The Peacock Cloak

of the ship. “These are your rights, Mr Stone. You are not obliged to speak, but anything you say…”
    “ Murder? What? I’ve been in space these last two years for Chrissakes! Who could I murder in space?”
    “One of your tardy charges, Captain Stone.”
    “Jesus,” muttered Jacob.
    For one brief moment it came to him just how much trouble he had managed to get himself into and just how wicked a thing he had done. Then he gave a characteristic snort of dismissal and contempt.
    “That little tardy? What a lot of nonsense! It was only a pinprick, and anyway she wasn’t really alive. So how could that be murder?”
    “I’ll show you something,” said the lieutenant, linking her data pack to his system.
    On his screen appeared the tardies, still sitting in their seats somewhere down on the planet surface, while their container was filled with moisture-saturated air.
    “These particular tardies are converts to the Universal Church,” said the Lieutenant. “I suppose you knew that? They’ve spent a total of nine years travelling across space to get here for the Church’s General Synod, which only happens once every hundred standard years. It’s a big occasion, a big fuss is going to be made of them, and they agreed to let their rehydration be filmed so that the whole gathering could see it.”
    Jacob shrugged.
    “The agent guy said they were religious or some such.”
    As the tardies’ desiccated bodies absorbed the water, they trembled and quivered and jerked. They would have fallen to the floor if they hadn’t been strapped to their seats. And Jacob could see the flesh rapidly expanding inside the apparently empty transparent skins. As they filled out, the tardies stopped being transparent and began to look solid. They were no longer empty shells but small silvery-coloured people. At one end of the chamber, presumably the end where the moisture was being introduced, some of them began to move.
    One of them unbuckled her seat-belt. She stood up and stretched. Nearby an adult male was reaching out to one of the little children. The child had also woken and was tugging crossly at her belt. A couple of seats further down another, smaller female unbuckled and stood up. She looked back at the children too for a moment but then her attention was abruptly drawn away by something happening at the far end of the chamber.
    The camera followed her gaze and at once the scene changed from one of calm, slow reawakening to one of crisis and desperation. The newly married husband was holding his wife’s threshing body, his head turned away from her to shout for help. Not only was his wife’s body twisted by violent convulsions, but something had gone terribly wrong with the rehydration process inside her head. Her newly reconstituted eyes were not looking out of the hollows that they were meant to see from, but were pressing up against the top of her transparent skull, staring out horribly in two different directions.
    The young husband fumbled with her seat belt to release her, still yelling all the while. Other tardies came rushing forward. As they lifted and turned her, her convulsions were already subsiding into limpness. And then a gaping hole became visible in the back of her head. Lieutenant Niyibizi froze the picture as the camera closed in on the wound.
    “Well that was nothing to do with me,” grumbled Jacob Stone. “I just gave her a little pin-prick with a tiny little awl.”
    The lieutenant looked at him in disbelief.
    “You’ve had all this time to think about it. Did it not occur to you for one moment, Mr Stone, that a pin-prick might get bigger when the flesh expanded?”
    “Uh, I guess.”
    The lieutenant pushed a button on her wrist and instructed her officers to find the awl.
    “And what was the purpose of that little pin-prick, Mr Stone? Do you deny you meant to kill her?”
    Stone snorted.
    “She wasn’t alive anyway. No more than that mug over there, no more than that plastic fork.”

    In the trial Jacob Stone offered no defence at all other than repeating at every opportunity, and with increasing irritation, “It was only a pin-prick” and “She wasn’t really alive”. Nor did he show any remorse or provide any explanation except for boredom and being drunk.
    Stone’s face was indifferent as he was led off at the end to spend the remainder of his life in jail. It was as if he was saying, “You do what you like with me, I don’t give a damn.” But then, of course, he had