way.’

  Raincoat was staring glassily at the plate. ‘It’s perfect,’ he intoned in a shaky voice. ‘Just what we need. He’s nothing but an insect himself.’

  Castor stood up as Raincoat turned to him. The suit at this point made a brief attempt to invest him with grace and beauty, but his fractured nervous system interpreted the impulses so badly that he merely leaped up and down like a mad puppet, baring his teeth in a weird grimace and uttering animal-like sounds. The horrid spectacle goaded Raincoat, Gadzha and Rabbish into action. They dragged him kicking and screaming from the bridge and down to the package ejector port at ground level. Castor’s screams became increasingly terrified as the import of events came home to him, but only in the last minute or so did he plead, and then it was to no avail. They locked him in the ejector chamber and worked the ramrod that pushed its contents into the open air.

  Afterwards they looked at one another, gasping.

  Castor ceased to scream once the outer hatch was opened. Foolishly he had tried to breathe; the flies, which had already flooded in to clog his nasal cavities, had evaded all his apertures and formed a layer between his skin and his garments, in seconds filled his lungs and stomach.

  In spite of that he was still alive when the ramrod ejected him from the chamber. He staggered and floundered in the dense atmosphere of living, buzzing flies, which clustered around him like iron filings on a magnet, creating a manshaped blotch of near-solid consistency.

  The flies were voracious: they lived by eating a semi-organic rock-like substance that rumbled up constantly from beneath the surface of the planet. In an astonishingly short time they had devoured Castor. Tissue, blood, bone, and all trace of undergarments entirely disappeared.

  They did not, however, eat the Frachonard suit.

  Over the past year it had gained much experience in the monitoring of sentient activity. It had reached the point where it could, if need be, control living systems directly, wherever they stood on the evolutionary scale. What was more, the primitive nervous systems of the flies offered no problems of incompatibility, as had the advanced human one possessed by Castor. The suit, despite its setback, had not abandoned its mission and was in no way faltering or reticent.

  It did not collapse or even become slack when Castor disappeared. Instead, it filled itself up with flies, organizing them into a collective pseudo-body which powered it in a stiff mimicry of human action. Falteringly it turned to the closed hatch of the ejector port, and directed the combined efforts of thousands of flies to push loose the dogs. That done, it floated from the ground, entering the chamber and allowing in only as many flies as suited its purpose, leaving the rest to cover the open hatch like a black wall.

  Behind it the hatch closed automatically prior to takeoff. The Little Planet swayed into the air to rise rapidly above the fly layer. Minutes later, after opening the inner door of the package ejector port with difficulty, the suit was free and walking the passages of the ship by means of its humming pseudo-body.

  In the long corridor beneath the level of the bridge it encountered Gadzha’s girl. She stopped and stood stock-still with a petrified snarl of fear on her face, staring at the apparition: at the suit recently worn by her rapist Castor, but worn now by a body of flies. The head, hands and feet were each composed of a black fuzzy mass. The legs, even though they floated a foot above the floor, persisted in striding slowly in walking fashion as the monster came slowly towards her.

  A breathy sound from the girl’s throat signalled her vain attempt to scream. Then, recovering her power of movement, she turned and fled in the direction of the bridge.

  The Frachonard suit arrived there scarcely half a minute behind her. Gadzha, Raincoat and Rabbish all froze to see this phantom return, as, for the second time, did the girl.

  In the seconds remaining to them only Raincoat had the presence of mind to reach for his gun, a futile gesture he did not even complete.

  He did not complete it because the suit released its hold on the flies, sending them exploding in all directions to fill the interior of the bridge. While it collapsed neatly on the floor, the flies began to feast on their victims; but shortly, with the bodies only partly devoured, the suit recalled them again. They streamed back, causing the suit to rise up from the floor as if lifted by a string.

  It floated over to the guidance board. The pseudo-hands hovered over the controls; clumsily, exerting all their puny force, the flies began to manipulate them.

  The Little Planet changed course and went hurtling obliquely through the Gulf.

  The Frachonard suit was in search of its property.

  And that property was Peder Forbarth.

  10

  Ledlide, in terms of geological time, was but recently accreted, a slagheap of a planet still drifting through a miasma of gas, dust and rubble that was the detritus of sister planets yet to form. It orbited a primary which was itself no more than a dimly glowing cloud of gas, more a proto-star than a star in the true sense, yet providing a modicum of heat and gloomy light.

  To the Ziodean mind such a remote and dismal spot made an ideal prison site. Ziodeans did not view the social offender as a candidate for reform or rehabilitation. Responsibility for misdeeds was seen as personal and absolute: the criminal got his deserts, and the logical punishment, short of death, was for him to be removed from society, the farther the better.

  Accordingly the convict, on his journey to Ledlide, looked ba
ck through the prison ship’s viewports and saw the Ziode Cluster receding into the distance. Thus he was made to feel how decidedly he had been rejected.

  The Frachonard suit experienced considerable difficulty in locating this six-thousand-mile heap of cosmic garbage. Finding the partially condensed cloud that was Ledlide’s solar system was not so hard, but once within the cloud it was unable to use the ship’s instruments and so had to rely on its own growing powers of apprehension. Guiding the ship at this stage was even more difficult, for the flies having fed on the remains of the bridge’s previous occupants until nothing was left of them, were unused to a human-type atmosphere and were dying off despite the suit’s strict control over their vitality.

  Out of Ledlide’s smog-like sky, the Little Planet descended towards the vicinity of the leaden prison roof, which jutted a few feet above the gravelly surface. Drifting northwards, the ship landed just beyond the horizon, behind a low ridge.

  Once the ship was down, the depleted swarm of flies finally died, and the now-flaccid suit collapsed to the floor in a neat pile. The stench of decomposing flies filled the bridge.

  After a while a door opened in the prison roof, and a man wearing a breathing mask appeared. Pausing once to orient himself, he trudged the mile or so to the ship. After a brief inspection he opened one of the hatches and went inside, exploring all sections of the ship and calling out to announce his presence.

  When he reached the bridge the brittle bodies of the flies crunched under his feet. He still wore his breathing mask and did not notice the stench, or he would instantly have vomited. Otherwise the only sign of occupancy was the suit heaped on the floor near the guidance board. For some moments the man gazed at the suit. Then he bent down and carefully picked it up, straightening the folds and draping it over his arm.

  After one last look round he retraced his steps and left the ship to trudge back to the prison. He reported that the ship was empty and appeared to have landed on automatic, but to make sure the governor ordered an air search of the surrounding terrain. The possibility of that unheard-of-thing – an escape attempt – was raised, but the governor quickly dropped it, secure in the knowledge that Ledlide was deemed escape-proof. The crew of the Little Planet must have suffered some accident, he decided. The craft must have flown itself here. He would ask for it to be taken to Ziode with the next supply ship.