The Peacock Cloak

backers have acquired. It’s an old Chinese space station actually, but the Chinese haven’t got much use for it any more, not since…”
    He gave a gloomy little shrug to represent flood, famine and civil breakdown.
    “You’re given a muscle relaxant to temporarily paralyse you,” he said. “You’re given intravenous oxygen, you’re scanned for maybe forty-five minutes. It’s not pleasant and there is a small but certainly not insignificant chance of death. I consider you a friend Juan and I feel I have to be honest with you about this. There’s something like a one in three hundred chance of death, which of course is terribly high in one way, yet, in another way, is really quite low odds. In most cases there’s no harm to the donor at all.”
    He glanced at me to see my reaction, perhaps fearful that I’d be angry with him for suggesting that I risk my life. But I just shrugged, so he carried on:
    “If all goes well with the transfer, which currently happens about half the time, a viable copy is received by the orbital station, which can then be used for research purposes. You will receive your payment though, of course, whether or not the copy is viable.”
    He grimaced.
    “I say viable but even when the copies seem viable at first they never last longer than a week or two. It’s the same when we’ve tried it with animals. And of course my backers want that sorted out, because what they want to achieve is perfect avatars of themselves and their loved ones that can wander through the stars when this poor old Earth has finally frazzled up completely.”
    “One in three hundred?” I asked.
    I wasn’t interested in the science. I didn’t care what they wanted to do with the copies. What concern was that of mine?
    “Yes. I’m afraid there’s a risk associated with high doses of muscle relaxants and anaesthetics.”
    “Why am I even listening to this? This isn’t real. If these backers of yours have all this money, why don’t they advertise properly for volunteers? Why pick me?”
    “They never advertise because of the legal situation. You might think that the government lets anything go these days, but it’s actually a little more complicated than that. They let some things go, but others they’re very fussy about. You can rape and kill some little beachrat waif and tip her into the Marsh and no one wants to know. But if you make copies of human beings for research purposes, that’s a major ethical issue and if the wrong people get to hear about it, the state will feel obliged to step in and stamp it out. It makes no sense, I agree, but I suppose it’s their way of retaining some sense of being in control.”
    Again I shrugged.
    “They are prepared to turn a blind eye,” Pham said, once again glancing nervously around. “If we’re very discreet and if we use only beach…” he broke off. “If we use only illegal immigrants like yourself who are legal non-persons anyway. But still the project isn’t legal. If there was a crackdown, I could lose my job and all the privileges that go with it. I’m taking a risk telling you, but we’ve been friends haven’t we? You and I have been friends?”
    Well, if he wanted to think that, I wasn’t going to argue.

    There’d been some sort of shoot-out on St Giles. A big RAF airship had descended into the middle of the square and soldiers with loudhailers were keeping people back while the bodies were scooped up. We were told later by the BBC that it had been a fight between two beachrat gangs and that the army had stepped in to break things up. But it’s quite possible that the gang fight story was just a pretext for one of the army’s occasional culls of the beachrat population in general. I saw more than twenty dead for sure (though the BBC would refer vaguely to two or three causalities). The Old Brits were very brutal, but I suppose we weren’t much different back in Spain in times gone by when the Africans coming over the Straits stopped being a trickle and became a torrent. We shot them too, for all the good that did us. They kept on coming anyway, and the Sahara followed close behind them.
    I hurried back to Walton Street.
    “Suzanne! Suzanne!” I called out as I flung open the door of our first floor room, revealing the black mould, the peeling wallpaper, the single-ring cooker in the corner, the bed that filled half the space, the stained toilet in its tiny cupboard, the tangled undergrowth outside the window that led down to