The Peacock Cloak

turned and began to stagger back between the seats, he was trembling. And he shrank away from the gaze of the two rows of empty transparent eyes.
    “ What? What’s your problem? Some of you die anyway. You heard the guy say it himself. You heard Mr Expert Tardy-lover. Some of you die every time. It might have been her anyway for all you know.”
    He reached the low door of the container.
    “Think yourselves lucky I left your tribe alone, eh? That’s what your buddy Hempleman said, isn’t it? Your Mr Nice Guy. It’s the tribe that counts for you people. At least I respected that.”

    Jacob slept for fourteen hours or more at a time. And when he wasn’t sleeping he watched movies and played video games, and ate and drank, and looked at pictures of girls, and watched more movies, and thought about the money building up in his bank account. Just beyond the wall of his tiny quarters blazed the universe, but he paid it no heed.
    “One million eight hundred and forty two thousand federation dollars. Lick that, Mr Nice Guy Hempleman, with your little house by the sea.”
    He never entered the white container again and tried not to look at it when he had to go into the hold, but he didn’t give much thought to what he had done in there.
    “It was only a pin-prick after all,” he’d mutter, “and she might not have woken anyway, just like Hempleman said. And they’re not really alive either, are they? It’s not as if they were human or anything.”
    Then he’d let his mind drift to more pleasant things.
    “One million eight hundred and forty two thousand dollars. How about that!”
    And pretty soon it would be time to lie down again and sleep until the ship woke him to carry out his next round of daily checks.

    This was his actual job, stipulated in his contract. The ship ran itself, but every standard day he was required to spend thirty minutes running through checks to establish whether any one of fifteen possible trigger events had occurred which might require human intervention to safeguard the ship and its cargo. None of them had ever occurred, not just on this voyage but on any of the voyages in all the thirty-two standard years that Jacob had spent riding spaceships back and forth across the void. Every single one of them would have passed off just as well if he hadn’t been there at all. He was called captain but as it had turned out, he’d only ever been a passenger, or maybe a janitor at a pinch.
    And after another six months the Rio Quinto IX , without its captain’s help, duly put itself into orbit around the planet of Little Earth. Without his help, the ship negotiated with the planetary authorities. Without his help, robot shuttles docked at the Rio Quinto ’s bow and drew out the one hundred containers from the hold, four at a time, the tardies’ container being in the first batch.
    Unloading took the better part of a day, with Jacob monitoring the whole process from a screen in his quarters (for it happened that no less than three of those fifteen prescribed triggers were events that could occur only during loading and unloading). He was in no hurry. He didn’t enjoy the descent to a planet surface. It wasn’t easy, after all this time, to emerge from his little den into the great gravity well of a habitable world, and see the ocean and clouds and continents, and to know that there was a whole complicated world of human relationships waiting down there, talking, arguing, laughing, doing deals, making love, and just generally getting along perfectly well without him.
    When there were only eight containers of samarium left in the hold, and Jacob was waiting for a shuttle to come for the next batch, he was irritated to see instead a government launch docking alongside the external airlock. It was some sort of safety regulations check-up, he supposed. It happened from time to time in the more officious and metropolitan jurisdictions such as that of Little Earth. Safety people came on board with checklists and questions, and told him off for not keeping the gym in working condition, or not changing the air filter often enough. Jacob Stone sighed.
    And was taken completely by surprise when five armed police officers came bursting in.
    “I’m Lieutenant Gladheart Niyibizi,” their leader told him, “and I am putting you under arrest.
    “What for?”
    He really was bewildered.
    “For murder.” She put handcuffs on him, indicating to the other officers that they should begin their search