The Peacock Cloak

“I really don’t. Why wander through endless light years of empty space? Why trudge around dreary and impoverished little colonies half way across the galaxy? Everything I want is right here in front of me.”
    “It’ll still be here when you return.”
    They leaned over the balustrade and looked straight down. Immediately below them were the domed pools and hanging gardens of the upper tier, where lived wealthy businessmen and senior officials in the Regulatory Entity. Then came progressively dimmer levels through which from time to time flashed high speed trains rushing across the world-wide city at two thousand kilometres an hour, disappearing with a clatter and a sigh. In the shadier middle levels were the homes of minor officials and skilled workers, with all their lights already on. Beneath them, pretty much invisible from up here, were factories and generators. Finally, at the bottom of it all, two vertical kilometres down, was the murky orange glow of slum settlements on the planet surface where there was virtually no sunlight at all. Small yellowish lights moved about down there as surface dwellers made their way through the gloom.
    “Aaaaawk !” shrieked a parrot, bright and brash in the evening sunlight.
    “ Clear platform !” the parrot cried, alighting on a railing. “ Clear platform for departure !”
    Clancy and Elena laughed, and then the laugh became an extended kiss. But soon the announcement came calling Clancy to his ship. They pulled apart and ascended to the wide platform where his silver vehicle, ‘Sphere,’ was waiting. Ragged windblown clouds, some grey, some white, passed across the high blue sky above them, torn and broken immediately overhead by the constant coming and going of underspace ships. In the distance to the west the clouds were tinged pink by the descending sun.
    They kissed goodbye and Clancy had already put one foot on the ladder when suddenly he turned back again and once more wrapped Elena’s small, light body in his arms, holding her tightly and calling her his darling, his dearest, his sweetheart.
    Sweetheart. Sweetheart. My sweet dear heart. These words appear over and over in the record of that period which my uncle’s faithful secretary deposited in that Metropolitan Library archive. He just couldn’t seem to say them enough. Yet up to that point he had always been the absolute archetype of the Metropolitan sophisticate: subtle, ironic, restless, determinedly unattached.
    “But I didn’t know then,” he told Com more than once, “I just didn’t know.”
    Elena had thawed out places inside him that he hadn’t realised were there. And he still wasn’t used to it, still couldn’t keep himself from visiting and revisiting this well of tenderness that had unexpectedly opened up inside him.
    “It’s crazy to leave you,” he burst out. “I should just cancel this whole trip.”
    She laughed and kissed him.
    “Of course not, dearest. We’ve been over this. It’s your job. It’s what you do. We have to do something in our lives. We can’t just gaze forever into each others eyes.”
    “I’ve heard of worse plans.”
    “You don’t really mean that.”
    “But will things change between us? Will you still be here for me when I return?”
    “Of course I will. Right here.”
    Well my uncle had kissed goodbye to many other women, sometimes even on this very same spot, with the same clouds rushing by above, the same parrots shrieking, the same vast city stretching away to the horizon all around, but he had never before sought this assurance, not even once. On every single previous occasion his departure had been – deep down, if not at the surface of his mind – a welcome escape, a way of dealing with the fact that his heart was going cold.
    Solitude had always been his resting state.
    “This is different from anything I have ever experienced before,” he told Elena
    She laughed.
    “So you keep telling me, dearest. So you tell me, over and over, every time we’re together.”
    “You’re shaking,” he said.
    “I don’t like underspace, that’s all. It gives me the creeps. The idea of descending into that dreadful little wormhole… Ugh! But I know it doesn’t bother you and I know you know what you’re doing. I’ll be fine once you’ve set off.”
    “Go now if you want. You don’t need to watch me go.”
    “I know I don’t have to, but I want to.”
    “Mr Clancy,” called out the artificial intelligence that controlled the