The Peacock Cloak

exploratory visit to see if human life still existed there at all and the second an archaeological project. There have been a few other visitors in between so, although the planet is no longer culturally untouched by the Metropolis, it may go ten years at a time without any contact.”
    “Books?” Clancy asked.
    “No books have been written solely about Isolus 9, but it is mentioned in twenty-two archaeological and anthropological texts. The planet’s religious frescoes are of course the single most mentioned topic.
    “Give me a bit more on the religion.”
    “There have been no comprehensive studies on the Isolan religion. The only two scholars who have discussed it in any detail both did so as part of wider explorations of the religions of the Dispersed Peoples. And they profoundly disagree with each other. Professor Loyah Tomins, in his book Heritage and Necessity , argues that Isolans and other Dispersed Peoples never completely forgot their own history but rather ‘encoded’ it in the ‘compressed form’ of a religion. Professor Julina Doyana, in her book Narrating Abandonment, dismisses Tomins’ view as ‘obfuscatory’ and argues that the Isolan religion is not compressed history at all, but ‘reified anxiety management’. ”
    Clancy snorted contemptuously.
    “It can be both, can’t it? And other things besides. Religions are stories . Any decent story works on several levels at once.”
    His own books were a case in point. Each was, on one level, the description of an interstellar adventure, but each was also an enquiry into the nature of human existence. And each was a piece of personal self-exploration, a confession even, albeit elaborately disguised.
    “My books are like my journeys, David,” he once told me, not long before his mysterious final disappearance. “Each is simultaneously a cowardly escape from the world and an audacious attempt to get up close to it.”
    This was a theme that he often came back to in those later days: the cowardice that hides in apparently courageous acts, the bravery necessary to sustain an apparently unadventurous life.
    “Do you have any thoughts as to the main strands of the Isolus 9 book?” Com now asked him.
    Com knew that my uncle always began the book before the journey itself had started. The outer journey was always contained within the inner one.
    “One: the new experience of travelling with someone I love to return to. Two: dispersal and return in the Isolan religion. What links the idea of religion and idea of love is connection. Love connects people to each other. Religion makes people feel connected to the universe. So I’d also like you to come up with three or four treatments of that . Okay?”
    Clancy got up and headed to the bathroom.
    “You do need to bear in mind,” Com began, “that the religion of Isolus 9 is rather unusual in that…”
    But its master wasn’t listening anymore. He was humming cheerfully as he began to undress for the shower.

    When my uncle set out for Isolus 9, Elena came to see him off. They had a last drink together on a gallery just below the launch platform, with a view of the City all around.
    “I can’t believe how much I love you,” Clancy said.
    The platform was near the equator and it was hot up there, but a cooling wind gently tossed Elena’s fair hair this way and that. Brushing it back she leaned forward and peered into Clancy’s face.
    “Are those tears ?” she asked him, touched and a little shocked. “Are you crying? Why? We’ll be together again before too long.”
    The launch platform rose out of the planet-wide city like an emergent tree rising above a forest. Below and all around them were galleries, penthouse apartments, the giant golden sunflowers that gathered light for the city below, and the parabolic dishes that allowed the city to communicate with the moon and satellites and the local planets. (You cannot of course communicate with the Dispersed Worlds except by travelling to them.) Here and there other emergent pinnacles – launch ports, hotels, chimneys – rose above the general mass. Helicopters passed to and fro between them, along with parrots and other brightly coloured birds. And from time to time a sound like a small thunderclap broke above them, as another starship either descended into underspace, or emerged from underspace into the world. Each time the birds rose and rushed about in noisy indignation.
    “I don’t know anymore why I travel,” Clancy said.