The Peacock Cloak

In The Fleeing God , his book about Isolus 9, Clancy describes how the Isolans’ eyes kept turning furtively towards the bright scenes which the screen displayed. He notes that even the grey-bearded headman of the settlement, the most powerful person on Isolus 9, was wearing the frayed and faded jumpsuit, three sizes too big for him, of a corporal in the Metropolitan Peace Force. Pathetically, Clancy says, the old man seemed to think this conferred more honour on him than the coloured robes that were traditional signs of leadership among his own people.
    And Clancy encountered a familiar figure which he had met and described several times before, the figure of the half-Metropolitan, alienated both from the local culture and the Metropolitan one. This time the role was played by a young woman called Uletha, the child of a local woman and young male archaeologist from the City.
    “We despise the Metropolis here,” she told Clancy in his own language. “We’re proud of our tradition of surviving not by relying on machines but by using our wits.”
    Clancy always describes women carefully. It seems that Uletha had dark hair, a pretty but bitter face, and a prominent vertical scar on her left upper lip.
    “And so you should be,” he told her, quite sincerely. “It’s a tribute to your people’s ingenuity that you are here at all.”
    They were talking in the meeting hall under that annoying screen. The headman and most of the people of the main settlement were gathered around them.
    “Exactly,” Uletha said. “With no one to help them and on the hottest and driest planet that has ever supported a human life, our ancestors built a new civilization, a new culture, raising it up over the centuries from a low point at which their numbers had been reduced by famine and disease to no more than nine individuals. Imagine that, Mr Metropolitan man, who can have everything he wants with the touch of a switch and can meet ten thousand people in a single day. Imagine that. Nine people all alone in a world of sand and dust and rock, building a culture that would endure for two thousand years without any help from the rest of the human race. Excuse us if we hold our heads high in your presence. How many Metropolitans would survive under the same circumstances?”
    Having heard Uletha speak to the Sky Man in a language they didn’t understand, the watching Isolans turned to Clancy to hear his reply. Many of them, including the headman in his ridiculous jumpsuit, stood with their mouths gaping open.
    Clancy took Com out of his pocket.
    “Your ancestors survived where most Metropolitans would undoubtedly have perished,” he told Uletha and all the rest of them, politely forbearing from pointing out that the original settlers were Metropolitans themselves, “I salute you all.”
    Com repeated the tribute in their own language. Everyone’s eyes goggled at the talking egg and then cheered with delight and gratitude when they heard what, in all his glory, the magnanimous Sky Man had to say.
    But, as my uncle said in his book, and as I can vouch from personal experience since, the Isolans really did not hold their heads high. That was the sad and painfully obvious fact. Possibly they had done so when the first Metropolitan expedition came, perhaps they had done so previously in the centuries of their isolation, but the Metropolis had long since ground them down, not by cruelty or oppression but by misplaced benevolence, and above all by simply being there. Without meaning to at all, we had convinced them of their marginality and ignorance and backwardness, we had made them feel like fools. Now, receiving Clancy’s tribute, they were abject in their gratitude.
    “The Sky Man is too kind!” the bearded headman croaked, with tears forming in his eyes. “The Sky Man does us great honour! The Sky Man has lifted our hearts!”
    Probably he had said the same sort of thing when that Peace Force corporal had tossed him his cast off jumpsuit.
    “The great warrior does me too much honour!”
    Uletha frowned.
    “Isolans are like babies,” she told my uncle tartly. “They are easily impressed. But you won’t find me like the rest of them. I really do have pride.”
    But even so her eyes shone with excitement when he distributed his usual gifts: miniature underspace ships that leapt back and forth between two points, cheap little speech processors which would mimic the language of their owners, small holographic representations of