Radiance

  Really, it all went fine. We montaged right past it in the first cut. Battened everything down, said goodbye to the Clamshell kids, except the doc, Margareta, who came with us in case of…injuries. The rest of them were pleased as punch at the prospect of six months’ debauchery in White Peony without us. We set off by 1000. Took nine days in the waterways to get to Adonis, which is due south of White Peony Station on the backside of nowhere. We came out through the Suadela Delta just clotted with dark pink silt. The pontoons looked like fairy floss. The cacao-trees canopied us, all full of blue-throated glowworms as long as my forearm. I gather they’re quite predatory toward the local fauna but uninterested in humans. I took stills; Horace got some establishing shots, some bits of Severin smiling, of Aylin consulting our maps and permits.

  I should say that contrary to what I’ve heard on the radio down here, the whole area around Adonis was totally quarantined, no different than Enyo or Proserpine or any other run-of-the-mill disaster site. We had a pile of permissions the size of a baby hippo. Because of Venus’s unique political situation, our passports and visas looked like a Parade of Nations. That little world belongs to everyone and no one. Too precious to be claimed. Severin recorded a voice-over to play through some of those boring establishing shots.

  When she came shining from the sea, all the gods desired her greatly, and strove one against the other for possession of her. But Jupiter the Lightning-Father knew that to give her hand to any among the Olympians would only cause war unending in the quiet of his halls, and so no one was allowed to station enough personnel or resources to effect a manned quarantine or repair or dispose of much of anything; nor, even if they could, would any of them agree upon the rights of one officer to shit before another on Venusian soil; and thus quarantine on Venus means little more than a sign saying GO AWAY in as many languages as can be shouted out before the Honourable Representative Whoever from the Republic of Nothing finishes her drink.

  We built our camp on the freshwater delta before attempting Adonis. Minimum safe distance. Aylin had secured us what amounted to a portable town, all military surplus. Collapsible barracks with solid roofs to keep the rain out and foldout floors to keep the equipment and our feet from sinking in the mud. A mess tent, a command centre, fire braziers, a chemical toilet, the works. Horace, Cristabel, Santiago, and Mariana set about testing all the equipment to make sure it had survived the trip. The Sallandars got dinner started—hardtack, ’tryx stew, tinned peas.

  It started the next morning. Everything went tits up right away. We took one of the gondolas into Adonis proper. We saw everything just like you’ve seen it. It was so much like the stories and stills we’d seen that walking through the place felt like being in a movie that was already made. The hotel looked like an earthquake had hit it. The old carousel, smashed into a twisted junk heap studded with horses’ eyes.

  And there he was, centre stage. It was like glimpsing a celebrity at a café. Anchises, just walking around the memorial like it was nothing, a morning constitutional, and in a moment he’d ask for orange juice and eggs. Only he wasn’t Anchises yet, he was…an artefact. Like a weathervane. Or a church bell. Part of the town. Evidence.

  We spent the afternoon setting up lighting for the sequence where Rin makes contact with him. And, you know, sometimes I think the only difference between Severin and her dad is that he lived through things first and then reshot them to get them right, while she hung back until everything was perfect, then called action. Couldn’t live through a thing until the camera was rolling.

  [coughing] I need a break.

  CYTHERA: If we could just get through your first encounter with the auditory phenomena…

  ERASMO: I. Need. A. Break.

  How Many Miles to Babylon?:

  Episode 764

  Airdate: 1 June, 1943

  Announcer: Henry R. Choudhary

  Vespertine Hyperia: Violet El-Hashem

  Tybault Gayan: Alain Mbengue

  The Invisible Hussar: Zachariah von Leipold

  Doctor Gruel: Benedict Sol

  Guest Star: Araceli Garrastazu as the Finnish Fury

  ANNOUNCER: Good Evening, Listeners, if it is indeed Evening where you are. Gather in, pour yourself a cup of something nice, and sit back for another instalment of the solar system’s favourite tale of adventure, romance, and intrigue on How Many Miles to Babylon? Celebrating our thirtieth year on the waves, Babylon is a joint production of the United/Universal All-Worlds Wireless Broadcom Network (New York, Shanghai, Tithonus) and BBC Radio, recorded at Atlas Studios, London.

  This evening’s programme is brought to you, as always, by Uzume Brand Soap, milled pure and clean with soothing oils, invigorating herbs, and wild alpine flowers plucked fresh from the gentle fields of Europa. Additional promotional consideration provided by Hathor Co. Premium Callowmilk, Diver Owned and Operated since 1876; Red Chamber Specialty Teas, Bringing the Bounty of Titan Home; the East Indian Trading Company; and Edison Teleradio Corp.

  Previously on How Many Miles to Babylon?: Our pioneer heroine, Vespertine Hyperia, having been taken captive by Venetian bandito-magicians in the Venusian pirate paradise of Port Erishkegal, was bound by unbreakable chains to the volcanic glass spire of Namtar Tower! The dastardly king of the banditos, Doctor Gruel, determined to make sweet Vespertine his bride, strapped her into his wicked Cartesian Splitting Machine, causing her to forget not only her beloved, Tybault Gayan, but her own twin brother, the great inventor Valentino. Valentino staged a daring rescue, soaring through the Venusian mists on his miraculous mechanical musk ox Braggadocio. Listeners gasped as Vespertine turned her face away from her own kin! They leaned in close when Braggadocio begged her with his tinny tongue to come and live with Valentino in his big belly and sail through the skies, safely home to Earth, where Tybault waited with the longing of a thousand hearts. And when she would not answer, the whole system wept.

  VESPERTINE: [sounds of whistling wind and clanking metal] Begone, deceiver! I shall marry Doctor Gruel at the stroke of dawn! He is my one true love! How I adore his warty chin and heavy fists! I grow faint at the thought of his hunchback; I dream of nothing but his scarred and hairy brow! I will never love another for all my days! [long, mournful groan over clanking engine parts]

  ANNOUNCER: Meanwhile, we find our stalwart hero, Tybault, having defeated a band of mercenaries and black alchemists bent on inciting war with Austria at any cost, recovering from his grievous wounds in a mysterious hospital, attended by buxom masked nurses and a physician revealed last week to be none other than his sworn enemy: the Invisible Hussar!

  THE INVISIBLE HUSSAR: [music cue #3: minor key crescendo 2] Yes, it is I! None other could vanquish the Hero of the Crimea! And these masked beauties are my sisters, the Ninja-Nuns of Nanking! They thirst for the blood of good men. I really don’t know how long I can hold them back. But first, you must witness the magnitude of your defeat! Behold, this is not a hospital, but my ship! [sounds of howling space winds] You have slept soundly, my old foe, with the help of my sisters’ potions. We will soon rendezvous with my comrades—Doctor Gruel and his band of banditos! [music cue #4: minor key crescendo 6]

  ANNOUNCER: Will Tybault escape the clutches of his nemesis? Can the Ninja-Nuns of Nanking resist their terrible bloodlust? Will Vespertine marry the devious Doctor Gruel or will her loyal lover reach her in time? Who is the Invisible Hussar? Will these long-suffering sweethearts—one untamed spirit enamoured of the stars; one true man, devoted to King, Country, and Mother Earth—find each other at last, or will they yearn on in vain? Find out now!

  Come with me to the rough-and-tumble worlds of Venus and Earth in the early days of the Diaspora, a fantastical journey into that special place in the heart where history meets the imagination, hard science meets flights of fancy, love leads the way, and the impossible becomes—for a moment—true, on…How Many Miles to Babylon?

  [theme music]

  From the Personal Reels of

  Percival Alfred Unck
<
br />   [SEVERIN UNCK walks hand in hand with CLOTILDE CHARBONNEAU down Usagi Avenue in Tithonus. Christmas lanterns glitter all around them. The Actaeon Theatre is visible behind them, searchlights swinging wildly over the night sky. CLOTILDE and SEVERIN are bundled in thick coats. Identical furs frame their faces. PERCIVAL UNCK walks backward down the street, filming them as steadily as his camera Clara will allow. SEVERIN sucks the filling from a street vendor’s blin. CLOTILDE’S face is sullen. She scratches at ruby earrings. She will leave them within a month.]

  PERCIVAL

  How did you like the picture, pumpkin?

  SEVERIN

  I’m not a pumpkin!

  CLOTILDE

  Are so. If we put a candle in your head you’d be a jack-o’-lantern.

  SEVERIN

  Ew! There’s no room in my head for a candle, Mama.

  PERCIVAL

  All right, you are definitely not a pumpkin, and we will definitely not put any candles in your head or make a tart out of you or turn you into a coach at midnight. Now, did you like your papa’s movie? He made it just for you, his first one for children.

  SEVERIN

  [long pause] No.

  PERCIVAL

  But you were so wonderful in it, darling! Didn’t you have fun filming your little bit? Isn’t it nice to see yourself on that big giant screen?

  SEVERIN

  [bursts into tears] I’m sorry, Papa! But there just aren’t such things as octopuses that talk or wear spectacles and spats in real life. It’s only Uncle Talmadge in a suit with sequins stuck on him. I shall never meet a talking octopus like Mr Bergamot, never, never! [Tears roll down SEVERIN’s cheeks and into her blin. She dries her face on one furry sleeve, sniffing in the cold.] It’s just a lot of silliness.

  The Deep Blue Devil:

  The Dame in Question

  Case Log: 14 December, 1961

  “Mr St. John, my name is Cythera Brass,” said the dame in question, shaking my hand like an adman while the Talbot drove itself calm as you please through a particularly obnoxious All-Clear mob and into the money-gargling heart of the Te Deum business district.

  She let me eat. She let me drink. I feel about the same describing that as I do describing a quality fuck. It’s private, you pervert, take a hike. What I do with my gullet is my business. I mumbled my name back at Cythera Brass. I don’t care to say it too often. I barely live in that name. Hangs on me like someone else’s coat. It’s a name with too much room in it for a chap like me. Too famous, too fancy, too much chance of someone looking me up and down and belching out the dreaded: Oh, you’re him. But Miss Brass, she already knew who I was. She wouldn’t’ve come to scarf me up if I wasn’t who I was, so she and I, we could just sit tight, each knowing what we knew. Except she had me at a disadvantage, as I didn’t know a blessed thing about her. I hate that. Goes against my nature. I’m a hoarder of information.

  “You American?” I asked her. Slugged back more of her bourbon.

  She nodded; barely moved her chin, but it was a nod. “Seneca.”

  Right. Sure. I’d thought Sioux, but hell, Americans all sound the same to me. “I went to the Nation once, when I was a kid. Toured the League halls and grounds. Shook hands with a coupla judges. Liked it better than the States, myself.”

  “Mmmm,” answered that long-legged dame, without taking her eyes off a fish-masked fella jumping around outside the limousine like a particularly unnecessary exclamation point.

  “I’m nothing, me. Don’t even know what ball I got myself born on. Spent time on Venus, obviously. Good long spate on the Moon, which was miserable as a year of Lent. Just about everywhere else, too. If you count up all the orbits on which I’ve hung my hat, I’ve been a subject of four different Crowns; a citizen of China, France, and Argentina; and a serf on Io—which I think technically made me Italian—but only for a month.”

  Look at me. Hoarder of information, spilling my worthless biography to a lady just because her pretty bronze knees looked like a premonition of kingdom come. I didn’t have to say anything. I coulda soaked up the Talbot and the quiet and the drink. Cythera Brass had it all in a file somewhere anyway. She was the kind of broad whose job it was to keep files. To keep the secrets in a straight line and working toward payday. And still, I sat there on leather the colour of chicken fat trying to get her to like me.

  “Listen,” I said. The slick of her booze greased my head. “I know it’s a lot of money and I’m broke. But I don’t want the job. I’ve got no gut for travelling anymore, and I just don’t care about what you care about. I don’t want to know. I’m not curious. You’d think I would be, yeah? But I’m not. I’m good. I am right with the Lord my God on this. Frankly, I don’t like to work at all when I can avoid it. I came here to stick it out. Just plunk down in the snow and ride out the long year. Should be enough. Eighty-four Earth years for each natural year out here on the snowball. Maybe I got it in me to see it through to spring. Maybe summer’ll gimme a lick and a slap. Summer on Uranus. That’d be something. But maybe not. I’m not fussed if it’s not in the cards. Look—” I grabbed her hand suddenly, panicked. I don’t know why I did it. She looked down at my paw like a Sasquatch with the clap had gotten ahold of her. “Look, you might call it sixty years or fifty or, given my habits, twenty, but the way Uranus sees it, big-picture-wise, I got less than a year to live. And I find that just peachy, Cyth. I find that comforting. I need that comfort. I don’t want it fucked by running around with aims or ambitions or plans beyond my next fifteen rounds with sleep. Don’t you take my year from me, Miss Brass. It’s mine.”

  The Talbot swung tight into a plaza. I was meant to meet my contact at the Tartarus Diner: not a dive, but not a proper sort of place, either. Clearly we had bypassed Tartarus and headed straight for HQ. Frozen fountains. Tall statue of a naked girl with her arms glued to her sides and her head thrown back so her body looked like a rocket ship. Ice junking up her feet like afterburn.

  Melancholia.

  The most expensive address in Te Deum—well, one of. Melancholia. There’s four of them, naturally, the Towers. The Humours: Sanguina, Cholera, Phlegma, Melancholia. Four fluorescent high-rises spiking TD like birthday candles. Twisted-up unicorn horns studded with bosses. Bosses run things. The rest of us get run. It’s the only rank that matters these days. You can dress it up as baronies or boyars or caliphates, but that’s just sticking lace and ribbons on a dinosaur and hoping he’ll take you to town. Is you a boss or isn’t you? That’s about the size of it.

  I’d been inside Cholera once, for a game of quoits and an unhappy little blowjob. The walls were soft. Like lungs.

  “It’s not me, Mr St. John,” Cythera Brass said in that wide-open voice. She poured herself out of the Talbot and came round to open my door—downright gentlemanly, this Iroquois maid. “You made your year. If it were up to me I’d let you lie in it.”

  A bubble lift strung us up through Melancholia’s lavender spine. Up above the blue stink of Uranus’s cigar smoke. Through a dormant patch of glowglass I saw black sky and stars. Hard and bright as bullet holes. No moons. Something in my bones rightened up. My body knows that’s how a sky should dress. It poured over me like a hot shower.

  The lift bonged out the penthouse, and Cythera Brass, not a molecule out of place, walked crisply out onto a huge checkerboard floor. Her heels smacked kisses on the glass squares. An office, big as a ballroom. Low buttressed ceilings crisscrossed with liquid glowglass patterns, tangerine into candy cane into St. Elmo’s Fire. At one end of the room sat a long black desk with a green lamp on it. A personal long-distance radio setup occupied substantial real estate in the north corner. Windows ate up the whole back wall, opening onto Epi ’Vard, way down below this hundred-story nest. Over the windows hung a painting—a glowglass painting. I’d never heard of anyone who could control glowglass well enough to do something like that. I gawked at it. The colours slid and ran: a lady with no clothes and long peacock-coloured hair. She didn’t use it to cover up, eith
er, the way ladies in paintings like to do. She just stood there, bold naked, looking down at a bloody-bright man with more muscles than pride. He knelt rosily at her saffron feet, offering her a long coppery belt stuck all over with jewels: Hephaestus presenting the girdle to Aphrodite. When she wore that belt, not even the gods could keep it in their trousers. The gems swirled, oozing through every colour, every possible colour. And then, just for a moment, they weren’t gems. They were planets. They were moons. Then they oozed back into garnets and emeralds and opals. I felt sick. Coloursick. Uranian vertigo.

  A figure turned toward me, hidden in the shadows of the far right side of the room. I focused on it. It wore brown. Grey. Black. My eyes held on for dear life to that drab spot in the darkness.

  “That will be all, Cythera. Thank you,” the figure said. A woman’s voice. Easy bull’s-eye: Hungarian by way of Saturn. Not just Saturn, but Enuma Elish. My old instincts rubbed their cricket legs together to spite me. An upper-crust capital madam—but her consonants were a little too practiced. She wasn’t born to it, I reckoned. “You can wait outside.”

  Miss Enuma Elish emerged. Shaved head. Short, hard, squared off, a boss like a shotgun. I’d have called her a gymnastic fifty, but living out here ages you fast. Guessing gets pointless. She was wrapped up tight as a mummy, but I could see the thick quality of her suit. It practically flexed at me. Three silver clamps up the ridge of each ear. A tiny speck of rainpearl in each nostril. Huh, creaked my crickets, waving their antennae. She’s All-Clear. Top of the world, dripping money, not a dumb kid or a junkie, but All-Clear, nonetheless.

  The boss kept mum. She moved some papers around on her coffin of a desk. It must kill her not to be down there with the crowds, I thought.