Free The Peacock Cloak by Chris Beckett

branches were all made of the same smooth flesh, like the flesh of mushrooms. It was yellow, grey or pink. A kind of moss covered the ground, pink in colour, and also fleshy and mushroom-like. And there were ponds, every hundred yards or so, picked out by the pale sunlight that elsewhere in the forest was largely filtered out by trees. The ponds were surrounded by clumps of spongy vegetation, pink or white or yellow.
    But the children, pressing their faces to the car windows, were trying to spot something more interesting than trees and ponds. Cassie told Peter he would win five points if he spotted an animal of some kind, and one hundred points for a castle. They’d only ever seen one of those and that had been in ruins, its delicate, butterscotch, shell-like architecture smashed and kicked to pieces by settlers.
    But the forest, with its spotlit ponds, remained an empty stage. There were no castles, and no animals either, only the occasional solitary floater drifting through the space between canopy and forest floor, trailing its delicate tendrils, and bumping from time to time against the trees. Cassie didn’t consider floaters either sufficiently animal-like, or sufficiently interesting to deserve a point.
    “We see those all the time,” she told her little brother, who persisted in pointing them out.
    “Those aren’t really ponds, you know,” she presently informed him. “Under the ground they’re all joined up. It’s like a sea covered over by a roof of roots and earth.”
    “Quite right, Cassie,” said her father, David, from the front passenger seat.
    “I wish we’d see some goblins,” said Cassie, glancing defiantly at the back of her mother’s head. “I’ll give you twenty points, Peter, if you spot us one, and I’ll let you have turn with my microscope as well.”
    “We don’t call them goblins, do we?” David reminded her. “We call them indigenes. They’re just living creatures like us, going about their lives.”
    “Everyone at school calls them goblins,” said Cassie.
    “Well, most kids in your school are the children of settlers,” said her father, “and they don’t know any better. But we’re Agency people. We’re supposed to set a good example.”
    Another floater (which Peter, annoyingly, still pointed out), more ponds, more silent empty space beneath the mushroom-like trees.
    “Most of the kids say that goblins are only good for shooting and nailing up,” Cassie said off-handedly. “They say the Agency is soft.”
    “Well that’s just silly, Cassie. There’s no reason to persecute the indigenes. They harm no one, and they were here for millions of years before the first settlers came.”
    “They give you funny ideas though.”
    “Well, maybe. But that’s probably just their way of protecting themselves.”
    “Protecting themselves?” Cassie weighed this idea for a moment, tipping her head to one side, then dismissed it with a shrug. “Well whatever it’s for, I…”
    “ Must you talk about those horrid things all the time?” interrupted Cassie’s mother, Paula.
    She turned a corner, leaving it rather too late, and the car only narrowly avoided a particularly large pond, a small lake almost, with the road running along the edge of it. David winced, but did not comment.
    Peter pointed out two more floaters drifting by above the water.
    “You’d better play in the garden when we get back,” Paula said, half-turning her beautiful but bitter face as they left the pond and headed back into the trees. “I need you out of the way so I can get ready for the visitors. We’ve hardly got enough time as it is, let alone with you two getting under my feet.”
    “Honestly Paula,” David whined. “I can’t win. You keep saying how bored and lonely you are. I thought you’d appreciate the company.”
    “Yes, David, but it was just stupid to invite people to come to dinner at six o’clock, when you knew that we ourselves would still be two hours’ drive away at