The Peacock Cloak

the suggestion but genuinely amazed. The thought had never once occurred to her.
    “He’s got nothing to do with that ugly lot, Mr Kohl, I can assure you,” said Jennifer firmly. “Our ancestors brought him over with them when they first came here.”
    Both she and Lucia were completely unable to see, even slightly, a similarity that was commented on by every Agency worker who arrived in Lutania. But drunk though he was, Stephen knew that it would be tactless to tell them that no god back home had ever looked like Yava, and certainly not the ones that the first colonists had, as a matter of record, brought with them.
    People needed their verities to be eternal. This was true, after all, even of the Agency.
    “But Yava can see into your head like they can, can’t he?” he said. “Isn’t that what you believe?”
    He passed Jennifer the flagon and she took a long swig. He felt wonderfully comfortable and at ease, with these two women on either side of him.
    “Goblins can’t really see into your head,” Jennifer snorted dismissively, handing the flagon to Lucia.
    “Well all right,” she reluctantly conceded, “they reflect back what’s in your head, like a mirror, but they don’t understand anything.”
    Unusually, this traditional Lutanian view was broadly shared by Agency biologists, who speculated that indigenes’ ability to stir up uncomfortable feelings in the minds of potential predators served the same defensive purpose as smell did for a skunk, or a nasty taste for a toad.
    “They might think they understand,” Lucia agreed, “but really they don’t at all.”
    “Horrid creatures,” sniffed Jennifer. “It’s giving them too much credit to say they think at all. They might have hands and stand up on two legs, but they’re only animals. I don’t care what anyone says.”
    Then suddenly she laughed out loud.
    “Honestly, Mr Kohl! You Agency people! Yava like a goblin indeed! No, of course not! He doesn’t even come from Lutania. You ought to know that. He comes from the same place as you.”
    She lit up a cigarette, drew deeply on it and exhaled with a contented sigh. Nothing more seemed to need to be said on the subject of Yava and the indigenes, and the three of them sat for a while in comfortable silence.
    “What bad thing would you do, Lucia,” Jennifer asked after a time, “if you knew that no one you know could see you, and if you knew you wouldn’t remember a thing afterwards?”
    “It couldn’t really happen, though, could it?” said Lucia piously, touching her forehead. “Yava could still see and remember what I did.”
    “Yes, all right,” conceded Jennifer, with slight impatience. “But just suppose for a moment he couldn’t. After all, Mr Kohl here doesn’t really know about Yava does he? None of the Agency people do.”
    “That’s because they’ve got bone heads,” said Lucia, rapping Stephen on the forehead with her knuckles, and then giving him a little kiss on the cheek to show no hard feelings. “That’s why they sit staring at those screens all the time, if you ask me. It’s the only way they know how to connect up to anything.”
    She took a thoughtful swig of beer, then laughed.
    “Okay, I’ll tell you then. There’s a good-looking bloke called Paul down at Porto. You know him, Jennifer, that man in the hardware store? If I really believed no one would ever know, not even Yava, and I myself wouldn’t remember, perhaps I’d have a fling with him. He’s asked me often enough, and why not say yes, if I knew I’d forget it completely afterwards so it wouldn’t come between me and Luis?”
    She considered this.
    “Mind you, Paul would have to forget too.”
    “You’ve got a one-track mind, Lucia,” her employer told her.
    “Well you did ask, and I’m not saying I’d really do it, am I? I’m just saying if . Anyway, Mrs Goody-goody, how about you? What would you do?”
    Jennifer puffed on her cigarette.
    “All kinds of things you could do, couldn’t you?” she said after a while. “You could steal something you really wanted, and then put it somewhere where you’d find it later and think that you’d just been lucky.”
    “ Boring! ” complained Lucia, reaching across to give Jennifer a prod. “Boring boring! Is that really the worst you can come up with, old lady?”
    “The worst I’m telling you,” Jennifer chuckled.
    “And anyway,” she said, “maybe you don’t really know until you get in that situation. Maybe your