The Peacock Cloak

the World-City through which brightly lit trains were constantly rushing…

    What I particularly want to tell you about, though, is my uncle’s trip to the Caves of Laygaroth, some way from the main settlement, where the most famous of the religious frescoes are to be found.
    Clancy travelled by night on camelback. He was accompanied by a couple of tongue-tied young boys and by Uletha. Surly as she was, adolescent in her resentment of her father’s people and in her scorn for her mother’s, she was the sole official archaeologist of the planet, having received a very basic training as a child from her father and his colleagues before they disappeared back to the World City. She rode way out in front of Clancy and the boys, like a teenager performing some unwelcome social duty under protest, following a faint track beaten into the reddish earth, and leaving them to follow her as best they could.
    A selection of moons were strewn like a broken necklace across the sky and, in their pale pink light, nocturnal animals scurried and flittered round them, muttering and croaking and rustling, each with its own gauzy ring of pale moon-shadows. Winged beasts the size of dogs swooped and dived above the human travellers and their camel-like beasts, assaying their potential as carrion or prey. Trees that by day were nothing more than shrivelled stumps opened up and waved long feathered tentacles in the cool night wind, seeking for the windblown spores and tiny flying creatures on which they fed, and giving off a subtle scent that reminded Clancy of the smell of a baby’s skin. It was at night that Isolus 9 came to life, and the four of them reached the site of Laygaroth just as night was coming to an end.
    As the animals returned to their burrows and the tentacled trees battened themselves down for the remorseless onslaught of the day, they came to another bleak little fragment of the Metropolis. There was nothing at all to see on the surface at Laygaroth except for a kind of shed made of carbon polymer material which the archaeologists had left behind some twenty years previously, standing on its own on the desert plain. Inside the shed were monitors and machines that regulated the air in the underground caves. In the name of preservation, in the name of helpfulness, the Metropolis had managed to turn this masterpiece of Isolan culture into a mere adjunct of its own vastly more complex one, to transform it from an ancient and holy site to an interesting artefact, an object of study. Even though no Metropolitan had been here for many years, the caves had nevertheless become, in effect, exhibits in the Great Metropolitan Museum, maintained in their original location for the sake of authenticity, and out of benign deference to the religious sensibilities of the locals.
    So it seemed to my uncle, and so it seemed to me too when I visited some years later.
    Uletha picked up a powerful torch and led the way down a shaft in which the original foot holes cut into the soft sandstone had been replaced by a metal ladder. Once the cave would have contained its share of the luminous saprophytes that the Isolans used to light their tunnels, but these had all been removed by the archaeologists because they were shortening the life of the frescoes by increasing the moisture levels. As a result it was pitch dark down there without artificial light.
    Uletha had a sense of drama and liked to be in control. She did not turn on her torch, instead leading Clancy blind through a low and narrow tunnel until they emerged into a large and echoey space. The boys followed giggling behind.
    “All right then,” Uletha commanded. “Stop here and look straight upwards.”
    She turned on her torch. Fierce desert colours appeared in profusion all around them – red, steely blue, yellow, orange, covering every surface – and painted faces stared down at them from above and from every side.
    “This is Mem,” said Uletha, pointing straight upwards. “This is the origin of us all.”

    Mem was not your usual God, presiding in glory over the world. Not at all. He was not big and powerful, not surrounded by angels, not enthroned at the pinnacle of a pyramid of worship. This place was the core of the old Isolan religion and the undisputed centrepiece of its culture, its Cistine Chapel, its Mecca, its Wailing Wail, but there were no genuflections, no rituals of reverence. Imprisoned in a cell barely bigger than himself, Mem beat helplessly against the rocky