The Peacock Cloak

what he thought of as self-awareness was only the hole left over by the absence of anything.

    Elena was there to meet Clancy when he emerged from Sphere, but this time so were the representatives of a score of news organisations. Right across the World-City, millions studied their first embrace. Did the famous traveller’s heart still beat for his unknown lover? Had this obscure publisher’s editor succeeded where models and movie stars had failed?
    Theories were advanced. “Close friends of the couple” were earnestly questioned. Panels of psychologists and relationship counsellors were invited to speculate as to what might be going on in her mind and his.
    Clancy climbed slowly down the steps of Sphere, turned at the bottom to face the waiting crowd and let the newsmen capture his image and call out questions while he sought out Elena’s face over their heads. The questions themselves he didn’t answer or even hear, except as a kind of background braying. All he was interested in was finding her.
    “Elena,” whispered Clancy. “Elena.”
    There she was, just as he had remembered her, her fair hair blowing this way and that in the warm wind. “Are you all right?” she asked him, as she pushed forward and took him in her arms. “You look so thin and tired, my dear. You look half-starved!”
    As he felt her warm lips against his and her small warm body against his, tears came pouring from his eyes and he began to shake with sobs.
    “What’s the matter dearest?” Elena asked him again. “What’s wrong?”
    Security guards hired by the publishing company hustled them over a footbridge into a private room, holding the journalists back. Far below, lights moved in the gloom of the planet surface.
    “Say something to me, Clancy,” Elena said in this new quiet space. “Just say something .”
    “The camel…” Clancy began.
    “What about a camel?”
    She wondered if he had gone mad.
    “What I mean to say is…” Clancy tried again. “What I meant to say is if the camel is only in Mem’s mind then so is the rock! So is that dreadful cell!”
    Elena laughed uneasily.
    “Can you explain it another way? I can see you’re very upset, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
    “No, not upset!” Clancy protested, the tears still streaming down his face. “Not upset at all. Relieved.”
    “Relieved to be home? That’s good.” She kissed him gently. “I’m relieved you’re home as well.”
    “Relieved,” Clancy repeated. “They made their god in their own image, that’s all. Just like everyone does.”
    Still completely bewildered, Elena kissed him again. Then one of the security men came in, asking if Clancy could come out and offer a few words to the press. He nodded. He’d have to explain it to Elena later.
    “Those famous paintings weren’t the final truth about anything,” he informed the puzzled journalists. “The Isolans were trapped in a hostile world, alone in the universe, and they made a god who was also trapped. That’s all it is. It’s just how things seemed to the Isolans long ago, when the Great Machine failed and they were left alone.”
    A huge burden seemed to lift from his heart as he returned to Elena over the little bridge and took her once again in his arms. She might be puzzled, she might be troubled, she might be a bit distanced from him on that account, but she wasn’t a picture on a screen, not a dream in his mind, not a mere projection of his longings. She was a real warm physical person, as real as he was, with a mind and will of her own.

    That night, over dinner in her apartment, my uncle tried again to tell Elena how much she meant to him. Writer as he was, words seemed inadequate to the task, and he could only repeat the same things over and over again.
    “Really and truly,” he told her, “you’ve released me from a lifetime in solitary confinement.”
    She laughed but there was something strained in it, and quite suddenly he realised that she didn’t want to hear all this. He might have crossed thousands of light years of empty space but she had also been moving through time, confronting new experiences, passing through places that he knew nothing about – and she had changed.
    Clancy fell silent. And then for a short time the two of them just looked at each other, trying to read each other’s troubled faces and trying to decide what to say next.
    Elena spoke first.
    “The thing is Clancy I’m just me . I’m just a person