The Peacock Cloak

kids. Come here, you silly boy. Come to big sis. I love you don’t I?”
    She pulled Peter close to her, putting her arm round his shoulder in a rough masculine way. Three baby water dragons appeared in the pond, supple as eels and slender as human fingers, and began to chase one another round and round the little goblin, which was once more staring straight ahead.
    “There you are, Peter,” Cassie said, hugging her brother against her, and absent-mindedly patting him. “There there. That’s better isn’t it? You’ve got me to look after you, haven’t you? You’ve got your big sis. So you don’t need them, do you? You don’t need anyone else at all.”
    Peter sniffed and nodded.
    “There’s all the food anyone could want out here, after all,” Cassie told him, giving him a little encouraging shake. “We’ll be quite happy having fun out here all by ourselves. No Mum blubbing. No Dad whining.”
    She thought for a moment, a little sadly, about Carmelo.
    “And no horrid school with settler kids,” she added firmly, “who think killing things is fun.”
    At the bottom of the pond, the goblin suddenly swum off, disappearing, in a single, frog-like stroke, into one of the water-filled tunnels under the trees.
    “Come on then, trouble,” Cassie said to her brother. “Let’s get moving again, before someone notices we’ve gone.”

    All that night, with pauses for food and rest, they wandered through the caramel forest, Cassie telling Peter stories to keep his spirits up, or providing him with improving pieces of information, or making up games for them to play together. Who could find the biggest tree pod? Who would spot the next dragon?
    “Why don’t you be Max the dog again, Peter,” she suggested when he seemed to be flagging, “and then you can snuffle things out for us.”
    Snuffling things out wasn’t exactly hard to do, with the show in full swing all around them.
    “Woof! Woof!” said Max almost at once, spotting a gryphon fanning a pair of incandescent wings that crackled with electric charge.
    “Woof! Woof!” he said again, as a white hart darted away from them, and plunged into the underground sea.
    “Woof! Woof!” he shouted out, as an agency helicopter came thump-thump-thumping over the mushroom trees, probing down into the forest with long cold fingers of light.
    “Good boy Maxie,” Cassie told her brother. “ Good boy. Now quickly come and hide.”

    Not long after the helicopter had passed over, dawn began to break. The phosphorescent glow faded from the moss and the ponds, the stage emptied, and the two children found themselves walking alone through ordinary sunlight that filtered down through the trees, as in pictures of Earth, that faraway world across the void, that place where leaves were green.
    They lay down to sleep in deep soft moss.

    When Cassie woke the sun was already setting. Beside her Peter still slept peacefully, sucking the edge of one finger, and for a while she just lay there watching the shadows of dreams rippling across his face and his eyes darting about under his closed lids.
    During the quiet still hours of daylight, Cassie realised, creatures had come to watch her dreaming, just as she was watching Peter now. She’d had strange thoughts running through her sleeping mind, and a familiar voice in her head had been telling her that there was no faraway home, no great void of space, no ‘Earth’ or ‘Lutania’, only a single whispering, seething world, strange and familiar all at once.
    From a nearby pond climbed a small winged quadruped, shaking its sparkling wings.
    “Come on Peter,” Cassie called out gaily. “Wakey, wakey! It’s another lovely night.”

    They were deeper into the forest that night, further away from Agency stations and settler villages alike, and they came across many goblins.
    The creatures were sometimes on their own, often in twos and threes. They watched the children with their black button eyes and smiled their V-shaped smiles. One of them held out a white stone, another a piece of twig. One even showed them a small brown button from a settler’s jacket.
    “There is no space,” said the voices in Cassie’s head, as the goblin’s eyes watched her. “There are no people. There is no such thing as far away.”
    It seemed strange to her that she’d ever been persuaded to believe in an immensity of empty space beyond the caramel forest and its sky, for it seemed obvious now that everything that existed was as