The Peacock Cloak

walls which contained him. He was small and nondescript, trapped in the midst of solid rock whose extent was infinite. There was no outside. That cell was the only space in the universe and Mem the only living thing inside it, doomed to be alone there forever. He hammered on the rock with his fists. “I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” he screamed, but there was no one there to hear, for there was no one in existence but Mem himself.
    The images were like cartoon strips, brightly coloured, divided up into frames. Frame after frame around that central image showed Mem’s torment: Mem screaming, Mem pushing and hammering on the walls, Mem clutching his head in horror, Mem weeping, Mem tearing at himself, Mem screaming and hammering again.
    Clancy was unexpectedly shaken. He half wanted to scream himself. He half wanted to flee from that cave as fast as he could go, out into the open air, even into the baking daytime air of Isolus 9 with its three ferocious suns.
    But he allowed Uletha to lead him onwards into other chambers in which there were other kinds of images. There were, for example, several series of pictures in which tiny people and animals and moons and stars came bursting out of Mem’s head.
    And then of course there was the famous sequence in which Mem, that wan, colourless figure, was depicted riding alone on a camel. He was riding as fast as he could, his robes trailing behind him in the wind. In one frame he gazed ahead longingly, as if something on which his life depended was disappearing beyond his reach. In another he was looking back fearfully over his shoulder. These images depicted the theme in Isolan iconography, made famous by Clancy himself, to which archaeologists had given the name ‘The Fleeing God’.
    “Mem is no longer in prison,” Clancy observed, “but he still looks afraid.”
    “Oh she is always afraid,” agreed Uletha, with a shrug.
    And for the first time she gave him a smile, a small smile, mocking, but not entirely unfriendly.
    “Male Isolans use the male pronoun to refer to Mem, female Isolans use the female,” Com explained after translating her words. “The word Mem itself simply means ‘self’ ”
    Clancy wasn’t much interested in the pronouns.
    “Imagine that!” he breathed, “A god who is always afraid!”
    Uletha shrugged. What other kind of god could there be? Surely any sentient being in this terrifyingly empty universe must be afraid, unless it was either very foolish or very blind?
    “How did Mem get out of his cell though?” my uncle asked. “I can’t see a picture that shows us that.”
    “She didn’t get out.”
    “But he’s on the back of a camel, fleeing!” he protested. “He’s no longer trapped in the rock.”
    Uletha shook her head, smiling at his naivety.
    “She’s always in the rock,” she said. “The camel is just in her mind, like everything else in the world. We’re all just dreams in her mind. We’re all Mem herself dreaming. She herself is always alone inside the rock. We might like to think that we have companions but the thing that looks out of our eyes is always alone. It’s just that Mem divides herself constantly so as to make it seem not so.”
    Clancy gave a whistle. He was impressed. He was also quite seriously alarmed, though he didn’t yet realise to what degree.
    “Com, what was the name of that silly scholar who said this religion was a form of anxiety management?”
    “Doyana.”
    “Well she missed the point completely as such people usually do. She got it the wrong way round. If this lot are right, the entire universe is a form of anxiety management for God!”
    He shook his head.
    “But what solace is there in this for these people?” he muttered. “What possible benefit?”
    He hadn’t intended the question for Uletha but she turned and answered.
    “We learn endurance,” she told him. “We learn not to ask for what is impossible.”
    The next picture in the sequence showed what Mem was trying to escape. Following the cartoon-like conventions of Isolan art, the image was contained in a rough square, its background painted bright red. On the left-hand side, the fleeing god and his mount were disappearing out of the frame. On the right-hand side, his pursuer was just coming into view. The pursuer wasn’t some monster, though. It wasn’t a stranger. It was in fact none other than Mem himself, on an identical mount and wearing an identical cloak to the other Mem that he