The Peacock Cloak

was chasing. Only the facial expressions differed and even then only a little: the fleeing god looked back in fear, the pursuing god urged his camel forward with a look of longing.
    But now there was a development. The fleeing god stopped, dismounted and turned to face his pursuer. He held up one hand to say, “Stop! No nearer.” His pursuer unexpectedly complied, also dismounting, though holding out his own hands in pathetic entreaty. The two identical figures stood facing each other from opposite sides of the frame.
    “What’s happening here?” my uncle asked Uletha.
    She gave her characteristic shrug.
    “The one behind longs to touch and hold the one she pursues. The other says no, if you come too close the dream will be exposed and we will both be one again, one person, alone in the cell in the rock.”

    An unexpected thing happened on the return journey to the main settlement. Uletha dropped back beside Clancy, glanced round to check that the two boys were out of earshot, and spoke to him quietly.
    “If you would like me to come and visit you some time in that silver sphere of yours…”
    Her eyes were bright, her voice soft and she reached out and touched him lightly on the hand. She offered no explanation for her change of tone, no apology for her coldness and rudeness up to now.
    “You do me an honour,” he told her, after a few seconds pause, “but I belong to someone else.”
    Uletha nodded. Clancy guessed that she’d hoped he would provide her with an escape route, a means and an excuse to leave this bleak world behind forever. But now, accepting with dignity her continued incarceration on lonely, empty Isolus 9, Uletha drove her camel forward and became a proud Isolan once more.
    “It’s not jam today or jam tomorrow for these people,” Clancy said to Com. “It’s living with no jam ever . “
    “Indeed,” Com observed, “and as Professor Doyana has observed…”
    “I don’t want to hear about Professor Doyana,” Clancy said shortly.
    He didn’t want the thoughts of people whose job it was to dissect and pin out the beliefs of others like the insides of dead animals. He wanted to look at Uletha’s slender back ahead of him, erect, proud, but stiff with disappointment. He wanted to guess at her feelings and to experience his own. He felt a moment of regret, of guilt even. There was something about this proud, scarred, bitter young woman that made him feel protective, and at the same time something that he would like to have conquered, to have overcome, to have seen unravelled by passion. The writer in him, always hungry for vivid new experiences, hated to let the moment go. But he reminded himself of the reason.
    “Elena,” he whispered. “Sweetheart.”
    Suddenly he missed Elena desperately, longed to be with her, longed to abolish the appalling tracts of emptiness that lay between them.

    “Let’s have one more look back,” said Clancy, a few hours into the return journey to the Metropolis.
    Sphere surfaced into Euclidean space, darkening its inner lights and making itself transparent. The planet Isolus 9 itself had disappeared from view, but Clancy could still make out, in the corner of a large constellation shaped like the letter L, the reddish fire of the triple star Isolus. Next time they surfaced the L itself would be too small to see.
    As Sphere slipped back down into underspace, Clancy and Com got back down to his book. It was of course my uncle’s trademark, his gimmick, that the book of each of his journeys became available in Metropolis at the exact moment he first emerged there from his sphere.
    “I think we might start the book off with the Fleeing God sequence in the caves,” he decided. “Let’s try that. Can you show the pictures for me?”
    Sipping a cup of coffee, Clancy studied the images which Com had captured and was now projecting onto Sphere’s viewing screen. He looked at Mem in his cave, screaming, kicking, covering his face with his hands. He studied Mem in his despair hallucinating the world into being. He looked at Mem on his camel, fleeing from himself, fleeing from having to wake in his tomb-like cell in the rock.
    “We’ll call the book The Fleeing God ,” he decided. “It’s such an arresting image: a god in flight with his cloak flying behind him and his eyes full of…”
    And then he broke off. He was shaking violently, his mouth dry, his stomach clenched. Quite unexpectedly he was overwhelmed by fear. And I don’t mean by