The Peacock Cloak

during the three centuries of their isolation was a cause of great distress to the Agency, and was a subject of frequent lectures in the Community Centre.)
    “So what is it that’s troubling you Mr Kohl?” Jennifer asked as they settled on the bench. “I’d have thought you’d be looking forward to going home after three whole years away? Yava knows, I would be.”
    She began to pour the coffee which Stephen had politely carried up on a tray. It was dusk. The big Lutanian sun had already sunk into the dark trees behind them, like a fat dollop of sweet red syrup.
    “Well, yes, I suppose I am.” Stephen said, without enthusiasm, as he took a cup from her. “To be honest, though, my worries are more to do with the transmission itself.”
    “Ha!” Jennifer exclaimed triumphantly, as if winning a long-standing argument. “Well, I can’t say I blame you for that ! Not in a million years would I let anyone put me in that dreadful machine. Not in a million years. They say it takes you to pieces, beams you out like a radio signal, then puts you together again at the other end.”
    Stephen smiled, amused by her vehemence.
    “No way would I subject myself to that, Mr Kohl,” Jennifer insisted. “No way at all. My ancestors came here the long way, meaning to stay here for good, Yava rest their souls, and I’m going to stick to that plan.”
    Jennifer touched her forehead, supposedly Yava’s doorway into the human soul. Then she tipped three wooden spoonfuls of brown sugar into her coffee, and stirred them in with the handle.
    “But you’ve done it before, Mr Kohl, haven’t you! You came here by transmission in the first place. I’d have thought that would help.”
    She took tobacco and papers out of the pocket on her apron and began to roll one of her large cigarettes.
    “And I’ve heard it’s quite safe, really,” she said, without much conviction, “however dangerous it seems. As safe as crossing the strait, one of your Agency friends told me.”
    She was referring to the five-mile strait between the flat forested continent in which they were sitting, and the rocky island of Balos, where the Agency had built Lutania’s new capital, with its National University, its House of Assembly, and its fine Academy of Science.
    “Not that I’ve ever done that either,” observed Stephen’s landlady, who had never travelled more than twenty miles from Lisoba. “I’ve got more than enough here to keep me busy, and Balos is a nasty wicked place by all accounts.”
    “It’s not the transmission itself,” Stephen said. “It is scary, of course it’s scary, knowing that for a while you’re gong to be nothing but a signal travelling through the ether, but that’s not what’s really bothering me. It’s… It’s to do with the memory thing.”
    “Oh yes, I heard about that. People lose some of their memories when they cross over, yes? That other Agency fellow said something about it.”
    Jennifer lit her cigarette and drew on it, lighting up their faces with that same orange glow that Stephen had often seen from the window of his room, when he’d looked up for a moment from the numbers on his screen.
    “Yes,” she conceded, “that must feel strange. But then again, people forget things all the time, don’t they? And it’s not as if you forget your whole life or anything, or forget who you are. Not from what that other man said.”
    “No, that’s true.”
    Stephen wondered if he was worrying unnecessarily. It was so pleasant sitting there in the fading light with Mrs Notuna, and the wooden statue, and the coffee, and the sounds from the village, and the tobacco smoke mingling with the caramel smell of the forest, rotten and sweet all at once.
    “You’re right,” he said, “you don’t forget your past at all, only the time immediately before the transmission itself. Four weeks before it, at minimum. Five-and-a-half weeks at most.”
    He snatched up a bit of leaf from the ground and twisted it in his hands.
    “To be honest, Mrs Notuna, it’s not the loss of memory as such. It’s…”
    He tossed aside the leaf and turned to face her.
    “You see there’s a point, forty days before transmission – Day 40 as the Agency calls it – when you know you may not remember anything from then on. And then there’s another point, Day 29, when you know for sure that you won’t remember anything after that day. Everything you do and think and say, from last thing on Day 29 at the very latest, will