The Peacock Cloak

that much about consequences that they don’t have to see, or care that much about other people that they’ve never had to meet. It’s just the way that human beings are.
    Unless of course they’re like you, Dr Brennan, with all your noble dreams.

The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9

    My uncle Clancy was quite well known for his love affairs with famous women, but there was one occasion when he really fell in love. And this was not with a celebrity, not with a famous beauty. Elena was a quietly pretty, thoughtful, rather self-contained woman who worked as an editor at the company which published his books.
    “What’s new about this,” he said to his secretary Com, “is that I’m not trying to prove anything, and nor is she. We’re not performing on some kind of stage. We’re not trying to play heroic roles.”
    He chuckled.
    “Yesterday evening at dinner,” he told Com (who helpfully backed up every conversation in an archive of the Metropolitan Library), “I did slip into Famous Space Traveller mode for a bit and Elena just told me to knock it off. She was quite sharp about it actually but I can’t tell you what a relief it was.”
    “Sometimes it can be tiring to play a role,” offered Com (who, incidentally, was a powerful hyperspatial computer resembling a small yellow egg).
    “I used to have a job like hers once,” Clancy went on. “Probably I still would have if Seven Moons hadn’t taken off the way it did. And I am like her in other ways too. We have the same interests, we take pleasure in the same things, see things from the same sort of angle. I’ve become so bloated by fame lately, you know, so swollen up. Elena has brought me right back down to the ground, or as near to the ground as we get in this city, and it feels like a good place to be.”
    Com was very familiar with my uncle’s moods, but this one was new in its experience.
    “You sound – happy ,” it tentatively suggested.
    “Happy?” Clancy repeated, as if it was a novelty to him as well. “Happy? Yes, do you know, I believe I am!”
    “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Com offered, having quickly consulted many thousands of reference works. “Opinion seems to be divided on the subject but many authorities consider happiness to be the actual goal of human existence.”
    “She’s pretty, Com, and she’s funny, and she’s bright and kind and loyal and resourceful. But do you know what I value about her above all else? It’s that she just lives her life. She doesn’t feel the slightest need to be a household name in her own apartment block, never mind anywhere else. What could be more sensible than that?”
    “What indeed?”
    Com might have all of science and literature in its reach, and might hold in its mind the complete map of the inhabited galaxy down to the level of individual dwellings, but very reassuringly for Clancy it nevertheless derived its system of values entirely from him. It was built that way. Whatever its legal owner thought important or worthwhile was important and worthwhile to Com, just as whatever its owner wanted, it pursued indefatigably. Subject of course to the usual legal safeguards and contractual obligations.
    “I wanted her to come with me on my next trip but she has a horror of underspace, like most sensible people.”
    “Where are we going this time?” asked the intelligent egg.
    “I thought we’d visit Isolus 9.”
    Like the good secretary it was, Com tried to anticipate its master’s wishes and over the next tenth of a second it searched through all the libraries of Metropolis, seeking out every reference to the planet Isolus 9.
    “A quick summary?” it asked.
    “A one minute summary,” said Clancy, who was meeting Elena shortly to go to the theatre.
    Com told him that Isolus 9 was first settled two thousand years ago, just before the dissolution of the Wide Empire and the destruction of its Great Machine. When the Machine ceased to function the Isolans, just like all the other Dispersed Peoples, were cut off from the Metropolis for almost two millennia. The difference in their case was that they’d had very little time at all to get established. Lacking the surplus capacity to sustain the intergenerational transmission even of reading and writing, they reverted to a precarious hunter-gatherer existence and came very close indeed to complete extinction.
    “Over the past century,” Com went on, “two major expeditions have visited Isolus 9, the first an