Radiance

  SEVERIN calls to him. He does not flinch or stop. He does not look up. The camera watches him. SEVERIN watches him. Slowly, the CREW cease their activity and turn their gazes to the child. The footage crackles into life as the sound equipment comes online. SEVERIN squats down on her heels in a friendly, schoolteacherly fashion, still holding out her hand, beckoning. She tilts her head in an aw, come on gesture. Two kids in a garden. One wants to play. The other does not.]

  SEVERIN

  Hey, little guy…it’s okay now. It’s fine now. I’m here. My name’s Severin. You can call me Rinny if you like that better.

  [The BOY simply turns and turns and turns, over and over. His huge diving bell casts a shadow like a black spotlight. The film is damaged. It has always been damaged. It was damaged in the dailies. No one has ever seen it uncorroded. The BOY seems to leap forward and backward round the ruined Memorial, jumping in and out of reality as the print cuts in and out, in and out.

  CUT TO: EXT. ADONIS, DAY. 07:45: MARIANA ALFRIC is screaming, clutching her hand to her breast FILM DAMAGED FOOTAGE SPLICE CORRODED SKIP AFFECTED AREA SKIPPING SKIPPING UNABLE TO COMPENSATE ERROR 143 SEE ARCHIVIST FOR ASSISTANCE]

  Production Meeting,

  The Deep Blue Devil

  The Man in the Malachite Mask

  (Tranquillity Studios, 1960, dir. Percival Unck)

  Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako

  MAKO: No, no, Percy, listen to me. It’s not working.

  All right, it’s working, but it’s not right. The noir setup has a certain energy, I agree, but it sits pretty heavy on the action. Though I like making Cyth Brass a secretary. We should keep that. She’ll probably sue us for defamation. But we said we’d give him a love interest, not a probation officer! And what are we going to do when we get to Venus? And we do have to get to Venus, I promise. You can dawdle all you like, but it’s there in the middle of the story, throwing its gravity around, warping everything toward it. The point is, what kind of hardboiled finale did you mean to stick on it? Shootout at Adonis? Breathless bullets and betrayal and a fedora on her grave? Is that what you think happened? That she’s buried in a swamp somewhere with a hole in her head? If you go with noir, you’re building in a certain expectation of violence. Of death.

  PERCIVAL UNCK: Varela has said she’s dead all along.

  MAKO: And Erasmo has said she isn’t. You said you’d rather not have death, but you’re stuffing it in from all sides. And…Severin’s outside the scope of the story. She can’t help it. That’s all a script like that will let her be. An object on a mantle that has to go off by the third act. A gun that must be fired. She’s not a person, the way you’ve got it set up, with your broads and bitches and dark streets at the edge of space. She’s just a goal.

  UNCK: Not a goal, Vince. A Grail.

  MAKO: Sure. Fine, Percival. A Grail. Very clever. Very subtle. But a Grail isn’t an alive thing. It has no blood but the blood of another; it has no life but the life it grants. Its job is to sit there and…be a Grail. To be sought. That doesn’t sound like anyone we know. And, frankly, it’s all a bit pedestrian for you. For us. I think you’re holding back. I know I am. Because…because we think she’d want us to. To double down on the kind of stories she liked to tell. Really, how different is your Te Deum from the actual digs? Barely a streak of grime out of place. It’s just…events that could really happen taking place in a real city. That’s not you. That’s not me. That’s her.

  UNCK: But it did really happen. In a real city. Just not that city.

  MAKO: When has that ever slowed us down? We put vampires in The Abduction of Proserpine! That was a real thing that happened in a real city. And Proserpine is a real city that really disappeared off the map of Pluto, I think it’s fair to point out, not so different from Adonis. We shovelled in vampires by the coven and we didn’t even blink. We just ordered up a vat of fake blood and started stitching capes.

  [Unck laughs, a laugh that is half a grunt.]

  Listen, I have an idea brewing. It’s just a little shift, really. In perspective. In framing. Because noir isn’t really a new thing at all. It’s just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that’s all. He’s no less idealistic—there’re good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It’s just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they’re usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That’s all they’re about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her.

  And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that’s where we live, Percy. That’s our house. So why don’t we lose the trench coat and pick up a black cloak. Turn the Byronic all the way up. An ancestral curse, a mad lord, a brooding castle. Obsession, desire, secrets. It’s all already there. And a ghost. Because the truth is…the truth is, this is all a ghost story. It always has been. We’re pouring out a bowl of blood on the banks of the Styx, asking her to drink it and speak.

  UNCK: That’s…not bad.

  MAKO: I know, dummy. It’s my idea. Of course it’s not bad. We’ve already sent him to Pluto. It’s perfect. Nothing darker and more mysterious than that blasted place. For all anyone ever hears out of Pluto these days, it might as well be Hades itself. A whole planet that’s nothing more than the haunted mansion on the hill. Lights in the dark. Sounds in the night.

  Percy…we owe her our best, not just our most polite. You and I, we’re no good at telling a story straight. It won’t come off right. Like a dog reciting a sonnet. Impressive, but how much better to let him howl? So, look. She’s…she’s captive in a black palace of a thousand rooms. Imprisoned by a terrible master. Behind briars, Sleeping Beauty in black lipstick. No one has seen her for years. She’s a legend, a whisper in the taverns and the alleyways.

  UNCK: And a stranger comes to town.

  MAKO: A stranger with a hidden past. An unnatural secret. A concealed deformity?

  UNCK: And a curse, Vince. You’ve got to have a curse. It’s the accessory the fashionable antihero cannot go without. How about…when asked, he must always tell the truth. It’s not even much of a leap from the detective who must deliver the truth to his bosses. We’ve still got all the Pluto sets from Proserpine. And the Bertilak woods from Sir Gawain on Ganymede.

  MAKO: And Varela slots right in. He was always hip deep in a phantasmagoria anyway. You want to look that liar in the eye? Let’s do it. Maximo Varela did actually run off to Pluto when Oxblood turned him loose.

  UNCK: And the end, Vince?

  MAKO: How do all Gothics end? With magic. And with revenge.

  The Deep Blue Devil

  The Man in the Malachite Mask:

  My Sin

  20 February, 1962. Early morning. Obolus cantina.

  During the whole of that frozen, dark transit through the glittering, howling autumnal moorlands of the trans-Neptunian wastes, as the ice road hung thin and ragged as funereal curtains beyond the portholes, I had been keeping studiously to myself within the confines of our slim vessel as it passed through that singularly lonesome expanse of darkness and, whilst the blue and ghostly shades of morning at the edge of civilization roused the passengers, drew within sight of the melancholy face of Pluto.

  Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.

  “There is naught on Pluto but magicians, Americans, and the mad,” rasped the old woman who had settled in beside me
in the Obolus cantina, a lavishly appointed, elegant space filled topful with the intolerably irritating chime of cutlery and soft whisperings. She needn’t have troubled me; there was room enough for her to encamp at a table of her own and gum at her crumpets whilst leaving me in peace. I despised her for failing to do so and turned up the corner of my greatcoat against any further conversation. It is always damnably cold on these ships. At the evening receptions, the décolletages of all the earnest and well-meaning ladies prickle with gooseflesh and the throats of the paler girls sheen a trembling, vampiric blue. The crone with whom I unwillingly shared my morning meal, however, did not worry herself with the chill. She wore red and violet, and she had pinned in her white hair black silk calla lilies with long, viridescent stamens thrusting suggestively upward, as though her head were a radio array tuned every direction at once. She smelled sour—but then, so did I. So did the blue-necked ladies dancing in their rosettes and pink damask. Everyone reeks after six months on the Orient Express. There is no hiding our animal nature out here on the ice road. Crone, maiden, paladin, my own unhappy self: not a one of us smells better than a week-dead lion on the veldt.

  “Is that so?” I groused at her, nose plunged deep into my tea, praying for her to return to the counter for more of today’s pastry (sugared gardenias in a glazed puff globe), more of today’s jam (fig-candleberry), more of anything but my attention. My own flaky globe and pot of jam sat unmolested before me—how quickly I had forgotten my previous starvations, privations, depredations, and come to that unimaginable point wherein I refused the obscenely precious food supplied by our invisible, unmentionable hosts at Oxblood Films. The price of my breakfast, which only increased with every day further distant from any place where a gardenia or a candleberry could grow, could purchase a small estate in the less fashionable bands of the Kuiper Belt, yet I could hardly taste it. The past coated my tongue and robbed the present from me—and yet I own no nobility on that account. Give me a little bacon and milk and I become, inevitably, a decadent like all the rest of them.

  I wondered what use our hosts could have for this doddering old woman, what favour she had done or would do them, to earn passage. I had grudgingly reached first-name terms with most of the other passengers, but for six months, this baggage of a woman had declined to share her name with anyone at all. Perhaps she had once been a starlet. Perhaps I would recognize her younger self, if presented with evidence of those lilies in red hair thick as blood and life. Her voice had that old-fashioned, hard-edged showman’s twang, that affected, too-bright accent of the Nation of Theatre, as though all plays came from a single strange planet where you could pick up, without meaning to, the local dialect. That voice had no relation to her broken body, to the lump in her back or the long, sad draperies of her skin. Her voice was a wholly separate being, one flush and good and bright and subtle. She was all voice. In the dark, I might have worshipped her.

  “Oh yes,” she said, crunching a sugared gardenia between her shockingly white teeth. An addict, then. Af-yun turns the teeth a lambent, unsettling, inhuman white, so white it edges into lavender, into a colour as clean as death. That’s what comes of eating the muck scraped off of Venus’s underside, of breathing the stars’ putrescence.

  I will not say my teeth are brown.

  “The question is,” the crone chortled in that surprisingly rich, full, clotted-cream voice, spilling bits of flower and pastry down the front of her red gown, “which one are you? I’m American, which doesn’t bode well for you, I’m afraid. Well, I’m American now, in any event. Morocco never treated me as well as I deserved, so I saw no reason to stand by my man. Pluto is the end of everything. Last Chance Gulch. For me, that spells home.”

  I made a noise in my throat that could be interpreted as agreement, rebuttal, amusement, disgust, or commiseration—I have perfected this noise. I consider it vital, for rarely do I wish to say anything to another person which a well-timed grunt cannot replace.

  My tormentor, however, wheedled on as though I had clasped her to my chest and implored her to speak, speak now, speak forever, speak until the sun gutters and the snow road melts! “But you are a young man. Only the young are so rude and unpleasant. There’s no fortune to be made on Pluto, if that’s your mind. Someone ought to have told you.”

  “I have business.”

  “With whom? The buffalo?”

  I sighed and fixed her with a black gaze. I have perfected that gaze also—it is necessary in Te Deum and elsewhere. If you cannot wither a man with your eyes you will be withered by his fists. Yet my best back-alley glare did not move that ridiculous soul whom I by now had to admit had become my breakfast companion. “With Maximo Varela, if you insist on prying into my affairs. Though it has been indicated to me that he is no longer going by that name.”

  The woman snorted. Even her snort had melody. Incredulity shaped itself upon her face. “That…that he is not.”

  “We are to be met at the Depot by his daughters and escorted safely to his house, though neither the house, nor the daughters, nor the Depot, nor the meeting are any concern of yours.”

  Her rheumy eyes swam with dark mirth. “Poor lamb,” she crooned, and patted my hand in a grandmotherly fashion. “What a pity we wasted this voyage in not knowing one another. I might have told you tales. I might have told your fortune. I might have told you to yourself. People used to listen to me, oh how they used to listen! Hung on every word. I made gold out of horseshit in my day, my boy. Imagine what I could have done with you.”

  I, naturally, did not share her sentiment. We would disembark at midnight tomorrow and already my feet itched for earth, my heart for silence, for the surcease of the endless thrum of engines in the walls, the constant hum and rumble that maddened me, made my blood ricochet up and down my spine, no less than the equally endless need for the smallest of talk shared between the few rarefied passengers, all of us avoiding the plain fact of the ghastly waste of this ship, its food and fuel and polish spent on sixteen nervous, uncertain souls.

  “If you have information on Varela, I will certainly hear it,” I allowed, knowing I might as well accept my defeat. I would be her creature until lunch service, and probably dinner, too. She would never let me be.

  The crone with the bronzed voice looked out the bolted porthole at the growing spheres of Pluto and Charon, opals hanging in the stony blackness, clouds like hands clutching their few, scattered continents, clutching warmth, clutching life. When she spoke, the pitch of her voice plucked at my sinews. It was as familiar as my own shadow, yet I could not, could not recall where I had heard it before. Its rhythms changed, peaked, rolled—and I felt as though my mother were telling me a tale before bedtime, though I have no memory of my mother and would not know her if she called my name from the depths of hell.

  “Once upon a time, a man, weary of both body and soul, shipwrecked upon a faraway isle. This isle dwelt in the midst of an endless, wine-dark sea whose depths were strewn with stars and horned leviathans and secrets kept by unguessable fathoms—and upon this isle it was always night. This man possessed in his heart and his hands the power to command light and force it to follow his will, but this power no longer comforted him, for he had once been charged with the protection of a maid both good and beautiful, and had lost her. But the whispers of the world said that he had done more than lose her, that he had killed her with his own hand. In shame, this man threw his name, the name of a man who could cast an innocent girl into darkness, underfoot and trampled upon it. From the moment his foot touched the sweet-smelling shores of that faraway isle, he called himself Prospero, a name so famous he could bury himself within it. He put upon his head a jester’s crown and on his feet the belled dancing shoes of a fool, and spoke only madness to any who came before him, begging him to perform his old feats of light and shadow. Yet even this did not bring him the oblivion he craved, the anonymity of the guilty or the rest of the defeated. The more absurd his speech, the more frenzied his dance, the more he behaved like a j
ungle creature in a man’s skin, the more he found himself sought after by the folk of Pluto, for whom amusement is the only currency.

  “On that lawless carnival isle, the castle of Prospero became a constant Saturnalia, a house on a high icy hill where unholy lights flashed and burst through the permanent night of that world of phantasms. Even to breathe the air of those halls was to become intoxicated. To light a single lantern was to invite ghosts and will-o’-the-wisps and sirens from every gable and eave. Into this miasma the man thought he could finally disappear. But word reached the great Emperor of the shadowy isle that wonders unheard-of were afoot in the house of Prospero, a house which was quickly becoming a kingdom unto itself. The Emperor donned a mask, the face of a black coatl whose tongue dripped with nightrubies, and went to the revels to see for himself. What he saw there no man can say, yet when he emerged, he had made Prospero his only heir, and placed the coatl crown on that poor magician’s grieving head.

  “This is the isle toward which our pretty silver ship flies, for whose sake our golden sails catch the sun’s good wishes and bear us both across the starry, frozen wasteland between our former lives and the End of All. And the man I speak of is Maximo Varela: Prospero, the Mad King of Pluto. I wish you your fill of him—you will have it, I’m sure, and more.”

  The old woman looked back to me and laughed like a young girl. A flush rode high on her cheeks. She clapped her hands, applauding herself. “I reckon I’m as good as I ever was, don’t you? Give me a script; I’ll eat you alive and you’ll love every moment. Now clear off and quit bothering an old woman at her breakfast.”

  I returned to my quarters in a consternation of curiosity and black dread. I felt, far beneath the polished green floorboards, the fragrant Ganymedean banyan with its glinting golden grain, the pneumatic array gasping into life, the intimate suckle of gravity cupping the Obolus and drawing it down, down into its long well. Very soon my work would have to begin, truly begin, rather than remaining comfortably far off, like a suit in a closet with all its attendant discomfort, ready to be worn sometime soon, but not today.