Radiance (25 page)

SEVERIN

You're not really going to tell a ghost story, are you? Maybe I'll go see how the Neptunian Crime Spree Hour of Fun is shaping up.

ERASMO

Shush. You don't get a vote. So. Enyo was a Martian trading post near the Chinese-Russian border—surrounded by kangaroo ranches and brothels and dice halls and mining stakes. Good times for all! And in one night—gone. Windows smashed, buildings shattered, as though someone pulled them up by the roofs and dropped them. Callowmilk, or something like it, splashed twenty feet high, like blood spatter or graffiti. No bodies. No blood. But something else.

[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 milkmad 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 La Bianca
: 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.