The Peacock Cloak

get instead an eternity of bliss. Otherwise they still got the eternal torment.”
    Clancy laughed.
    “People manage to believe in the strangest things, don’t they? If you are going to believe in something other than the world that you can actually see around you, why dream up a torture chamber where the torture never ends?”

    Isolus 9 was separated from Metropolis by more than a thousand light years and, even through underspace, it took several weeks to get there. Days passed, during which Clancy and Com did the preparatory work for his Isolus book while Sphere twisted and turned, driven by its own miniature and portable version of the city-sized Great Machine that had sent out human colonists to every corner of the galaxy two thousand years previously.
    Once in a while Sphere surfaced into Euclidean space, in order to take astronomical readings and make the adjustments necessary to take it to its destination. During these times Clancy would indulge himself in another of his favourite pleasures. He would instruct Sphere to shut down all the lights and adjust the molecular structure of its outer walls to make them transparent. And then he was surrounded by nothing but stars: stars in every direction in vast cliffs and canyons, moving round the galaxy on their billion-year cycle, pulling and tugging at one another across the void, utterly indifferent to human concerns.
    “Elena,” he whispered in that dreadful void. “My sweet dear heart.”
    Still the tenderness was undiminished and he was reassured. He had told Elena over and over that his feeling for her was different from all his other so-called loves, but he had secretly feared that he was deceiving them both. People don’t seem to realise this – his biographers tend to portray him as cold and calculating in his human relationships – but my poor uncle was appalled by the fickleness of his own heart, and lived in fear of the coldness and emptiness that seemed to him to seep constantly into every place that might possibly feel safe and warm.

    There was a thunderclap. Lightning, white and pink and green, flickered across the cloudless sky of Isolus 9. Mirror shards seemed to rush together to form a gigantic silvery sphere, which hung there for a moment, as if it were a steel ball on a chain about to smash poor Isolus 9 to rubble. But instead it shrank. It became a tiny glinting speck, far far up, descending towards the planet’s dusty red surface.
    Camel-like animals stirred and whinnied. Winged creatures with leathery skins rose screeching from their perches just like the parrots back in the Metropolis, all that unimaginable distance away. And children came scrambling up ladders from underground dwellings where they’d been sheltering from the midday heat, shouting excitedly to one another, and hopping from one foot to another on the baking sand.
    “Sky people!” they shouted. “Sky people with toys!”
    Most of them had only heard of such things in stories.
    And then here was Clancy himself, in silvery gear, descending the steps from his shiny starship, as he’d done so many times before.
    He had travelled to more of the Dispersed Worlds than anyone else has ever done before or since. A few of the worlds he visited had never been contacted since the destruction of the Great Machine, so that it was Clancy himself who brought them the news of their forgotten brethren beyond the stars, but most had been visited over the previous century by other explorers. Isolus 9 was in many ways typical of that second group of worlds. It had acquired just enough Metropolitan technology and culture to make the indigenous culture seem primitive and tawdry, but not enough to confer even slightly the subtlety and richness of the World City itself. I have since visited it myself. It is a dismal place.
    There was a single modern air-conditioned building near the landing site in the main settlement. There were modern flower-like solar collectors scatted over the surface with their cables trailing down into the tunnels where the people lived, providing them with bright electric light in place of the soft glow of the luminous saprophytes on which they had relied for the previous nineteen centuries. In the main underground meeting hall, the bright cartoon-like frescoes of village history that covered the ceiling were all but forgotten, overshadowed by a huge screen provided ten years ago by a Metropolitan charity that worked to improve the lot of the Dispersed Peoples.