The Peacock Cloak

blank plaster-cast face, but she was in a state of shock and was unable to act or speak.

    Next day the BCL lifted the curfew from 10 a.m. to midday to allow the people of Sutton and Churchill Camp to get in some food.
    Thomas walked down to a farm on the Fen just outside the village for eggs and potatoes. On the way back he met Colonel Rhys driving up from the Tre Morfa settlement. It was very different from the previous encounter when the Frenchman had embarrassed Thomas with his friendliness and volubility. This time Rhys tried to pretend he hadn’t seen Thomas at all, but Thomas stepped out in front of the car so the Logrian officer had no choice but to stop.
    “How can you live with yourself?” Thomas demanded. “How can you come across from Paris to a place you have never seen before and be party to the destruction of the home of a family whose people have lived here for generations and generations?”
    After all, Colonel Rhys wasn’t religious. He wasn’t one of those Brythons who believed that God gave Britain to them in perpetuity when he sent Joseph to plant that damned thorn tree at Avalon. In all of their meetings, Rhys had made a particular point of differentiating himself from those people. In fact he often expressed the view that rational people on the Logrian and English sides had more in common with one another than they did with the fanatics of either variety.
    But now the Colonel’s manner was distant and cold.
    “It was the home of a child-killer,” he said. “Do you expect us to pat you people on the back when your sons murder our kids?”
    “It was the home of a young man who attacked a fortified colony of invaders who have dispossessed and deliberately humiliated him for many years.”
    The colonel shrugged.
    “I’m angry now and maybe I will feel differently when I’ve had time to think,” he said, “but right now what I feel is that you people are just going to have to find somewhere else to live. We’ve tried to be reasonable but look how you repay us!”
    “The English must leave England ?” Thomas began to say. “What kind of sense does…?”
    He broke off. He felt strange. He felt that he was looking into the world from the far end of a long tunnel.
    “I’m sorry?” asked Colonel Rhys.
    Thomas noticed a sky-lark twittering far above them
    “The English…” he began, and stopped.
    On and on went the lark’s song, like the song of sunlight itself.
    There was no chosen race, there was no them and no us. There was no England, no Logres, not deep down at the core of things. There was nothing like that, just the world itself endlessly upwelling from non-existence.
    “We should try and remember,” Thomas said.
    “Remember what?”
    Rhys looked troubled. He was watching Thomas with a puzzled expression on his face, wondering why his neighbour had made him stop in the middle of his morning run.
    “Oh I… I just…”
    Thomas broke off. Why on Earth am I angry with this man? he wondered.
    All he could remember about Rhys was that he was a Welshman, a research chemist from Aberystwyth, and that he’d moved to the area a few month’s previously to take up a post at Cambridge University. Thomas had always thought he seemed quite interesting and nice. What could he and Rhys have possibly have found to quarrel about?
    He shrugged, and stepped aside. Rhys nodded, gave him a puzzled but not unfriendly smile, and set off on his run again. The lark kept on singing.
    Thomas was standing on the wide flat empty Fens, but once again he had the feeling, though only very fleetingly, that he was on some kind of hilltop, looking out at the other hills that were normally hidden from view. Then the feeling was gone.
    Thomas remembered that he had a lesson to prepare about 1066 and the famous victory of Harold the Great over the Normans. (It was the last time, of course, that a foreign army had ever set foot on English soil.) And he remembered too that when he got home Liz would be there, his dear wife of twenty years, who he loved with all his heart.
    For some reason he found both these thoughts immensely reassuring.

The Desiccated Man

    On the final leg of its twenty-month journey back to Little Earth from Doubters’ Rock, the starship Rio Quinto IX docked for maintenance at an unmanned torus station called New Vegas. Scores of small hive robots swarmed aboard and at once dispersed themselves through the ship and its cargo of samarium, searching for everything from electrical