The Peacock Cloak

perimeter fence with a herbicidal spray. Beyond was the Lutanian forest, that strange forest with no green in it, only pink and yellow and grey. The Station was full of its sweet but slightly sickly smell like fermented caramel.

    “Hey Steve,” said his colleague Helen Fu, as he returned to his office. “A bunch of us are going over to New Settlement for a few beers. Fancy joining us?”
    “No. No thank you. Not tonight.”
    “Oh come on, Steve. You hardly ever come out these days! And you’ll soon be leaving us!”
    “Really, no. But I appreciate you asking.”
    He began to close down his workstation.
    “Don’t be a killjoy, Steve,” persisted Helen. “Come and have some fun for once!”
    Stephen didn’t like to be put under pressure.
    “What do you mean fun?” he barked, as if he was an animal that had been goaded one time too often. “We all stopped having anything to say to each other ages ago. Didn’t you notice? All we do now is get drunker and drunker and louder and louder to try and cover up that fact. Excuse me, if that doesn’t strike me as fun.”

    Agitated, resentful, and (though he didn’t so readily admit this to himself) ashamed by his own outburst, Stephen chose to walk the three miles through the forest back to his lodgings rather than take the bus. He was one of those very bright people who are quickly irritated by the slowness of those round them, and tend not to notice the many ways in which other people are actually wiser than they are. But at some level he did notice. At some level he knew there was something out there that other people understood and he just didn’t quite get.
    Fifty yards along the road, he was overtaken by the bus. A few of his colleagues looked out at him. Then the bus picked up speed, turned a corner and was gone. Inside it, they would of course still be discussing Stephen and his rudeness. But why should he care? He told himself he was much happier alone. And in some ways it was true.
    He was alone, in any case, whether he liked it or not. He was profoundly alone. The Station was soon out of sight and, if it wasn’t for the metalled road itself, he could have been back in the old Lutania: not just Lutania as it had been fifteen years back before the arrival of the Agency and the Transmission Station, but Lutania as it had been three centuries ago, before the first human colonists arrived, when the forest and its denizens belonged only to themselves. For even now the human encroachment hadn’t gone very deep. These trees around him, these strange Lutanian trees that came in three different colours but never in green, stretched away for thousands of miles, interrupted only by the occasional road or tiny settlement.
    It was a silent, sombre, and utterly alien place. The pale tree trunks rose without branches for twenty feet before putting forth their pendulous pods and their giant leaves, pink or grey or yellow. There was no intermediate layer of vegetation to fill up the shadowy space beneath the canopy. The only breaks in the gloom were the intermittent ponds that were a feature of the entire forest: little patches of clarity and sunlight half-hidden by the trees.
    And nothing moved. Most of the time nothing moved at all out there in the daytime except for the occasional twitching of a pod and the odd balloon-like floater drifting through the trees between the canopy and the forest floor. The leaves drank in the sunlight. The ponds shone in the distance, like windows into a brighter world. The forest floor, covered in pinkish moss, lay like a newly vacuumed carpet in an empty room. Even the caramel air was still.
    Then suddenly, so suddenly that he gasped out loud, Stephen came across three indigenes.

    Goblins, the colonists called them, though the Agency tried to discourage the term. They were squatting round a large white pebble, just ahead of him and only a few yards off the road to his left. They nodded and bowed as they took it in turns to touch and prod their lump of stone.
    One of them stood up. Half the height of a man and grey-skinned, it did indeed look very like a goblin in a children’s story book, with its thin pointed face, its black button eyes and V-shaped mouth, which could be seen as smiling teasingly, or could be seen as devoid of any meaning at all. And of course it was naked. Its large member dangled down like a length of hose, ridged with thick black veins.
    They were always male, like all Lutanian creatures, each one of which