Radiance, Page 5

  I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system.

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

  I stumbled out of the Astor and onto Caroline Street, into the blue fog and the smell and the wet, snowed-in trash. Into the bells bonging out my missed midnight appointment. Coughing, crying like a damned widow, wiping sour, half-digested port wine slime from my mouth. The glowglass alley pulsed grape to apricot. Juliet and Titania, coupla old crescent hags, judged me from the heavens. Umbriel sloshed up slowly under the girls, the lights of Wunda coming on across its blasted moonface. All those moons. The sky over Uranus always looked like a bloody traffic jam to me. Venus doesn’t have any moons. The sky is unbroken. Perfect. A sky that can’t look back.

  Tears froze on my face. Very unmanly. But of the things I’ve lost, manliness left first and easiest.

  Radiant Car’s a horror flick, is what it is. An old Gothic screamer with tits just barely kept in check by veils and corsets and the rating system. A girl went into the dark and met a monster there. So simple. So easy to fill the seats with that kind of thing.

  So easy to empty them with the truth.

  I wasn’t even allowed to enjoy my misery. Caroline Street gagged on the mobs getting riled up for All-Clear. Nothing but elbows and eyeshadow. A car pulled up alongside me, a gorgeous red Talbot that would part the seas anywhere else, but the All-Clear has no respect for vehicles. See, old buddy Uranus, he got a day as short as your mama’s skirt. Humans don’t like it. Keeping a seventeen-hour day jitters you up like bad cocaine. Feels like you’ve got engines behind your eyes burning out your fluids. Like you carried the sun with you all this way, and lord but the old bitch hates being ignored. At this distance, she’s not much more than a foggy streetlight through the snow and the fumes. Jupiter’s bigger and badder and brighter. But the lady does like things done her way. Thing of it is, seven hours is just too big a gap to be able to make it up with a nice Martian nap at 12:01 Greenwich. You notice seven hours when they don’t come home from the bar. So they built us a fake day out of the outworld twilight that goes on forever. Ignore that little splatter of phlegm in the sky; the glowglass will tell the hours: bright in the morning, dim in the evening. If you know what’s good for you, you let your neon tenement tuck you in with a cup of warm shut-your-mouth at 2100 sharp. These All-Clear kids, though. They sleep the short sleep. In their clock-addled heads, they’ve gone Uranian. They keep the seventeen-hour day, sped up, catnapping, caffeine-surfing, cramming their living and sleeping and joyful noise into a horrid squeezebox. And at 1700, that no-man’s time in which their midnight ticks over while the rest of the world grinds home to supper, they begin their dalliance with the Uranian clock. They’re all dead asleep by the time most of TD is tucking into the evening’s drink, and up again for work and wickedness when everybody’s babies are snoozing away the lightless night. The All-Clear rings out at midnight proper, midnight mean time, and in their dawn and our dead of nothing, they have their church. God is in the overlap, they say.

  And when the All-Clear sounds, Bedlam would call it madness. They dance this no-skill-required rabbit-jumping dance and shove stimulants up their noses, down their throats, in their arms, under their tongues, anywhere a fix will fit. They wear big glittery fish-fin masks dripping with snowmelt and those wizened little glass pearls that fall out of the sky in the gorgeous, higrav spring monsoons. Rainpearls. Or so I hear. I arrived in winter, and it’ll be another twenty years before I see the crocus shrimp mass on King George’s Sea.

  I tried the All-Clear when I first got here. You always gotta try the local madness once. It gave me a heart murmur. There’s an awful little pantomime right before it ends. Like one of those old Punch and Judy shows. The whole thing is pretty low-rent, but religion usually is. Takes some piss-poor manners to worship a planet. It’s already doing everything it can for you.

  I didn’t want any part of their hallelujah, or, for that matter, anything the long, lurid, teardrop-shaped Talbot had to offer. I was nowhere near far gone enough for whoring, and I had no scratch for purchasing distraction. I turned up my collar. Houndstooth light stung my eyes like snow. I made a sharp left onto Tethys Road. A dark spit of nothing, is Tethys. All back doors, no front. Strictly corridor action, running from Caroline Street to Epimetheus ’Vard. But that bastard car ground on in after me over the snow. Its headlights swung round, pink whips against my back. I knew the drill: Sooner or later they’d get bored with lumbering after me in first gear and step on it, swing wide, roll down the window, and out would come the girl with rouge on her face and eyes practically spinning a merry-go-round with af-yun and King George’s Fumes. She’d offer to buy me or sell herself for the men in the backseat. I’ve lived in Te Deum for seventeen months of winter. It is a fuck of a long block I’ve been around.

  That’s about how it happened. Before I could disappear into the All-Clear crowds on Epi ’Vard, the Talbot swung out in front and cut me off. Just sat there glowing like a hot coal. So dark a red as to be black, so bright a black as to be red. Steam coming off the cherry hood, fog on the smoky windows. Christ, it had to be so warm in there. Warm enough to sleep. Warm enough to lay down naked with that long leather bench seat—leather from a cow, not squeaky brownfalse imitation—under your bum. The driver kept the engine running. Mocking me. Even in this snap I bet you could fry a ham on that hood. Raise a Miranda pig in the boot, let it run wild in the acreage of the backseat, slaughter it in the passenger side, and fry it up on the hood.

  The window stayed shut. The door swung open and a pair of long, long legs slid out. Legs like a pilgrimage. Silver stockings, pumpkin pumps, suit green as the salads I haven’t seen in years. Her scarf was a scrap of silk the same colour as the Talbot, disappearing down her cleavage—which, I’m happy to report, was both substantial and on display. The dame didn’t even get out. She leaned her elbows on her knees and plunked her sweet little face down into her hands. She was tall, but delicately built, like a moth. She had rouge on, but not a slut brand. The expensive stuff. The kind that comes in colours with names. The kind that comes from home. From Earth, where you can make anything as easy as tripping and falling. Lipstick to match her shoes. Eyelashes as long as my thumb, tipped in a soft fuchsia fringe. Nails to match her big violet eyes. I bet she had that shade done up special—the nails or the eyes; I wouldn’t know which. A classy piece by any measure. She smelled like accounts receivable. She looked like old money. The kind of money that can ship a Talbot all the way to the outer planets without chipping the paint.

  “You’re late,” the dame said. Big, rolling voice. An American voice: round, hard, flat, open as Sioux country and twice as dry. Interesting.

  “Not ‘late’ if I never planned on showing up,” I replied. My voice was not big, nor did it roll. My voice cracked. It crumbled. It shook. I never had what you’d call a leading man’s timbre. My voice starts coming apart as soon as it leaves my mug.

  Lady pouted. Small baby-bird lips in her broad, curved face. Maybe some Chinese mixed in with the Sioux. Maybe not. Not too much call for knowing the American gene spread on the snowball.

  “Now why would you want to hurt my feelings like that? And after my employer has been so generous with you. Anyone in TD would skip their rocket home for the tiniest hope of the faintest ghost of a meeting like the one you’re booked down for.”

  She blinked demurely. The furry fuchsia petals on the ends of her eyelashes kissed her cheekbones. It was a gesture designed to unman. Lucky for me that job got done long before she came along. But this girl did have other weapons. Smells fired out of the cabin with precision, hit me with both barrels: cigar smoke and oily brown liquor and, Christ redeemed, bread. High-end labels on all counts. No callowmilk mix-ins, just applewood casks and tobacco fields in the sun. And wheat. I couldn’t believe it—couldn’t even understand it. There just isn’t money like that. It doesn’t exist. Drug money, min
eral money, whore money, sure. But not bread money. Not here.

  You can’t grow grain on Uranus. Point of fact, grain is a hard call all over. Grain guzzles sun; accept no substitutes. Venus, Neptune, and parts of Uranus do rice. The road to heaven is paved with rice. Rice isn’t picky, doesn’t play favourites, will go home with anyone if they’ve got water and light in the fridge, though she mutates if you look at her funny. Uranian rice is electric blue with a black bran, the longest of long grain. Tannic tea-ish aftertaste that’ll pucker your face. Official name is Capilli Regis Filiae Sophiae. Princess Sophia’s Hair. With a name like that, you know there’s nothing but groundbound idiots in charge back home on Earth. They’d name their own shits after a princess if they could. We call it rice, for fuck’s sake. Saturn has rhea: carefully bred lavender corn. It’s not half bad. But then, anything Uranus can do, Saturn can do better. Bigger rings, more moons, deeper mines, food that’ll grow without a guy getting down on his knees to beg. Mars, being a bitch of many talents, can do you quinoa, amaranth, even a stunted barley in a good year, but no wheat. Mercury’s got fuck-all, and who’d bother trying on Jupiter? Probably half the moons get by on hybrids. Pluto, our nearest buddy, the mad wife in the attic of the solar system, has a night-blooming lily called infanta. (See? Even the Yanks love a princess.) Big, blowsy white flowers with a nutritional mug shot not unlike a coconut: fat, sugar, carbs, calcium. When the first ship landed, all they saw were the lilies, covering the whole planet. Turned toward the spittle-sun like radio antennae. Landed in a field of them like Santa Claus in the snow.

  I’ve never eaten one. I’d like to, before I close out my accounts. I’ve heard they taste like honey and coffee and your mother’s own milk. But Plutonians don’t export. Not so much as a fart aimed down-system. The youngest kid never has to share their toys.

  You think about food a lot when you don’t have any. The parts of your brain that used to think about getting ahead in the world, about doing wrong to those who need it, about art or fucking, they just get burnt out, ’til they can’t do anything but grind on the thought that if I lived on Saturn I could have corn.

  Here you get loaves of midnight-green lichen scraped off the bottom of King George’s Sea, mashed up with callowmilk and Sophie’s Shits and morels. Cubed for your barest sustenance. Collect your weekly allowance at your local Depot. Oh, I know morels sound like the better quarter of that mess, but they’re not really morels, just what we call the powder-blue mushrooms that grow on the lee side of the luminescent towers. Come up by the million at sunrise; taste like your grandma’s worst perfume; rich in all-important vitamin D, vitamin C, and Queen Sugar; and ever so slightly hallucinogenic.

  Fuck morels and fuck vitamin C, too. The bitch had bread. Real bread. With a crust and a soft middle. And it was hot. It had had carnal relations with an oven on the recent.

  My stomach, recently vacated, made its preferences known. It wasn’t a fair fight and the American lady knew it. Come, dog. Heel. Good boys get treats. She reached back and pulled out a knob of something wrapped in wax paper. She didn’t say a thing—didn’t have to. Just peeled back the red wax wrapper corner by corner with her perfect purple nails. Slow like, so I could hear it coming away from the creamy lump of heaven within.

  Butter.

  “Get in the car,” the dame said, and it would knock your head back how fast I did what I was told.

  Good dog. Sit up. Shake a paw.

  Newsreel

  PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL INCLUDED WITH ORIGINAL TRAILER REELS OF THE RADIANT CAR THY SPARROWS DREW; WITHDRAWN IN FINAL PRINTS

  TITLE CARD

  The Road to Heaven is Paved With Prithvi Brand Concentrated Callowmilk—You Can’t Leave Home Without It!

  [Male voice-over, a rich, deep, and reassuring voice, but not authoritative—an after-dinner voice, merely sharing its knowledge among friends.]

  VOICE-OVER

  What can you do without Prithvi Brand Callowmilk? Nothing.

  [Stock footage of Venus beaches, palms waving like vacation posters under a brilliant sun.]

  Hand-harvested on the lush, scarlet shores of Venus, the most precious bounty of the universe arrives at every supper table courtesy of your friends at Prithvi Deep-Sea Holdings Incorporated.

  [Shot of a thick mahogany table groaning with an array of PDSH products: glass pitchers of foamy callowmilk, porcelain dishes of callowbutter, china bowls of ice cream, rinds of callowcheese enrobed in gleaming wax. A happy, portly family greets each other at the evening meal, all smiles after a long day of honest labour. They join hands to say grace. Transition to another family, this time on Venus, in a traditional cacao-wood hut, divers’ helmets visible in the background. The same PDSH largesse blesses this table, the same contented smiles, the same bright-eyed, attractive children.]

  Our divers, carefully selected for their strength and daring, begin by seeking out the most majestic and fertile of the great callowhales in the furthest deeps of the Sea of Qadesh. They tirelessly search out the fattest fishies with the richest colours and the longest fronds, heavy with the sweetest milk available. Like knights tangling with the dragons of old, Prithvi divers pierce the most promising balloons with their gleaming spiles, draining that exquisite cream into instant-sealing amphorae, locking in freshness so that not a whiff of vapour is lost.

  [A diver in a finned copper helmet battles the immense, seaweed-like fronds of a callowhale. The perilous electrified ferns fall all around her like a forest, like Sleeping Beauty’s briars, until she thrusts her spile into a greenish gas bladder as if tapping into a maple tree to catch the syrup.]

  Don’t worry, kids! The whales don’t feel a thing, any more than you do when a strand of your hair falls out and wafts away on the wind. Once the milk arrives on shore, it enters our clean and modern processing stations.

  [Footage of assembly lines and bottling machines; workers smile and wave at the camera.]

  Prithvi Holdings cares about sustainability. Our facilities are wholly integrated with Venusian village life, providing safe, reliable employment and a number of enrichment programs that make life on Venus a breeze. Happy workers make premium products!

  Take young master Willem Greenaway.

  [A fresh-faced young man with wide-set eyes shakes hands with the foreman of the Hedylogos sector plant. The boy wears a Sunday suit. He is well fed and tall, with excellent posture.]

  Only sixteen and already possessed of a lifetime of applicable skills! When his tour on Venus is finished, he will be able to choose his homestead from any planet or moon—and, no doubt, his wife from any of the solar system’s most eligible ladies.

  [Willem’s steely, stalwart stare takes in the crashing Sea of Qadesh, the massive callowhales floating like islands offshore.]

  Yes, his work is dangerous, but young Willem knows that without his service and the devotion of everyone at Prithvi, from the lowest milkmaid to the fleet-fingered shipping agent to every last shareholder, there could be no saloons on Mars, no cruises on Neptune, no movies on the Moon. Willem Greenaway and those like him are truly the backbone of all the worlds. And Prithvi makes it possible.

  [A young, buxom mother with well-muscled arms sets a platter of pint jars brimming with milk in front of her crowd of five ruddy-cheeked children. She holds the dish before her ample breasts—a wonderful substitute and improvement on their bounty—and smiles beatifically, the vision of responsible motherhood.]

  And now, Prithvi Brand Concentrated Callowmilk has a new, better-tasting formula!

  [The children, all taller than average and without blemishes or birthmarks, clamour for their mother’s milk. She gives them what they want and settles into a hickory rocking chair with her newborn—and a bottle of Prithvi Brand Callowrich Infant Formula.]

  Fortified with a secret blend of spices and vitamins, callowmilk products don’t just taste good, they taste better than dairy products, more wholesome, richer, cleaner, and better for you! We know you care about your family’s health—and so do we. />
  [A nutritional graph shows briefly, the bars of the chart represented by cartoon callowhales with cheery grins and spouts of water bursting from friendly blowholes in varying, informational heights.]

  Just one serving of Prithvi products at every meal provides a wallop of protein, fat, immuno-boosters, ultra-calcium, and plain, old-fashioned deliciousness. In recent taste tests, mothers preferred Prithvi milk over our competitors nearly two to one. Those are numbers we can be proud of. And it doesn’t stop at the supper table!

  [An array of PDSH products flashes before the camera in new, redesigned packaging.]

  Our callowmilk proves itself over and over, as a foodstuff, industrial lubricant, fuel additive, fertility aid, antibiotic, anaesthesia, base for many indoor and outdoor paints, recreational hallucinogen, and coal substitute. When dried and moulded, it produces excellent building materials and its proteins provide fibre for the most fashionable fabrics. And, of course, callowmilk is the only source for the all-important bone density supplement and radioactivity prophylactic, without which humanity would still be bound to one lonely planet.

  [The buxom mother tucks her children into bed one by one, finishing with the baby in its bassinet. Her face shows infinite love and careful concern.]

  Yes, Prithvi Brand Concentrated Callowmilk truly is the stuff of life. We take our duty as stewards of this priceless substance seriously. You can taste our commitment in every sip.

  [A bottle of classic Prithvi Callowmilk on a black starfield, the label showing the same genial, comic callowhale blowing a fountain of milk out of its grinning blue head.]

  Prithvi Brand Concentrated Callowmilk: You can’t leave home without it. See your local recruiter for information about lucrative opportunities in Prithvi’s Offshore Operations Sector!