Radiance

PART ONE

THE WHITE PAGES

My soul burns to speak of strange bodies transformed!

O gods in heaven, you ardent lovers of mutation,

become the breath inside me

and draw up my song, untroubled, unbroken,

from the first beginnings of the world

to this very moment and this very day.

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

—Ethel Barrymore

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

(Oxblood Films, dir. Severin Unck, 1946)

SC1 EXT. RED SQUARE, MOSCOW—DAY 1 LATE AFTERNOON [12 JUNE, 1944]

[Open on the pristine streets of sunny Moscow, lined with popsicle-carts, jugglers, dazzled tourists. The streetlamps are garlanded with lime-blossoms, sunflowers, carnations. The joyful throng crowds in fierce and thick; the camera follows as they burst into Red Square. The splendid ice-cream towers of the Kremlin beam down benignly. The elderly TSAR NICHOLAS II, his still-lovely wife, and their five children, hale in their glittering sashes, wave down at the cannoneers standing at attention on the firing pad at the 1944 Worlds’ Fair. The launch site is festooned with crepe and swinging summer lanterns, framed by banners wishing luck and safe travel in English, Russian, Chinese, German, Spanish, and Arabic.]

SEVERIN UNCK and her CREW wave jerkily as confetti sticks to their sleek skullcaps and glistening breathing apparatuses. Her smile is immaculate, practiced, the smile of the honest young woman of the hopeful future. Her copper-finned helmet gleams at her feet. SEVERIN wears feminine clothing with visible discomfort and only for this shot, which she intends, in the final edit, to be ironic and wry: She is performing herself, not performing herself in order to tell a story about something else entirely. The curl of her lip betrays, to anyone who knows her, her utter disdain of the bizarre, flare-skirted swimming-cum-trapeze-artist costume that so titillates the crowd. The wind flutters the black silk around her hips. She tucks a mahogany case—which surely must contain George, her favourite camera—smartly under one arm. All of her crewmen strap canisters of film, a few steamer trunks of food, oxygen tanks, and other minor accoutrements to their broad backs. The real meat of the expedition, supplies and matériel meticulously planned, acquired, logged, and collected, was loaded into the cargo bays overnight. What Severin and her crew carry, they carry for the camera, for the film being shot of this film being shot.

The cannon practically throbs with light: a late-model Wernyhora design, filigreed, etched with forest motifs that curl and leaf like spring ice breaking. The brilliant, massive nose of the Venusian capsule Clamshell rests snugly in the cannon’s silvery mouth. The metal beast towers over Saint Basil’s, casting a monstrous shadow. Most of its size is devoted to propulsion. The living space within is surprisingly small. That etched silver forest will be jettisoned halfway to Venus, destined to drift alone into the endless black. But for now, the Clamshell dwarfs any earthly palace built for the glory of man or god.

They are a small circus: the strongmen, the clowns, the lion tamer, the magician, and the trapeze artist poised on her platform, arm crooked in an evocative half-moon, toes pointed into the void.

CUT TO: INT. Clamshell cantina, NIGHT 21:00 ERASMO ST. JOHN and MAXIMO VARELA pour vodka for the CREW and laugh uproariously:::FILM DAMAGED, FOOTAGE UNAVAILABLE SKIP DAMAGED AREA SKIPPING SKIPPING ERROR SEE ARCHIVIST FOR ASSISTANCE]

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[A camera is on. The screen is black, for the camera is skewed toward the wall, a clandestine attempt to capture the child without her knowing she is being recorded. Occasionally, flickers of silver interrupt the darkness—echoes from a screen showing more lively activity somewhere behind the device that picks up the following quiet conversation.]

PERCIVAL UNCK

Now, in any film it is important that you know who is telling the story, and to whom they are telling it. Even if no one on-screen talks about it, the director must know, and the writer, too. Now, who is telling this story?

SEVERIN UNCK

Daddy is telling the story!

PERCIVAL

[laughing] Well, Daddy made the movie, but Daddy is not telling the story. Look at the characters and how they speak to each other. Look at how the film begins, how the very first scenes shape everything else. Now, who is telling the story?

[There is a long silence.]

SEVERIN

The camera is telling the story. It’s watching everything, and you can’t lie to it, or it will know.

PERCIVAL

My girl is so clever! No, the camera witnesses the story and records it, but it is outside the story. Like a very tiny god with one big, dark eye. Baby girl, look at the lovers, and the villain, and the doting father, and the soldiers, and the ghosts. Which one of them is the authority? Who controls how the story is told? And who is the audience, for whom all these wonderful things are meant?

[Another long silence follows. There is a rustling, as of a little girl twisting her lace skirts while she tries to work out an answer.]

SEVERIN

They are all telling the story to me.

Preproduction Meeting,

The Deep Blue Devil [working title]

(Tranquillity Studios, 1959, dir. Percival Unck)

Audio recorded for reference by Vincenza Mako, screenwriter

PERCIVAL UNCK: If you want to know about the beginnings of things, you have to talk to the dead.

I know how that sounds. The dead should do endings. Surely that’s their squat. In the space after the story, they’re kings and queens, ruling with bony hands, pulling epilogues, last acts, climaxes, pulling finality from declining action like spinsters at black wheels.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve always been aces at endings. At the Fin I’m like a ball player, balanced hips over knees, brandishing my bat, pointing to the outfield, pointing like I’ve been doing from the first word spoken, the first frame shot, at the revelation I intended to hit all along. Lean into the last scene; you can hear the whiff and the crack of my swing. If anything, I’ve always been too eager to get to the ending. I’ll throw the haunted, wild-eyed gamine from her tower too soon, slaughter a soliloquizing retinue complete with bicyclists and bears five minutes in. Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions—if you’ve been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it’s all just to lure an ending into your bed. The right ending can’t resist a spread like that. She sidles up like she’s lived there all along, sleepy-eyed, hair a fright, asking the antihero for coffee and be quick about it, wouldn’t you? There’s a love.

But I’m rubbish at beginnings. Listen to that mess. My metaphors all rumpled about my ankles. So I talk to the dead. They’re the only ones who can see the whole story. All they’ve got is story. Look, say the ghosts, she was doomed all along because of how it began. You watched her to death. She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you. No one could have gotten out of this thing alive. Not with Acts I-V stacked against them like that. If Hamlet couldn’t swing it, what hope did she ever have?

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. But the deadest of the dead—the ancient, toga-tugging, sheep-fucking, olive-gobbling, laurel-spangled dead—they rattled on about nothing else. Gardens and clay and the Sky slinging back a nebula or two for courage then slicking back his hair to make nice with the Earth. They had it right. It’s downright dishonest to begin with anything but the Creation of the Known Universe, and a tale that ends before the destruction of all and sundry is a damnable lie. By fire? Well, that’s too obvious. And floods always look amateurish. Maybe it just winks out. Cut. Print.

Point is, the Greeks had their heads on straight: If you’re going to bother beginning at all, you have to throw up a believable theory of origin or it’s got no anchor. No root. Why four seasons? Why seasons at all? Why just the one moon? Why green trees and red roses and not the other way round? Why death and time and is there such a thing as fate, and what, percentage-wise, is the efficacy of human sacrifice? You have to answer those questions before anyone comes on stage, you know. In even the littlest story about a…let’s say a housewife in an aqua-blue print dress and matching apron making a roast, only she’s planning to kill herself later, obviously, or maybe her husband—otherwise why should we care one soggy whit about the vagaries of beef at temperature? At any rate, someone’s got to die. That’s why she’s wearing aqua. Blue invariably means death. Even in poor lost Millicent’s kitchen—yes, Vince, her name is clearly Millicent, do try to keep up! Before she even pricks the meat to slide the garlic in, it’s all been arranged for her. Does death do its thing, in this universe? Yes. Time, in Millicent World? Progressing one second per second, twenty-four and seven and three hundred-odd. Seasons: four. The moon: intact, in orbit, in phase. Green elm, red peony. Seventeen per cent sacrificial success rate under ideal conditions, results not peer reviewed. And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody. Given all these parameters, husband Humphrey should be dead by dessert. See? It’s only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than—well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.

It’s all down to girls, one way or another.

[indistinct]

All right, all right, I’m boring you. I’m babbling. I haven’t made up my mind about this one yet. I don’t even know how to go about making up my mind. I would rather not have death. I would rather that. Time is terribly tawdry, as well. And let’s see what we can do about that percentage.

Let us begin properly. This is what I’m thinking: She came from nowhere. She came from the sea. She came from the dark. The Earth fucked the Sky and made a hundred children—or maybe just nine. Mercury, Venus, Mars, the whole ragtag family. And the nine had their own kids: Phobos, Triton, Io, Charon, all the brats. Maybe we can do this like we used to do, way back when. You know I can never quit Vaudeville. Toga up the main cast as the planets and the moons: rings around Saturn’s head; Venus dripping wet; Mars in a cowboy getup; Neptune, I don’t know, up on strings like the levitators, maybe? Stupid on af-yun, all heroin eyes and running makeup. Stand them in tableaux against a spangly cloth backdrop. Then they can start killing each other. It’ll be Shakespearian. Barking big knives. Buckets of blood. Blood and callowmilk.

So the little bastards stab the Sky to death and throw the spangles into the sea, and they turn into the title, and that’s where she comes from. Out of the words and the water. She can rise up on a clamshell naked and covered with blood and milk. That’s what birth looks like, after all. Naked, with a myrtle branch in one hand and a camera in the other.

I have no ideas for casting. Someone new. I don’t want anyone whose face has been someone else. I’ll have to call Richard. He’ll find somebody fresh off the rocket who looks like her. He always knows what I want. So, whoever she is, she’ll look through the camera in her hand at the camera in my hand. The waves hit her and wash her clean. Mostly clean. Leave a mark on her face. Like a wound. Presto: Birth of Venus.

[indistinct]

Yes. Severin’s birth, too. No difference.

But that’s the last time we use her name, Vince. What’s our rule? You can’t name the subject. You can’t say the word death in a murder mystery after the body gets discovered; no more than you can say love in a romantic flick until the end, until it’s a bullet firing, the bullet you’ve had on deck since the scene-one-take-one clapper smacked its lips. You circle it. You stalk it. But you don’t call it out.

MAKO: But everyone will know who it’s meant to be. What’s the point of being coy?

UNCK: Coyness is what makes it art, darling. Otherwise…otherwise it’s nothing but a funeral.

[long pause] We’ll call her something else. Hell, I named her once, I can do it again. Something bombastic, something mythic, something Venusian. All the names have to come back to Venus in the end. I remember what you said when we were writing Rocketship Banshee—we went up to that cabin on the Sea of Fertility and trotted out our old dance, writing movies instead of fucking. Two rooms, two typewriters, the blue cassia forests, moon-daisies by the door. We swam naked in the bitter silver sea and you floated on your back under the Earthlight with water running off your colloidal blue breasts and said: Names aren’t loners, they’re connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny. You wouldn’t just let me name our hero John and his demon bride Molly.

MAKO: This is different.

UNCK: We’ll call her Ares. I gave her a boy’s name the first time around, so why not this time? It’s perfect. Ares went and shagged Venus when he should have stuck to what he was good at, which was fighting with anyone who’d put up half a fist. Good, right? Yeah. Yeah.

MAKO: Let her have her name, Percy. Let everyone have her own name. She’d hate you for changing it. You know that.

UNCK: [Clears his throat several times. His voice quavers.] I don’t want to. I don’t want to write it at the top of every page. I don’t want to have to say it. Every day. All day. I don’t want to have to call some nobody actress by my daughter’s name.

MAKO: Too bad. It’s my script, too. I’m not your secretary. Her name is Severin. You don’t get to turn her into one of our demon brides.

[Sounds of typewriter keys and cigarettes extinguishing, lighting, smoke exhaling.]

UNCK: Fine. Fine. You win. Severin bloody Unck forever and ever amen.

Back to it. Once we’ve got the world created—Sky, Earth, clamshell—we move on to more important business. The Plot at Hand. We switch scenes entirely. I want to go full noir: neon fritzing signs reflected in rainy streets on Luna. Unless it shouldn’t be Luna. Could do somewhere more interesting. They get vicious storms on Uranus. Wrath of God-type stuff. We shot something in Te Deum once, didn’t we? What was it? Thief of Light? The Oberon Assassin? Christ, I can never remember. We’ve made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant. But TD is a spectacular city, really. All those coloured towers—bioluminescent, you know—thick as a fat man’s fingers, stubbing up pink and purple and hot green to the stars. Cheap as hell, too. Pubs everywhere like mushrooms in the morning. Good gravity, at least in the winter.

MAKO: If you insist on shooting on location, at a minimum we’ll need permits for Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter. We’re fine for principal photography on Luna, obviously. Venus?

UNCK: Oh, Vince, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. Isn’t there somewhere on the Moon we can dress for Venus? We have enough seas. I’ll hose down half the globe if it means I don’t have to go to Venus. Or we could try Earth. Glum old Earth. Moscow, maybe. Or Chicago. Could try Australia, but the red tape is absolutely frightful. Melbourne, perhaps. I can’t stand Sydney. We almost did Hope Has No Master down there, remember? Looks quite a bit like the older parts of Mars. Then again, Mars actually gave us a better deal, when you figure in the tax incentives. Guan Yu is a fabulous town. You can see Mons Olympus from every balcony.

MAKO: But ultimately, we want a city. Deep in a city. Noir has to have a city. And a detective. I presume we’re talking about Anchises.

UNCK: I know, I know. Who else could it be? If we don’t produce him pretty quickly, everyone’ll just be waiting for his entrance. We’re telling a story everyone already knows. We gotta outrace their memory.

MAKO: I think he’s living back on Venus, now. Shouldn’t be too hard to find him, if we want the man himself.

UNCK: Christ, no, he’s not gonna play himself! I’m not a masochist. Let him rot in those stinking swamps. I’ll make him better than he ever was. Our great detective…and he’s an amnesiac. Looking for his memory. Piecing his life together—and he can’t do that without finding her. It writes itself. He hunts down the story, and he is the story. Get him a trench coat and a hat with a brim so sharp it’ll cut the night. A revolver strapped to his hip, something big and mean looking. Fucking never stop raining on him. If I see a dry patch on that lantern jaw, so help me. We can even afford a voice-over if we want it.

[indistinct]

UNCK: Well, I don’t particularly give a shit, Vince. Where’s your obsession with authenticity now? Severin made talkies. It practically has to have sound.

MAKO: [long sigh] I’ll talk to Freddy. So…our man needs a love interest. Someone more mysterious than he is. Long legs, long hair, long gazes. If you don’t put someone on-screen who loves him, the audience won’t know they’re supposed to.

UNCK: Yes, now you’re talking. A proper dame, in stockings and a dress tighter than a close-up shot. Smoky, broken eyes. Not the innocent kind, though. A fatale. As if I know how to make any other kind of heroine. You’d think after all these years I’d be able to manage one Ophelia amidst all of my Lady Macs. But no. It’s just not in me.

MAKO: You know, I don’t think we have to go to Venus at all. Our detective will know he needs to go, he’ll know it’s waiting up there, just sitting on the answers he wants like a stinking orange dragon, but he won’t be able to face the idea of it. Of those red shores. Of the sound of the whales. Of going home. [wry laughter] Of course, you know Severin would hate every second of it.

UNCK: [long pause] She’s not here. She started out like a heroine in one of my films. Why should she end up as anything else?

The Deep Blue Devil:

Come Find Me

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

It was closing in on midnight, the kind of midnight you only get on Uranus after a three-day bender. Ultramarine fog reeking of ethanol and neon and some passing whore’s rosewater. Snow piled up like bodies in the street. Twenty-seven moons lighting up what oughta be a respectable witching hour so you can’t help but see yourself staring back in every slick glowpink skyscraper. And the rings, always the rings, slashing down the sky, slashing down the storm, spitting shadows at the fella humping his carcass down Caroline Street, hat yanked down over his bloodshot eyes, coat hugged tight, shoes that need shining and a soul that needs taking in hand.

That’d be me. Anchises St. John, private nothing.

You can look at yourself everywhere you turn in Te Deum. The whole city is your shaving glass. Stare yourself down, scrunch up your eyes, and drag a dull blade down your cheek. The wall of the pub next to me flushed leek-green and I saw those sickly rings slicing across the skyline, disappearing through my neck and punching out again, a pure white shiv. I hear they used to make a big fuss over the light in Italy, painters and that crowd. Well, I’ve been to Italy, and the old girl’s got nothing to teach Uranus. A leprechaun would get a headache out here. It’s the algae that does it. Algae in the ice, in the dirt, in the glass, in the big black dichroic swell of King George’s Sea. They didn’t build Te Deum, nor Herschel City, nor Harlequin. Didn’t have to. They grew these stained-glass slum-gardens like mushrooms on a dead log. Salted the sea with a confetti of exotic hydrocarbons and up they sprung: unpredictable, enormous, disorganized—unless you dig an anemone’s sense of feng shui. That’s all they are. Anemones as hard as a man and as big as his ego. They only look like casinos or banks or dancehalls. Just the littlest bit alive, but nothing to lose sleep over.

If you have any sleep to lose. I like the idea of sleep, myself. Sounds like a nice place to visit.

So there I was, on Caroline Street, the hairiest street in the rowdiest city on the snowball. A good place to get forgotten. I was unshaved, unwashed, unslept, unwell, profoundly unsober, and had thus achieved all my aims in life. I had on the only suit I still owned under my jacket, a conservative raisin-coloured number with a chartreuse tie. And gloves, always gloves, even if the cold didn’t slap me around like a whining brat, always gloves. I have a trunk of leather gloves lined with fleece and hydrostatic furpack. Yeah, leather. My only luxury. None of that brownfalse rubbish they say is just as good. Made special on Mars, where you gotta bat away steers like bottle flies. I need them thick, but they’re never thick enough.

It was a suit fit for a job interview, though I hadn’t let one of those get near me in years. I didn’t think I could manage a conversation longer than How much? anyway. I can’t stomach a man telling me what to do and when to do it. That cog got banged up good in me. The one that lets normal folks say, Yes, sir; right away, sir, and mean it. And then get the business done for the sirs of the world, right away, on the double-quick.

And yet. I wasn’t on Caroline Street to scare up a woman or to sell my cufflinks for a lump of af-yun or put the last of my emergency protein fund on the ammonite races. I was calling on a million quid. A job. Gainful employment. A gig particularly suited to my extremely specific talents and Historia Calamitatum. If you lined up all the soul-choking jobs a body ever dreamed up, neat as a chorus line and twice as hungry, this’d be about the last dame I’d wanna take round the floor. And yet.

Being on time is a filthy habit practiced only by roosters and retirees. Frankly, the roosters can’t even get their heads on straight round here. The sun, such as it is, comes up every seventeen hours on Uranus. It’s hard on the poultry. Still, I probably woulda made it, despite all my efforts to black out before the hour struck Cinderella, if the Astor hadn’t put up a midnight show. One of those weird, off-putting studio talkies from back in the bad old days when Edison ruled the nickelodeon universe with a celluloid fist. We get a lot of that stuff out here. This is the end of the line for movie prints. It takes ten years to get them out to Uranus and once they make landfall they tend to stick. Just kind of swirl around the theatres like water down a drain till the reels break or someone steals them. If you’re looking for a flick that no one’s seen hide of for a good long howl, there’s probably one kicking round some freezer case in a Uranian cellar. Who knows where they dug this one up?

The Astor marquee came ghosting up out of the blue brume, sickly topaz pop-bulbs and black block letters bearded with ice.

Self-Portrait with Saturn.

Well, fuck me sideways.

I didn’t wanna buy a ticket. For one thing, I’ve seen it. Boy howdy, have I seen it. For another, my petty cash was feeling particularly petty that night. There’s probably a third thing. I didn’t want a ticket. I sure as hell didn’t want the booth jockey to smell my breath and wrinkle her pretty little pierced nose like her opinion kept the lights on. I didn’t wanna sit fifth row centre in a chair whose springs would leave red half-moons on my arse by the end of that self-indulgently long barely-a-movie. I did want the cheap pus-yellow port wine they make up on Miranda out of callowmilk, freeze-dried coca, grapes that once sneezed in the general direction of France, and whatever else is lying around the floor for flavour. Popcorn alone won’t pay the rent on Caroline Street. I did want to sit in the clammy warmth of that god-awful cathedral-arched candy-cane decoglass theatre, under the headless, broken saltrock cherubs and breadcoral mermaids holding up the sconces on the wall, the threadbare peacock curtain, the greened brass EXIT sign.

And I did want to see her.

I didn’t want to watch her. But I wanted to see her. The way you want to see an old friend, or an ex-lover you hope is miserable without you. Fix her coffee and listen to her troubles, make concerned faces and sympathetic mooing noises in all the right places while she gets bitter and hot as the coffee. But all the while you’re sizzling with excitement; your heart’s a champagne burn. Her sorrow tastes fantastic. It’s a sorrow for savouring, and when she wants to spend her despair in your bed, you’ll say no, and that’ll taste fantastic, too.

That’s why I slunk into my seat instead of showing up where I shoulda been. Rigorously ignoring the five or ten other sets of eyeballs in that dank cave of a theatre. Barely able to get my yammering heart or my pickled gut under control. Leaning forward like she’d notice me if I got far enough in her face. Like she was a schoolteacher who’d choose somebody out of the shiny row of brats spelling furiously for her pleasure and love the kid who had the right answer best of all. Except, I didn’t have it. Nobody did. But nobody felt bad about that the way I did.

Nobody was supposed to know how to spell “Venus” but me.

I stopped breathing when the lights went down. Gripping the arms of my seat like the paws on a claw-foot tub, my nails going right down into the damp wood. The breadcoral broads up on the wall leered down, acting out the birth of the Titans, I think, their rough carrot-coloured arms full of lights and tiny monsters with tails and feathers and snouts. Two rows up a fella took off his hat. A head already moved rhythmically up and down in his lap. Before the credits! Have a little class!

She came on-screen eyes first. The sight of her irises slammed into me like a pair of heart attacks. I felt the port wine come up, harsh sulphur bile in the back of my throat. I smelled a storm of phantoms: cacao-fern, burnt coconut bark, the terrible copper-sugar whip of a faraway sea. My wrists throbbed. The opening music jangled in my ears, a nauseating player piano going fifteen rounds with my one working eardrum. Her face: fifty feet high.

She is a planet. She is the sun. She is the only woman in the world. She is so young. She is adjusting the camera in a self-indulgent little bit of metafilm that always made me embarrassed for her. I hate her and I am hard and I am sick and I adore her and I want to fuck her and I want to tear her apart and I want to save her and I want her to tell me it’s all okay and I am ten years old again and nothing bad has happened yet. I turned to the empty seat next to me and threw up onto the floor of the Astor, a milky, mewling splash of stomach juices and Miranda’s best, my head moving rhythmically up and down. No one cared. It was for someone else to clean up.

I couldn’t stand looking at her anymore. I used to do nothing else. I lived to stare at her. I worked enough to eat enough to look at her. Every image; any image. All of them. And there were always so many to choose from. I could sit down to a banquet of her and gorge myself. On some nights I might even have started with Self-Portrait—it’s such a rookie’s flick, a young wine, untried, raw, too afraid of the palate to use it well. But then I’d pull back, pace myself, nibble on her cameos in her old man’s films: a little baby in an interplanetary stagecoach beset by pirates, a cherub devil besetting a nun’s big, bright soul. A quick salad of red carpets and Percy’s home movies before gobbling down another of her features. Always keeping Venus for last, always putting off Radiant Car as long as possible, always dreading that first savage moment when she and I shared the stage. Not yet, not yet. First a soup course of interviews and newsreels—I always liked to end with the last interview.

You’ve seen it. Who hasn’t seen it?

The sacrificial not-even-close-to-a-virgin laughing in a soft grey chair, wearing long silk trousers and a dark scrap of Tritonic fabric flung over her shoulders. It hides her breasts, binds them down something breathless, but shows her belly, and she’s just so languid, so unconcerned, gesturing with a cigarette in a long black holder. A party wheels around her. Hartford Crane kisses her hand while the Grenadine sisters dance in shimmering sheaths nearby. Torn-out ransom letters of her talk flash on-screen between the dancers and the champagne like cut sequins spilling all over the floor as the night grows wild and thick.

It’s her eulogy. She gave it herself and no one’s ever managed better. Recorded on sound equipment that must have cost more than the house she drank in, sewn together to make a good monologue from whatever she said before Annabelle August collapsed into her lap in a tangled heap of long limbs and giggles and blue pearls and she lost interest in anything else.

I know her pearls were blue, though the film shows only smooth grey. Sometimes the things I know are of no use at all.

Oh, I’m not famous. Don’t laugh! I’m not being disingenuous. I have money, and my father is famous, but that’s not the same thing as being famous, and that isn’t the same thing as being good, or being good at anything. That’s just people knowing your name and what you wore on Tuesday. I didn’t deserve any of that. It was pure chance that I was born in that place and at that certain time—and, unbelievable! Really, all those mothers! I think it needs a rewrite or two to make it relatable. I’ve tried to make good on that wholly unfair premise. But I haven’t yet. Famine Queen, you say—sure—and The Sea. Yes, those are certainly films I made. But they’re nothing. Journeyman stuff. I took a camera along while I saw the solar system. No better than half the lens freaks are doing, and worse than some. This one, though. When I think about Radiant Car, my heart hurts. Like the movie is already done and showing inside me, projecting onto the inside of my skin, flickering on the white screens of my bones. As long as I don’t fuck it up. As long as I don’t, then maybe, when I’ve come back and we all know what happened out there in Adonis, when I can sit in this chair and tell you about everything I saw, everything I felt, what the seas of Venus smelled like—well, then maybe we can talk about fame. Because to me, famous is only worth shit if you’ve earned it through the work of your hands, and I haven’t earned anything yet. I feel like I can almost touch the edge of goodness. But not yet, not yet. Come find me in two years. Maybe then I’ll be worthy of you.

I loved to hear her say those words. Come find me in two years. Half a year’s shooting, plus transit to and from and post-production back home. I watched with my face so close to hers, waiting for her to say she’s nothing yet. She’s nothing yet because she hasn’t met me. Just a rich, beautiful girl—and there she is, saying flat out that she’s not worthy of me or even good. Her words taste like whiskey and oh, how the bouquet improves when you play them back over a long shot of her rocket disappearing in the sky, becoming a punctuation mark in that last, sad sentence.

Her flicks packed the nickelodeons and wrapped the streets three times round. Weeks before her movies opened, buskers and salesmen would camp out on the thoroughfares beside every theatre, selling genuine cells she touched with her own hand and replica spangled cages from Self-Portrait, sized just right to hold a gravity-challenged male of Saturnine extraction. Why? Why all that crass excitement? I still can’t figure it out. Her father was Percival Unck, a brooding, notorious director in his time. Made a heap of sweaty gothic dramas full of wraith-like heroines with black, bruised eyes and mouths hanging open in horror or orgiastic transcendence or both. Her mother was probably one of those ever-transcendent actresses, though which one it was, the man kept to himself. Each Unck leading lady became, by association and binding contract, the poor kid’s mother. You can see in her flickering, dust-scratched face the echoes of a half-dozen fleeting, hopeful actresses, some still famous, some easily forgotten except in the odd mood flashing across their daughter’s lean features, her cryptic glances, her scornful, knowing grin.

She washed her hands of Daddy sometime between Famine Queen and The Sleeping Peacock. Her film debut in The Spectres of Mare Nubium is charming, if you go for the cute kid shtick. During the famous ballroom sequence where the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, Severin can be seen picking at the pearls on her bonnet and rubbing at her makeup. The legend goes that when the great man tried to stick eyeshadow on his girl and convince her to pretend to be a Schirm relation while a hungry shade—a young Maud Locksley, no less—swooped down upon the innocent child, she looked up exasperatedly and said, “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”

And so she would be, only herself, forever and always. As soon as she could work the crank on a camera by her lonesome, she set about recording “the really real and actual world” (age seven) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale” (age twenty-one) and declaring her father’s beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double-exposure drivel.” Her second documentary, The Famine Queen of Phobos, brought that blasted little colony’s food riots to harsh light and earned her a Lumière medal, a prize Papa would never get his paws on. Maybe that was it. She told the truth once or twice, and she told it with a bleeding head and a broken arm: Old Mummy Earth is a mean drunk, and she doesn’t look after her babies too well.

When asked if his daughter’s fury in the face of fiction ever got to him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said, “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”

Of her final film, The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, only four sequences remain. They’re all badly damaged. Everybody copies them, cuts them up and spits them out again into endless anaemic tell-all docs I wouldn’t wipe my feet on. The originals continue to putrefy in some museum in Chicago. More people than you’d think go there to watch them rot. I did. It was comforting. You plonked your head against the cool wall on a soft pink Midwestern evening that seems impossible when you’re freezing to death on Uranus. She flashes before your eyes: a sprite, a fairy at the end of a long, dark tunnel, smiling, waving, crawling into the mouth of the cannon capsule with the ease of a natural performer.

Sometimes folk recognize me, even this far out, from the old newsreels, though I never gave interviews and the lawyers haven’t let anybody show my face since ’51. I don’t like looking at myself on-screen. It’s what you call existentially upsetting: I am here and I am there. But I can’t chase down all the images of myself.

Here’s the short of it: A handful of people survived Unck’s Venus expedition, and I’m one of them. I don’t remember everything, and not everything I remember is important. My life, my life proper, began when a woman with short black hair and a leather aviator’s cap and coat crouched down in front of me and asked my name. The lost boy, the turning boy. I came back, and she didn’t.

Don’t think I’ve forgiven myself for that.

Now I watch. I’ve watched everything. I can’t stop watching. Waiting for the docs to show me just a little of her face; show her laughing; show her when she was a child, her arms stretched up, asking her father to lift her onto his shoulders, away from the chaos of adult feet and canes and slippers dancing to Mickey Hull’s latest ’dustrial-Charleston rag. Show me anything of hers. I’m as bad as any of them, begging to stare at her corpse for just one more moment—or, if not her corpse, the places where she once stood and stands no more. Tell me, invisible voice-over, voice of god and memory, tell me everything I already know. Tell me my life.

But her face was a slow poison to me. I knew it, I knew it, and I tucked in anyway, starving for her narrow, monkish, poreless cheeks, her eyes huge and sly and as black as her hair.

I can’t even say her name. She doesn’t have a name. She is she. She is her. She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one her in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not “no one.” I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one’s him.

Do you know what she does first in Self-Portrait? She smiles. She fucking smiles. And then she laughs. A sweet, wry little self-deprecating laugh. Like she’s embarrassed to be taking up so much space in the shot. Like she has stage fright. But she wasn’t. She didn’t. Nothing embarrassed her. Maybe she had stage fright when her ma first put a tit in her mouth, but never a day since. Offstage fright, maybe. She never knew what to do with herself if the camera wasn’t running. But the laugh says she’s embarrassed. The smile tells us she has butterflies. Oh, isn’t it a funny damn racket, to be in the flickies? Who, me? This old thing? I’m so nervous! Who needs a drink?

I haven’t earned anything yet.

Come find me in two years.

Her smile yawns up over me, black and white and enormous—and I knew, as only a man who’s stared at it until he ralphed into his own lap can know—entirely fake. It’s a good one, though. One of my favourites of hers. Full of the feral thrill that surrounded All Things Venus back then. People couldn’t get enough of that shitty little burg—the one world that made all the others possible. But it’s their smile, not hers. Look at her, look at her, don’t you see? She’s going to Venus. She smiles like people smile when they’re obsessed with Venus. It’s a smile like a trailer for the real thing.

But no, it’s too soon for that. I was drunk. I hadn’t slept in three days. When I think of her I see all her movies, all her faces, at the same time. Stacked up into orbit. But you can’t see what I see. I see the Venus smile, but it’s not there yet. This one’s a baby version of that nine-thousand-watt grin. It’s Face #212: Intrepid Girl Reporter. She hadn’t been to Venus yet. Venus always felt so obvious, she told me under the hot, wet stars of Adonis, when she didn’t think I could hear her. In Self-Portrait with Saturn, Venus was four movies and nine years away. Up there, she’s just a kid. Twenty-one. Sleeps like a dragonfly so she never misses a thing. Lovers like a revolving door. Drinks like she’s allergic to water. She’s barely a person yet. The girl in that decrepit print with a cigarette burn in the middle of her forehead like the mark of Cain and film scratches all down her cheeks doesn’t even know that Self-Portrait will be a hit. Better than a hit. It’ll make her name. Her name. Not her old man’s.

These’re things I know about her. These’re things everyone knows about her. It’s not fair that I should know as much as anyone who cares to pick up a magazine. I should know more. I should know it all. But you begin where you begin, and hope—even if hope is a pickpocket with both fists full—to go, somehow, further and higher.

Well, I began with her. And she began on-screen.

I hunt for likenesses between us. For places where, laid over one another, our topographies would match. Capital to capital. River to river. There aren’t many. I try to make more, but she’s done, finished, finite, and I am not.

And what about me? I don’t remember a damn thing before the age of ten. A man is nothing but memory, and by that count I was born on a burnt grass shore with a woman grabbing my wrist so hard she bruised me, a neat line of her four fingers on my skin, over my pulse, over my heart. A flash of light: fiat fucking lux. The smoky, acidic smell of the sea. Hot, pollen-drunk wind. A whirr and a clatter. I’ve been recorded since I was born. So has she. That great black eye got us good. I was born the minute I was noticed.

Before that there’s just a calm pre-credits wipe of darkness, nothing into nothing. There’s footage of my entrance; there’s footage of her exit. We’re each missing the other half. I only know my parents’ names because people who oughta know wrote them down for me. Her father sat astride her life. His name is her name. What luxury.

The fifty-foot woman winks. To no one. To me. To the hatless man and his orally-fixated buddy. To the Astor and Te Deum and the mermaids with their miniature Titans. But really to a solemn goatee’d bellhop in a blue cap who dutifully dropped the needle on an old phonograph so that we could all hear her deep yet somehow nasal voice echo loudly—too loud, too loud—in the theatre.

It hurt our ears. Everyone winced, straightened up. Hatless got his jollies interruptus. We all hated it. We all squirmed.

Nobody makes talkies anymore.

I could stand her face, but her voice did me to pieces. I heard her say the first words of her first movie and her first words to me all at once; and I’ve taken punches, I’ve taken gut stabs, but I couldn’t take that.

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, mineral 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!

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

SEVERIN UNCK

Daddy, why won’t the movies talk to me?

[PERCIVAL UNCK laughs and crouches down next to his dark-haired gamine child. His beard is thin along his jawbone. She pats the silk projection screen with her hands, imploring it to speak.]

PERCIVAL UNCK

Do you remember Uncle Freddy, from the Christmas party?

SEVERIN

He gave me a wind-up pony.

PERCIVAL

Yes. Well. Uncle Freddy has enough money to buy all the wind-up ponies you can think of, because his grandfather invented the moving picture camera and several other devilishly useful gadgets, plus a few things he didn’t really invent but told everyone he did anyway, including a machine that could record sound and make the movies talk.

[SEVERIN lights up, as though she expects that now her father will reveal to her a world of speaking movies she had heretofore been denied.]

PERCIVAL

Oh, my wee small baroness, don’t look at me that way.

[He takes his daughter in his arms. Her dress crinkles loudly as the petticoat brushes the microphone.]

PERCIVAL

Baby girl, do you remember the bandit in Thief of Light? How he wanted to keep everything locked away in his great lonely house, the crown jewels and the Miraculous Machine and Mina Ivy most of all?

SEVERIN

Yes, Papa. He was bad. And he had a mask.

PERCIVAL

Well, Uncle Freddy is like that. Only the crown jewels are audio patents, and the Miraculous Machine is a stack of colour film patents, and Mina Ivy is a world where a girl in a movie could sing to you in a red dress.

Self-Portrait with Saturn

(Tranquillity Studios, 1936, dir. Severin Unck)

(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 1, SIDE 1, COMMENCE 0:37)

SC1 INT. LOCATION #3 NAVIGATIONAL CABIN—DAY 483 AFTERNOON [3 SEPTEMBER, 1935]

[FADE IN: Pilot’s nave of the good ship Stone in Swaddling Clothes, 1600 hours. Six hanging lanterns are tuned to low afternoon. Portholes show the glittering ice flow of the Orient Express speeding before and behind: Earth’s affectionate nickname for the steady, stalwart currents and eddies of ether and frozen debris cradling the Swaddling Clothes in advantageous gravitational tracks and the kind of acceleration no engine could muster. Jupiter shines ahead: Grand Central Station. There the long silver craft will loop around and lurch forward with renewed, breakneck momentum, the final leg to Saturn little more than a controlled fall from Jupiter’s great height. But the giant planet is still small, no bigger than a lonely cellar light bulb in the distance. Readouts display all well. Lights pulse on and off, slow and steady, the heartbeat of the ship.

SEVERIN UNCK curls up in the plush astronomer’s chair with a globe of cider to suck and a knob of af-yun palmed in her large hand. A casual habit now, but one she will never quite kick. She chews tiny peels of it as she talks, carving them free with a dark fingernail. Most prefer to smoke it, but the fumes would interfere with the instruments. She wears a pearl-grey sari; her eyes sport heavy black shadow and liner thick as a zebra stripe. Her short hair has gone frizzy from the static charge in her cabin and she looks tired. Tired but excited. Scrupulously maintained shipboard muscles show in her arms, her stomach, and the stony calves she dangles over the arm of the chair. Exercise on Earth and exercise in transit do not make the same bodies. SEVERIN has spent half her life in the sky. There is a longness to her, a hyper-Vitruvian extension anyone would recognize. Her skin is the odd blue of all natives of Earth’s Moon, the natural result of long-term exposure to the colloidal silver present in the entire lunar water supply. It appears on black and white film as the distinct soft charcoal grey sported by every star and starlet since the first ingénue took a bow with the Earth rising behind her.

Nine months on the ice road this time. Only another fortnight to go. Nine months with the same twenty-seven souls: her seven-member skeleton film crew and the twenty-strong mummers’ troupe SEVERIN hoofed to Saturn as a show of goodwill to the locals. Entertainment is as dear as bread on the outer planets.

Her delivery is natural and thoughtful, as though she has just pulled up that velvet chair to have a chat with us. Almost out of frame, a multicoloured script rests on the floor of the nave. The original draft pages are white; new scenes and major edits are a range of colours: blue, red, green, gold, pink, lavender. On film, they all flatten to silver and black. She turns the pages with a casual, dangling toe. It’s a subtle movement, but it’s there. It has a rhythm. A little dance between her body and the script. Whatever we are about to hear, however casual it sounds, none of it is unplanned, unedited, or unrewritten from the first earnest pause to the last well of tears.

SEVERIN adjusts George’s aperture. Her face comes very close to the camera—we can see the bags under her eyes and the first lines starting at the corners of her lids. For a moment, it is possible to imagine what she will look like as an old woman. Satisfied, she slots a sound cylinder into place and rests her feet against the long-distance radio. The film fuzzes and judders with the motion of the ship as Severin records the opening monologue of her first and perhaps most personal film.

SEVERIN smiles.]

SEVERIN

I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system. I know, I know—who didn’t? But your own dreams always seem so special, so terribly yours, until you grow up and figure out they’re just like everyone else’s. How perfect and beautiful and silent and dead each planet hung in my heart! All nine names, written in squiggly, shaky handwriting, glowing inside me.

[FADE to a series of drawings. They are the works of a child, but an exceptional child, who might make something of herself someday. The beginnings of an understanding of chiaroscuro, a hard handle on perspective. A male hand turns each drawing aside. It wears a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. The child’s planets go by in schoolhouse order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars and the asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Forests stick out from the surface of the Moon like sunbeams; flowers ring Pluto like a doll’s curls. Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the eternal hurricane, glowers red on the face of Jupiter. The crayon strokes slash so deep they almost rip through the paper. Venus is pink and green and ringed with a hoop of whales joined tail to tail, a kindergartner’s idea of whales: big tails shaped like wide lowercase m’s, flumes spouting merrily from blowholes, jolly grins with disconcertingly human teeth.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

I imagined them all empty and waiting for me, gorgeous, radiant playground worlds: the red plains of Mars, Neptune’s engorged oceans, still pools in the jungles of Venus, Pluto’s lilies shining violet and white. They turned in the dark without sound, like a movie. No one lived there; no one could. When I stepped on them I would be the first, a pioneer-girl with a whip and a gun, like Vespertine Hyperia in the old radio dramas.

That notion lasted longer than it should have. When my father took me to Mercury for principal photography on The Hermit of Trismegistus, I reasoned that Mars still held herself pure for me. When he bundled Maud Locksley to Mars for Atom Riders of Ma’adim, I knew that Saturn, at least, would cast her rings around me and hold me close. When I got to the outer planets for the first time, well, no one even looked out the windows to see ringrise anymore. Someone snapped off a picture of me standing in the observation car and crying like an idiot. I’ve still got it pasted on the inside of George’s case. I look at it sometimes, try to really look. To remember everything I hoped the solar system would be. Self-portrait with Saturn. The photographer sold a copy of that miserable snapshot to Limelight and I hated myself for forgetting that I have never been unwatched, unwitnessed, unrecorded in my whole life.

[CUT BACK to SEVERIN, sipping from a cider globe. She looks out the porthole and speaks in profile. Dollops of ice cascade past. They look like stars, more like stars than the stars themselves. The camera can barely pick up those dim stellar pinpricks washed out by the greater light of the ship and a million glassy cold shards.]

SEVERIN

This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes. Pilot, lighting designer, director of photography, production assistant, sound engineer, astronomer, local guide. You pay Mr Edison through gritted teeth and try to recover your finances by launch. You choose good kids, strong and a little gullible and intrepid as Argonauts. You check their references and they’re just as bright and perfect as stained glass. You get them all in a tin can together, set the clock for nine months transit on a favourable orbital window, and pour out the last real bourbon you’ll see for a year. Settle in for a long sail in the dark. And the first thing your kids do when the cameras are off and our big dumb blue mama is drifting away in the portholes is lean in close with eager puppy eyes and say: Come on, Severin, you can tell us now—who’s your mother, really?

But it doesn’t matter, that’s what the rags don’t get. And my crew does read the rags, sucks them down like sweets.

Let me tell you something terrifying, instead.

When I was seven, I saw Mary Pellam in The Seduction of Madame Mortimer—do you remember that series? Madame Mortimer, lady detective, having lost an eye on Uranus in The Saturnine Solution, finally meets her match in the dashing person of the master criminal Kilkenny, known to me as Igor Lasky, actor, Lothario at large, and frequent occupant of our liquor cabinet and back bedroom. Oh, how I loved those murder flicks! And Madame Mortimer best of all, with her bouncing blond curls and cruel laugh and hidden pistols and leaps of pristine logic. Madame always got her man. This was after Clotilde Charbonneau left us quite bereft and ran off with Clarence Feng, darling of the Red Westerns. Papa and I were both disconsolate. And I looked at my father and I pointed at the screen and I said: I want her for my new mother.

And he got her for me.

It took almost a year of gentle, insistent courting to seduce Madame Mortimer for my personal use. But Mary Pellam moved in by Christmas and had taught me to shoot like a bandit queen by Easter. The night after my father put a ring on her finger I sat up quite late, thinking very seriously about what had just occurred. I could ask for anything and receive it. Even people. Even a mother. I had a terrible power. I could easily become a monster like Kilkenny. Monstrous in my appetites, and each of them satisfied without end. I was reasonably certain I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I’d never seen a movie about someone with power who turned out nicely. If you have something, well, you’ve got to use it. I cried myself to sleep that night. I had been given a destiny, and that destiny was to be a villain, when all I wanted was to be Madame Mortimer.

Mary Pellam was a good mum. She taught me the Four Laws of Acting, which she had made up over gimlets at the Tithonus Savoy one afternoon so she could make a little scratch teaching between MM features.

[SEVERIN breaks into a glossy imitation of Mary Pellam’s crisp Oxford accent.]

No one will listen to a word you say if you don’t gin up a System of some sort. Everyone loves a System. Laws, Rules, Keys. You can sell Laws. You can’t sell, “Just be good at this for God’s sake; I’ll need a drink if you’re going to keep on like that.” If there’s a System to follow, that means it’s easy—why, patting up a good strawberry tart is a harder job than acting! If only we had known all along! Jolly good we’ve got you to set us straight, Mary. Offer up a System and everyone relaxes.

Mother Mary’s been retired for a while now, so I won’t be stepping on her side gig if I reveal her secrets. Miss Pellam’s Four Immutable, Immaculate, Ingenious, Imitable Laws of Acting:

1. Show up on time.

2. Bring your own makeup.

3. If you’re going to sleep with someone on set, make sure it’s the director.

4. Remember that the expressions and vocal patterns you are committing to film will become synecdoches. That’s a big word for a little mouth like yours, Rinny. It means something little that stands in for something big. Your smile will stand in for all human happiness. Your tears will be a model for everyone else’s sadness. Wives will copy your red nose, your shaking voice, the shape of your aghast mouth when they beg their husbands not to abandon them. Rakes will arch their eyebrows the way you do, grin just like you, tip their hat at your hat’s angle, and, with the weapons you give them, they will seduce the folk of their choice with ease. The more successful your film, the wider these synecdoches will spread. You have a responsibility to the people who will repeat your lines, wink your winks, imitate your laughter without knowing they are imitating anything. This is the secret power that actors hold. It is almost like being a god. We create what it is to be human when we stand fifty feet tall on a silk screen.

So you’d better be good at it, for God’s sake.

Mary Pellam was pretty as a playbill and hard as a hammer, but she was a philosopher, too. I used to stand next to her in the upstairs bath and we’d practice our faces in the mirror.

Determined. Betrayed. In Love. Awed by the Numinous.

She had 769 faces in the bank, she said, and was working on Number 770. She kept a little notebook with a green velvet cover that had all her Systems inside. But she wouldn’t write in a face until she had it deep down, locked up and loaded into the bones of her face. As I was only little, I couldn’t be expected to have so many, but no time like the present! If I applied myself, I might have as many as twenty under my belt by the time school started in the fall. Try Number 123, Attentive Reporter. Or Number 419, I Know Whodunit but I Won’t Say Yet, No Sir. And Number 42, Is That for Me?, useful for class birthday parties and being asked to jump rope with the bigger girls. Don’t think school isn’t a movie set, kid. It’s the most cutthroat location you’ll find ’til you work for your father. You’ll be competing for roles and you won’t even know what they are, or when auditions are over and you’re stuck with what you’ve got. I’d shoot for Professional Understudy. That way you can move from clique to clique undetected. Play chess until you can beat the club champion—but don’t move in for the kill. Let her have her pride. Move on and learn how to outqueen the queen bee.

Pretend you’re Madame Mortimer, she told me. Perfect your disguise case and you can go anywhere.

I remember touching her green velvet notebook. It had a brass lock on the side. I thought it must contain everything you could ever need to know about being alive. I was sure Mary had a System for anybody I wanted to be somewhere in that book.

She and my father weren’t well matched, though. That’s what happens when you let your kid pick your wife. He’s lucky I didn’t pick the dinosaur from Attack of the Cryptolizards, a B-flick my Uncle Gaspard made on the cheap and I loved like most children love their blankets.

Obviously, Gaspard Almstedt wasn’t really my uncle. He was Ada Lop’s agent’s lover, which made him family. Eventually, Madame Mortimer packed up her things and moved on to her next case, citing a need to hunt down Number 771 on Neptune, where the gravity changed the whole muscle sequence of smiling. In her wake, my father fell hard for Ms Lop.

Ada Lop, born Adelaida Loparyova, got her start in the business as a ballerina, although she was never one of the pink and rose-scented set. [Footage of Ada Lop’s performance with the Bolshoi plays beneath SEVERIN’S words.] Instead she tore her tulle to pieces at the culmination of Giselle and streaked her body with ugly black paint like blood. She kept the paint in little packets sewn into her leotard until the moment at hand. The first time, this was rebellion on her part—a statement about the stagnation of the ballet world, performing the same handful of very pretty but stultifying shows on a long loop—but it caused such a storm that she was compelled by her directors to repeat it night after night, to increasing and passionate crowds. She repeated it until she hated it. Until the tears were real. Until her body revolted and developed an allergy to the pigment in her leotard, and she retired up to the Moon and onto the screen, as so many dancers did in those early days. It is now simply part of the ballet. You’d be hard pressed to find a Giselle mounted anywhere outside of Nekyia that does not conclude with a young woman doing serious damage to her costume. The Plutonians are all decadents, anyway: the planet of the lotus-eaters.

On the first morning of her new life as my third mother, still in her bridal nightgown, with her long hair falling down her back like black paint, Ada made me breakfast. Hard-boiled egg, bitter greens, Saturnine corncakes, and a thin, almost translucent slice of pink pork from the rooftop farms in Tithonus. She even let me have coffee. She poured it into a cup meant for one of my old dolls, then poured herself a much bigger cup. We both got cream, I got sugar, and Ada Lop looked at me with those famous gigantic dark eyes and asked me what kind of mother I wanted her to be. She was very frank that way. She just asked things and expected straight answers, even when they were inhuman, unrealistic, performative questions. She performed even her most intimate conversations. As if we were recording all the time. I suppose we were, which is probably why Ada lasted so long in our house. No one in the world talked out loud like Ada talked. Not even people in plays. It’s too hard to write. Embarrassing to everyone else, but nothing embarrassed Ada.

[SEVERIN’S voice deepens, a cigarette-voice, feathery and Slavic.]

What does love look like to you? What do you think a mother is?

I was ten and a half. I was ten and a half and she was asking me for stage directions. I said, rather churlishly: A mother is whatever a father isn’t. She’s a detective. She’s a bandit. She knows 770 faces. A mother is a person who leaves.

Honestly, Ada Lop was the best interviewer I ever met. She got you off your guard. She asked things nobody asked. You never got to know her, but she’d get every last drop out of you and in her cup. I always wear her wedding ring when I interview somebody. It has a black amber stone in it with a golden flaw, like an eye. And she did exactly as I asked. Whatever my father failed to do, she picked up; taught me how to fix a cannon and do my own taxes and do a perfect plié and that to perform, to really perform, you have to make yourself ugly at some point. Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.

There’s a fairy tale where all the good fairies come to bless a princess and give her something she needs. Beauty, a good singing voice, manners, skill at maths. But they forget to invite one fairy and so she curses the girl to die young and a whole heap of nonsense follows on—I don’t really care about the rest of it, it’s a just lot of overwrought handwringing about who marries who.

Point is, I didn’t have twelve fairies, but I guess I had seven.

[SEVERIN leans into the lens conspiratorially, inviting anyone and everyone into her confidence. Smoke curls around her face.]

I’m thinking of actually putting this stuff in the final cut. Everyone wants to know about my mothers, so why not lay it all out? But then I’d have to start over. From the beginning, because the beginning is where the end gets born. I suppose I could edit it back together so it looks like I started with Clotilde, which means starting with myself, with that morning and that doorstep and that ridiculous blanket. But that wouldn’t be honest. That wouldn’t be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it’s obvious where to start—BIRTH—and even more obvious where to stop—DEATH. Fade from black to black. I won’t have it. I won’t be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn’t living easy? Isn’t it grand? As easy as reading out loud.

No.

If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I’ve been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can’t. I can’t tell you that lie. That’s Dad’s game, and I’ve been sick of playing it since I was four.

If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I’m doing.

So. Act One, Scene One. Arriving shortly after Scene Two but well before the swelling Overture. We’ll get to the trumpets and the timpani when this big bullet fires into Jupiter orbit.

[SEVERIN rolls her eyes in disgust and runs her hand through bobbed hair full of split ends and static, scratching the back of her head, bashful. She pulls her knees up under her chin and watches the camera watching her. She peels a slice of af-yun from her ball and places it on her tongue like a Eucharist. A shower of ice shimmers outside the porthole ringing her head: a saint’s corona. The rest of her words play over exterior shots of the ice road intercut with old footage in which she is just leaving the frame: ice crystals; a girl running out the door of a soundstage; snowy seeds and pebbles; the back of her head as she burrows into a heap of costumes; frozen boulders, colliding and breaking apart, fracturing, bursting, tumbling through the dark. The Swaddling Clothes had to be kitted out prelaunch: fore, aft, two starboard and two portside cameras, each globed in a protective plasto-crystal lantern. The lantern warps the image slightly, fisheyes it so that we seem to see as we do when just waking: blurry at the edges, soft with frost and dust, only the centre of vision perfectly, painfully clear.

The flotsam dissolves to show their passage through the asteroid belt, never an easy slalom. Other ships pass by in the Orient Express, the ice road, the traffic jam of heaven, nearly clipping the corners of the swift, silent reef around them, sometimes just barrelling through and hoping for the best, streaming on undaunted, with dents buckling their hulls.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

God, when I record sound, I feel so alive. I feel excited about my work. I feel like Ada Lop when she first crushed a hundred little capsules of black paint against her breast. I feel ugly. I feel real. My voice is raspy and kicks around a low tenor from the af-yun. The dryness of our recycled air kicks it down a note or two from true and makes it squeak when it should flow on. It’s not a leading lady’s voice.

But it’s mine.

And fuck Uncle Freddy if he thinks he can keep me quiet.

Well, once upon a time I was a baby. Everybody was, but no one remembers themselves as babies. There is some line in the sand, some pole vault of sentience over which we suddenly begin to learn the trick of memory. It’s not innate—I don’t think so, at least. I think if you left a baby alone it would grow up on the crest of now, experiencing time like a lion: only this instant, only the hunt and the blood and the cubs and the mating and the long savannah full of prey. Nothing comes before you sink your teeth into skin and meat and marrow. Nothing will come after. Everything is always happening for the first time.

But what baby ever got left alone?

Not me, if that’s what you’re thinking.

I hate talking about how I was born. Obviously I don’t remember it. It’s a story that’s been told to me. We all start out with this lie. Our parents tell us the story of our beginning and they have total control of it. Over the years they change it—they know they’ve changed it, and we know they’ve changed it, but we just let them. They massage the details to reflect who we are now, so that there will be a sense to it: You are this because that. We gave you a blanket with birdies on it and now you’re a pilot, how lovely! All so that we think of ourselves as being in…not just a story, but a good story. One written by someone in full command of their craft. Someone who abides by the contract with the audience, even if the audience is us. Everyone loves a System. Everyone relaxes.

In my case, this is the literal truth. I have been an audience to my own life. I can verify most of the events because I have watched them happen on film. I am told that the first time I saw my father without a camera held up to his eye I shrieked with terror and confusion and would not be consoled. His camera was his household god: Clara, an Edison Model B II handheld 35 mm, painted pearl-white with silver inlay and a walnut tripod. Even when more elegant, lighter, less cumbersome cameras flooded the market, old Percy just took Clara’s guts and transplanted them into a new, sleeker casing, or vice versa. These days there’s probably nothing left of the original girl but a bit of glass and polish, but it’s still Clara to him. The only woman he was ever faithful to.

I began my life as a character in my father’s films. It’s mortifying, really. I appeared one morning as if from nothing. A spontaneous child. A mystery afoot! The commencement of plot! I was, in point of fact, dropped in a literal basket on the actual doorstep of one Percival Unck. A note tied round my neck with a black velvet ribbon, wrapped in swaddling clothes of pewter-coloured satin. Even the wicker basket was silver. And I was, too—I had been prepared to meet my father. My dark hair and dark eyes needed no help, but the rest of me had been painted as well: my blue skin tinted as white as death, my lips stained black with greasepaint, even my tiny fingers daubed as pale as a mime. I entered real life as monochromatic as a movie. And as archly, humiliatingly Gothic. I have been assured that the doorbell rang at the stroke of midnight and that there was a thunderstorm.

This was, naturally, by design. I wonder: if my absconding mother had not framed the scene just so, might old Percy have stuck me in an orphanage and never given the little gurgling wastrel at his feet another thought? I wonder if I’d rather that.

My mother vanished, as the genre requires her to do. She also would have been painted and dressed in shades of black and white and grey. Otherwise she’d never have gotten past the gate. Those were the days of Virago Studios. The rules were strict. No exceptions.

[Archival footage of the construction of Virago Studios, the soundstages, the colourisation barns, the set builders setting up shops like medieval blacksmiths.]

It was more a city than a studio lot. Virago is one of Artemis’s names, because heaven forbid anything on the Moon not get named after Artemis. Or Chang-e or Hathor or Selene. It means a maiden who behaves like a man. [SEVERIN grins impishly.] Maybe I was too hasty about foreshadowing. He built it far enough away from the Big Four’s territory that it felt safe, a place of his own outside sparkling, noisy, filthy, gorgeous Tithonus—Grasshopper City, my home and yet never home for a moment. Far enough for peace but not so far that anything Papa did at Virago would not be breathlessly reported upon. Lord, it was so much easier then. All money was new money, land was cheaper than beer, and you could build Versailles for a tenner. So he did. A city of sets and scenes and great glass greenhouses dressed to stand in for Mars in winter, Ganymede during Carnivale, Venus before we landed there. Our own house was formerly the mansion set for The Gods Alone Delight in Thunder. If you turned the wrong way, you’d run smack into a false wall, a staircase that went to nowhere, a painted window instead of a real one.

Back then it seemed so important to cover up the fact that living on the Moon turned us all blue as gumdrops. Who wants to watch a movie where no one looks like them? So in the early days they caked on the greasepaint like clowns so that everyone on Earth could rest easy knowing life offworld was just like life at home. Nothing weird out there, lovies, finish your tea! But Percy took it a step further. That’s all he ever does: go a step further, more ridiculous, more difficult, more absurd. So the Law of Virago was simple: No Colour.

Colours show up strangely on black-and-white film. You can’t be sure what that magenta bustle will look like on the final print. So Virago lived in black and white. And grey and silver and jet and charcoal. The makeup never came off. I was four before the sight of scarlet ceased to utterly paralyze me. I’d go stock-still with horror. The red could see me. It could get me. Of course I saw myself without makeup in the morning and the evening, but it didn’t help. I thought I was the only blue girl in the world and had to be covered up for the shame of it. If I opened my mouth, everyone would know that the red was already inside me. I was the very carefullest girl in Virago. No one would guess my secret.

I’ve never seen the note. That does seem odd to me. Of all the artefacts of my life, that one is surely the most important. I assume it shared the rather tawdry information that my father had gotten some hopeful little fool of an actress in trouble and wouldn’t he kindly do something about it; thank you, regards, sincerely. Perhaps some appropriate evidence of my provenance, as if my face—even then nearly identical to Percy’s sloping, lupine, dissolute mug—was not as good as a birth certificate. Perhaps some little pillow-joke they shared. Perhaps a name for my father to ignore.

I should like to see my mother’s handwriting. I should like that.

Vince found me. Vince brought me in out of the dark and the wet. Vincenza Mako, who never slept with my father but outpaced all the women who did by miles: She wrote his movies, every one. What’s the point of screwing somebody once you’ve gotten that close? It’s…redundant. Vince brought me in, kissed my forehead, read the note, and made the decision before Percy got downstairs. She opened her dress to hold me against her hot, greasepainted skin, out of the cold. I couldn’t stop shivering, but I didn’t cry.

[The footage of SEVERIN’S discovery in Virago plays under her narration.]

And Percival Unck, unable to stop being Percival Unck for even a single moment, made her do it all over again. Get the shot. It didn’t happen if it didn’t happen on film. No matter what else happens—hell and the resurrection and dinosaurs and comets—get the shot. He made poor Vince take me back out into the screeching storm and the rolling clouds and never you mind the rain and the lightning, just leave her there until I can get Clara and at least one good overhead light going. Yes, fine. Shut the door. We’ll add in the doorbell cue later.

It all happened again. This time, Percy opened the door to find the abandoned orphan daughter he had never known existed. [PERCIVAL raises his hand to his mouth. His eyes fill with tears.] Percy looked into Clara’s big black eye with an exquisite expression of shock, wonder, fear, and cautious, not-quite-believing joy. Percy gathered the shivering black-and-white bundle into his arms with a father’s instinctual protective gesture. [PERCIVAL brushes a stray tuft of dark hair from his daughter’s brow.] Then Percy, his own Byronic, Stygian hair plastered across his forehead by the deluge, gave one last gaze out into the street and the wind as if to say, By golly, the world is so terribly full of unlikely magic, before closing the door to the great house and opening the door to a new life. [A slow, tender, terribly vulnerable smile blossoms on the face of Percival Unck. He shakes his head. The rain pours down. He shuts a heavy door on the storm, bringing an innocent within.]

This is the version I’ve seen. I have watched it over and over. It is beautiful. It is right. It is full of hope for the future. It is perfect. It is a whopper of a lie.

Percy had to find me a mother right quick. It was the casting decision of a lifetime, as all the papers speculated wildly. He couldn’t raise that wee poppet all by himself, the poor man! A child needs a woman’s tender hands! And he could have his choice. Who wouldn’t leap at the chance to slot herself into that family portrait, to cradle the beautiful baby, to rest her hand possessively upon the elbow of the great man? A role had been written, the costumes made, the sets impeccable…he only needed a leading lady. Oh, but isn’t that always the trouble, though? An actress who can be nymph enough to interest the patriarch; mother enough to comfort the child; genius enough to build a kid from scratch to be that most elusive of creatures, the useful and interesting adult; fairy godmother enough to make the thousand magical woods and towers and castles of childhood appear at a snap of her fingers? File your headshots with the secretary, please. Form a line to your left.

But Clotilde? Clotilde wasn’t an actress. His first choice, and she couldn’t have delivered a line with conviction if God in Heaven cried action. Clotilde was no topless tart of Ilium. But she made a fine Airy Spirit, to say aye and thank him for his commands.

Clotilde Charbonneau is a box of photographs in my mind. She was gone before I started school and I recall her in bursts, flashes, frames, stills. Moments exploding in the recesses of my brain like lightning effects. I remember Clotilde’s furs. I remember Clotilde’s fingers. I remember Clotilde’s soft, throaty French consonants. I remember Clotilde’s hair, falling around me like the trees of a dark and secret forest. Hair like mine. Excepting Mary Pellam, Percy was always careful to make certain my mothers looked like me, could plausibly be mistaken for sharing my blood. They all had black hair, big dark eyes, and cheekbones like statues. He made sure I was never an alien; always a native in a nation where all the women looked like sisters.

When I think of Clotilde Charbonneau I am surrounded by blackness, by softness. She loved furs, and my father was delighted with an obsession he could so easily satisfy. Otter, stoat, mink, fox, sable, rabbit. Wilder still—Martian beaver, Ganymedean woodmonk, Uranian glacierfox. All black, infinite and uncountable shades of black. I remember closing my fists in her furs as though she were an animal and I were her cub. I must have seen her without her furs at some point, some pale slip of a thing beneath her panther skin, but I cannot recollect it.

But her fingers—oh, yes, the fingers of Clotilde Charbonneau! In all the monochrome kingdom of Virago, Clotilde’s fingers were rainbows. She couldn’t help it; she wore the silver paint we all did, but by the end of the day it always rubbed away and her colours showed through: saffron and rose and moss and robin’s egg and lilac and lemon.

Miss Clotilde was a colourist, see. Percy had scads of them; a whole army, really. Squirreled away in a great grey barn hand-colouring every frame of whatever opus he could not bear to realise in black and white alone. They are strange beasts, those prints. Their colours lie on top of the image like fitful lovers, unable to quite sink into the impermeable silver world of my father’s heart. The vampires from The Abduction of Proserpine soaked in wriggling red. Peachy-golden quivering angels in Trismegistus, their vapour trails ghosting green. Clotilde’s fingers were saturated in those poisonous inks. All the water on Mars couldn’t out that damned spot. She began wearing gloves when she moved in (black, obviously), but I saw her secrets when she put me to bed, for a child needs human touch and not leather, no matter how fine.

So after all the Moon’s most eligible ingénues had eaten Percival Unck’s cake and sipped his tea and exclaimed over the very special beauty and intelligence and character of his daughter, he pulled a twenty-two-year-old colourgirl out of his barn, put ermine on her back, and sat her in a nursery that spangled and glittered like New Year’s Eve, every surface covered in silver and glass and white and shimmer. Because she was the best painter he’d ever met. Because she liked to drink and swear, even though she looked like the kind of girl who never would. And because she told him that she’d never see a single one of his movies in a theatre, for she’d seen them all already, flowing, frame by frame beneath her hands, and she liked the stories she made up in her head better than anything the dialogue cards could say. Fill her in like a new frame, Percy whispered to her. Make her red and green and peachy-golden. Trace the woman she’ll be around the child she is like indigo round grey. Make her leap off the screen in better colours than the real world has ever met.

Clotilde eventually tired of inking Uncks, both celluloid and flesh, in anonymity. I can’t blame her. She left us after The Majestic Mystery of Mr Bergamot premiered. I cannot imagine what an iron-sided soul she must have had to be the first to leave my father. To tell him no. The last words she said to me in that mirror-ball nursery weren’t even her own words, but they’re the only ones I remember her saying to me. It was a quote from Mr Bergamot.

[SEVERIN’S voice goes soft and tired, vanishing down into Clotilde’s Marseilles accent.] Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.

Funny thing about Clotilde. She remarried-didn’t even take long to manage it. To a Battersea backdrop artist indentured to Oxblood Films. Practically every forest and starscape and lonely moor you’ve ever seen were his, excepting the ones done by her after she signed on to his contract. His name was Felix St. John.

[SEVERIN extends her hand offscreen and pulls ERASMO ST. JOHN toward her. He perches delicately on the arm of the navigator’s chair, incongruously graceful for a man of his size. He kisses her; they grin at each other.]

ERASMO

Which mum are you on?

SEVERIN

I’d only just got through ours. But I already did Mary and Ada. It’s a little jumbled at this point.

ERASMO

Ah, then it’s Amal next, is it? Number Four.

SEVERIN

Queen of the Tigers. I’m impressed you remember.

ERASMO

[He reaches out, tucks her hair behind her ear.] I know your life story cold. It’s like the twelve days of Christmas. Five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and Amal Zahara the Tiger Queen.

SEVERIN

She was the animal wrangler on The Virgin of Venus. Almost as tall as you.

ERASMO

You first saw her leading six tigers to the set, dressed as a squid-princess so that she could direct the animals without seeming out of place in the shot. She had on a crown of tentacles and stars. The alpha tiger was called Gloucester.

SEVERIN

I was twelve. She let me ride him home. He had fur like a chimney brush and he licked my face all over.

ERASMO

Your father loved her selfishly for once—for himself, for herself—and they were happy. The tigers moved in. She refused to dye their fur. They were a constant, cheeky orange eyesore in Virago.

SEVERIN

Ravens, too. And parrots who could all say one line of Chekhov each, but nothing else. A brace of black bears; four peacocks; two pythons; an albino deer; a komodo dragon; several lynx; seven ponies; and a tame, elderly kangaroo.

ERASMO

They all had something wrong with them. The albino deer, the aged kangaroo, one of the bears was missing an eye…Which one?

SEVERIN

Gonzalo. Trinculo had had his hind foot mashed in a trap.

ERASMO

The peacocks were deaf. The pythons had eczema. Half the ravens had broken wings and the other half couldn’t stop imitating babies crying. Gloucester had a stomach condition and could only eat meat ground up to slurry and mixed with milk, which Amal fed him by hand three times a day.

SEVERIN

The komodo dragon—Andromache—seemed all right at first. The only one of the lot fitted out for life in this world. But she fixated on Percy. Wouldn’t leave him alone. Insisted on sleeping with the pair of them every night or else she’d put up this terrible hue and cry, keening like a broken trumpet till they relented.

ERASMO

You tried to learn that cry.

SEVERIN

But they wouldn’t let me sleep with them.

ERASMO

Amal collected broken beasts.

SEVERIN

So naturally she collected us. The tigers slept in my room when they weren’t working. When I had tea parties, only tigers were invited.

ERASMO

Amal was the first person in your life who didn’t slather you with attention.

SEVERIN

[laughing] Hey.

ERASMO

Hey yourself. Not even six tigers could give you enough attention to let you rest easy. Hey, let’s talk about you a little more, and then we can address the issue of whether or not the world revolves directly around Severin Unck. I like Amal. I’ve never met her, but I like her. She had her zoo and she was in love with Percy and she treated you a little better than the deaf peacocks but not quite as well as Gloucester the tiger. You didn’t need your meat slurried, after all. There’re whole weeks when you were that age where there’s no film of you at all.

SEVERIN

Don’t let Percy hear you say that.

ERASMO

I like thinking about a version of you that doesn’t look for a camera all the time.

SEVERIN

Amal said once that I needed her tigers more than I needed a mother. That I had all the wildness of a plate of cheese. And a little tiger shit was good for a girl who lived in a fairy tale.

ERASMO

[His smile is enormous, frank, warm.] I can be a tiger if you want. What big teeth I’ve got.

SEVERIN

[ignoring him] She left anyway. One of the younger tigers, Cortez, bit off most of her hand when they were doing The Jupiter Circus. She was putting the bellhop’s hat on him and he just took it off at the wrist. No matter how you think you know a beast, she said in hospital, no matter how much love you’ve spent on him…then she waggled her stump. But she had an extra-wide bed brought into her room so that Cortez could lie next to her while she recovered. He rested his big old head in her lap and never moved from her side. She slept with her good arm around his scruff. Percy didn’t come to visit once. I suppose a twelve-year-old can’t begin to guess what goes on inside a marriage, most especially a marriage primarily concerned with lenses and the half-tamed. But when Amal got her clean bill of health she went to her chalet on Mount Ampère and sent for the rest of her animals.

ERASMO

Except two.

SEVERIN

Except Gloucester. I found him sprawled on my bed with his belly ready for scratching and a note round his neck that had instructions for his slurry on one side and on the other: No matter how much love you’ve spent.

ERASMO

And?

SEVERIN

[laughs softly] And Andromache. I bet she was sprawled on Percy’s bed, too, cooing and flicking her tongue at the pillows. Sometimes I think Amal was having a last joke at his expense. Percy complained about Andromache noon and night, but he grudgingly gave her soft-boiled eggs at breakfast when she came nosing at his bathrobe and called her a hell-bitch just like he called me sweetheart. I caught him rubbing her nose just once, and he looked ashamed of himself. But really, I think Andromache would have lain down and died if she’d been parted from her Percival. I think Amal left a lizard in lieu of a wife.

ERASMO

And then Faustine.

SEVERIN

[Her eyes take on a faraway, clouded expression. She chews on the inside of her cheek.] And then Faustine, my fifth mother. She only lasted a year. Opera singer. She started out a soprano, but she was an alto by the end. Chest like a barrel of bourbon. Everyone adored her. She was like laughter turned into a person.

ERASMO

And a baleen addict.

SEVERIN

Well, who isn’t? [SEVERIN peels a rind of af-yun with her fingernail and sucks on it ruefully.] But Faustine grew up on Venus. I’d never met anyone who’d been born on Venus. I thought she was magic. A real life Vespertine Hyperia come to live in my house and lie on my bed and tell me tales of pirates on the callowseas. Her parents were divers, then homesteaders. She floated in callowmilk in utero—literally. Her mother tapped a huge lode on one of the outer whales when she was six months along. We think it’s in everything here, but on Venus…on Venus it is everything.

ERASMO

Baleen, though…

SEVERIN

I know. A lady can smoke her af-yun on the steps of the Actaeon and still be called a swan in girl’s clothing, a gift to man and the stage. It’s delicate, pure callowmilk, nothing added but a little cacao-butter, a little ergot, a little cocaine. A drawing-room vice. Baleen is the whore’s luncheon. Have you ever seen a piece of baleen? When you’re married to my father you can afford the best. She had it brought in on a jade tray every morning. On a piece of black lace. It looks like a white piano key. About that long, about that thick. It snaps like cold chocolate. Smells like Monday laundry. Raw callowmilk protein cut with soya, industrial bleach, sugar cane, a dash of oleander, a whiff of boric acid, and a healthy lashing of heroin.

ERASMO

She gave it to you.

SEVERIN

Well, of course she did. I was fourteen. Do you have any idea what a fourteen-year-old girl will do to be loved? I wasn’t any kind of innocent at fourteen—she didn’t corrupt me. If you could pour it down your throat or stick it up your nose, I had managed to get my hands on it and give it a go. Percy didn’t care. Experience, he said. Experience is the only reason and the only master. I asked Faustine one afternoon what Venus was like. She put a stick of baleen in my hand and said it’s like this, baby girl. I ate it and curled up into my tiger and went to Venus with my mother.

ERASMO

And what was it like?

SEVERIN

It was like being inside a star. Like a star turning on inside of you. And then Faustine sang and that was like a star, too. A blue one sizzling down the dark alongside the red star of me. I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I went to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered: I know it, baby. I see it, too. That’s my insides coming out. Sometimes I see it so clear I pull back my feet to keep my shoes clean. But that’s what it looks like when you’re doin’ okay up there. Maybe you’ll do okay someday and I’ll get to see your guts blown out. That’d be nice. Wouldn’t that be nice? And then she put her head in my lap and died. Miss Faustine had so much baleen in her stomach that it backed up her works and she was poisoned to death by her own fluids.

[SEVERIN and ERASMO are quiet for several seconds. The displays tick on, lights faithfully flickering like candles.]

Araceli Garrastazu came after that. The femme fatale, Mary Pellam’s opposite—the perfect witch-seductress for my father’s every overwrought phantasmagoria. I barely knew her. I was running with whatever wolves would have me by then. The colours of Tithonus beat grey Virago every time. I didn’t want to act, but I slept with producers anyway; Gloucester and I danced on the carousel boats every weekend with my father’s rivals and I took girls and boys to my cabin on endless ugly promises of introducing them to Percy: Yes, of course, darling, he’s just dying to find the next big thing and you’re so lovely. You’re devastatingly talented. You’re perfect. You’re perfect. Until that horror show with Thaddeus Irigaray. That turned off my faucet, I can tell you. And by then Araceli was off to reinvent herself on the radio. [SEVERIN strokes her throat with her hand, a throttling, effacing gesture.] We’re almost done, aren’t we? Lumen’s left. Lumen’s my mother now, lucky number seven. She’s the reason I’ve got a boatload of circus with me. I love her. I love Lumen Molnar for everything she is not. I love her because she is nothing like me. I love her because she has never been to Venus. I love her because she has only one face. I love her because she is at this moment having supper in the cantina with Maximo and Mariana and Augustine and Gloucester. Because she came with me. Come with me, and I’ll love you until Jupiter burns out and the callowhales speak.

[SEVERIN clutches ERASMO’S arm. Her nails dig in. But she speaks to the camera.]

Do you want to know the truth about my mother? She was wonderful. She was kind. She never left me. She tucked me in at night and woke me in the morning. She played with me every day and she never missed a recital or a bedtime story.

Her name was Clara.

She could hold just under 150 metres of film at a time.

Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!

Limelight, 20th February 1933

Editor’s Note: The Iron Hand of Edison

A simple rule, enforced simply:

Movies don’t talk.

But whose rule is this? What Moses came down from the mount with such a thing engraved upon his personal stone?

Surely, our current state could not have been the shining future meant by those early masters of light and sound. It is Edison’s rule, enforced not by the Burning Bush but by Lawyers Burning for Their Fees. The name of Edison has become synonymous with the dastardliest of business practices, the most crushing arrogance. It stains the whole family, from Thomas Alva, who collected patents like baseball cards, to Our Present Edison, who continues such draconian strategies that he has, single-handedly, retarded the progress of motion picture technology by fifty years.

Your humble host has taken out editorials of this sort before. My readers must forbear. Given the upcoming Worlds’ Fair in the glorious metropolis of Guan Yu, overlooking the glittering shores of Yellowknife Bay on our dear sister planet of Mars, the very first to be hosted offworld, what better time can there be for Mr Franklin R. Edison (Freddy to his friends) to release his patents’ vice grip on reel, recording, and exhibition equipment and allow talking pictures to run wild and free? That is, after all, the natural state of technology. And so it was, once upon a time. Before the right to speak, the privilege of the voice, became the property of one man, to give and take away as he pleases.

Places, Everyone!, 14^th April, 1933

Editor’s Note

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. That’s how the song goes. It does not go, In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the Patent Office and the Word could only be afforded by God. In the early days, for a brief moment, the wealthiest of studios and directors—and of course, governments—could afford the exorbitant fees demanded by Edison and his descendants for the use and exhibition of films. For a dim, glimmering moment, the great epics of Worley and Dufresne crackled with orchestras and soliloquies. But it did not last.

One must praise the independents, who simply ignored Edison and continued to make beautiful silent movies, more advanced and complex and heartbreaking than any throwaway studio talkie stinking up the summertime. I remember it: how slowly, then less slowly, sound ebbed away. Sooner rather than later, for an actor to talk on-screen became the mark of the Sellout—someone with deep enough pockets to pay Edison’s blood price. No True Artist, no Work of Quality, no Real Film would be caught dead making that kind of obnoxious noise. And bit by bit, the Big Boys on the Moon copied the starving artists so that they could convince the public of their Authenticity, their Great Aesthetic Merit, so that they could butter their bread on both sides. We are the People’s Entertainment! Bang, Smash, Yell, Crescendo! No, wait! We are Radical, Envelope-Pushing Artists! Hush, Hush, Soft Now. Win awards, stuff cannons with cash, bask in acclaim—and, hell, it saves money not having to deal with the devil in a back room, dithering over the price of a microphone.

And thus we find ourselves in an upside-down land where the technology exists, works beautifully, has even advanced—for no Edison can keep his hands to himself for long—but no fashionable soul would be caught dead using it. Men stand astride our world and call out: STOP. The System Works. They ask that everything stay the same forever, for Sameness is Profitable. Our Man Freddy E still bleeds filmmakers for exhibition rights, and we may all look the other way while he rolls piggily in his piles of lucre. Time passes, and we become accustomed to the status quo. Theatre Speaks, Vaudeville Sings, Radio Yammers Away Nonstop, but the movie hall is quiet as a church. Time passes, and audiences drink in this Truth with their mother’s milk. I have seen with my own eyes the recoil of audiences when faced with some flickie that sliced up its producers’ hearts at Edison’s golden table for the right to let poor Hamlet ask his famous question instead of staring dumbly at a plaster skull and waiting for the title card to do his job for him. Today’s moviegoer will get up and leave, convinced he has been swindled, rather than listen to a human voice.

What could it cost Friend Freddy to, quite simply, let us speak?

And yet, and yet. There is beauty in silence. I do not believe a film like Saul Amsel’s Bring Me the Heart of Titan would have been made in a world where every film chattered on to its contentment. What of The Moon of Arden? The Last Cannoneer? If I were to turn back the clock and pluck Fred Edison from his ill-gotten celluloid throne, I should lose these reels which wrapped my heart three times round. He has bound us to Prometheus’s rock—but have we not made friends with the eagle? Have we not learned to love life without our livers?

The Worlds’ Fair is a time of brotherhood and goodwill. It is an expression of Progress and Marvels of Modernity.

Let me put it baldly: Mr Edison, get out of the way.

Halfrid H

Editor-in-Chief

I am not willing to relinquish the rare and rough magic of our silent movie halls. They are silent as a church, yes. Because they are churches. Yet I am no less willing to never hear the dreary Dane fail to decide his own fate. For him, the question will ever remain: To be or not to be? For us, it is: To speak or not to speak?

I myself can put nothing baldly, for I feel quite hirsute on the matter, tangled, knotted. But I will say: Mr Edison, you have exiled us to an uncanny country of the mind. We cannot love you for it.

Algernon B

Editor-in-Chief

Look Down

Look down.

Across the stage of your skin. The graceful proscenium of your clavicle, your shoulder, the long bones of your arms. The apron of your gentle belly. The skene of your skull, where all the gods and machines hide away, awaiting their cues, clanking away in their cases, puffing smoke and longing. Look down; something is happening on your navel, your omphalos, your knotted core of the world. You cannot feel the light playing over your skin, but you prickle with gooseflesh anyway. Light has no personal temperature. But your body knows instinctively that light is cold. The idea of light, the narrative of light. Light will chill you blue. The trickster hemispheres of your brain insist that the flickering images do have weight; they press on you like greyscale fingers, corpse fingers, angelic fingers, unworlded hands. The touch of images alters you—it must, it cannot help but. And more than touch you, these pictures, these maps of illumination enter you. Photons collide with flesh; most reflect, some penetrate. You carry them inside you. You carry them away and far.

You feel them, though they cannot be felt. You shiver, though there is no cold. You take them inside you, though they asked no permission.

It feels like breath. A breath spent long ago, arriving only now.

Severin’s face dissolves into another. This one is more beautiful. Anyone would admit that. It possesses the pressed-moth-like quality of a person born, through sheer chance, with precisely the face that her era prized. It’s too delicate and arch for our modern tastes. Too crafted, too distinctly feminine to suit our current rage for the androgyne. The small, sullen, Christmas-bow mouth. The immense, slightly wounded eyes. The pale hair curled like a statue of Apollo, crowded close in to her heart-shaped head. The perfect and somehow vaguely perverse jut of jaw. Her eyebrows spring high, high, high, like parentheses over the sentence of her face—a sentence that goes, “Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death.”

This is Mary Pellam. The Moon’s Sweetheart. Ingénue for Hire. Seventeen years of age, in her first significant role: Clementine Salt, heiress with a pistol in her petticoat. Meet Me On Ganymede (dir. Hester Jimenez-Stern, Capricorn Studios, 1908), in which Miss Pellam appears on-screen for a scant four minutes, one and one half of which she spends shut into a stasis cask, banging on the glass with her fists like a Snow White who hasn’t read the script. But she quite makes off with the picture. She will work steadily but not spectacularly in the maiden mill after Ganymede, her look too innocent for villainess roles, too cherubic for the fallen woman. In distress and out, she remains an upstaged damsel until wrinkles sign her resignation letter. Only then does her career really crack off. With a Hamburg hat and an eye patch she will become Madame Mortimer, greatest detective on nine worlds. With a shot through the eye of a villain she enters our concerns.

Mary’s smile is a spotlight—whomever it lands upon becomes brighter, becomes more real.

It lands upon us.

The Ingénue’s Handbook

Begun 20 August, 1908, Quarter to Three in the Afternoon

By Mary Alexandra Pellam (Age 17)

Grasshopper City, Luna

I have come to the Moon to make my fortune!

Good Lord, isn’t that what all the girls say? And the boys and the richies and the paupers and the grifters and the real damn artistes and the homesteaders and the silver panners and the writers and the vaudeville has-beens and the bank men and the gangsters and the patrons—oh the patrons! You be sure to call them patrons, missy, while they’re patting your knee and sweating through your skirt—the old perverts and the young ones, too. A chickie hates to be cliché, but the minute you set foot up here, on this rock that’s nothing but one big studio set, you figure out right quick that clichés sign your checks and tuck you in at night. Come on up to wardrobe, honey, we’ve got a belt-sander to take care of any originality you might not have checked at customs. No problem.

I didn’t need much work, truth be told. I could’ve come off a showroom floor. The Latest and Greatest Model, Shined and Sheared and Shipped First Class, Perfectly Engineered and Industrially Lathed to Factory Specs! Get One Now, Before the 1909s Come In!

That’s me. I’m not ashamed of it. It gives me a good giggle. I am the Girl. I barely need a name. Every audition is a room full of rose-faced cupid fodder, and they all look just like me, talk just like me. They’ve suffered just the way I have: enough to give the eyes a knowing slant, but not enough to ruin the complexion. And they all came to the Moon as freight, just like me.

Check my credentials if you have a care: Born Oxford, England, Earth, eighteen and ninety-one. Mama was a mama but she did something artistic-like so you can be sure I come by my ambitions honestly. Mine painted. She covered canvases with portraits of the prize roses in her garden, large and small, red and pink and coral and puce like shades of lipstick. Wild and tea and heirloom. Desperate, weeping things, they were. I’ll tell you something: when you see a Pellam rose blossom in close-up, three metres by three metres, it looks like a mauve monster. It looks like a mouth set to gulp you whole. Papa was a professor of linguistics. Helped to write the dictionary, did Pellam Senior. Gaze upon my childhood, O ye curious: I was built out of roses and etymologies.

Obviously I ran away to Camden Town just as soon as my nicely turned calves could carry me. No more dinners with those lurid leviathan gullets staring at my peas and potatoes with pointedly erect stamens. No more Greek origins of simple household words and I say, we’ve started in on the J’s this year and you know what that means: Jackals and Juggernauts and Jungles! Deriving respectively, of course, from the Sanskrit roots srgalah, “the howler,” jagat-natha, “the lord of the world,” and jangala, which, oddly enough, signifies “aridity.” Couldn’t you just scream?

I could. Because when you draw a really rotten lot in life, you stick it out, make your best, tighten your belt. But when your draw is just a touch irritating, just a squidge confining, well, you hightail it and right quick. I’d have been good and goddamned if I was going to end up painting roses like my life depended on it in some snivelling doctoral candidate’s hut. Oh, but you didn’t stay in Camden! Not if you could help it. Not if you were a Girl Like Me.

No, in those days—and by those days I mean these days, and by these days I mean all the days to come—it was the heavens or nothing at all. If you had a brain to rub against a lust for something better than shabby old Earth and her crabby old empires, you were saving up for a rocket or already long gone. It was fifty years on from the great train robbery perpetrated by Master Conrad Xavier Wernyhora and his big sister Miss Carlotta Xanthea, a couple of Australian-born Polish kittens run off from the Hobsons Bay rail yards with spare parts, lunch, and a working knowledge of engineering to set off their little cherry bomb in Hawaii, where the equator loves us and wants us to be happy. I used to draw pictures of that first fabulous ship in my schoolbooks. The Tree of Knowledge, shot out of a bloody circus cannon, a snug capsule with their handprints on it in gold paint. It carried Conrad and Carlotta all the way up here to the Moon, crash-landing through a genteel sort of gravity into…well, just about where I sit, where the Savoy in Tithonus now stands, with the silver-choked shores of Mare Nubium in sight.

It’s a fair bit nicer now, with pistachio meringues, a nice pot of white-tips, and a waiter with a rear that I daresay won’t quit. Although I’ve not developed a taste for creaming my tea with callowmilk yet, I’m sad to report. It’s just not right. Milk shouldn’t taste like much of anything but vague thickness and sweetness. Callowmilk has a spice to it. A tang. I expect I shall learn to savour it soon enough. I need it, after all. We all do. Slaves of Venus where the callowhales lie silent offshore and ooze. Without callowmilk we couldn’t stay. It’s a matter of density, see. Skip the cream in our tea and our bones would go as light as hat-straw within a year or two and we’d keel over with a sad Irish slide whistle. So I stir and stir and stir and it still tastes positively beastly.

Once upon a time I played Conrad and Carlotta with the neighbour boy, the son of a lowly junior lecturer in astronomy and therefore utterly delicious with the frisson of slumming it. I do not imagine Conrad and Carlotta did half the things in their capsule that I did in the peach trees with…oh, what was his name? Lucius. Or Lawrence. Lawrence! From the Latin Laurentius, meaning from the city of Laurentum, near Rome.

Well, I missed the first big rush. One always does. The good bit is forever one generation back. But I’m not such a latecomer that I escaped the sense of being historical. Here I sit, writing in my little green book while I gnaw over whether or not I can afford a bowl of the monkfish soup to insulate my belly against the fact that I’ve (finally!) gotten a part in the new Stern flick but not been paid yet. I know, I just know, that my little diary will be read by somebody someday, and not just to divine how to get me in the sack. It’ll be read because I’m an actress in the early days of cinema and the somewhat later days of interplanetary immigration. I don’t have to do a thing to be interesting! Did she or did she not have the monkfish soup? Did the thyme taste like the thyme she knew back home? (Or the scrubbly stuff we call thyme even though it’s lunar native and in no sense of the word thyme. Though, for that matter, it wouldn’t be monkfish either, but we call our local long scaly bastards with their razor snouts and six vestigial legs monkfish because the Savoy, good sir, does not serve moon-monster soup!) Did the flavour make her think of innocent days in the manger of man?

Not especially, no.

But we all keep diaries. We all scribble and babble. Because we know the future is watching everything and taking its own notes. So I shall tell you, Mister Future, all about Conrad and Carlotta, just in case you get careless and misplace them along the way.

I was saying I missed the first big rush, wasn’t I, Mister Future? By the time I made my entrance, all the planets had their bustling baby shantytowns, each and every one with a flag slapped on it. You weren’t anybody at the imperial picnic if you didn’t have a planet. Moons, though lovely, just lovely, are consolation prizes. Sino-Russian Mars. Saturn split between Germany and Austria-Hungary. French Neptune. American Pluto. Spanish Mercury. Ottoman Jupiter. All present and accounted for—except Venus. Nobody owns that Bessie because everyone needs her. The path to the stars is paved with treaties. If I wanted to stay English, I had my pick of the Moon or Uranus or a sea of satellites. But I didn’t see it as a choice. Only the Moon for the likes of me! Who wants to freeze on Uranus where there’s no paparazzi at all?

I hoarded my little walnuts like a good squirrel, sitting for advertisements and doing the occasional shimmy on some appalling stage. I’ll have you know I was the face of Dr Goddard’s Premium Disinfectant and Little Diamond Brand Refined Sugar in the same fortnight. And that very fortnight I did my evening shifts at the Blue Elephant Theatre, playing Ariel in an all-female, mostly nude production of The Tempest. The glitter stuck to my nipples something vicious. Stained them green for a month after the coppers shut us down on indecency charges. Fair enough, I said then, and I say now. I drank too much and ate too little, got in a spell of trouble with a stage manager and had it taken care of; put something up my nose and something in a pipe, but that’s what was done. Preparations for a better role. I tried to get plum work. I did try. Turned out for Mr Wilde and Mr Ibsen’s affairs, lined up round the block to be seen for the opportunity to cough offstage in Chekhov. But the bold truth is that nothing on your person earns as well as tits earn, and only after I did a spell as a cheesecake bacchante (I got to carry Pentheus’s head three nights out of five—four if Susanna had a boyfriend that month) did I have my egg.

I lined up in Kensington Gardens with the crowds. Passed by the statue of Peter Pan and reached up my hand to pat him as thousands have done. Millions now, I suppose. Built but the year before and already his foot is near worn away. Second star to the right, my lad. Right-o. Carpetbags and cold-weather rags and the afternoon sun like a sickly porridge glooping over the lindens. The cannon towered over me. I went terribly quiet inside, as you do when you’re little and your father looms over you and you don’t know yet whether he means to praise or scold. I went up on a boat called the Topless Towers of Ilium, which made me smirk. I looked round and saw a sea of flappers—flappers!—heaps of girls with bleached hair and dance shoes and carmine lips. All of us piling in for a day’s flight in cramped quarters with a lot of men who will be happy to tell you they’re directors, kid, you just sit right here by me. It was like an audition. An audition for a whole world, to see if the Moon would accept us and let us in or turn us out after a spin as an extra in a crowd scene and a starring role on a hotel bed with a producer in a top hat testing your range with his prick.

Oh, the wide universe needs us all, great and small, to fill her up and make her good, make her ripe, make her full and teeming. There are no small stories, only short ones. But the Moon…the Moon is where they make movies. And the Moon is a heartless bitch. She only needs a few. She wants fewer than that. She sits up there, high and mighty as you please, on her starry director’s chair and she ticks off the weak on a clipboard stained with ingénues’ tears. The Moon cares nothing for our cute little troubles. She ate a thousand girls for lunch yesterday, and she was hungry again in an hour. She barely even looks at us.

But I only have eyes for her.

So here I am. I’ve a room—not at the Savoy, goodness, perish the thought! I’ve the room they assigned me at Princess Alice’s Landing, at the top of a three-floor boarding house on Endymion Road, back end of Grasshopper City. Five girls to a room. And our wardrobes count as a sixth tenant, for not a one of us earns her keep anywhere but before the lens and on the boards. Callista’s Virgin Queen getup takes the whole rear corner, and all our cats live under the skirt. But I save my little shillings for luncheons at the Savoy so that I can feel grand. So that I can feel like I’m somebody going somewhere. So I can read Algernon B dishing gossip and maybe spy with my little eye old Wadsy Shevchenko canoodling with a prop boy. So Søren Blom can find me if he’s scouring the cafes for an Ionian duchess who might just look like me, or if that dashing darling Percival Unck comes looking for a new heroine to drop into a bucket of ghosts. So I can watch the summer Earth at half-wax going down over the froth of Mare Nubium and the candy-coloured streetlights come on in a long bright wave over my city.

My city! Tithonus, jewel of the Moon, Queen Slattern of the Alleyways, Grasshopper City, my home! I stepped off the Topless Towers of Ilium and took in her round blueglass spires and filth-fat holes and opium gardens and botanical dens and the wicker-coral palaces barely keeping the moss at bay like I was taking the first breath of my whole life. I was in love. I was a new bride. If I’d had a penny left over I’d have grabbed the first whore I saw and had her right there against the side of the Actaeon, just to have the city inside me and my hands on its heat. Nickelodeons every four steps, but those four steps also hoisted up grand theatres like castles, studio gates like St. Peter’s, peep shows and brothels and dance halls coming up like posies in every which spot between. They even built a Globe, so achingly, throbbingly familiar out there on this new West End, looking like an ice queen’s personal gladiatorial arena, blueglass and silver and scrimshaw.

I am going to play them all.

Oh, I thought I’d be sensible about it. Don’t pan for gold, says the wise man. Sell pans. I’d learn cameras, I thought. Inside and out. I could do it. Find work as an assistant to an assistant to an assistant. As long as I could be near the movies, I’d’ve won. Maybe someone would catch a glimpse of me taking light readings, notice the way the Earthlight caught my profile. Maybe not. Manage your expectations, Mary! But oh, I took one look at Grasshopper City, at the Globe and the Actaeon and the Savoy, and I knew it would never do. I don’t give a fig how a camera works, just as long as it works on me.

No, I am going to play them all. I intend to step on-stage as Ariel with my dress on. I shall pose just so at the Actaeon’s emerald double door at my own premiere, name above the title, all in lights, all in red, like a rose, like a mouth, all in. I shall absolutely murder Wilde and Ibsen and Chekhov; I shall eat Claudius’s heart in the marketplace, I shall pine for the love of Robin Hood. All of them, all of them. Men’s parts, too. Hamlet in high heels, and don’t you dare forget my name! I will hunch my back as Dickie III until I am quite literally blue in the face. I will make the Moon love me if I have to spike her drink and knock her on the head to do it.

And I am turning blue. It thrills me to my toes! I would say I’m a shade between powder and sky so far. I shall be quite sapphire by Christmas, I expect.

Granted, it’s not going so well on the working front. I ran around like a perfect fool during the slaughter of the suitors in Dorian Blister’s Odyssey last year. My bathwater ran pink with fake blood. Even after I seemed squeakingly clean, the bubbles said I still had a bit of Telemachus on me somewhere. But the camera lingered on me for a half second longer than the other handmaids, and I had a particularly good expression of horror on. Then, I was a dead body in The Mercury Equation. Strangled in a short dress. Big black finger marks on my neck. (Pssst: The prodigal son did it). And a fairy in The Fair Folk Abroad, which if you ask my opinion was an absolute coke-addled mess. Just a great wad of big paper flowers and suspension wires and pukingly sweet orchestral nonsense, along with half a circus’s worth of animals that’d had rum poured in their water bowls the morning before their scenes so they’d stagger docilely across the soundstage instead of ripping Titania’s face off. You can see a panther passed out cold on the horn of plenty in the second scene.

I’ve learned it’s important to have a name. Fairy #3 is a losing game. At least let me be Mustardseed in the credits, Mister! It won’t cost you anything. I do so long to graduate from being a number to being a name. Dead Girl #2. Handmaid #6. I celebrated with one of my four flatmates (Regina Farago—you’ll see her in that big splashy Napoleonic flick next year: built like a giraffe, tall and brown and possessing that clumsiness that looks like grace when you’ve got legs like hers) and a bucketful of gin when I was cast as Faun #1 in The Thrice-Haunted Forests of Triton. Moving up in the world! Yesterday #6, today #1!

But now I’ve a character with a proper name! Signed the contract Mary Pellam with a big flourish. Maybe something will come of it. Probably not. But I’ve got years to make my go.

Today I’m Clementine Salt.

More important, Miss Clem is my ticket to a studio contract. Oh, the Grail, the chalice, the font of prosperity! Locked away in the castle perilous and just sloshing with fine print! I do so dream of selling myself to a studio. For a tidy sum, of course—Dr Pellam didn’t raise a fool. I positively wriggle with the thought of some big meaty boss closing his clobbering hand over mine and guiding a gold pen across glossy pages. Sign here and we’ll make you immortal, little missy. And they’ll own you for just as long. A pretty unicorn in a pretty zoo. What to eat; who to breed with; shows at seven, nine, and eleven.

Look at me, I’m growing a proper lunar coat of cynicism.

The fact is, a unicorn cage is the safest place to be. And I want to be safe. I have to be safe. And to be safe I need protection. These studios prowl the Moon like little emperors bouncing on great stupid beasts. They’ve carved up the place between them like England and France and Austria-Hungary and Russia.

They’ve put on actual wars!

You won’t hear a breath of it back home, no sir. But it’s happened. They’ve all the costumes and props and explosives for any battle in history, after all. Why let it go to waste just because no one is making a war flick this week? Tithonus is divided into territories: the north belongs to Capricorn, the south to Tranquillity, the east to Plantagenet Pictures, the west to Oxblood Films. The rest of Luna is carved up the same way, minus a few independent strongholds here and there. Virago, Wainscot, Artemisia. Woe betide the soul who crosses lines! Little wee emperors with ivory crowns jousting on rhinoceroses. Only, what actually happens is that Oxblood swipes Maud Locksley from Plantagenet and Simon Laszlo storms their backlot—which is more or less the whole west end up to Coriander Street—with a hundred actors who think they are re-enacting the betrayals of the Duke of Burgundy until their bullets actually blow the heads off the “loyal French peasants” and Miss Locksley gets a shell-shocked escort home and a month locked up in Laszlo’s house with her head stuck in a bushel of af-yun before she can pull herself together enough to stand on her mark.

Oh, the money on the Moon is English—you can see Vickie’s sour old kisser on the bills. But no one is under one single illusion as to who runs this joint. You take sides if you’re smart. Offer up your loyalty, ’cause it’s all you’ve got to trade.

Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody’s buying.

I picked up this little notebook at the shop round the corner from the Huntress, which is a whorehouse, but quite a good one. If I’m ever in a bad way, I’ll hope to get hired on there. You get breakfast brought on a tray and don’t have to start work ’til four. I mean to record in it Things I Know. There is such an awful lot to know up here. I suppose I thought the Moon would be like London, only bigger and less expensive. I’m quite certain that was the idea. But just like everywhere else, it only took about five seconds for folk to notice that Earth is very, very far away.

The first supper rush is coming on. My tea’s gone cold. There is already a foxtrot tinkling away in Imperatrix Square: garlands of pale green callowlanterns swinging in the sea wind, heels clapping on the cobblestones like an audience, girls with short hair laughing at boys with feathers in their lapels. Perhaps I shall join them later. I am a fair dancer. Not superb, but fair. I am always honest about my capabilities. I am very pretty, though my prettiness lacks depth and therefore misses beauty by a hair. I have an extremely expressive face that I can contort at will. I am short, but I have a serviceable chest and practically perfect calves. For stage work I have a rich voice which carries well, though it is somewhat deeper than the fashion. I can alter it somewhat. I can pass for an American or a Frenchwoman, and I am working on a Muscovite lilt. Perhaps at twenty I shall be a superb dancer. Perhaps at thirty I shall be beautiful. Anything is possible.

My waiter has taken pity upon me and brought me a plate of walnuts and cheese and thus won my heart entire. Yes, my lad, I shall marry you. I shall.

Very well, Mary, very well! Get to it!

As of today, the Twentieth of August in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eight, I believe the following to be Immutable Lunar Laws:

1. A woman has but eight roles open to her: ingénue, mother, witch, detective, nun, whore, queen, and corpse.

2. Sooner or later, someone’s gonna own you, kid. Call yourself Queen of the May if you get a say in whom.

3. You have no pride. If you have it, misplace it. Under your mattress, in someone else’s cupboard. It’ll do you no favours.

4. That person you are when the camera’s having its way? That’s not you. That’s a Looking Glass Girl. She lives on the other side of the lens. She’s better than you are—prettier, more graceful, walks more properly, sparkles when she ought to, blushes when she ought to, fades to black before anyone gets bored. And better things happen to her than the sad little teas and flophouse fleas that happen to you. Love that Looking Glass Girl. Love her hard and love her true. Make obeisance; say your Aves. She is your personal god, and you’ll chase her for the rest of your life.

Ship’s Manifest,

Small Commercial Craft Clamshell

Owner-of-Record: Oxblood Films/ Franklin R. Edison

Port-of-Call: Tithonus, Luna, United Kingdom

Built: 1940, Copernicus Ironworks

Manufacturer: Wernyhora Motors, Inc. (Subsidiary: J.P. Morgan & Company)

Model: Cerigo VI (Inner System Restricted Permit #NK55781432F00QWP)

Occupancy: 35

Tonnage: 5,771

Length: 425 ft.

Beam: 56 ft.

Propulsion: Ourania Class Cannon, Ford Quad-Firing Orbital Slugs, Carnegie Diesel-Balloon Braking, Foldback Magnetrisse Sails

Carriage Decks: Bridge, Crew Berths, Cantina, Observation, Passenger Berths, Radio Room, Darkroom, Cargo Bay, Engine Hold, Fire Room, Ballast

Preflight Condition: No Malfunctions. Kitchen Equipment, Data Transmission, and Interior Communication System Scheduled for Maintenance Upon Return to Dry Dock

Examined by: Piotr Krupin, Arkady Lagounov, Ekaterina Bogomolova, Depot Noviy Kitezh, Moscow, 11.6.44

Great Railway Merger Expected 2100 12.6.44, Anadyomene Junction, Switch 9.6.4.2

Film Crew:

Severin Unck: Director

Cristabel Ossina: 1st Assistant Director

Erasmo St. John: Director of Photography

Horace St. John: Cameraman

Maximo Varela: Lighting Master

Mariana Alfric: Sound Engineer

Santiago Zhang: Best Boy

Konrad and Franco Sallandar: Craft Services

Support:

Anastaas Dajo: Pilot (Inner System Transit Authority Certified 1919, Hesperides Medal 1924)

Griet Van Rooyen: Navigator (Junior Cartographer, British Railways, Corps of Engineers Special Commendation 1942 for Work on the Venus-Mercury Toll Artery)

Isaac Deerfoot: Conductor (M.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1938, Junior Conductor, Mohawk and Hudson Railway, Mars-Asteroid Corridor 1939–1942)

Ghanim Boulos: Signalman

Balazs Almassy: Security

Dr Margareta Nantakarn: Surgeon (Edinburgh School of Medicine, 1922, Specialization in Epidemiology. Offworld Residency: Mercury, Trismegistus, St. Talaria’s Children’s Hospital, 1925)

Aylin Novalis: Venus Liaison (White Peony Station)

Henry Lamb, Simon Poole, Jaromil Kysely: Stewards (Contracted from Tithonus Savoy, Term of Contract 29.5.44-8.8.46)

William Kaur: Sanitation Engineer

Carolyne Derrick: Wire Walker

Arlo Covington, C.P.A.: Oxblood Oversight

Mr Tobias: Ship’s Cat (Abyssinian, six years old, missing left ear)

Materiel:

1200 pounds beef

700 pounds mutton

775 pounds tinned beef

600 pounds veal, pork, sausage (beef-fennel, hot lamb-za’atar, chicken-tarragon)

1500 pounds chicken

250 tins preserved fruit

250 tins Dundee marmalade (orange, lemon, blood orange, muskbulb), Crosse & Blackwell jam (strawberry-peppercorn, gooseberry-port, cloudberry-champagne, Martian goji-serrano) and chutney (mango, cranberry, lunar coconut, Triton mint-miseryrose)

250 bottles pickles and sauces: Branston, Serapis Peppers, Nergal Morels, C&B Walnuts, HP Sauce, Hermeneus Fancy Catsup, Caloris Basin Hot Mustard, Worcestershire, Mount Penglai Soy Sauce, Tethys’ Tail Fish Sauce, Io’s Best Sweet Chili Sauce, McCollick’s Bird Pepper Sauce, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, Chinkiang Black Vinegar, Tethys’ Tail Shrimp Paste, Celestial Moose Maple Syrup (grade B), Rose’s Lime Juice. 65 bottles reserved for onsite sale/barter.

370 pounds Nereid roe (Interplanetary Quarantine cleared 2.5.44, Exotic Foodstuff Record #777121Ne, see attached form. Reserved for sale/barter in tot.)

250 pounds coffee

200 pounds tea

100 pounds potted fish (anchovy, salmon, herring, monkminnow)

900 pounds moist sugar (350 pounds reserved for sale/barter)

300 pounds lump sugar (100 pounds reserved for sale/barter)

660 pounds salt (200 pounds reserved for sale/barter)

510 pounds black pepper (200 pounds reserved for sale/barter)

825 pounds butter (various grades)

2 tonnes potatoes

1 tonne other vegetables

400 chickens, ducks, moonquail (live, egg-laying, to be bartered/sold upon landing in White Peony Station; buyer secured)

1.25 tonnes lard

78 barrels wheat flour

56 barrels rhea flour (Interplanetary Quarantine cleared 9.6.44, Exotic Foodstuff Record #413066Sa, see attached form)

40 barrels Phlegyas flour (Interplanetary Quarantine cleared 9.6.44, Exotic Foodstuff Record #900142Ma, see attached form)

7564 gallons fresh water

250 gallons callowmilk (Promotional Consideration Provided: 125 gallons Hathor Brand, 125 gallons Prithvi Brand)

21 quarts Prithvi ice cream (chocolate, vanilla, fig-pistachio, blueberry cider, black caramel, green-tea pink pecan, sweet potato, Saturn’s Bounty, Ionian Fire Tart, Quandong Ripple, Phobos Macadamia Surprise, Morning on Ganymede. Reserved for landing)

21 bottles Domain Aphros champagne (reserved for landing)

16 cosmetic cases (Provided by Elizabeth Arden, Fifty Daughters. Unused supply to be sold/bartered before departure)

27 cases perfume (Provided by Chanel, Madame Zed, Saturnalia, reserved for sale/barter in tot.)

4 Underwood typewriters

50 reams paper

46,500 feet Eastman 35 mm film

3 dollies (custom + collapsible tracks)

10 Pharos lenses, various lengths

3 cases Jotunn brand batteries

2 Aitnaios generators

2 jib cranes

3 tripods

5 Eastman light meters

4 Edison microphones + sleeves

4 cases flares

Assorted gels, lights, blackwrap, filters, tape, mixer, recorder, boom, cables

3 cases clamps

2 Edison Model G III handheld 35 mm camera

2 Edison Model B II handheld 35 mm camera

3 diving suits

1800 m. breathing tubes, various sizes

(Primary funding provided by Oxblood Films, Inc. Secondary funding provided by Prithvi Dairy Products, Hathor Brand Callowmilk, Crosse & Blackwell, Redrose Deep Mars Mining Corp., Chanel, Carnegie Steel Company, Lumen Molnar.)

I Left My Sugar Standing

in the Rain

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

CYTHERA BRASS: Begin recording. Session one, day one. The time is eight-fifteen in the morning on Tuesday, January third, 1946, at the Oxblood Industrial Park, 1770 Endymion Road, North Yemaya, Luna. I, Cythera Brass, Chief Security Officer for Oxblood Films, Ltd., am the sole conductor of this final postproduction interview. Would you please state your full name, age, and place of birth for the record?

ERASMO: Erasmo Leonard St. John. Thirty, Guan Yu, Mars.

CYTHERA: Am I then to assume you hold dual citizenship?

ERASMO: I believe my Chinese citizenship can best be described as “lapsed.” Why? Will I need to call down to an embassy for lunch? Or are you just wondering who might find my incarceration irritating?

CYTHERA: You are hardly incarcerated, Mr St. John. Don’t be absurd. And your last employment?

ERASMO: Director of Photography on The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew.

CYTHERA: [sound of a ballpoint pen clicking] All right, then. Are you ready to begin, Mr St. John?

ERASMO: Nope.

CYTHERA: I think we’ve been exceedingly patient. It’s been nearly seven months. If you prefer, we can provide you with materials and you can prepare a written statement, but either way, we see no reason to delay further.

ERASMO: Then why bother asking if I’m ready? You’ve decided I’m ready. And you didn’t even bring me a cup of tea. Some interrogation this is.

CYTHERA: This is not an interrogation. This is a standard debriefing conducted by the studio at the conclusion of all off-Moon shoots.

ERASMO: I’ve worked on…twelve? No, fourteen Oxblood pictures. I’ve been debriefed ’til I can brief no more and I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a swot over the age of twenty. Debriefing is intern’s work. The CSO wouldn’t shine her shoes with a DP’s report.

CYTHERA: [intercom crackling] Would you bring two espressos, Jane? And some toast with butter. Thank you. And yet, you still decline legal representation.

ERASMO: Oh, entirely. And I asked for tea.

CYTHERA: Mr St. John, you are entitled to access the full resources of our legal department, as an employee of the studio. These resources are both substantial and free of charge. Given the circumstances, I highly recommend you use them.

ERASMO: [short, sharp, quite humourless laugh] It strikes me as more than a little backward to allow a gaggle of Oxblood suits to look after my interests when, at the moment, you lot are the only ones accusing me of anything.

CYTHERA: I don’t know what accusations you’re referring to. This is just a conversation between colleagues. It doesn’t have to be anything more stressful or unpleasant than that. Everyone else has already given their statements and gone home.

ERASMO: Then you already know more than I could possibly tell you. How about I get my own tea down at the Savoy and never have to look at your fucking face again?

CYTHERA: Don’t you want to go home, Mr St. John?

ERASMO: I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit.

CYTHERA: There’s no need for belligerence, Mr St. John. Let’s start with something easy.

ERASMO: [laughs]

CYTHERA: You were involved in a romantic relationship with Severin Unck, correct?

ERASMO: You’re right, that is easy. Yes. Please do not use the past tense, or I shall have to start swearing again.

CYTHERA: When did this relationship commence?

ERASMO: Officially? Christmas…um…1937. At the Phobos wrap party. Unofficially, I met her when I was ten and she was twelve. Felix—that’s my father—contracted on Atom Riders. Mum was off working on some Blom flick. They never worked on the same film at the same time. People felt uncomfortable with a black man and his white wife just walking about, holding hands, laughing, other assorted sins against civilization. So I was helping Dad paint the flats for the shadow rodeo scene, shading depth on the radioactive lassos when Rinny wandered over to me. I saw her shadow on my shadows before I ever saw her. She said: Gosh, that’s just splendid! I feel as though they’re about to leap out and snatch me round the neck! And that was it for me. The rest of us just took a while to catch up.

CYTHERA: Very romantic. Did you ever have similar trouble when you and Severin worked on the same projects? On Radiant Car?

ERASMO: If we did, it didn’t matter. Come now, you know better. The director can do as they like. My parents were just set painters. Instantly expendable, if a producer happened to glance at them and get a crick in his soul.

CYTHERA: [amused snort] So you and Unck were together from 1937 through to 1944, is that right?

ERASMO: We broke up for a while on the way back from Neptune. There was another girl, a levitator. Rin was crazy about her, too. That was the problem, I guess. We both strayed. Took most of a trip across the solar system to spackle over it. That, and Rin didn’t want to get married. You can’t blame her, given her history. Then we split again when she was doing preproduction for Radiant Car. I thought she was being pigheaded, refusing to go into the shoot with an open mind. It wasn’t like Self-Portrait or And the Sea, which were personal and confessional, or even like Phobos and The Sleeping Peacock, where we were in the right place at the right time and filmed what was happening; the food riots or the proxy war on Io. Radiant Car was supposed to be almost…journalism. We were seeking answers. And if you think you’ve already got all the answers before you start investigating, you…alter what you find. You miss things. Ignore things. I told Rinny Bart Worley wanted me on Let Them Eat Death, his big French Revolution epic. Would have been a good gig for me, a huge production like that. But she gave in for once. Maybe she shouldn’t have. We would have patched it up anyway. Being apart never really stuck.

CYTHERA: But you would describe your relationship as stable during the Venus expedition?

ERASMO: As stable as we ever were. We’re not…easy people, either of us. We’re both selfish and stubborn and want our own way all the time, every time. We fought. We’d start laughing in the middle of the fight. Then pick up the argument a week later like we hadn’t even taken a breath.

CYTHERA: [clears throat] Are you sure you want to say that you and your girlfriend were having problems when her whereabouts are in question?

ERASMO: What the hell does that mean? We fought about what to have for breakfast. Who’d left their washing all over the trailer and thus was the bigger pig. The shooting schedule. Whether she or I or everyone on Venus was drinking too much. Normal couple things! Are you insinuating that I did something to her?

CYTHERA: I’m not insinuating anything, Mr St. John. I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to easy questions. What was your crew compliment at launch?

ERASMO: Oh, fuck off. You know all this. Eight attached to Radiant Car, ten support staff.

CYTHERA: And upon return?

ERASMO: I don’t know, what does your expense report say?

CYTHERA: Please, Mr St. John.

ERASMO: Well, I think that depends how you count. How is Santiago doing these days?

CYTHERA: [clears throat] I have been instructed not to discuss that with you, Mr St. John.

ERASMO: Of course. Fine. We got back on the Clamshell in White Peony Station light one director, one sound engineer, one idiot, one cameraman, and heavy one kid. Happy?

CYTHERA: And for the record, how do you account for the discrepancy?

ERASMO: Are you joking?

CYTHERA: I am not. Let’s take them one by one. Mariana Alfric, your sound engineer?

ERASMO: [shakes his head] Dead. We buried her in the village cemetery.

CYTHERA: Arlo Covington, the Oxblood representative?

ERASMO: Emphatically dead. Most likely, almost certainly, probably dead.

CYTHERA: Horace St. John, your cameraman? You knew him well, is that right?

ERASMO: He’s my cousin, yes. Dead…ish. I don’t know. We had to leave him.

CYTHERA: And Severin Unck, the director?

ERASMO: [unresponsive]

CYTHERA: Well, we’ll get to that. Can you take me through the landing and establishment of base camp? In your own words.

ERASMO: [long pause] [When he speaks again, it is in a whisper.] When I shut my eyes I see the film we meant to make. It was something elegant. Something accessible but still stylized, beautiful, satisfying. We saw a mystery in Adonis—the village that vanished. The movie would be like one of those wonderful scenes at the end of a Madame Mortimer flick, where she tells a room full of suspicious types how it all went down and you feel…you feel like you were groping around in the dark and your hand finally found a light switch. And the light comes on and it’s such a relief to see that those awful, frightening shapes in the shadows were just boxes of old clothes and a chest of drawers and a staircase. Our movie was meant to be a light switched on. It was our baby. We’d flip the switch and show how two hundred people could up and disappear in a night and leave nothing but wreckage. There was a solution, obviously. We just had to find it.

CYTHERA: The lighting master, Mr Varela, has indicated that a rough edit was completed at some point? Is this true?

ERASMO: Don’t. Don’t talk to me about Max. I don’t want to hear his name. Yes. We had enough footage for a feature. (Well, I say enough. You never have enough.) Not enough to make Radiant Car the way we’d broken it coming home from Enki. But enough for something. Cristabel and I worked on it in the Clamshell darkroom, cutting like Fates. Putting her together again. It was good in there, in the darkroom. Cristabel and I didn’t have to look at each other. Didn’t have to look at anyone else. Shadows and red light and little Anchises sitting in the corner not making a peep. Just looking at us and listening to us playing back the sound of screaming in the wind. If we stopped working, we’d have to look at everyone else. At Maximo and Santiago staring at nothing and Aylin and the Sallandars, at the crew who’d been gambling and drinking and swimming their brunches off in White Peony and were too polite to ask what happened. Their politeness just wrecked me. The only one of the lot who even seemed to care where the hell Severin went was the ship’s cat. Mr Tobias kept yowling and clawing up her berth. Just kept looking for her.

If not for Maximo, I’d have come home with a movie and you wouldn’t give two dry shits who died. Because the story’s better if people died for it. Disaster sends ticket sales through the roof. It’s a better mystery, a better story, if it hurt to make it. If not for Max, I’d just load up a reel and I wouldn’t have to try to say all this with words like a caveman poking at a rock wall with a damned stick.

I wonder…I wonder if I’d have been able to forget if it had happened somewhere else. If Horace had gotten torn up by a slickboar on Ganymede. If Arlo had drowned on a Nereid hunt off Enki. If an Edison man had shot Mari in a Tithonus back alley. If I didn’t have to drink Severin’s death every day, if I didn’t need that whale slime just to keep puttering along. I imagine other deaths for her quite a bit, you know. Uranian influenza. Trampled in the Phobos food riots. Strangled by a mad Belt miner. It’s a morbid hobby. It keeps me going. But a death is a death. It’s a thing you can’t get around. It just sits there like a fat arsehole in black pyjamas, eats all your food, drinks all your wine, and demands you call it mister for the privilege. I could handle a death. I could live with a death. Cook for both of us. Clean up after it. Pay its way. But I don’t get that luxury.

CYTHERA: The landing, Mr St. John.

ERASMO: I know. I know you want a simple accounting. Put it to bed, Raz. But the thing is, you already have the simple accounting. You know what happened. I know it. That’s not the mystery. You ask me to take you through it as though you don’t already have fourteen versions typed up neatly on your desk. As if it’s not public record. The facts are easy. See? I’ll do them standing on my head. I can recite them like a poem. Anything is a poem if you say it often enough. My poem goes: I loved a girl and she left me. You know that one?

CYTHERA: [sounds of china clinking, spoons knocking against cups, knives scraping against bread] Shut the door when you leave, Jane. We’ll take lunch at one o’clock. Now, back to the landing…?

ERASMO: [long pause] We landed in White Peony Station on the seventeenth of November, 1944.

CYTHERA: Earth time.

ERASMO: Yes. We kept to the home clock throughout. I won’t be giving you any headaches with a November sixteenth that lasts a year. We weren’t staying; no need to synchronize our watches with the local time in Wonderland. November sixteenth means autumn, and on Venus autumn means permanent dusk. No dawn ’til spring. Our rendezvous with our liaison, Aylin Novalis, at the Waldorf on Idun Avenue, went off fine.

Principal photography commenced on the seventeenth—interviews, man-on-the-street stuff with every crazy person who thought that Adonis had been taken by aliens, or God, or Hathor Callowmilk Corporation, or that the villagers had succumbed to religious mania and killed themselves at the climax of some orgiastic cannibalistic ritual coinciding with the Venus-Mercury alignment. The utter bullshit we heard, Miss Brass, I cannot begin to tell you. Every shade and flavour.

We spent three nights in the hotel—the ship’s crew, too. Everything was beautiful, though mostly broken and very damp. Some of the ceiling tiles had fallen down into the lobby. I remember the pink stone columns out front were all sort of pockmarked from the salt air. They looked like an old man’s skin. Even inside, there was pale white moss everywhere like velvet, on the chairs, on the bar, on the walls, on the beds. I think we checked in on a Tuesday. Like today. I suppose that makes it an anniversary. I’ll expect cake with lunch, Miss Brass. And a candle.

Anyway, on our last night in White Peony Station, everyone got out one last pretty thing to wear before we all had to start living in our hiking kit and waterproof socks. We all drank a great deal and gorged on ice cream like a gang of kids after school. Even Arlo seemed to have a good time. He kept trying to remember these dumb jokes, but he couldn’t get them right. So there’s this mummy snake and this baby snake and the mummy snake says, “Honey, I just bit myself!” No, wait, the baby snake says, “Mumsy, are we poisonous?” Wait, shit…

The ceiling dripped onto the plastic tubs we’d hauled over a hundred thousand kilometres, and before I finished my Quandong Ripple my spoon had grown a little fur of moss on it as well. Mariana and Cristabel sang “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain” up at a big mouldy baby grand while Aylin played, and pretty well, too. Crissy wore silver sequins. Mariana had a lavender flower in her hair. Maximo fired back with “It Never Rains on Venus” in his old rye-whiskey baritone, and you’d have thought no one in that shabby hotel bar had ever realised the irony of that tune before, the way we laughed while the chandeliers leaked onto our heads. They all tried to get Rinny to sing, but they took the wrong tack. I know my girl. She’ll sing you the moon—no kid raised in a theatre can turn down applause any more than they can turn down a meal. But Van Rooyen—that was our navigator—wanted to hear “Callisto Lullaby.” Too bad, Roo! That’s from Thief of Light and Severin would rather take an ice pick to the eye than do anything even the littlest bit Percy-adjacent, so she demurred. I don’t think I ever saw her demur before. It was interesting. Didn’t look quite right on her.

That was the worst Waldorf from Mercury to Pluto, but it felt like the most exciting place we could possibly be. Just us, the old crew. Except Cristabel, who we nabbed right out of film school, before anyone else could snap her up, and Franco, who was barely in long pants, we’d all been together since Saturn. We’d all fucked one another and cried over one another and gotten right with one another again. Maximo taught me how to juggle. I taught Santiago how to play the squeezebox and order a cocktail in eleven languages. Mariana and Severin swam together every morning at dawn in any town with so much as a puddle. Just the two of them, their arms flashing up in the mist, two dark heads like seals heading out to sea.

I can’t imagine many of us slept much that night. I heard Maximo and Mariana going at it already when Rinny and me stumbled by their door on the way to ours. I found out later that Crissy had a thing going with the signalman, Ghanim. That fellow was handsome as a statue and talked like a book, which made him candy for our little AD.

She told me about it in the darkroom while we watched some handheld stuff from that first night. We saw Carolyne (she was our wire walker) and Horace snuggling by the fountain—big brass Aphrodite, who else. We hadn’t even known they were an item till that moment. We watched ourselves jumping around drunk and grinning for the camera. And we smiled at ourselves smiling, Crissy and me. Our first smiles since it happened. A camera collects secrets. It collects people and holds them prisoner forever. And that’s when Cristabel told me about Ghanim and how he quoted Chaucer to her—in Middle English, no less—while they made love, all glottal stops and breathy German consonants, and how she couldn’t look at him now because if she looked he’d come to her quarters, and if he came, he’d ask, and if he asked, she couldn’t answer, so that was that over, she guessed.

Severin and I had Room 35. I remember it had this huge fuck-off mirror, half-frosted over with moss and dried rain, and I watched Severin in it while she straddled me on our sticky, lichen-y bed in a black kimono; drank the most bog-awful grappa that has ever touched my lips; and sang “Callisto Lullaby” for me. Just for me. This is what you want to hear, right? Details? We kissed half the night—we could have kissed for England, her and me. We could kiss so long we’d forget to fuck. We didn’t forget that night, and I’m glad. We listened to Idun Avenue and the drunks singing “Flower of Scotland” and “La Marseillaise” and some Chinese one we didn’t know, listened to the shops closing up, to the rattling percussion of pachinko parlour doors opening and shutting, to trucks peeling down the road too fast, to little curls and wisps and crumbs of music floating out of dance halls, to the constant trickle of rain into the gutters and grates and sloughs and potholes, to last call. We talked about the things you talk about when it’s two a.m. and you’re naked and you’ve known the person you’re naked with so long you could draw their face blind in the dark. About Clotilde, which other people always found strange, but never troubled us. We weren’t related. Aren’t. Her father married half the Moon and fucked the other half senseless. She’d have to go pretty far to find someone whose mum had never stopped round for supper. Clotilde connected us, from the beginning, like a story with foreshadowing. We talked about being children on the Moon, about the hole-in-the-wall curry place with the turquoise tureens in the Plantagenet Quarter back home, about the night on Phobos when we finally got together and how good it was. We both wore black and red, because we couldn’t live without dressing the set first. I tasted funny to her at first, and she thought maybe it wouldn’t last. A person has to taste right if you’re gonna stick around. I joked that she just didn’t like the taste of an honest man. I’d made that joke many times. It wasn’t even a joke anymore so much as a refrain. And then she said: You’re not that honest, because that’s the next line.

You know the first time we said I love you it got all banged up? She took a beating in that warehouse in Kallisti Square. I was patching her up in an emergency medical bay. Blood everywhere, both of us faint from hunger and adrenaline. One of her teeth didn’t look like it was going to make it. I tied my shirt around her head to soak up the worst of it. She said: “He kicked me right in the face,” at just the same second as I said, “I love you.” She laughed and she kissed me. The Kallisti water tower exploded. And after that, we always said “I love you right in the face.” And bit by bit, that’s how a couple gets pounded together out of two busted people.

Christ, there are things I miss and there are things I miss, but I can hear her voice now just as clearly as when the rain fell through our talking and the moss closed in as quiet and soft as falling asleep.

Am I making you uncomfortable?

CYTHERA: You’re certainly a very…frank man.

ERASMO: Good. Good. That makes me happy. I want to keep going, if I can make you squirm. If I can make you embarrassed to listen to me, because you should be.

I woke up like a shot at four in the morning. Severin was snoring away next to me. Only she didn’t quite snore. She made a sound with her jaw like a click, and then a sigh, and then a little soft choke. The first time I heard it I thought she was dying. Anyway. You know how sometimes you wake up and you’re certain as the grave that’s it for you and sleep? That’s how it was. So I got up and went down to the lounge. A proper hotel lounge never shuts, and I made sure the Waldorf was a proper hotel when Logistics was booking everything. I went down to the lounge. I wanted a pink lady. They’re my favourite. Do you have a favourite?

CYTHERA: Bourbon neat.

ERASMO: [laughs] That’s because you’re a terrible person. It’s my opinion that you should never order anything “neat” at a bar. Pour yourself a couple of shots at home for free—there’s no skill in it. Let the nice bartender-man strut his stuff a little! Me, I love pink ladies. I order them on every planet, on every tiny bootheel of a moon. A pink lady is never the same twice. Did you know, on Neptune they make them with saltwater? Disgusting, but wonderful. It’s all wonderful. I mean that. Everything, every place. Even salty grenadine. So I got down to the lounge and my cousin Horace was sitting up at the bar with my drink already ordered for me. We’ve always been like that. When we had sleepovers as children, we always had nightmares at the same time, or had to get up to pee at the same time.

The lounge had a wizened little gramophone wheezing its way through something called “Over the Rainbow.” I’d never heard it before. Horace pushed my drink over my way and said, “It would appear the Venusian recipe is a vague stab at gin, which they make out of all this white moss; grenadine which comes from xochipilli fruit and has nothing whatever to do with pomegranates besides being red; frothed callowcream; and a spritz of grapefruit, which is, shockingly, actual grapefruit.” Horace favoured pisco sours. Rinny was just starting to see my ineffable wisdom. She’d taken to chasing down gimlet variations.

It wasn’t half bad. Spicy. A little musty. We drank for a while and watched the twilight outside. The autumn light on Venus is a big gift wrapped up in a bow for a DP. A year of magic hours. No waiting for that perfect four-thirty p.m. sunlight. Venus is forgiving. The shoot can run as late or early as it wants, and you’ll still have the light.

I asked Horace, “Have any theories? Before we get started. My money’s on psycho axe-murdering diver. Chops everybody up and feeds them to the eels.”

Horace smiled. Two things about Horace smiling: It’s the only time you can really see the little scar on his cheek where I pranged him with a pub dart when he was eight, and when he’s smiling, he looks more like my dad than I do.

“Aliens,” he said. “Stands to reason we’d find some, sooner or later. I mean, other than the whales. They don’t count. They don’t do anything. I mean proper aliens that walk and talk and complain about the weather. Aliens, or Canada. That whole sector is contested. Could have been a tactical thing ordered by Ottawa. Peasants won’t move? Easier to wipe them out than try to have a civilized talk about it.”

And then we got this idea into our heads that we’d go for a run before everyone else got up. We didn’t have the right shoes for it but we jogged the whole length of Idun Avenue, down to the estuaries. We stuck our feet in the red water. His feet smelled horrible. Always did.

CYTHERA: I think we’re getting a bit far afield.

ERASMO: So what? You said, “in my own words.” These are them. You take what I give you or you get nothing.

Fine. I’ll speed up the reel. No fraternal waterfront breakfast for you.

Aylin Novalis met us at the Pothos docks at 0900 with four gondolas. She had to have been as hungover as the rest of us, but she never looked it. Even at the end, Aylin never looked tired or shaken. She was a better actress than anybody I ever met. Scrubbed and shined and ready to go, that was Aylin. Born and raised on Venus, Aizen-Myo Sector. She’d been a guide for ten years. The best. If you woke her up in the dead of night I bet she’d have her work shoes on under the covers. Her hair was up in a pretty little knotted ponytail that looked complicated to fix but really wasn’t. I saw her do it at camp later on. She looked for all the world like a schoolteacher ready to take us all on a field trip to the aquarium. Look at all the lovely fish! Let’s see how many different kinds we can count! One, two, three—don’t touch the glass, George…

We loaded up the gondolas. Land travel is useless on Venus—it’s all mud and silt. It took them forever to get the few cities there are to stand up straight enough to take a road. But the water goes everywhere. The gondolas weren’t anything of the sort—I assume they’re named after some hoary old Venusian/Venetian pun, but they’re just industrial swamp boats with pontoons and outboard engines and absurd little flourished prows like someone’s gonna pop out from under the tarp and start singing “O Sole Mio.”

Really, it all went fine. We montaged right past it in the first cut. Battened everything down, said goodbye to the Clamshell kids, except the doc, Margareta, who came with us in case of…injuries. The rest of them were pleased as punch at the prospect of six months’ debauchery in White Peony without us. We set off by 1000. Took nine days in the waterways to get to Adonis, which is due south of White Peony Station on the backside of nowhere. We came out through the Suadela Delta just clotted with dark pink silt. The pontoons looked like fairy floss. The cacao-trees canopied us, all full of blue-throated glowworms as long as my forearm. I gather they’re quite predatory toward the local fauna but uninterested in humans. I took stills; Horace got some establishing shots, some bits of Severin smiling, of Aylin consulting our maps and permits.

I should say that contrary to what I’ve heard on the radio down here, the whole area around Adonis was totally quarantined, no different than Enyo or Proserpine or any other run-of-the-mill disaster site. We had a pile of permissions the size of a baby hippo. Because of Venus’s unique political situation, our passports and visas looked like a Parade of Nations. That little world belongs to everyone and no one. Too precious to be claimed. Severin recorded a voice-over to play through some of those boring establishing shots.

When she came shining from the sea, all the gods desired her greatly, and strove one against the other for possession of her. But Jupiter the Lightning-Father knew that to give her hand to any among the Olympians would only cause war unending in the quiet of his halls, and so no one was allowed to station enough personnel or resources to effect a manned quarantine or repair or dispose of much of anything; nor, even if they could, would any of them agree upon the rights of one officer to shit before another on Venusian soil; and thus quarantine on Venus means little more than a sign saying GO AWAY in as many languages as can be shouted out before the Honourable Representative Whoever from the Republic of Nothing finishes her drink.

We built our camp on the freshwater delta before attempting Adonis. Minimum safe distance. Aylin had secured us what amounted to a portable town, all military surplus. Collapsible barracks with solid roofs to keep the rain out and foldout floors to keep the equipment and our feet from sinking in the mud. A mess tent, a command centre, fire braziers, a chemical toilet, the works. Horace, Cristabel, Santiago, and Mariana set about testing all the equipment to make sure it had survived the trip. The Sallandars got dinner started—hardtack, ’tryx stew, tinned peas.

It started the next morning. Everything went tits up right away. We took one of the gondolas into Adonis proper. We saw everything just like you’ve seen it. It was so much like the stories and stills we’d seen that walking through the place felt like being in a movie that was already made. The hotel looked like an earthquake had hit it. The old carousel, smashed into a twisted junk heap studded with horses’ eyes.

And there he was, centre stage. It was like glimpsing a celebrity at a café. Anchises, just walking around the memorial like it was nothing, a morning constitutional, and in a moment he’d ask for orange juice and eggs. Only he wasn’t Anchises yet, he was…an artefact. Like a weathervane. Or a church bell. Part of the town. Evidence.

We spent the afternoon setting up lighting for the sequence where Rin makes contact with him. And, you know, sometimes I think the only difference between Severin and her dad is that he lived through things first and then reshot them to get them right, while she hung back until everything was perfect, then called action. Couldn’t live through a thing until the camera was rolling.

[coughing] I need a break.

CYTHERA: If we could just get through your first encounter with the auditory phenomena…

ERASMO: I. Need. A. Break.

How Many Miles to Babylon?:

Episode 764

Airdate: 1 June, 1943

Announcer: Henry R. Choudhary

Vespertine Hyperia: Violet El-Hashem

Tybault Gayan: Alain Mbengue

The Invisible Hussar: Zachariah von Leipold

Doctor Gruel: Benedict Sol

Guest Star: Araceli Garrastazu as the Finnish Fury

ANNOUNCER: Good Evening, Listeners, if it is indeed Evening where you are. 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 to Babylon? Celebrating our thirtieth year on the waves, Babylon is a joint production of the United/Universal All-Worlds Wireless Broadcom Network (New York, Shanghai, Tithonus) and BBC Radio, recorded at Atlas Studios, London.

This evening’s programme is brought to you, as always, by Uzume Brand Soap, milled pure and clean with soothing oils, invigorating herbs, and wild alpine flowers plucked fresh from the gentle fields of Europa. Additional promotional consideration provided by Hathor Co. Premium Callowmilk, Diver Owned and Operated since 1876; Red Chamber Specialty Teas, Bringing the Bounty of Titan Home; the East Indian Trading Company; and Edison Teleradio Corp.

Previously on How Many Miles to Babylon?: Our pioneer heroine, Vespertine Hyperia, having been taken captive by Venetian bandito-magicians in the Venusian pirate paradise of Port Erishkegal, was bound by unbreakable chains to the volcanic glass spire of Namtar Tower! The dastardly king of the banditos, Doctor Gruel, determined to make sweet Vespertine his bride, strapped her into his wicked Cartesian Splitting Machine, causing her to forget not only her beloved, Tybault Gayan, but her own twin brother, the great inventor Valentino. Valentino staged a daring rescue, soaring through the Venusian mists on his miraculous mechanical musk ox Braggadocio. Listeners gasped as Vespertine turned her face away from her own kin! They leaned in close when Braggadocio begged her with his tinny tongue to come and live with Valentino in his big belly and sail through the skies, safely home to Earth, where Tybault waited with the longing of a thousand hearts. And when she would not answer, the whole system wept.

VESPERTINE: [sounds of whistling wind and clanking metal] Begone, deceiver! I shall marry Doctor Gruel at the stroke of dawn! He is my one true love! How I adore his warty chin and heavy fists! I grow faint at the thought of his hunchback; I dream of nothing but his scarred and hairy brow! I will never love another for all my days! [long, mournful groan over clanking engine parts]

ANNOUNCER: Meanwhile, we find our stalwart hero, Tybault, having defeated a band of mercenaries and black alchemists bent on inciting war with Austria at any cost, recovering from his grievous wounds in a mysterious hospital, attended by buxom masked nurses and a physician revealed last week to be none other than his sworn enemy: the Invisible Hussar!

THE INVISIBLE HUSSAR: [music cue #3: minor key crescendo 2] Yes, it is I! None other could vanquish the Hero of the Crimea! And these masked beauties are my sisters, the Ninja-Nuns of Nanking! They thirst for the blood of good men. I really don’t know how long I can hold them back. But first, you must witness the magnitude of your defeat! Behold, this is not a hospital, but my ship! [sounds of howling space winds] You have slept soundly, my old foe, with the help of my sisters’ potions. We will soon rendezvous with my comrades—Doctor Gruel and his band of banditos! [music cue #4: minor key crescendo 6]

ANNOUNCER: Will Tybault escape the clutches of his nemesis? Can the Ninja-Nuns of Nanking resist their terrible bloodlust? Will Vespertine marry the devious Doctor Gruel or will her loyal lover reach her in time? Who is the Invisible Hussar? Will these long-suffering sweethearts—one untamed spirit enamoured of the stars; one true man, devoted to King, Country, and Mother Earth—find each other at last, or will they yearn on in vain? Find out now!

Come with me to the rough-and-tumble worlds of Venus and Earth in the early days of the Diaspora, a fantastical journey into that special place in the heart where history meets the imagination, hard science meets flights of fancy, love leads the way, and the impossible becomes—for a moment—true, on…How Many Miles to Babylon?

[theme music]

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[SEVERIN UNCK walks hand in hand with CLOTILDE CHARBONNEAU down Usagi Avenue in Tithonus. Christmas lanterns glitter all around them. The Actaeon Theatre is visible behind them, searchlights swinging wildly over the night sky. CLOTILDE and SEVERIN are bundled in thick coats. Identical furs frame their faces. PERCIVAL UNCK walks backward down the street, filming them as steadily as his camera Clara will allow. SEVERIN sucks the filling from a street vendor’s blin. CLOTILDE’S face is sullen. She scratches at ruby earrings. She will leave them within a month.]

PERCIVAL

How did you like the picture, pumpkin?

SEVERIN

I’m not a pumpkin!

CLOTILDE

Are so. If we put a candle in your head you’d be a jack-o’-lantern.

SEVERIN

Ew! There’s no room in my head for a candle, Mama.

PERCIVAL

All right, you are definitely not a pumpkin, and we will definitely not put any candles in your head or make a tart out of you or turn you into a coach at midnight. Now, did you like your papa’s movie? He made it just for you, his first one for children.

SEVERIN

[long pause] No.

PERCIVAL

But you were so wonderful in it, darling! Didn’t you have fun filming your little bit? Isn’t it nice to see yourself on that big giant screen?

SEVERIN

[bursts into tears] I’m sorry, Papa! But there just aren’t such things as octopuses that talk or wear spectacles and spats in real life. It’s only Uncle Talmadge in a suit with sequins stuck on him. I shall never meet a talking octopus like Mr Bergamot, never, never! [Tears roll down SEVERIN’s cheeks and into her blin. She dries her face on one furry sleeve, sniffing in the cold.] It’s just a lot of silliness.

The Deep Blue Devil:

The Dame in Question

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

“Mr St. John, my name is Cythera Brass,” said the dame in question, shaking my hand like an adman while the Talbot drove itself calm as you please through a particularly obnoxious All-Clear mob and into the money-gargling heart of the Te Deum business district.

She let me eat. She let me drink. I feel about the same describing that as I do describing a quality fuck. It’s private, you pervert, take a hike. What I do with my gullet is my business. I mumbled my name back at Cythera Brass. I don’t care to say it too often. I barely live in that name. Hangs on me like someone else’s coat. It’s a name with too much room in it for a chap like me. Too famous, too fancy, too much chance of someone looking me up and down and belching out the dreaded: Oh, you’re him. But Miss Brass, she already knew who I was. She wouldn’t’ve come to scarf me up if I wasn’t who I was, so she and I, we could just sit tight, each knowing what we knew. Except she had me at a disadvantage, as I didn’t know a blessed thing about her. I hate that. Goes against my nature. I’m a hoarder of information.

“You American?” I asked her. Slugged back more of her bourbon.

She nodded; barely moved her chin, but it was a nod. “Seneca.”

Right. Sure. I’d thought Sioux, but hell, Americans all sound the same to me. “I went to the Nation once, when I was a kid. Toured the League halls and grounds. Shook hands with a coupla judges. Liked it better than the States, myself.”

“Mmmm,” answered that long-legged dame, without taking her eyes off a fish-masked fella jumping around outside the limousine like a particularly unnecessary exclamation point.

“I’m nothing, me. Don’t even know what ball I got myself born on. Spent time on Venus, obviously. Good long spate on the Moon, which was miserable as a year of Lent. Just about everywhere else, too. If you count up all the orbits on which I’ve hung my hat, I’ve been a subject of four different Crowns; a citizen of China, France, and Argentina; and a serf on Io—which I think technically made me Italian—but only for a month.”

Look at me. Hoarder of information, spilling my worthless biography to a lady just because her pretty bronze knees looked like a premonition of kingdom come. I didn’t have to say anything. I coulda soaked up the Talbot and the quiet and the drink. Cythera Brass had it all in a file somewhere anyway. She was the kind of broad whose job it was to keep files. To keep the secrets in a straight line and working toward payday. And still, I sat there on leather the colour of chicken fat trying to get her to like me.

“Listen,” I said. The slick of her booze greased my head. “I know it’s a lot of money and I’m broke. But I don’t want the job. I’ve got no gut for travelling anymore, and I just don’t care about what you care about. I don’t want to know. I’m not curious. You’d think I would be, yeah? But I’m not. I’m good. I am right with the Lord my God on this. Frankly, I don’t like to work at all when I can avoid it. I came here to stick it out. Just plunk down in the snow and ride out the long year. Should be enough. Eighty-four Earth years for each natural year out here on the snowball. Maybe I got it in me to see it through to spring. Maybe summer’ll gimme a lick and a slap. Summer on Uranus. That’d be something. But maybe not. I’m not fussed if it’s not in the cards. Look—” I grabbed her hand suddenly, panicked. I don’t know why I did it. She looked down at my paw like a Sasquatch with the clap had gotten ahold of her. “Look, you might call it sixty years or fifty or, given my habits, twenty, but the way Uranus sees it, big-picture-wise, I got less than a year to live. And I find that just peachy, Cyth. I find that comforting. I need that comfort. I don’t want it fucked by running around with aims or ambitions or plans beyond my next fifteen rounds with sleep. Don’t you take my year from me, Miss Brass. It’s mine.”