“How long is it possible to live in a space suit?” I asked.

“You’re going to love this,” Jesry proclaimed, taking the floor with a nod from Lio. Jesry strode over to where he, with help from Fraa Gratho, had, for the last hour or so, been assembling space suits. He approached one that seemed to be complete, and slapped a green metal canister socketed into the suit’s backpack. “Liquid oxygen! A whole four hours’ supply, right here.”

“Provided you show discipline in its use,” put in Suur Vay.

“Liquid!? As in cryogenic?” Sammann asked.

“Of course.”

“How long will it stay cold?”

“In space? It’s not such an issue. It’ll stay cold as long as the fuel cell has fuel to run the chiller.” Slapping a red canister, he went on, “Liquid hydrogen. Easy on, easy off.” He twisted it off, showed us some kind of complicated latching/gasket hardware, then twisted it back on.

“So we’re competing against a fuel cell for the available oxygen?” Arsibalt asked.

“Think of it as coöperation.”

“What about waste products?” someone asked, but Jesry was ready. “Carbon dioxide is scrubbed here.” He twisted off a white can and waved it around. “When it’s used up, slap on a new one. Then—you’ll like this—take the old one over to the tender.” He paced over to a separate piece of equipment that looked as if it belonged to the same genus, but a different species, from the space suits. It had color-coded sockets all over it for tanks and canisters. He jacked the scrubber onto one of these. “It bakes the CO2 out of the scrubber. When this bar has changed color”—he pointed to an indicator on the side of the can—“it’s ready to use again.”

“This device is also a reservoir of air and fuel?” asked Suur Vay, eyeing the sockets for oxygen and hydrogen canisters.

“If it’s available, this is where you’ll get it,” Jesry said. “It’s meant to be connected to a water bladder and an energy supply—usually solar panels, but in our case, a little nuke. It breaks the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, liquefies them, and fills any tank you slap onto it. And it uses heat to recycle the scrubbers, as I was saying. Likewise, when your waste bags fill up—we’ll discuss those later—you attach them here—” pointing fastidiously to an array of yellow fittings.

“Do you mean to say we’ll be defecating inside the suits?” Arsibalt asked.

“Thank you for volunteering to demonstrate this amazing feature of the praxis!” Jesry proclaimed. “Lio and Raz, would you be so kind as to give your fraa some privacy?”

Lio and I collected Arsibalt’s bolt from where he had left it, and held it up, stretched between us, to make a screen as Arsibalt shed his coverall. Meanwhile, Jesry fetched a double extra large space suit and trundled it over. It was suspended from a rolling contraption that he called the Donning Rig. The suit consisted of a big rigid construct, the Head and Torso Unit or, inevitably, HTU, whose upper back hinged open like a refrigerator door. Each arm and each leg was built up out of several short, stiff, bulbous pods, stacked like beads on a string. This gave it a different appearance from the space suits I remembered seeing in speelies, and on the Warden of Heaven: this one was bigger, more rounded, reassuringly solid. Another big difference, at least cosmetically, was that this suit—like all of the others that Jesry had been working on—was matte black.

Arsibalt stepped toward the Donning Rig, raising his hands to grasp a strategically located chin-up bar, and pulling/climbing to a step poised at the threshold of the suit’s back door. He was surprisingly game. Perhaps he was remembering spec-fic speelies he used to watch before he was Collected, or perhaps he just didn’t like being naked. With some help from Jesry he introduced one pointed toe, then the other, into the leg-holes at the base of the HTU, and lowered himself into them. As his feet descended, the hard segments rotated in different ways. Each bulb, it seemed, was joined to its neighbors by an airtight bearing. All of them could rotate independently, so that elbows and knees could bend normally without the need for a complex joint mechanism. Arsibalt looked even more roly-poly than usual now. He flexed one leg, than the other, giving us a look at how the segments allowed movement by rotating against each other.

“I want to you take notice of the bags ringing your thighs and waist,” Jesry said, indicating some rubberish-looking stuff hanging limp from the inner walls of the HTU. “In a few minutes, those are going to rock your world.”

“It is so noted,” Arsibalt said, thrusting one hand, then the other, into the arm-constructs, which seemed to end in blunt hemispherical domes—handless stumps. All we could see now was his back and his arse. Jesry did us all the favor of slamming the door on that.

Now that our fraa was decent, Lio and I let the bolt drop, then migrated round to Arsibalt’s front side. We could barely hear his muffled voice. Jesry jacked a wire into a socket on the chest and turned on an amplifier. We heard Arsibalt on a speaker: “There’s much for my hands to learn about down here—I wish I could see what I was doing.”

“We’ll go over it,” Jesry promised. He spoke distractedly, since he was busy examining an array of readouts on the front of the suit—making sure his fraa wasn’t going to asphyxiate in there. I noticed others staring at Arsibalt’s front and looking amused, so I came around to that side of him and discovered that a small flat-panel speely screen was planted in the middle of his chest. It was showing a live feed of Arsibalt’s face, taken by a speelycaptor inside the helmet. It was quite distorted because shot through a fisheye lens at close range, but gave us something to look at other than the opaque smoked-glass face mask. “Pray tell, what are all these nozzles in front of my mouth?” Arsibalt asked, eyes downcast and scanning.

“Left, water. Right, food and, as warranted, pharmaceuticals. The big one in the middle is the scupper.”

“The what?”

“You throw up into it. Don’t miss.”

“Ah.” Arsibalt’s eyes rose to look out the face-mask at where his hands ought to have been. He raised one arm until its stump was up where he could see it. A hatch popped open. We all jumped back as something like a giant metal spider sprang out of it, flailing its limbs. On a second look, this proved to be a skeletal hand: bones, joints, and tendons mimicking those of a natural hand, but all made of machined, black-anodized metal, and skinless, unless you counted the black rubber pads on the tips of the fingers. It all grew out of a wrist joint that was fixed to the end of the stump. At first, it twitched and flopped spasmodically. One by one, the joints seemed to come under Arsibalt’s control, and it began to move like a real hand. His other arm came up, the hatch popped open, and another hand emerged from it. This one, though, was less human-looking; it was studded with small tools.

“Explain what you are doing with your hands,” I requested.

“The ends of the arms are roomy,” Arsibalt said. “There is a sort of glove, into which I can insert my hand. It is mechanically connected to the skeletal hand that you can all see.”

“Pure mechanism?” Sammann asked. “No servos?”

“Strictly mechanical,” said Jesry. “See for yourself.” And we gathered round for a closer look. The skelehand was animated by a number of metallic ribbons and pushrods that all disappeared into the arm-stump where, we gathered, they were connected directly to the internal glove that Arsibalt was wearing.

“Simple, in a way,” was Fraa Osa’s verdict, “yet very complex.”

“Yes. Except for the airtight seals, the whole thing could have been made by a medieval artisan with a lot of time on his hands,” Jesry said. “Fortunately, the mathic world has a large number of medieval artisans. And, believe it or not, it’s easier to build something like this than it is to make a pressurized space suit glove that’s actually good for anything.”