Free The Peacock Cloak by Chris Beckett Page B

house, and this little local difficulty of her mother being miserable and her parents not getting on, would become so small that they’d be of no consequence at all. It was a bleak sort of comfort.
    Peter, meanwhile, would sleep peacefully in the room on the other side of hers.

    Right now, though, there were the visitors to attend to. Ernesto and Sheema
    “Sorry about the short notice, but it seemed a shame not to call by when we were in these parts.”
    “Hope we haven’t put you out. Good lord, look at this spread! You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble!”
    “Nonsense, nonsense,” cried Paula. “No trouble at all. Lovely to see you. We’d have been most offended if you’d passed this way and not come to see us.”
    Standing in the corner of the room, hand in hand with Peter, Cassie watched her mother with narrowed eyes. Paula really did seem pleased to see these people, that was the strange thing. She really did seem to mean what she said. She was smiling. She had laughter in her eyes. But that was how she was. You never knew. You could be laughing and joking with her one minute, thinking you were having a lovely time, and then the next look round and see her collapsed and broken, crying hopeless tears.
    “My,” said Sheema, “what beautiful children!”
    Cassie turned her attention to Sheema, accepting the compliment with a severe half-smile and a gracious inclination of her head. Sheema was quite pretty, she supposed.
    “Such wonderful red hair too!” Sheema said, quailing in the intensity of the little girl’s gaze, and turning back hastily to the grown-ups.

    “Okay, okay,” Cassie’s father conceded over the empty dinner plates. “They have an electromagnetic sense. They communicate with microwaves in some way. The trees act as antennae. I grant you all that, and I grant you that it may allow them to detect human brain activity. But it doesn’t explain how they interpret it…”
    “They don’t interpret it, Dave,” Sheema said. “They pick it up and beam it back to us.”
    “Sure, but you’re not getting my point. They don’t just beam back random signals, do they? They’re able to home in on certain things…”
    “Or perhaps just stimulate certain parts of…” Ernesto began.
    David ignored the interruption.
    “And anyway, Sheema,” he said, “the ‘beam it back to us’ theory doesn’t explain how we manage to receive the signal.”
    “You’re both complicating this unnecessarily,” Ernesto persisted. “Like I say, they don’t receive or send a signal ; they just stimulate certain parts of our brains. They disorientate potential predators by stirring up uncomfortable feelings. They don’t have to know what it is they’re dealing with or what effect they’re having, any more than a skunk has to understand the chemistry of his stink, or what it smells like to you.”
    Peter was already in bed. Cassie knew she would soon be sent to bed as well. She glanced between the adults with sharp appraising eyes. Dad and the two visitors were talking louder and louder as the evening went on, and crossly interrupting one another more and more, and yet they were smiling too. They seemed, for some reason, to be having fun. Mum was a bit quiet – she wasn’t a scientist like the other three – but even she was smiling. She did seem very thirsty, though. She was drinking glass after glass of wine.
    For a moment, David glanced uneasily at his wife, noticing warning signs. But he returned to the argument all the same.
    “What you’re stubbornly missing, Ernesto,” he said, laughing angrily and banging his hand on the table. “What you’re refusing to consider is this. How can a creature whose nervous system is absolutely nothing like ours at all, home in on our ‘uncomfortable feelings’ and stir them up? One can just about envisage how they or their trees might do this with other Lutanian creatures with similar nervous systems. But with humans? How? How are they able to