Radiance (37 page)

But Percy stopped it.

“Everybody cool off!” Percival Unck, for all his faults and virtues, can yell louder than anyone I know.
Quiet on set!
“Listen to me. This was an accident. Mary, I appreciate what you're doing, but it's not necessary. I am telling you the truth. Freddy and I were having a few scotches out on the deck, talking about the new camera line. Fred clapped me on the back, and when he turned around, he saw Penny and Thad through the ballroom windows. Thaddeus kissed Penny, and Freddy saw black. You can't blame a man for that. He shouldered the door in, confronted Thad, it came to blows, we struggled—all of us, all four of us! We struggled and the gun went off. It could have been any of us who pulled the trigger: me, Penny, Fred—we all had our hands on it at some point. But it was an
accident
. And what we have to decide now is: How many lives does this terrible accident destroy?”

I had such a horrid feeling in the hollows of my stomach.

He's lying
.

Like MM always said, it's bad maths. The sun might come up blue as Neptune in the morning, ice might turn to fire when it melts, I might become the long-jump champion of the world, but Thaddeus Irigaray did not kiss Penelope Edison. It didn't happen. I go for a bit of each, but Thad was true blue. I wanted to say so, but I couldn't. Not in that room. Not with all those people who Thaddeus didn't trust enough to tell when he was alive. Not with that Algernon B-for-Bastard already writing next week's column in his head. Even a corpse can be ruined. And a corpse's reputation doesn't mend. So I kept mum. God help me. I wouldn't let Thaddeus go down in the books as just another dead pervert. Because that's how we all end up, of course. No. I wouldn't let his heart be somebody's morality tale.

Or maybe I was just afraid. Of Freddy, of Percy, of all of them. I couldn't help it. I thought,
Percy, baby, you wanna run it back and do it again so you can get a better angle on the bullet? Make certain the shadows are right on Thaddeus Irigaray's eyes when the light goes out inside them? Or was there a better line you could've hurled in his face? Or at Penny, or Fred? And why would you lie for them? Why would you bother? You don't even know Penny, not really. You've been chummy with Fred since you were kids, sure … but the fraternal bubble never extends to wives. So what did Thad do to you, Percy? How did he really earn his bullet? Why is this happening?

“Whose gun was it?” I asked.

“What?”

“Whose gun? Who brought a gun to a wrap party?”

“It's mine,” Percy admitted.
Oh, Percy
.
No.
“I was showing it to Fred. Showing off, I suppose. I don't fancy ending up in a Plantagenet vault, Mary. I protect myself. Maud's got a pistol strapped to her thigh. Ask her. It's not so strange.”

Then Percival Unck told us how it was going to be. His best directorial effort and only thirteen people ever saw it. Thaddeus had a heart attack. The ship doctor could be paid off; he barely graduated from medical school, anyway. We'd clean it all up, all of us together, and Thaddeus would be cremated before anyone knew the difference. The rest of us would keep the secret for our own reasons. Because we were accessories, because we wanted system-wide distribution for our tawdry little magazine, because we didn't want a divorce to leave us penniless, because we wanted a part, because we didn't care, because we loved Thaddeus Irigaray and didn't want him to be remembered as a homewrecker or worse, because we could live forever on the favours Unck and Edison could do us.

What about me? Will I keep quiet? I said I would. I promised. With blood on my cheek, I promised. I took my silver—any part I want, and the director's chair, too. Though, honestly, I think it might be time to retire.

I don't want to write about scrubbing blood off ebony with a wire brush. Or burning my buffalo fur in the engine room. But I do want to write this: While we were cleaning Thad up, I pried open his fist and swiped a wadded-up piece of paper out of the muck and the crusting blood. I didn't look at it 'til I got it safely back to my room.

It's a photograph. Of a baby girl.

I can't be certain—babies all look a bit like one another. But I think she looks an awful lot like Severin.

 

Kansas

Transcript from 1946 debriefing interview with Erasmo St. John, property of Oxblood Films, all rights reserved. Security clearance required.

CYTHERA BRASS:
Session three, day two. Arlo Covington, C.P.A., Oxblood representative, instructed your crew to abandon the Adonis set. Why didn't you follow his lead?

ERASMO:
We did. We just … got distracted. Look, I know you think we're a great fat lot of useless drama society layabouts, but we are, each and every one of us, professionals. We stabilized the situation very quickly. Dr Nantakarn had a mobile ICU already set up in advance of the dives we had planned. Retta isolated Anchises and put gloves on him so he couldn't infect anyone else. She took Mari in hand, sliced that thing right out of her palm, and bandaged it up before Konrad and Franco could get breakfast cleared away. Gave her morphine for the pain. Mari was pretty doped up. She slept it off in the medical tent while we discussed what to do about Horace.
     Venusian freshwater wells are deep. To get past the saltwater you have to really burrow down. We had a boom mic and a small crane. Nothing nearly long enough. Max said … he said Horace was already buried. We could cap the well, carve his name on it. It would be a beautiful grave. He was trying to be kind. Maximo's kindness can be morbid. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't just let Horace rot down there, getting chewed on by who knows what blind, awful worms live in Venus's underbelly. I have too good an imagination. I could see it, some horrid night-eel laying eggs in his eye sockets … I couldn't leave him down there in the dark. He deserved a better final scene than that. Besides … he could have been alive. What if he'd only broken a leg? Both legs? What if he was slowly bleeding to death down there?
     Well, the only other option was the diving cables. We had two suits left: one for the diver and one for the cameraman, and heaps of breathing tubes. We could lower someone down, just as we would from the gondola into the Qadesh. I thought it should be me. Look at me—I'm the obvious choice. I'm a big man, I'm strong, I could carry Horace back up, easy. Like a fireman. I could carry them all back.
     But Iggy killed that idea. “These village wells, they narrow as they go down. You could get stuck, and, you know,
we
have to lower you and haul you and the body—and Horace—back up. We have no climbing equipment. No cleats or crampons. The tube could snap. We could drop you. You're the heaviest one of us, Raz. The lightest should go.”
     And all eyes turned to Arlo.

CYTHERA:
Did the background noise let up at all while this discussion took place?

ERASMO:
No. Maybe? I'm not sure. It wasn't
constant
. It surged and ebbed and surged again. But it never found a rhythm. If it had rhythm, we could have ignored it eventually, the way you learn to ignore the sounds of traffic late at night in Tithonus. But it never
lulled
, it just crackled and shrieked and garbled out those dreadful bursts of growling.

CYTHERA:
And Covington agreed to go down after the cameraman?

ERASMO:
After Horace. Surprisingly, yes. Everybody did the same mental maths: we couldn't risk the doctor, there was no way I'd let Rin go, Mari was out cold, Crissy's almost six foot of lean cheetah-girl muscle. We all had at least a stone on Arlo. If it had to be the lightest of us, he was it. You knew him—skinny as a jockey, and not so tall as all that. He was wiry, though. He must have done some sport or other—accountants don't usually have that sort of whippy physique.

CYTHERA:
Rowing, actually. He was on the Oxblood crew. Up every morning at four pulling oars across the Rainy Sea.

ERASMO:
Huh. I can see that.

CYTHERA:
You said he agreed to this plan? You didn't coerce him?

ERASMO:
Is that what the others said? That I forced him?

CYTHERA:
I'm asking you. I'm having some trouble with the notion, Mr St. John, because Arlo hated confined spaces. He worked on the Oxblood accounts by the lake in Usagi Park so he didn't have to suffer in his own office. And you're telling me he cheerfully went along with a plan that required him to jump into a pit in the ground.

ERASMO:
Without one second of argument.
He's your family—
that's what he said.
You don't turn your back on family
. I don't know. Maybe he lost a brother way back. Maybe his mum abandoned him. Maybe you don't know him that well. But I'll tell you for nothing that in that moment, I loved Arlo Covington like mad. He didn't even dawdle. Suited up right away—we had to strap down the suit a little to fit him. He kept the diving bell on, to protect his head, in case he fell. We rigged up a sling for Horace out of one of the hammocks and some gaffer tape, secured a lantern to Arlo's belt, and strapped Mariana's pride and joy to his chest. If she hadn't been surfing the morphine coast she would have lost her mind. Send her baby down a big black hole? No chance. See, she'd brought along a brand-new Edison-brand prototype wireless microphone. For field and stress testing.

CYTHERA:
That would be the Type I Ekho Ultra-Mic?

ERASMO:
You've got it. Mariana wouldn't let anyone else touch it. She had to keep notes on everything she did with it for the company back home. She kept saying it was worth more than the
Clamshell
, though that strikes me as bullshit—It looked like a little tin lunchbox. We needed it. What if something went wrong? We were happy to stroll around White Peony with parasols and a song in our hearts, but going … inside Venus—we couldn't let Arlo do that without some way to tell us if something went wrong. We gaffered the Ekho around his chest and tuned our field radio to seventy-six megahertz so we could pick up his broadcast. I cranked the volume up all the way and hoped to heaven we'd hear Arlo over the white noise.

CYTHERA:
What time did Mr Covington begin his descent?

ERASMO:
I'd say around 1100. It was stickily warm; the air didn't seem to move at all. We helped Arlo waddle into the town centre, to the mouth of the well. He stood there like a comic book hero amidst all that wreckage, all those mangled, mutilated houses, with his diving helmet tucked under his arm like Barracuda the Brave from that old Capricorn cartoon
The Arachnid vs. The Seven Seas.
He smiled at us, and I knew he was terrified, so it must have cost him something to flash that astonishing supernova grin our way. He was just trying to tell us everything was gonna be okay.
     “Hey,” Arlo said. “So there's this mummy snake and this baby snake and the baby snake says, ‘Mumsy, are we poisonous?' and the mummy says, ‘Yes, sweetums, but why do you ask?' and the baby says, ‘Because I just bit myself!'”
     It's not a great joke. But we laughed like he was headlining at Carnegie Hall.

CYTHERA:
Did Severin record any of this?

ERASMO:
[laughs] Are you joking? Of course she did. Severin and Crissy set up two cameras, one on our faces and one for the wide shot. It's a pretty amazing scene. If everything had gone differently, I think we'd be munching hors d'oeuvres at Academy Awards pre-parties right now, instead of these, frankly, dreadful biscuits and this abomination disguising itself as tea. Even after, in the darkroom, Crissy and I thought it was something else. The shards of Adonis casting hard, sharp shadows, the well in the centre of the shot, Arlo doing his Barracuda the Brave shtick, the breathing tube and diving cables tied tight around his chest, then a pan around Maximo, Santiago, Konrad, Franco, and Severin. All of us braced against the stone wall of the well like we meant to play tug-of-war with the public waterworks.
     Arlo tested the Ekho mic. The radio crackled on. “Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen! 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 Before Arlo Smashes His Skinny Arse to Bits?
Okay, down I go! Don't forget to make a wish!”
     I turned away when he jumped in. I'd seen that once already.
     As soon as Arlo saying
wish
whined out on the radio, the static boomed out its usual unintelligible hissing, then a voice exploded out of the white noise. This time we could all hear the words perfectly clearly:
Somewhere the sun is shining, but here it don't do nothing but rain …
     It was Mariana's and Cristabel's voices. Singing “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain,” exactly the way they did on our first night at the Waldorf in White Peony Station. But it came showering down from everywhere, knotted up in ribbons of static, out of the sky, out of the trees, up from the mud and the water.