The Peacock Cloak

up whatever fragments of the conversation that he could and stored them in his mind with the same reverence with which he copied down hieroglyphs in the British Museum. The way people talked to each other, were at ease with one another, the way they shared things and held one another’s attention, these were as much a mystery to him as the inscriptions on the mummy-cases of pharaohs: a mystery, but, like the hieroglyphs, pregnant with mysterious meaning.
    “Hi, Sue, it’s Jenny!” he muttered.
    He laughed. It struck him as funny. And then he tried just repeating the name, “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”
    It had such a sweet sound, that name, such a sweet, sweet sound.

    Jenny had her bug eyes set at low opacity. She could still see the world that Richard saw – the traffic lights, the taxis, the cars throwing up their fans of brown water, the shops like glowing caves of yellow light – but for her, soothingly, all this was enclosed in a kind of frame. Wearing bug eyes was cosy, like being inside a car. It reduced the city streets to a movie on a screen, a view seen through a window.
    Near the bottom of her field of vision – and seemingly in front of her in space – was a toolbar with a row of icons which allowed her to navigate the bug eye system. Near the top of the field there was an ‘accessories bar’ with a clock and a variety of pieces of information of the kind that people find comforting, like the many blades of a Swiss penknife, even if they never use them: things like the air temperature, the Dow-Jones Index, a five-year calendar, the TV highlights of the evening ahead, the local time in Sydney and Hong Kong…
    Above the accessories bar, advertisements rolled by:
    “ Even Detectives Cry, the powerful new novel from Elgar Winterton, now in bug-book format at Finlay and Barnes for just £2.99… Froozli , the great new snack idea from Nezco. Because being healthy needn’t mean doing without…”
    Of course Jenny wasn’t paying any attention to the ads.
    “Ben’s spent so much money on this,” she said to Sue. “You wouldn’t believe it! Jet-skiing, and diving, and rafting, and… Well, loads of things he’s booked up for us. I keep worrying that he’s done too much and that it’s going to be hard to… I mean, I keep saying he doesn’t have to…”
    A young couple passed by in the other direction, arm in arm. Although physically together, thanks to their bugs they were at that moment in entirely different worlds. He was blink-surfing the net. She was chatting animatedly into the air.
    Sue regarded her friend Jenny. Bug eyes did not transmit a visual image requiring a camera, but a virtual image in which movement and expression were reconstructed from facial muscle movements. Now Sue’s virtual face regarded her gentle friend Jenny with narrowed, worried eyes
    “Just try and enjoy it, Jenny!” she said. “Grab it while you can and enjoy it!”
    She hesitated, wanting to say more but unable to find quite the right words. She was nine years older than Jenny, and rather tougher.
    “Enjoy it, Jenny dear,” she ended up repeating. “It’s not every day you get a trip to Jamaica with everything paid for by someone else.”

    Communicating through bug eyes, paradoxically, allowed you to see other people bug eye free. But since he never used bugs himself and since he never entered other people’s actual homes, where folk removed their bugs to watch TV, Richard saw people with bug eyes on most of the time. He inhabited a world of human fruit flies. They saw his naked face and looked away.
    “Jenny,” he whispered, “Jenny.”
    And he laughed, not mockingly but with delight.

    Jenny finished her call with Sue. She crossed a busy road, then glanced at the mail icon on her toolbar and blinked twice. Her e-mail window opened and she skipped through the unread messages. One came from a bug-book club she subscribed to and needed a quick answer or she’d have to pay for a book she didn’t want.
    She blinked her message on its way. A relay station half a mile away picked it up, extracted its cargo of digital code and translated this into tiny flashes of light which travelled underground, at 300,000 kilometres per second, along filaments of glass, to a satellite station down on the Cornish coast which turned the light flashes back into a radio signal, a single phrase in a never-ending stream, and beamed it into space. Five hundred kilometres out, a satellite received Jenny’s signal, along