by Neil Clarke
Tawus smiled. He would act on his own account and not on instructions from his clothes, but all the same he lifted his hand to the latch and this time opened it. He was moving forward again. And the eyes on his cloak shone in readiness.
Inside the gate the path branched three ways: right to the cottage, with the peaks of the valley’s western ridge behind it, straight ahead to the little orchard and vegetable garden, left and eastward down to the small lake from which flowed the stream that he’d been following. On the far side of the lake was the ridge of peaks that formed the valley’s eastern edge. Some sheep were grazing on their slopes.
Clop clop went the wind chimes, and a bee zipped by his ear like a tiny racing car on a track.
Tawus looked down towards the lake.
“There you are,” he murmured, spotting the small figure at the water’s edge that the peacock eyes had already located, sitting on a log on a little beach, looking through binoculars at the various ducks and water birds out on the lake.
“You know I’m here,” Tawus muttered angrily. “You know quite well I’m here.”
“Indeed he does,” the cloak confirmed. “The tension in his shoulders is unmistakable.”
“He just wants to make me the one that speaks first,” Tawus said.
So he did not speak. Instead, when there were only a few meters between them, he stooped, picked up a stone, and lobbed it into the water over the seated figure’s head.
The ripples spread out over the lake. Among some reeds at the far end of the little beach, a duck gave a low warning quack to its fellows. The man on the log turned ‘round.
“Tawus,” he exclaimed, laying down his field glasses and rising to his feet with a broad smile of welcome, “Tawus, my dear fellow. It’s been a very long time.”
The likeness between the two of them would have been instantly apparent to any observer, even from a distance. They had the same lithe bearing, the same high cheekbones and aquiline nose, the same thick mane of gray hair. But the man by the water was simply dressed in a white shirt and white breeches, while Tawus still wore his magnificent cloak with its shifting patterns and its restless eyes. And Tawus stood stiffly while the other man, still smiling, extended his arms, as if he expected Tawus to fall into his embrace.
Tawus did not move or bend.
“You’ve put it about that you’re Fabbro himself,” he said, “or so I’ve heard.”
The other man nodded.
“Well, yes. Of course there’s a sense in which I am a copy of Fabbro as you are, since this body is an analogue of the body that Fabbro was born with, rather than the body itself. But the original Fabbro ceased to exist when I came into being, so my history and his have never branched away from each another, as yours and his did, but are arranged sequentially in a single line, a single story. So yes, I’m Fabbro. All that is left of Fabbro is me, and I have finally entered my own creation. It seemed fitting, now that both Esperine and I are coming to a close.”
Tawus considered this for a moment. He had an impulse to ask about the world beyond Esperine, that vast and ancient universe in which Fabbro had been born and grown up. For of course Fabbro’s was the only childhood that Tawus could remember, Fabbro’s the only youth. He was naturally curious to know how things had changed out there and to hear news of the people from Fabbro’s past: friends, collaborators, male and female lovers, children (actual biological children: children of Fabbro’s body and not just his mind).
“Aren’t those memories a distraction?” the cloak asked him through his skin. “Isn’t that stuff his worry and not yours?”
Tawus nodded.
“Yes,” he silently agreed, “and to ask about it would muddy the water. It would confuse the issue of worlds and their ownership.”
He looked Fabbro in the face.
“You had no business coming into Esperine,” he told him. “We renounced your world and you in turn gave this world to us to be our own. You’ve no right to come barging back in here now, interfering, undermining my authority, undermining the authority of the Five.”
(It was Five now, not Six, because of Cassandra’s annihilation in the Chrome Wars.)
Fabbro smiled.
“Some might say you’d undermined each other’s authority quite well without my help, with your constant warring, and your famines and your plagues and all of that.”
“That’s a matter for us, not you.”
“Possibly so,” said Fabbro. “Possibly so. But in my defense, I have tried to keep out of the way since I arrived in this world.”
“You let it be known you were here, though. That was enough.”
Fabbro tipped his head from side to side, weighing this up.
“Enough? Do you really think so? Surely for my mere presence to have had an impact, there would have had to be something in Esperine that could be touched by it. There had to be a me-shaped hole. Otherwise wouldn’t I just be some harmless old man up in the mountains?”
He sat down on the log again
“Come and sit with me, Tawus.” He patted a space beside him. “This is my favorite spot, my grandstand seat. There’s always something happening here. Day. Night. Evening. Morning. Sun. Rain. Always something new to see.”
“If you’re content with sheep and ducks,” said Tawus, and did not sit.
Fabbro watched him. After a few seconds, he smiled.
“That’s quite a coat you’ve got there,” he observed.
Many of the peacock eyes turned towards him, questioningly. Others glanced with renewed vigor in every other direction, as if suspecting diversionary tactics.
“I’ve heard,” Fabbro went on, “that it can protect you, make you invisible, change your appearance, allow you to leap from planet to planet without going through the space in between. I’ve been told that it can tell you of dangers, and draw your attention to things you might wish to know, and even give you counsel, as perhaps it’s doing now. That is some coat!”
“He is seeking to rile you,” the cloak silently whispered. “You asked me to warn you if he did this.”
“Don’t patronize me Fabbro,” Tawus said, “I am your copy not your child. You know that to construct this cloak I simply needed to understand the algorithm on which Esperine is founded, and you know that I do understand it every bit as well as you.”
Fabbro nodded.
“Yes of course. I’m just struck by the different ways in which we’ve used that understanding. I used it to make a more benign world than my own, within which countless lives could, for a limited time, unfold and savour their existence. You used it to set yourself apart from the rest of this creation, insulate yourself, wrap yourself up in your own little world of one.”
“I could easily have made another complete world as you did, as perfect as Esperine in every way. But any world that I made would necessarily exist within this frame, your frame, and therefore still be a part of Esperine, even if it’s equal or it’s superior in design. Do you really wonder that I chose instead to find a way of setting myself apart?”
Fabbro did not answer. He gave a half-shrug, then looked out at the lake.
“I’ve not come here to apologize,” Tawus said. “I hope you know that. I have no regrets about my rebellion.”
Fabbro turned towards him.
“Oh, don’t worry, I know why you came. You came to destroy me. And of course it is possible to destroy me now that I’m here in Esperine, just as it was possible for you and the others to destroy your sister Cassandra when she tried to place a brake on your ambitions. In order to achieve her destruction you found a way of temporarily modifying that part of the original algorithm that protected the seven of you from physical harm. I assume you have a weapon with you now that works in the same way. I guess it’s hidden somewhere in that cloak.”
“But knowing it doesn’t help him,” whispered the cloak through Tawus’s skin.
Another duck had alighted on the water, smaller and differently colored than to the ones that were already
there. (It had black wings and a russet head.) Fabbro picked up his binoculars and briefly observed it, before laying them down again, and turning once more to his recalcitrant creation.
“Be that as it may,” he said, “I certainly wasn’t led to expect an apology. They told me the six of you set out in this direction armed to the teeth and in a great fury. You had a formidable space fleet with you, they said, and huge armies at your back. They told me that cloak of yours was fairly fizzing and sparking with pent-up energy. They said that it turned all the air around you into a giant lens, so that you were greatly magnified and seemed to your followers to be a colossus blazing with fire, striding out in front of them as they poured through the interplanetary gates.”
Tawus snatched a stone up from the beach and flung it out over the water.
“You are allowing yourself to be put on the defensive,” warned the Peacock Cloak. “But remember that he has no more power than you. In fact he has far less. Thanks to your foresight in creating me, you are the one who is protected, not him. And, unlike him, you are armed.”
Tawus turned to face Fabbro.
“You set us inside this world,” he said, “then turned away and left us to it. And that was fine, that was the understanding from the beginning. That was your choice and ours. But now, when it suits you because you are growing old, you come wandering in to criticize what we have achieved. What right do you have to do that, Fabbro? You were absent when the hard decisions were being made. How can you know that you would have done anything different yourself?”
“When have I criticized you? When have I claimed I would have done something different?”
Fabbro gave a short laugh.
“Think, Tawus, think. Stop indulging your anger and think for a moment about the situation we are in. How could I say that I would have done something different? What meaning could such a claim possibly have when you and I were one and the same person at the beginning of all this?”
“We began as one person, but we are not one person now. Origins are not everything.”
Fabbro looked down at his hands, large and long-fingered as Tawus’s were.
“No,” he said, “I agree. It must be so. Otherwise there would only ever be one thing.”
“You made your choice,” Tawus said. “You should have stuck to it and stayed outside.”
“Hence the armies, hence the striding like a colossus at their head, hence the plan to seek me out and destroy me?”
Fabbro looked up at Tawus with an expression that was half a frown and half a smile.
“Yes,” Tawus said. “Hence all those things.”
Fabbro nodded.
“But where are the armies now?” he asked. “Where is the striding colossus? Where is this “we” you speak about? An awful lot of the energy has dissipated, has it not? The nearer you got to me, the faster it all fell away. They’ve all come back to me, you know, your armies, your brothers, your sisters. They have all come to me and asked to become part of me once again.”
Some of the eyes on the cloak glanced inquiringly upwards at Tawus’s face, others remained fixed on Fabbro, who had lifted his binoculars and was once again looking at bird life out on the lake.
“Fire the gun and you will be Fabbro,” the Peacock Cloak told its master. “You will be the one to whom the armies and the Five have all returned. Your apparent isolation, your apparent diminishment, is simply an artifact of there being two of you here, two rival versions of the original Fabbro. But you are the one I shield and not him. You are the one with the weapon.”
Fabbro laid down his field glasses and turned towards the man who still stood stiffly apart from him.
“Come Tawus,” he coaxed gently, patting the surface of the log beside him. “Come and sit down. I won’t bite, I promise. It’s almost the end, after all. Surely we’re both too old, and it’s too late in the day, for us to be playing this game?”
Tawus picked up another stone and flung it out into the lake. The ripples spread over the smooth surface. Quack quack went the ducks near to where it fell, and one of them fluttered its wings and half-flew a few yards further off, scrabbling at the surface with its feet.
“The armies are irrelevant,” Tawus said. “The Five are irrelevant. You know that. For these purposes they are simply fields of force twisting and turning between you and me. The important thing is not that they have come back to you. No. The important thing is that I have not.”
Fabbro watched his face and did not speak
“I gave their lives purpose,” Tawus went on, beginning to pace restlessly up and down. “I gave them progress. I gave them freedom. I gave them cities and nations. I gave them hope. I gave them something to believe in and somewhere to go. You just made a shell. You made a clockwork toy. It was me, through my rebellion, that turned it into a world. Why else did they all follow me?”
He looked around for another stone, found a particularly big one, and lobbed it out even further across the lake. It sent a whole flock of ducks squawking into the air.
“Please sit down, Tawus. I would really like you to sit with me.”
Tawus did not respond. Fabbro shrugged and looked away.
“Why exactly do you think they followed you?” he asked after a short time.
“Because I was in your image but I wasn’t you,” Tawus answered at once. “I was like you, but at the same time I was one of them. Because I stood up for this world as a world in its own right, belonging to those who lived in it, and not simply as a plaything of yours.”
Fabbro nodded.
“Which was what I wanted you to do,” he said.
The day was moving into evening. The eastern ridge of peaks across the water glowed gold from the sun that was setting opposite them in the west.
“After the sun sets,” Fabbro calmly said, “the world will end. Everyone has come back to me. It’s time that you and I brought things to a close.”
Tawus was caught off guard. So little time. It seemed he had miscalculated somewhat, not having the benefit of the Olympian view that Fabbro had enjoyed until recently, looking in from outside of Constructive Thought. He had not appreciated that the end was quite as close as that.
But he was not going to show his surprise.
“I suppose you are going to lecture me,” he said, “about the suffering I caused with my wars.”
As he spoke he was gathering up stones from the beach, hastily, almost urgently, as if they had some vital purpose.
“I suppose you’re going to go on about all the children whose parents I took from them,” he said.
He threw a stone. Splash. Quack.
“And the rapes that all sides perpetrated,” he said, throwing a stone again, “and the tortures,” throwing yet another stone, “and the massacres.”
He had run out of stones. He turned angrily towards Fabbro.
“I suppose you want to castigate me for turning skilled farmers and hunters and fishermen into passive workers in dreary city streets, spending their days manufacturing things they didn’t understand, and their evenings staring at images on screens manufactured for them by someone else.”
He turned away, shaking his head, looking around vaguely for more stones.
“I used to think about you looking in from outside,” he said. “When we had wars, when we were industrializing and getting people off the land, all of those difficult times. I used to imagine you judging me, clucking your tongue, shaking your head. But you try and bring progress to a world without any adverse consequences for anyone. You just try it.”
“Come on Tawus,” Fabbro begged him. “Sit with me. You know you’re not really going to destroy me. You know you can’t really reverse the course that this world, like any world, must take. It isn’t only your armies that have fallen away from you, Tawus, it is your own steely will. It has no purpose any more.”
But the cloak offered another point of view.
“Destroy Fabbro and you will become him,” it silently whispered. “Then you can p
ut back the clock itself.”
Tawus knew it was true. Without Fabbro to stop him, he could indeed postpone the end, not forever, but for several more generations. And he could rule Esperine during that time as he had never ruled before, with no Fabbro outside, no one to look in and judge him. The cloak was right. He would become Fabbro, he would become Fabbro and Tawus both at once. It was possible, and what was more, it had been his reason for coming here in the first place.
He glanced down at Fabbro. He looked quickly away again across the lake. Ten whole seconds passed.
Then Tawus reached slowly for the clasp of the Peacock Cloak. He hesitated. He lowered his hand. He reached for the clasp again. His fingers were trembling because of the contradictory signals they were receiving from his brain, but finally he unfastened the cloak, removing it slowly and deliberately at first, and then suddenly flinging it away from himself, as if he feared it might grab hold and refuse to let him go. It snagged on a branch of a small oak tree and hung there, one corner touching the stony ground. Still its clever eyes darted about, green and gold and black. It was watching Tawus, watching Fabbro. As ever, it was observing everything, analyzing everything, evaluating options and possibilities. But yet, as is surely proper in a garment hanging from a tree, it had no direction of its own, it had no separate purpose.
Across the lake, the eastern hills shone. There were sheep up there grazing, bathed in golden light that picked them out against the mountainside. But the hills on the western side were also making their presence felt, for their shadows were reaching out like long fingers over the two small figures by the lake, one standing, one seated on the log, neither one speaking. Without his cloak, in a simple white shirt and white breeches, Tawus looked even more like Fabbro. A stranger could not have told them apart.
A flock of geese came flying in from a day of grazing lower down the valley. They honked peaceably to one another as they splashed down on the softly luminous water.
“When I was walking up here,” Tawus said at last, “I met three children, and they reminded me of some other children I saw once, or glimpsed anyway, when I was riding past in a tank. It was in the middle of a war and I didn’t pay much heed to them at the time. I was too busy listening to reports and giving orders. But for some reason they stuck in my mind.”
