The Peacock Cloak

this some sort of interesting literary ‘fear’ contained and distanced by words. I mean real visceral terror.
    “Elena,” he whispered, seeking for a source of warmth and comfort.
    “Elena,” he croaked, as if he had woken after a bad dream and was seeking her beside him in the darkness.
    “Elena!”
    But of course he hadn’t been asleep and no one was near him. No one even inhabited the same continuum of space.
    “Show me a picture Com!” he muttered. “Quickly! Show me her face!”
    Com obliged. In my uncle’s eyes she was truly lovely and she never ceased to be. But a terrifying doubt was darkening his heart as Com produced a sequence of pictures of his lover’s gentle face. Who was she? Did she really exist or was she just a creature of his own longings?

    Clancy kept working on the book all the way from Isolus to the Metropolis. Most commentators have expressed admiration for the courage and professionalism that this demonstrated, given the appalling mental state evidenced by the medical monitoring data which the meticulous Com placed in the archive. I think myself, though, that it was a survival strategy, a way of mitigating the horror by naming it, by pinning it down, by locating it outside himself. As Clancy said to me more than once, heroism and cowardice are much closer to one another than many people think.
    He certainly needed something to distract himself. The experience of being in his sphere in underspace, which on the trip out had been positively cosy, was now so claustrophobic as to seem unendurable. Clancy felt like Mem in his cell. He began to feel that Elena and the Metropolis were only dreams. He began to fear that there was no such thing as space even, no such thing as air and light, nothing in existence at all except himself in this tiny bubble in the nothingness of underspace.
    “Elena does exist,” Com assured its master, showing him picture after picture.
    “What do you know about it, you egg ?” he snapped. “You don’t exist yourself. You feel nothing, you want nothing. You’re simply organised data. When it comes down to it you’re just a fancy list .”
    He glared at the small plastic object, wondering if he should smash it open and expose it for the mere artefact that it was. Then he decided that was beside the point.
    “In fact, you probably have no objective existence at all, let alone a subjective one. You’re just a dream of mine, most likely, along with all these silly little comforts here: this wine, this side table, this couch…”
    “It’s true that I feel nothing and want nothing,” said the calm voice that came out of the yellow egg, “but I am aware of myself.”
    “I also am aware of myself and so also exist,” Sphere then said, in the deeper, more sonorous voice that Clancy had chosen for it.
    Probably it had been prompted to speak by Com, for Sphere was no great conversationalist.
    “Two machines claim to know that they exist,” Clancy muttered bitterly. “Wow! Is that supposed to be a comfort to me?”
    My poor uncle could barely sleep, even with the sedatives that Com and Sphere kept pouring into him. He could hardly eat. He was unbearably restless. His body yearned to pace up and down, to run, to fling itself around, but there was no room for any of that in a living space the size of a prison cell. Sometimes he yelled until his voice was hoarse. Sometimes he broke things. Sometimes he huddled in a ball and sobbed, his machines administering chemicals and offering suggestions in their flat, patient voices.
    But there was no reassuring him. Even when he surfaced in Euclidian space and saw the stars all around him, there was no comfort. What were stars, far away, seen through the glassy wall of a tiny bubble? Even if they had an independent existence, which he seriously doubted, what story did that existence tell? Only one about the utter otherness of the material world.
    “Elena!” he murmured, peeking out between his fingers at the cold glare of millions of suns. “Elena my dear heart.”
    He had Sphere make the walls opaque again and return to underspace. He had Com summon up images of Elena once more. Throughout that long voyage he was unable to stop seeking solace in her face, even if solace did not in fact come, and even though, each time he looked at it, it became less like a face, and more like a pattern of dots on a screen.
    And probably even the screen had no existence. Probably there was literally nothing at all. Probably