The Peacock Cloak

be completely erased from your mind.”
    Jennifer grimaced and shook her head.
    “That must feel strange.”
    “Yes. It feels very weird afterwards, I can tell you, to know that you were walking and talking and doing stuff, only a short while ago, which you’ll never recall, no matter how hard you try.”
    She pulled on her cigarette.
    “You could write things down, perhaps?”
    “Yes, and that’s exactly what I did last time. I kept a diary. But when you look at your diary later, it doesn’t work like a diary normally does, because it doesn’t prompt your memory, not after the cut-off point. It’s like you are reading the diary of another person.”
    He was no longer looking at Jennifer. He’d grabbed up that bit of leaf again and was twisting it fiercely back and forth.
    “And of course… Well… You don’t know if the diary is a complete record, do you? Or whether you left something out.”
    He pulled the leaf in two.
    “So,” began Jennifer tentatively, “are you worried that…”
    Stephen interrupted her.
    “What I did last time – and in fact it’s what the Agency recommends – was to say goodbye to everyone on Day 40. That way you know for sure that you’ll remember the occasion. You wouldn’t want a goodbye that everyone can remember but you. And then you go off somewhere where no one knows you until the time for the transmission comes. You take a vacation.”
    Stephen sighed.
    “You actually have to stop work, you see, for legal reasons,” he said with great bitterness, “whether you want to or not.”
    They saw the kitchen door open over at the house, spilling out a pool of yellow electric light into which stepped Lucia with a pail of scraps. She glanced towards them, curiously and a little enviously, then emptied the scraps into the pigpen and went back inside, closing off the light again as she shut the door behind her.
    “So you did that, did you?” Jennifer prompted. “You said goodbye to everyone on Day 40 and then…?”
    “After that I went off to… Well you wouldn’t know the place, of course, but it’s a resort by the sea, a good way away from everyone I knew. And, during the part of the time I can still remember, I stayed in a hotel and I swam in the pool, and I watched movies and played screen games, and just, you know, filled up the time.”
    He looked at her. She exhaled a cloud of smoke and picked off a strand of loose tobacco from her lower lip, but she didn’t speak.
    “I can remember all the way up to Day 29,” said Stephen. “Up to that point I remember everything just as well as you’d expect to remember a vacation that happened three years ago.”
    Jennifer nodded, although vacations as such were outside her experience.
    “And I remember,” Stephen said, “I remember the first few hours of the morning of Day 29. The first few hours but nothing after that. My diary says that I carried on doing the same kind of things for the rest of that day and for all the days afterwards, right up to Day 1 – swims in the pool, beers, movies, screen games – but I don’t remember. I don’t remember a thing.”
    Jennifer watched him.
    “Well what else would you have done?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. I really don’t.”
    He rubbed his hands over his big raw face.
    “I am sorry Mrs Notuna. Us Agency folk must seem a funny lot to you Lutanians. We fret about things that you don’t worry about at all. You’re right. People forget things all the time. There’s really nothing so unusual about it.”
    “No,” said Jennifer, “we all forget. But perhaps you are…”
    Stephen stood up rather abruptly.
    “I appreciate the chat,” he told her. “I’ll let you get on now. There’s a report I need to get finished while there’s still time.”
    “Well if you’re sure you’ve had all the talk you needed.”
    Jennifer watched him as he made his way back to the house, then rolled another cigarette.

    Five days before Day 40, Stephen met another indigene on his way home from work. It was a small one, all by itself, squatting right next to the road and playing with two short pieces of stick. Its skin was piebald, pink and grey. It didn’t even glance at him until he was only ten or fifteen yards away, then it looked up suddenly, though seemingly without the slightest surprise or alarm. The Agency biologists said that indigenes could sense the electrical activity in a person’s brain from fifty yards at least.
    “Go away!” growled Stephen.
    He took a