The Peacock Cloak

mated with its corresponding tree.
    “Oh crap,” muttered Stephen.
    His palms were sweating, his heart pounding. For the past four or five months, he hadn’t seen one of the things close-to, let alone a group of them, only the occasional glimpse of an isolated individual, deep in the forest, wandering around by itself. He’d started to get used to the idea that the indigenes, like other Lutanian creatures, preferred to keep out of the way of human beings. It was the way he preferred it too.
    “Just leave me alone, can’t you?”
    They couldn’t hear him, of course. (They communicated by microwave, so the Agency biologists had discovered, their tree-females acting as relay stations.)
    “Just play with your bloody stone, why can’t you, and leave me be? I’m not interfering with you.”
    The goblin watched him. Its two companions watched him. Six shiny black button eyes. And all three were silent, didn’t even glance at one another, just smiled and smiled at him with those odd thin faces that could either be seen as full of cunning, or as empty of anything at all.
    Stephen knew perfectly well that, this close, there was no way he was going to be able to avoid it, the thing about indigenes that people most feared. In fact he’d hardly even finished framing the thought, when the voice spoke inside his head.
    “Hiding away.”
    It was his own voice, but not his own thought or his own inflection, as if his very thought-stream had turned out not really to be him, but only an instrument, a tool, that could as well be picked up and played with by others as by Stephen himself.
    “Hiding away,” it said.
    It had happened before, just three times before during the whole of his three-year tour of duty, that he’d come up this close to goblins and heard that voice.
    “Can’t get in,” is what he had heard the first time.
    “Ha ha. No home,” the second.
    He wasn’t alone that second time. He’d visibly started with the shock of it, and the three young Agency people who were with him had laughed and demanded to know what the voice had said. (He’d been mortified. It hadn’t struck him, then or since, that his companions were trying to distract themselves from inner voices of their own.)
    There had been one other time, too, when he’d seen an indigene watching him intently from far off in the forest. He wouldn’t even have noticed the creature if it hadn’t been picked out by the sunlight around a pond. And the voice had been so quiet that, if he hadn’t seen anything, he might well have been able to persuade himself that he’d just imagined it.
    “Too scared to leave the path,” it had said.
    For some reason, that had disturbed him very much, coming back to him many times in dreams.
    But I’m awake now, Stephen reminded himself, and he rubbed his hands over that raw pink face of his as he looked firmly ahead and walked on past the strange trio and their precious lump of stone.

    You could tell when the settlement of Lisoba was near by the green plants that had begun to creep out from it onto the forest floor, clashing with the pink indigenous moss. The clearing itself, with its densely packed vegetable plots, was startlingly, even shockingly, green after the shadowy forest. Emerging from the trees and seeing Lisoba spotlit by the low evening sun, Stephen felt as if he was looking at a picture in a stained glass window. The little wooden houses, the rows of bean and maize seemed too bright, too simple, too perfect to be real.
    “Good evening Mr Kohl,” called the blacksmith Jorge Cervantes in his big bass voice, standing up from his tomato plants.
    “Good evening, Mr Cervantes. How’s your day been?”
    “Hello, Mr Agency Man,” called Mad Gretel, who the villagers said was possessed by spirits.
    “Hi there, Gretel.”
    Stephen was easier with the tenth-generation Lutanian settlers who lived in Lisoba than he was with his own Agency people at the Station. They didn’t ask so much of him and, above all, they didn’t expect him to be anything like them. His foreign origin gave him permission to be different and separate without causing offence.
    He continued into the village, greeted from time to time by other villagers.
    Lisoba was only twenty houses, plus a satellite dish and a prefabricated Community Centre which the Agency had put in so that it could talk to the people of Lisoba whenever it needed to, and ask them things (for the Agency always longed to know ) and provide them with