The Peacock Cloak

earpiece said something. Toussaint’s irritable tone softened.
    “Straight to your office, Dr Brennan? For physical testing? Okay, we’ll bring it right down. Thanks.”
    “Physical testing?” I cried. “Please tell me, what on Earth is that?”
    “‘Please tell me, what on Earth is that?’” Toussaint mimicked me in a cartoon Spanish accent, as he and Abdul wheeled my bed to the door.
    The corridor was narrow and curved up visibly at both ends as it encircled the revolving space station. There was a smell of perished rubber, bad coffee and stale urine. They wheeled me past a forlorn, grubby little cafeteria where four or five other technicians in blue overalls sat drinking from white plastic cups.
    “Hey, Toussaint. Whisky! Going to come and join us?” one of them called out
    “Soon as we’ve dumped this thing off.”
    On the wall of the cafeteria was a screen showing the image of the planet Earth beneath us. Unusually there was very little cloud and almost the entire Atlantic was laid out to see, as if this was a globe in a schoolroom.
    I thought about the real Juan, with Suzanne and Maria, slowly crossing that blue ocean. I ached inside as I thought about Suzanne and my little girl who I would never see again, far, far away from me. The real Juan, on the other hand, I could happily have killed.
    “How could he have put me out of his mind so quickly and easily?” I wondered, as we continued along the corridor. “A glass of wine, a promising opportunity for sex, that was all it took. Yet I’m not a stranger, I’m not someone whose needs he’d find hard to understand. I’m like him in every single way.”
    But then we reached your office, Dr Brennan, and a beautiful friendship began.

    Look at you in your crumpled jacket and your Heinrich Himmler glasses. Look at you wracked with longing and self-hatred and principles: the compassionate sadist, the doctor whose ethics forbid him to follow the Hippocratic oath, waiting in a metal box in space for defective copies of human beings to be delivered up to him.
    “I must apologise for my technicians,” you said. “They have this superstitious idea that copies don’t have souls. It helps them to live with what they’re doing, though of course it makes no logical sense since this whole enterprise is based on the premise that a copy is or could be fully human.”
    Then you shook your head sadly.
    “Of course I know that you have feelings every bit as much as I do. And…” Your voice cracked slightly and for moment you seemed on the verge of tears. “And that makes it all very hard for me. Very hard. You’ve no idea. But be assured of my sympathy at all times, and be assured that I will reduce to a minimum any pain that I have to inflict.”
    After which you tortured me for some time – yes Dr Brennan, tortured : that is the correct word – with electric shocks and cuts inflicted without anaesthetic, your face gleaming with sweat, and contorted by excitement and shame. You kept apologising – “I’m so so sorry. I do hate this. I only wish there was another way!” – but you wouldn’t stop and I was powerless to stop you. It was unendurable yet unescapable. I will never forgive you for it.
    “There,” you said at last. “That’s the worst part over.”
    You were pale and trembling, your gloved hands slimy with my blood.
    “Ghastly for both of us, but it’s done,” you said. “I always feel it’s best to get that out of the way at the outset. For all the other procedures, normal anaesthetics can be used. Please accept my apologies for what I’ve just inflicted on you. I’m afraid it is necessary because an abnormal pain response is one of the characteristics of defective copies, and we absolutely have to try and….”
    Suddenly you rushed out. Was it to be sick? Or to visit one of your other mutilated copies in some other grubby little cell? Or to masturbate? Or was it just to mop your face and gulp down the spirits that I smelled on your breath when you returned? Another technician – a white man this time, I think perhaps a Russian or a Pole – came in and wiped the blood off me with a cloth. He wouldn’t meet my eyes or answer my questions. Then you were back, gently explaining to me how you were going to have to remove parts of me for tests: my intestines, my pancreas, an arm, a foot…
    “I assure you, Juan, I’m a good doctor and will do everything in my power to keep you painless and comfortable throughout the time