Radiance

  [ERASMO stops. He pinches SEVERIN’S knee and grins sidelong at her.] Want me to stop? [She says nothing. Her lips part slightly.] Very well. Let the record show Miss Unck wants to hear a ghost story. This one even less reliable than the voice shouting Kansas at the outer reaches of space. I have heard it said—only a few times, but I’ve heard it—that in the centre of town where the pump used to be, the Martian constables found a reel. A movie reel. Just sitting in the dust, covered in milk.

  SEVERIN

  And? What was on it?

  AMANDINE

  I’ve heard about the reel, too. People say a thousand things. It’s the destruction of the town. Or it’s some print of a porno the miners loved. A woman crying. Forty minutes of blackness. Worse. Better. Who can know? Who has the reel now? No one even claims to have seen it, only heard from someone who met someone in a Depot queue who had a family friend in Martian salvage and demolition. Enyo is the sort of thing you thrill about late at night, when shadows feel like electricity on your skin.

  But then there’s Adonis. Adonis is different.

  [ERASMO drinks his pink lady; he lets AMANDINE take the story.]

  It wasn’t a trading post or a farm town. It wasn’t just getting started. It was a whole colony—gone. Divers mostly, like most settlements on Venus. Slaves to the great callowhales, like the rest of us. But in Adonis they built a lovely hotel and carousel for the tourists who came to get their catharsis revved up as the divers risked their lives to milk our benevolent, recalcitrant mothers in their eternal hibernation. I have heard it was a good place. A sweet village on the shores of the Qadesh, plaited grease-weed roofs and doors hammered from the chunks of raw copper you can just walk around and pick up off the Venusian beaches. They lived; they ate the local cacao; and they shot, once or twice a year, a leathery ’tryx from the sky, enough to keep them all in fat and protein for months. There’s good life to be had on Venus. I almost went there instead of Halimede. But in the end, I wanted to fly. Maybe, if I had not flown, I would have found my way to Adonis and helped build the carousel. Then I would have been stuck. Because, just like Enyo and Proserpine, one day—pop! All gone. Houses, stairs, meat-smoking racks, diving bells.

  [SEVERIN drinks her saltbeer. You can see her thinking, some new and massive idea taking shape behind her eyes. ERASMO chews on the crust of a crab-heart trifle, mesmerized by AMANDINE’S voice. AMANDINE casts her eyes downward within the equine blinders knotted to her head.]

  All gone except for the something new. Only this time, it’s not a reel and it’s not a voice. It’s a little boy, left behind. They say he’s still there. I’ve heard it on the radio, so it’s as true as anything is. He’s stuck, somehow, in the middle of where the village used to be, just walking around in circles. Around and around, like a skip on a phonograph. They can’t get him to talk. He doesn’t eat or drink. He never even stops to sleep. He’s just…there. He’s been there a year already. Like a projection. But flesh.

  ERASMO

  What do you think happened, Amandine? Don’t listen to Rin, just…what do you think?

  AMANDINE

  [She is quiet for a long moment.] I think we are all suckling at a teat we do not understand. We need callowmilk. We cannot live without it. We cannot inhabit these worlds without it. But we made a bargain without thinking, because the benefits seemed to be endless and the cost nothing but a few divers, a few accidents—what’s that next to what we stood to gain? My god, it was nothing, nothing at all. All these empty worlds could be ours—no one living there, no one to make us feel ashamed. Not like the New World, with its inconvenient millions. A true frontier, without moral qualms. You must admit how compelling that is. Whole planets just waiting there for us, gardens already planted and producing. A little gravity wobble this way or that; a slightly unpleasant tang to the air; oh, perhaps we can’t have as much hot buttered corn on the cob as we’d like—but they were so ready for us. Edens full of animals and plants, but no folk.

  Except the callowhales. We don’t even know what they are, not really. Oh, I went to school. I’ve seen the diagrams. But those are only guesses! No one has autopsied one—or even killed one. It cannot even be definitively said whether they are animal or vegetable matter. The first settlers assumed they were barren islands. Huge masses lying there motionless in the water, their surfaces milky, motley, the occasional swirl of chemical blue or gold sizzling through their depths. But as soon as we figured out how unbelievably useful they were, we decided they didn’t matter. Not like we mattered. Beneath the waterline they were calm, perhaps even dead leviathans—Taninim, said neo-Hasidic bounty hunters; some sort of proto-pliosaur, said the research corps. The cattle of the sun. Their fins lay flush against their flanks, horned and barbed. Their eyes stayed perpetually shut—hibernating, said the scientific cotillion. Dreaming, said the rest of us.

  And some divers claim to have heard them sing—or at least that’s the word they give to the unpredictable vibrations that occasionally shiver through the fern-antennae. Like sonar, those shivers are fatal to any living thing caught up in them. Unlike sonar, the unfortunates are instantly vaporised into their constituent atoms. Yet the divers say that from a safe distance, their echoes brush against the skin in strange and intimate patterns, like music, like lovemaking. The divers cannot look at the camera when they speak of these things, as though the camera is the eye of God and by not meeting His gaze, they may preserve their virtue. The vibrations are the colour of need, they whisper.

  Of course, no one works as a callowdiver forever. We aren’t built for it. The Qadesh or the callowhales or maybe just Venus itself, the whole world; something does us in. Everyone goes milk-mad eventually, a kind of silky, delicate delirium that just unzips us, long and slow, until we fall down babbling about the colour of need. We say the callowhales are not alive like we are alive. But I say: Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly “nurse.” What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? And what do they mate with? It would have to be something big. The size of a city, maybe…

  [The indistinct crackle of the radio broadcast from home suddenly spikes in volume—Au revoir, mes enfants! À la prochaine fois! Bonsoir! Bonsoir! À bientôt!—then cuts abruptly to silence. Within Enki, the lights go dark.]

  AMANDINE

  Welcome to the end of the world.

  Look at Her Face

  Look at her face. It is your face. She is the mask you wear. Look, and you can see the film she wants to make being born across her features. Across your features. It has not happened yet; it doesn’t even have a title. It is less than a full idea. But it is there in her set chin and her narrowed eyes. She frowns sourly in black and white, and her disapproval of such fancies—her father’s fancies: disappeared heroines and eldritch locations where something terrible has surely occurred—shows in the wrinkle of her brow, the tapping of her fingernails against the atomizer as bubbling storms lap their glass cupola and armoured penance-fish nose the flotation arrays, their jaw-lanterns flashing.

  Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? There are children. The ghost-voice of Amandine comes over the phonograph as the final shot of And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly flickers silver-dark and the floating Neptunian pleasure domes recede. Everyone knew where Severin was bound next, long before principal photography ever began. You could see it on her face. To Venus, and Adonis; to the little village rich in milk and children that vanished two decades after its founding, while the callowhales watched offshore, impassive, unperturbed. You would have gone, too. You would have yearned to go. Chasing after an ending to a story already in progress. An ending means there is order in the universe, there is a purpose to events. There is a reason to do things, an answer to be found, a solution key at the back of the book that maps to the problems posed. Find one ending, a real ending, and the universe is redeemed, ransomed from death—but death
can never be that ending. It is a cheat, a quick shock, but no story truly ends with a death. A death only begs more questions, more tales.

  Across your ribs her ship speeds over the ice road as fast as it can go. You almost want to cheer it on—but it speeds toward cessation, toward negation, toward sound and darkness and a final, awful image flickering in the depths.

  But you can see her thinking, see her new film, her last film, taking shape behind her eyes.

  They are documentaries, yes. They are also confessional poems. She is her father’s girl, though she would rather no one guess.

  Severin asked the great question: Where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know an answer. But it can never be her answer. We offer it anyway.

  Adonis returned to his mother: the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld, the Queen of the Final Cut.

  The Miranda Affair

  (Capricorn Studios, 1931, dir. Thaddeus Irigaray)

  Cast:

  Mary Pellam: Madame Mortimer

  Annabelle August: Wilhelmina Wildheart

  Igor Lasky: Kilkenny

  Jacinta LaBianca: Yolanda Brun

  Barnaby Sky: Laszlo Barque

  Arthur Kindly: Harold Yellowboy

  Giovanni Assisi: Dante de Vere

  Helena Harlow: Maud Locksley

  Father Patrick: Hartford Crane

  [INT. The observation carriage of the good ship Pocketful of Rye, barrelling down the icy, starry tracks of the Orient Express. Ferns and chaises and brandy and cigarettes in gold cases. Io looms overhead, volcanoes glowering, electric cities glittering and blinking. The Pocketful of Rye is thundering through Grand Central Station, the heart of the Jupiter System, a thick knot of gravitational whirlpools thrusting the ship toward beautiful and dangerous Miranda, moon of a thousand seductions.

  Little do her passengers know that KILKENNY, master criminal and assassin at large, hides on board! MADAME MORTIMER, lady detective—fresh off of her latest victory over the forces of anarchy and corruption in THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING DESPERADO—has taken a private car on the Rye with her loyal companion, the heiress WILHELMINA WILDHEART, hoping for a little rest and relaxation.

  In the lounge we find our players: FATHER PATRICK, a missionary with a dark past and a secret to protect, bound for Herschel City; HELENA HARLOW, wealthy owner of Blue Eden, a notorious Te Deum brothel; ARTHUR KINDLY, a veteran of the Martian wars, headed for retirement and the good life in the outer system; BARNABY SKY, a dashing playboy with vicious gambling debts; and JACINTA LABIANCA, a Mercurial horse breeder with a man on the side.

  GIOVANNI ASSISI, interstellar coffee baron, lies face down on a Turkish rug with a Psementhean bridal knife in his back. Madame Mortimer stands over him with her hand on the pommel of her pistol.]

  MADAME MORTIMER

  Oh, I do love a spot of murder with my tea!

  JACINTA LABIANCA

  What a thing to say! Poor Mr Assisi!

  MADAME MORTIMER

  Poor, indeed! Didn’t you hear? Typhoons took out his Venusian plantations. The man was just desperate for a wife to top up his coffers—he’s been canoodling with half the ship, really scraping the bottom of the blueblood barrel. He’d have been knocking at Father Patrick’s door before long. It would seem someone has spared him the embarrassment. Well! The cards are dealt! [She claps her hands sharply.] Place your bets, ladies and gentleman. We have a murderer on the ship and I intend to flush him out. And not only on the ship—I have reason to believe the murderer is in this very room!

  [All gasp.]

  Wilhelmina, darling, would you be so kind as to stand guard by the carriage door? Thank you. I’m afraid I can’t allow any of you to leave just yet. Everything we need to solve this sordid little mess is right here at our fingertips, if only we are keen enough to see, grasp, and act! Confusion spreads out from a corpse like blood. The further one gets from the body, the harder it is to see the truth. Mr Assisi’s death is a fact—everything else is mere supposition.

  Let us hew to the facts. Firstly, Giovanni Assisi is dead. Secondly, he lost his fortune. Thirdly, he recently divorced his wife, the long-suffering nurse Annalisa Assisi, leaving her with seven children on Ganymede. Fourthly, he has been carrying on an affair with Miss LaBianca—I’m sorry, my dear, but how many women wear a Venusian coffee flower in their lapel? It’s a hideous plant. Besides, you reek of his aftershave.

  JACINTA LABIANCA

  I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about! I have an aunt on Venus!

  MADAME MORTIMER

  Don’t worry, dear, he meant to break it off with you before we made planetfall. Your…bank accounts…aren’t nearly large enough for his tastes. And, fifthly, I’m afraid, he was a frequent customer of Miss Harlow’s, and he paid her a great deal of money while we were docked in orbit waiting for our acceleration window. Clearing a bill? Perhaps. A creature of prodigious appetites, our man Giovanni! Next, I believe our young Master Sky owed the deceased a rather large poker debt? He needed you to pay up, and quickly, but you couldn’t, could you, Barney?

  BARNABY SKY

  How the devil would you know that?

  MADAME MORTIMER

  Oh, it’s perfectly obvious. You aren’t in the least upset by his death! Our unhappy friend here positively adored cards and played with everyone on board—except you. He wouldn’t come near you, and when you dealt in to a table he got up to leave. And Father Patrick—tsk tsk, Father! One of those seven children is not an Assisi, isn’t that right? Annalisa is a noble beauty and a pure soul, it’s true. But when Papa Johnny here showed Willy and me his lovely family portrait, I couldn’t help but notice that one of the little angels—Lucia, was it?—looked ever so much like you.

  FATHER PATRICK

  That’s a damnable lie!

  MADAME MORTIMER

  Oh, I think not. But that’s the marvellous thing about a murder—it brings everything out in the open. All the dark places just scrubbed with sunshine and flung wide for all to see. A sudden and unexpected crime sharpens the soul wonderfully.

  [KILKENNY has been sitting in a chair facing the quiet hearth all the while. He is smoking a pipe, wearing a pinstripe suit and a rakish hat.]

  KILKENNY

  Well put, Miss Mortimer. I quite agree.

  WILHELMINA WILDHEART

  Kilkenny!

  MADAME MORTIMER

  Good morning, sir! I trust you slept well in the cargo bay? You missed stormrise—the great red eye is especially beautiful this time of year.

  KILKENNY

  I expect I shall see it again. Some small sacrifices must be made in the pursuit of one’s ambitions. I’ve seen a few rainstorms in my time. And how is your sister, Miss Mortimer? I do so miss Emily at Christmastime.

  [MADAME MORTIMER’S face flushes angrily; her hand tightens on her pistol.]

  MADAME MORTIMER

  You know perfectly well how she is. And if you were a decent man, you’d tell me where you buried her!

  The Ingénue’s Handbook

  13 January, 1930, Half Past Three in the Afternoon

  The Savoy, Grasshopper City, Luna

  I’ve been prancing about in front of a camera for—Heavens!—twenty-two years now, so kindly invest the following statement with grave and dignified Authority.

  I love wrap parties more than just about anything else in the world.

  Oh, it’s lovely to plan, and lovely to work, but having worked is ever so much better. And dancing yourself silly in pearls knowing you don’t have a thing to do tomorrow is best of all! The fine and the fatigued positively sparkle with the frantic fizz of having pulled it off despite the odds—you can’t help being light on your feet with all that weight off your shoulders. It’s the party at the end of the world—the quick, fantastic world you’ve all made together, a world that now exists only on a heap of black tape in a tin can. Oh, well! On to the next one! And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off the
m like Salome’s veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You’re not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit. It’s a secret, rollicking room where everything is still half make-believe. That scamp can’t stop walking like Robin Hood; that other fellow isn’t done trying to seduce you like Heathcliff; those two prizefighters might come to blows tonight because they haven’t quite scrubbed off Cain or Abel; and oh, gracious, the mischief you’ll get up to while your heart’s half Maid Marian, a squidge Cathy, a wee bit Madame Mortimer—but then, I never completely shed MM. I’ve been her almost as long as I’ve lived on the Moon, which is to say almost as long as I’ve been alive. Before the Moon, it hardly counts as living. Madame Maxine Mortimer has thoroughly rubbed off all over me. Why, just the other day, Betty Raleigh’s black pearls went missing from her dressing room and I’d locked all the doors and started interrogating suspects before I came to my senses.

  Poor Betts. Her insides are nothing but sunshine and bunny tails, but she’s had a devil of a time lately. It’s intensely trying. Hartford Crane gave her those pearls right before he ran off with Yolanda Brun. The gossip rags are just full of their sopping laundry, and while Yolanda loads up her supper plate with the attention, sweet innocent Betty can hardly squeak for shame. Cheat first and cheat often, Betts, that way you’re never stuck cleaning up after your husband’s midnight snacks.

  Thus we circle the point, miss it, put our car in reverse, and come round to it again, and the point is this: The Miranda Affair is in the can, along with the last, rather wobbly, decade. It’ll be Thad’s last talkie—the tide’s against us. Receipts go up the moment I shut my mouth. I’ve always liked my voice. It’s a pity MM will have to save the day with wild gesticulations, but what the people want, the people will have!