The Peacock Cloak

platform. “You need to make a move or you’ll miss your window.”
    Clancy nodded. He climbed inside Sphere and the door closed behind him.
    “Clear platform!” said the firm calm voice of the AI, much admired and imitated by the local parrots. “Clear platform for departure!”

    Elena made herself watch as violent lightning, white and pink and green, suddenly flared around Clancy’s ship and it shot away with a sound like thunder. Parrots fled noisily. High under the ragged clouds of Metropolis, the sparkling Sphere seemed from Elena’s perspective to balloon to a gigantic size, like some silvery Godhead glaring down at the multi-layered anthill of the City-World, and then to explode into jagged mirrored shards.
    It was an illusion, of course. With her head at least Elena knew that perfectly well. The ship was not disintegrating but merely surrendering its tenure of a specific location in Euclidean space. It was disappearing from the universe we all inhabit into a tiny universe of its own. But that alone seemed quite dreadful to her, because she lived for air, for space, for light, for companionship.
    She stood there alone on the viewing gallery for a minute or two, steadying herself, allowing her racing pulse to settle. Then she gave herself a little shake. It was a characteristic gesture of hers. It was how she shook off the mood of one moment in order to move on to the next. And now, since there was nothing here for her any more (just a gap where Sphere had been, into which another ship was already rising up into position), she turned away.
    And then came the moment that always comes after a parting, the moment when the person who stays behind becomes, by definition, someone that the one who has departed can never directly know. She became a stranger.

    Clancy had dreaded the moment of departure in anticipation but in fact, at the precise moment when the departing Sphere had seemed to Elena to blow itself to pieces, my uncle had been reclining comfortably inside it, pouring himself a glass of wine and experiencing the familiar sense of contented release that he always felt at the beginning of one of his journeys.
    What horrified Elena about underspace was precisely what made him feel at home in it. He liked being outside of space, beyond radio contact, beyond human contact of any kind. He liked the thought that there was no one with him, no minds except for his own and the machine minds of his faithful cybernetic servants, Com and Sphere.
    I remember from when we were children that Uncle Clancy would often play with us cheerfully but that a moment would always come when we realised he was no longer with us, he had withdrawn into a private world of his own, not out of a lack of fondness for us, but because of some need of his own, a need for replenishing solitude. Well, here in underspace that private world became an objective fact. There was no one to call him out of it. There was no ‘out’ to which he could be called.
    He was savouring this, as he always did, when he thought about Elena and wondered whether he should not be feeling more grief at their parting?
    “Elena,” he whispered experimentally to himself, “Elena.”
    He was relieved to find that his heart filled up at once with warmth and tenderness. He could bear being away from her, but he had no sense at all that he was relieved at having left her behind. Clancy clapped his hands together with delight.
    “What do the great religions have to say about love between men and women?” he asked Com, who lay on the table beside him, next to his glass of wine.
    Com obliged at once with a selection of sacred texts from religions of every hue from the polygamous Warranians, to the strange Cassiopeians with their three-cornered morality, to the Christians, back in ancient times, who liked to say that marriage represented the sacred union between their Holy Church and the Son of God.
    “Christians,” mused Clancy. “I can’t remember anything about them. Remind me, Com, what do they believe? I know they were very big at one time.”
    “Yes, very big once. Not many of them left now. They believe that the human race was so wicked as to deserve being sentenced to an eternity of torment. But a merciful God sent his…”
    “Ah yes, now I remember! God’s son came to Earth in person, didn’t he, and allowed himself to be executed. And if people believed that he had died on their behalf, they could be spared from the punishment they deserved and