Radiance

PART THREE

THE GREEN PAGES

You have often

Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp’d

And left me to a bootless inquisition,

Concluding ‘Stay: not yet.’

—Miranda from The Tempest, William Shakespeare

A director only makes one film in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.

—Jean Renoir

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

(Oxblood Films, dir. Severin Unck)

SC3 EXT. ADONIS, VILLAGE GREEN—DAY 13 TWILIGHT POST-PLANETFALL 23:24 [30 NOVEMBER, 1944]

[EXT. Former site of the village of Adonis, on the shores of the Sea of Qadesh. Night. The Divers Memorial is a backlit monstrosity, bulbous and black. Wind buffets the sound and lighting equipment; lanterns swing wild, illuminating splatters of congealed white fluid drenching the site. In twenty-eight months no one has cleared the damage or removed the debris. Beams of illumination land on a series of objects, as briefly as a kiss, then leave them in darkness again: A door with an absurd number of locks—more than anyone could need—stove in. The crumpled, netted face of a diving bell. The mangled head of a carousel horse. A swath of white fabric wadded up like scrap paper—a parachute, perhaps? Tarpaulin? Broken amphorae. Pieces of roof. Broken glass. The child’s slack, catatonic face. The faces of SANTIAGO ZHANG and HORACE ST. JOHN, struggling with cables and the boom mic, which dips into frame with the gusts of wind. MARIANA ALFRIC, her at-waist sound rig turning smoothly, though she has turned her back on the scene. She holds her hands over her face. Her nails are bitten raw. The mic records only wind, rendering SEVERIN’S beloved talking picture a silent film.

SEVERIN is grabbing the child’s hand urgently. He begins to scream, soundlessly, held brutally still in his steps by ERASMO and MAXIMO VARELA, whose muscles bulge with what appears to be a colossal effort—keeping this single, tiny, bird-boned child from his circuit. The boy clutches his hand to his thin chest as though it is a precious possession. His only possession. The boy’s eyes are as wide as an electroshock patient’s, pupils blown, his whole body rigid, erect. He moves his head back and forth: no, no, no. It is hard to tell—the film is damaged, the light levels destroyed, patches of overexposure blossom over the footage like splashes of milk—but the boy is mouthing a word that looks like please. The storm eats up his voice, if he has one.

SEVERIN’S jagged hair, and occasionally her chin, swing in and out of frame as she struggles with him. She turns over the boy’s hand, roughly, to show the camera what she has found there: tiny fronds growing from his skin, tendrils like ferns, seeking, wavering, wet with milk. The film jumps and shudders; the child’s hand vibrates, faster, faster. FILM DAMAGED FOOTAGE OVEREXPOSED SKIP AFFECTED AREA SKIPPING SKIPPING SKIPPING]

Production Meeting,

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream

(Tranquillity Studios, 1960, dir. Percival Unck)

Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako

PERCIVAL UNCK: No, no, you’re wrong, Vince. It’s shit. It doesn’t sit right. He’s too unpleasant, too weak. He’s not likeable. And that curse isn’t adding anything but a stick up his arse. It just sags. Gothic stories will sprawl if you let them, like spilled wine. No writer should go anywhere near the Island of the Lotus-Eaters—you get stuck there. If Odysseus couldn’t get quit of that place, our boy has no hope. It’s got all the right pieces, but the end comes in the middle of the blasted thing. I hate it. I want to get out of my own movie. That can’t be good.

And, I just…I just can’t do it. I can’t give her an ice dragon and a vampire and smack her bottom and tell her to go play. I need something real to hold on to. She’s gone. If it were enough to imagine her killed by a mad magician on the American frontier, I could have done that in my head and not bothered with a script. No. No. It can’t be my story. It can’t be ours.

MAKO: But it can’t be hers, either. The thing about a mysterious disappearance is that it’s mysterious. There’s no answer that will be satisfying enough for the masses. There’s no documentary to be made, no scandal to be exposed.

UNCK: I don’t care. I made The Abduction of Proserpine already. I’m done with that. Christ, I was a young man when Proserpine wrapped. You can’t use the language of your youth to talk about your daughter. It doesn’t work. Maybe we should go back to noir. Or something else. Or fucking quit. It’s never taken us this long, Vince. We’re the king and queen of the quick turnaround. Why can’t I tell a simple story? She was born, she lived, she wanted things, she died. Yes, she died. I’m willing to admit that as a possibility. I can stage her death if that’s the right ending. I can do anything for the right ending. I staged her beginning, so I can place the marks for her end.

[long pause]

MAKO: Then let it be what it always was. What it must be. A child’s story. Not hers. Not ours. But his. Something terrible happened to a little boy in a beautiful place and it kept happening until a woman came from the sky to save him. Came sailing down like Isis with her arms full of roses. It’s a fairy tale. A children’s story. Not a funny or silly one, but one with blood and death and horror, because that’s fairy tales, too. A kid got swallowed by a whale. A little Pinocchio. A little Caliban. It’s all there.

And, you know, in a fairy tale, the maidens are never dead—not really. They’re just sleeping.

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream

The Land of Milk and Desire

Once upon a time, not so long ago at all, there lived a boy whose wishes never came true. The boy was born in the Land of Milk and Desire and had never known any other country. The Land of Milk and Desire had made him into himself, and he loved it the way some children love a velvet toy with a worn-out tail.

In the Land of Milk and Desire, everything is always wet. Everywhere you might want to step has, at the least, a river running through it; or a rich, golden-blue swamp; or a sweet-green suckling bog; or a bright, rosy lake; or a deep, quiet pond; or a fragrant, iridescent bayou; or one of the many seas, which are all as red as longing. The boy grew up in a little village on the shore of one of these seas: the very biggest one, the Qadesh. He played on the beach, collecting whelks (which are not really whelks, but rather rough, smoky crystals with frilly, fragile, florescent creatures living inside) and driftwood (which is not really driftwood, but the petrified bones of wily, whopping, woolly beasts that once roamed the Land of Milk and Desire before time woke up with a sore head and started ordering everyone about) and listening to the strange yelping songs of the seals (which are not really seals, but two-horned candy-striped aquatic ungulates with whiskers as long as tusks and as fuzzy as your father’s moustache). And he stared out to sea, past headlands cluttered with thick, dripping jungle that smelled like salt and cinnamon and cocoa, past the lights of the boats in the harbour, past the pink breakers and the heavy mist, and out to the long, dark shapes that floated in the deeps of the Qadesh like islands, like places you could get to and climb, explore, lie down on, and dream up at the many, many stars.

But they were not really islands, and no child born in the Land of Milk and Desire could remember a time when he or she thought they were. For in the sea of Qadesh lived the callowhales, as mysterious as they were magical. The callowhales never said a word nor came out of the water, did not sing like the seals which were not really seals, nor leave their shells behind like the whelks which were not really whelks, nor behave carelessly with their bones like the driftwood that was not really driftwood. And from the time he was so small that he did not know what a lie was, the boy had one secret, silent, singular wish—a wish so secret he never once said it out loud: to see the face of a callowhale.

Now, for a long while, the boy did not know that he had the gift of wishes that never came true. He thought himself no different than any other boy or girl in Adonis. Adonis was the name of the village he had lived in since the beginning of the world, which, in his case, was July the third, when his mother gave birth to him in a cacao-hut with three rooms, while her husband and her midwife held her hands and told her she was doing very well indeed. She named him Anchises, who was the lover of Venus in a very old story.

Anchises was born in the morning, which in the Land of Milk and Desire is the same thing as saying he was born in the springtime, for on that wonderful planet, a day is as long as a year. The world takes as long to move on its murky-vivid golden path round the sun as the whole of the Land of Milk and Desire takes to turn itself around, though Venus manages both of these in two-thirds of the time that Earth takes, the old dawdler. This means that the morning lasts as long as springtime and it is morning for ages and ages; until the bright, glassy, humid summer brings the afternoon; which stretches on and on into the crisp, windy autumnal twilight that seems as though it will never end—until winter brings a night as long and dark as memory.

July the third was a kind year. There was plenty of rain in the morning, and in the afternoon the cacao (which is not really cacao, but a dark, dusty, dizzyingly tall tree that gives fruits which are not really dates and nuts which are not really cashews) produced thickly, the cows (which are not really cows, but four-hearted fern-eating fire-red brutes that give good meat and have reasonably even tempers) chewed cud and grew fat, and the divers brought back many groaning amphorae of milk from the callowhales. In the pale rosy melancholy fall of evening the children gathered so many cacao-nuts and cassowary eggs (which are not really cassowaries, but grumpy, green-blue, gobbling flightless lizard-birds with black marks on their breasts like human hands) that a Nutcake Festival was declared and held every autumn twilight thereafter. Even the interminable winter night was not so cold that anything froze, but not so warm that the plants that needed cold to thrive could not get their healthful midnight sleep.

The Nutcake Festival was the boy’s favourite thing in the world—after his parents, callowhales, and chasing cassowaries until they squawked indignantly and told him he was wicked, wicked! in Mandarin, a language the birds had learned like parrots when the first humans arrived in the Land of Milk and Desire, on account of those first humans being Chinese. (The creatures have stubbornly refused to learn any of the other languages humans enjoy speaking, such as English and Turkish, Anchises’s personal tongues, but at least it all had the enviable result that little children spoke passable Mandarin, albeit with a cassowary’s clipped accent.)

At the conclusion of the Nutcake Festival of Adonis, each of the villagers chose their own glittery, painted egg and a large brown cacao-nut, still in its shell, from a great copper basket at the centre of town. Now, one of the nuts was not really a nut, but an empty shell containing a pretty little ring the same weight as a nut. Whoever drew this shell got to make a wish that was sure to come true, and also got to take home a sweetloaf and a barrel of black beer. The year Anchises was six, he chose the shell with the ring in it, and, holding up the copper ring (too big for even his fattest finger) for all to see, he quite solemnly wished that his parents should love him forever and live forever, too—which is really two wishes, but the villagers let it pass, because that is a very endearing thing to ask.

Anchises did not know yet that his wishes could not come true, that any wish he spoke out loud would echo among the stars and find no home there. And since forever is a long, long time, he did not discover this curse until long after that Nutcake Festival when the salt-sweet sea wind was so full of seal song and good promises.

And in the meantime, he kept on wishing.

The next thing that Anchises wished for was to be just like all the other children in the Land of Milk and Desire. Many children wish for something like that—not to stand out or be strange among others, lest one be left alone and abandoned when everyone else has gone home to rosy windows, to full arms and plates. Anchises wished this because other boys in his class liked to make fun of him for being dark skinned and for drawing callowhales in the margins of his books, their delicate fronds flowing all around the paragraphs in precise, complicated patterns like small labyrinths, the swollen gas bladders that bore the all-important callowmilk hanging off the corners of his lessons on the settlement of the Land of Milk and Desire by the Four Founding Nations. But as soon as the wish left Anchises’s mouth, it began the work of not coming true.

He grew tall first of all the boys in his class, sitting in his desk uncomfortably like a carrot ripened too soon. And he began to grow very beautiful, with high, broad cheekbones and brooding, dark eyes, with shining hair that fell just so, no matter how hard he tried to leave it messy and uncombed. Soon the parents of the other children began to talk of him leaving the Land of Milk and Desire for some other, more civilized, more cosmopolitan, less out-of-the-way place, such as the Country of Seeing and Being Seen or the Land of Wild Rancheros, or even Home (which was not really the home of anyone Anchises knew—in fact, most of the bakers and divers and packers and dairymen he said hello to every day had never seen the place they called Home, which was really the fertile, faraway, foreign world where their grandparents and great-grandparents had been born). Surely a boy with his face could become famous if only he were living someplace where folk appreciated more refined things than milk and desire. But Anchises wished to stay in Adonis by the shores of the Qadesh forever, to be a diver like his mother and father, and to one day bring children of his own to the Nutcake Festival.

Whether he wished for big things or little things, Anchises was thwarted. When he wished for a diver’s bell of his very own for Christmas, he received a bicycle with a horn and a case of terrible eczema that meant he could not even put his poor, peeling toe in the red Qadesh for the rest of the night. When a girl in his class, who wore a black ponytail and loved cassowaries so much she could hardly bring herself to speak English at all, grew sick with scarlet fever (which is not really scarlet fever, but a horrible, heedless, haemorrhagic virus that occasionally strikes delicate children in the Land of Milk and Desire), Anchises wished fervently that she should get well. He loved her a little for the softness of her voice and the thickness of her ponytail, but the girl died quickly in a lonely ward in White Peony Station, the great electric city where all the doctors lived. Anchises wept on his cacao-bark bed for days upon days, wishing to the red rafters that he could die with his friend and live in heaven with her and a hundred cassowaries and a hundred callowhales all singing together in perfect Mandarin.

But he did not die.

Anchises had begun to have suspicions. He did not speak of them, lest others think him mad. He drew his callowhale pictures and thought hard while he drew them. This is what Anchises drew when he made a picture of a callowhale:

As far as beginner naturalist’s drawings go, it was not bad. It was basically accurate. Anchises always drew the top half of a whale the same way, the way he had seen them all his life. But he had no idea what the bottom half of a callowhale looked like. He had never been allowed to go diving with his mother or his father, no matter how hard he had wished it. And besides, even divers didn’t really know what a callowhale looked like. They were too big to see all at once. It would be like trying to guess what South America looked like when you have only seen one cafe in Buenos Aires. But Anchises guessed anyway. He tried many times to make one that seemed right to him, but none of them really did. They looked like a blimp wearing a hula skirt, or a pinto bean with noodles growing out of it. They looked silly to him, and stupid. But callowhales were not silly or stupid. He knew that. He knew it, though he had no reason to know anything about them. Even the people who did know something about the vast, beautiful animals that lived in the wonderful scarlet sea couldn’t seem to agree on anything about them, though Anchises felt quite certain they were animals, and not “great bloody meatloafs,” as Mr Preakness called them, nor “overgrown Brussels sprouts,” as Miss Bao insisted.

Finally, Anchises decided to try something new. He laid out a piece of fresh, new paper, the best sheet he could find, with only a few bits of cacao-seed flecking the fibre. He sharpened his pencil with his knife and made sure he had a good breakfast and a glass of orange juice by his side (which was not really orange juice, but a tangy, thready, tingly juice from a plant whose fruit is orange, but whose exterior is the size of a doctor’s satchel and covered in lilac fur) in case he got thirsty. He sat at his desk, which faced the beach and the foamy Qadesh, and said, very clearly, to the surf: “I wish that I can’t ever draw what a callowhale really looks like, and always make a real hash job of it.”

Anchises put his pencil to his paper, and this is what he drew:

After that, Anchises put his pencil and paper away under the floorboards and only took out his bottom-half-of-a-callowhale picture to look at when everyone else had gone to bed. He never asked his mother or his father whether his drawing looked right to them. He didn’t have to.

And day after day, when his chores were done and he had read all the passages required for the next day’s lessons, Anchises went down to the shore near his house. He no longer collected whelk shells which were not really whelk shells, nor driftwood which was not really driftwood. He did not try to sing along with the striped seals which were not really seals. He only watched the callowhales. In his mind, he kept drawing them, over and over, their endless arms beneath the red water wrapping him up like love.

The boy whose wishes couldn’t come true was a good child with a good heart in his good chest. Even after he discovered how to wish for the opposite of what he wanted, he did not abuse the privilege. If you play too hard with a toy, it will break. Anchises had never broken any of his toys, even when he was so small he thought his stuffed velvet turtle was a real turtle. He spent his wishes carefully, like a miser spends his coins.

He wished that his parents should have terrible draws when they dove for callowmilk—and his voice trembled when he said it, for even though he knew it would come out well, it hurt him to wish bad fortune on his family. When he overheard his father weeping in the night because he had wanted seven children for as long as he could remember—being one of seven himself, whose mother and grandmother had also had six siblings—Anchises looked out to the fiery autumn waves and wished that his mother would never have any more children ever, that he should always be an only child and never have three brothers and three sisters, which was too many, anyone would admit. And he wished—finally, guiltily—that all the children in school would hate him and call him names and beat him, that they would shun the sight of him and never ask him along with them when they went fishing after school. He shook all night afterward, terrified that the spell would work, but also terrified that it would not; sick with the conviction that, this time of all times, he had gone too far, wished for something too precious, too impossible, too princely for the magic to manage.

And the amphorae of Anchises’s house swelled with callowmilk.

And the mother of Anchises swelled with twins.

And the children of Anchises’s acquaintance clapped him on the shoulder; and laughed at his shy jokes; and called him Doctor Callow, because he knew even more about callowhales than the teacher did; and boy howdy did the Doctor catch more trout (which are not really trout, but skinny, skittish, scaly fish with wine-coloured fins and three bulging eyes, one of which is a false lantern-eye that lights up at night to seduce krill-which-is-not-really-krill into the creatures’ wide mouths) than anybody else!

Doctor Callow found himself, suddenly, a happy child. And thus happified, he grew to the age of eight in the Land of Milk and Desire, no longer wishing for the opposite of his own desire, for he had all he could ever imagine wanting.

The Famine Queen of Phobos

(Oxblood Films, 1938, dir. Severin Unck)

(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 4, SIDE 2, COMMENCE 0:09)

SC3 EXT. LOCATION #6 MARS/PHOBOS—KALLISTI SQUARE, DAY 49. AFTERNOON [5 APRIL, 1936]

[EXT. The Kallisti Square Depot on Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons. The camera careens unsteadily; a throng of furious men and women stampede across the square, slamming bats and batons into the windows of the public distribution centre, the customs house, the cafes and warehouses. They are looking for food—they chant for food, they scream for food, they sob for it. But the distribution centre has nothing. The cafes have nothing. They closed weeks ago, and the warehouses contain little but shipping labels from the last deliveries of bread and callowmilk. The people of Phobos would loot the whole city, if there was anything to loot.

Phobos is a tiny world, with poor soil and few features to lure tourists or investors. It is an industrial settlement, a halfway house between the mines of the asteroid belt and the markets of Earth. Almost all food must come from somewhere else: from Mars itself, from Earth, from the fertile Inner System. Nearby Deimos can offer little help—greener, softer, but her population still hovers precariously over stability; unable, quite, to touch down. Two months ago, the organized workers, led by Arkady Liu and Ellory Lyford, went on strike, demanding all the things workers need and management withholds: wages, shortened contracts, more doctors, more food, more protection. The response was simple: all food shipments to Phobos ceased. A year from now, very few offworlders will not know the name Arkady Liu.

SEVERIN UNCK runs with Liu’s mob, searching for a place to stand and speak. She ducks through the doorway of a Prithvi Deep Sea Holdings processing facility and crouches into the shadows. She breathes heavily, a flush riding in her cheeks. She has not eaten in two days. She has had one cup of water in the last twenty-four hours. She is hiding—her equipment is worth something, even her clothes. She came to shoot something else entirely: a year of holidays, each on a different moon. An ice-cream cone of a project, contracted with Oxblood to pay for the Jupiter project she is already writing in her head.

It is Easter on Phobos. An egg might cost your life.

For the first time, SEVERIN has no script at her feet. She looks into the camera; she stutters slightly on her first words, whispering, trying to recall what she wrote for this scene the night before.]

SEVERIN

Who…wh…who. [She swallows hard, begins again.] Who owns Phobos? China settled it, Britannia Fair owns two thirds of the landmass. The East Indian Trading Company is her mother and her master. But in truth, no nation owns the heart of Phobos.

It is a familiar story: Before the Wernyhora siblings gave us our road to the stars, the colonial powers and their worst-behaved corporate children made a feast of the world, and seemed ready to slaughter each other at table for one more slice of the bloody prize. To prove which one could fit the whole world in its mouth at once. And then—what? We are still stuck at that same table, frozen in place, a portrait of the dinner party at the moment it dispersed for more exciting revels. What would be left of Europe if those hungry empires had not been distracted by a hundred new worlds? What would be left now of the Iroquois League if half the American experiment had not lost interest in Louisiana the moment Venus sashayed by? Why should the doors of wild and raucous space still read England, Russia, France, Germany, China? Ninety years on, we still cannot get free of that cannibal dinner party whose invitations hit the post before any of us were born.

[SEVERIN tries to catch her breath. Terror shows in her eyes. The flush has drained from her cheeks. Her hands shake.]

I…I don’t remember what I meant to say. I had something written. I don’t remember. [A tremendous boom sounds somewhere off-camera; SEVERIN drops to the ground instinctively, crouching low. But she does not stop speaking.] I was born on the Moon, yet am not Lunar. I call myself English for no reason but the lion on my passport. I have never been to London. I have only set foot on Earth twice. I don’t know or care what goes on down there—but Earth still owns me. Earth owns all of us. And when we try to run into the garden, just for a moment, just to see something besides the same parlours and kitchens and halls our resentful parents built, we know what happens now. Phobos knows. They will starve us. They will burn us. They will bleed us.

[Fire detonates against the building; glass flies, cutting SEVERIN’S face, her arms, knocking her hard against Prithvi Deep Sea Holdings’ massive steel mineral processors. She crumples to the floor. She tries to lift herself up, but her left arm will not take the weight. She does not lift her head, but her words can be heard clearly. Blood drips from her mouth onto the cement.]

Our mother countries never stopped longing to devour everything. They never stopped hanging garlands for the party they had planned, never stopped groping to pin the tail on the manifest destiny. Back then, back before the stars, they meant to go to war over who got that pin. Today, I can’t escape the feeling that their war is still coming. It’ll take longer than it would have if we had stayed safe in our Earthbound beds. It may take a lot longer. It will be so much worse. But there is a script, and it will be followed.

[Men swarm into the warehouse, bashing the machinery with crowbars, with their bare hands, with streetlamps hoisted by six at a time. They do not see the camera or SEVERIN; they trample her, their boots on her cheek, her shoulder, her back. She calls out pitifully before she loses consciousness.]

ARKADY LIU

They may starve us, but we will choke them on their own wealth!

SEVERIN

Raz, help me. Fuck. I’m really hurt.

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[PERCIVAL UNCK films his daughter playing on the slopes of Mount Ampère. Blue alpine cassias twist up all around her, gnarled and stumped and prickly with translucent needles. They prefer the relative warmth of the valleys. The heights turn the endless forests of the Moon to hunched, baleful, contorted creatures. A thin scrim of snow crunches under SEVERIN UNCK’S small feet. She is dressed in her father’s idea of a mountain climber’s costume: lederhosen, stockings, buckled shoes, a ruffled shirt. Her long hair is ribboned into thick pigtails. Severin tries to entice her father into playing hide and seek, but though he is happy to seek her, he will not perform his part by hiding. He might miss something. Finally, the child gives up.]

SEVERIN

Daddy, you have to chase me! Don’t you know anything?

PERCIVAL

Oh, I’ll chase you, Rinny. I’ll chase you anywhere you run! And when I find you I will chomp you to bits like a bad old wolf!

[Shrieks and giggles. SEVERIN runs behind a malevolently torsioned cassia. She peeks out again, brushing needles out of her hair.]

SEVERIN

But when you catch me and chomp me, after that you have to hide and I’ll chase you! That’s how you play, silly! And when I find you I’ll roar like a TIGER and scare you to DEATH.

PERCIVAL

[Laughing.] Shan’t! I have the camera, and whoever has the camera is King and gets to make the rules.

SEVERIN

[Leaps up, grasping at air. The image shakes as he yanks Clara up and out of reach.] Gimme! Give it to me! I want it!

The Ingénue’s Handbook

January 16, 1930, Definitely Three in the Morning

The Butterfly Room, Aboard the Achelois, Sea of Tranquillity

Place your bets, ladies and gentleman. We have a murderer on the ship and I intend to flush them out.

The band finished playing at the stroke of midnight. Union musicians are just awful sticklers. The heaving mass of us tottered out of the ballroom and onto the decks of the Achelois, a glitter-mob of prodigious proportions. The night was warm; the wind blew toward Tithonus and not from, so the scents were pleasant instead of foul: the tang of salt-silver water, the sharp whips of pine forests on shore, spilled grenadine, and a hundred kinds of perfume, from Ye Olde No. 5 to Shalimar to that just-shagged musk that has no brand name, yet could never be mistaken for anything else. Nobody had the slightest inclination toward bed, so the bash went on outside while—this is important—the stewards shut up the ballroom for cleaning. We all hung off the railings, rainbow-tinsel-barnacle people, and all was right with the world so long as the world was nothing more than that beautiful boat sailing through the beautiful dark. Then the old dance began: people paired off and vanished two by two, sometimes three by three, and the decks grew more peaceful, emptier, sleepier. I was occupied with Nigel—oh, I know, it’s too dreadful, all those gorgeous glitterati and I end up sitting on the staircase talking to my ex! I felt really and truly forty for the first time. I didn’t want to sneak off behind the smokestack to canoodle with one of the pretty girls from contracts or even take a stab at snaring Wilhelmina Wildheart at long last. I just wanted to talk to someone who’s seen me with a runny nose and a bad cough and still thought I was all right. Nigel was always aces when I was sick. He’d pratfall by the bed and make my slippers talk like dolphins ’til I laughed, even though it made the cough worse.

Digression! No! Mary! The reason I must make a note of the fact that I was talking to Nigel on the staircase is to establish that:

I did not see Percy or Thad at all between the closing of the ballroom at midnight and twenty past one in the morning.

N. and I were sitting in the aft stairwell, which adjoins the south wall of the ballroom, thus…

We heard the gunshot immediately and bolted toward the grand entrance, which the stewards had opened up with a quickness, however…

A small number of people had already trampled all over the crime scene by the time I arrived.

We heard a great deal of screaming and dropping one’s drinks and weeping. I ran pell-mell; the heel of my left shoe broke off, but I kept hobbling on until I swung wide round the great carved ballroom door—Thad had it brought over from Mars only last year. And I saw it all. I saw the whole ugly thing like a set dressed for shooting. Poor Thaddeus lying face down on his own ebony floor, bleeding like mad. It was ever so much more blood than in the movies. When you shoot someone on film it’s just a pinprick, really, and then a little trickle of red. They slump to the floor and it’s over ’til the next take. But Thad’s blood gushed out all over the place. People had stepped in it. Yolanda Brun was trying to wipe some off of her green silk slingback.

I’ve said wrap parties obey no natural law. I’d been Madame Mortimer, at full tilt, only the week before. She roared up inside me, all pearl-handled soul and acid heart. Without a word, I walked up to one of the stewards (who’d gone about as pale as arsenic), took the key off his belt, shut and locked those grand Russian doors, and shoved a brass hat-rack through the handles for good measure.

“If I may have your attention?” I put on my biggest, most booming voice, the one that had slapped the back row in the face at the Blue Elephant Theatre back in London. I locked down my tears—I’ll cry for you later, Thaddy baby. I promise. “Thank you. I’m afraid I can’t allow any of you to leave just yet. Everything we need to solve this awful mess is right here at our fingertips. There’s not a moment to be lost if we’re to uncover the truth.”

You’d think I’d put them all in a cage and dangled the last rump roast in the universe outside the bars, the way they behaved. Shameful. But I stood my ground, and the stewards stood with me—whether because they knew who sliced their bread or because they appreciated the need to secure the scene of a crime before all the evidence gets simply fucked away by cretins, I’ve no idea. It would take a day to sail back to Grasshopper City, and by that time there wouldn’t be so much as a sip of evidence left for the police. I had to work quickly. For Thaddeus. He didn’t need my tears just then, he needed his heroine.

I knew everyone I locked into the ballroom that night, some better, some worse: Yolanda Brun, Hartford Crane, Nigel Lapine, Freddy and Penelope Edison, Percival Unck, Algernon Bogatryov, Himura Makoto, Dante de Vere, and Maud Locksley. (I’d only met Makoto, Capricorn’s newest golden boy, that night, but we’d already made plans to shoot pheasant together on the weekend.) I don’t quite know what came over me in that moment, facing those people—people I had known most of my life, worked with, slept with, admired, loathed, envied, the whole handbag of human push-me-pull-you—but suddenly, watching Yolanda whine and pour club soda on her bloodstained shoe, I was positively sick to death of them all. I could have gaily tossed them all into the drink and poured myself a grapefruit juice without a wink of pity in my heart. I don’t know what got into me, except Maxine Mortimer and her damnable need to solve the puzzle.

“Shut up, you puling, overstuffed veal calves,” I snarled, and even though it’s a line from Doom on Deimos, I delivered it better in 1930 than I ever did in 1925. “Have a little respect! Clear off! Give me some room!”

They flattened against the wall like school kids at a dance. I examined Thaddeus. He still had his dinner jacket on. The shot had gone through his back, straight into his heart. His cigarette still burned itself down between the fingers of his right hand. His left arm was folded under his chest. The craziest thought popped into my silly head: His hand’s gonna fall asleep that way! He’ll be all pins and needles when he wakes up. I went to disentangle him. No! Maxine Mortimer snapped in my head. Don’t you dare move that body, you dozy cow! The further one gets from the body, the harder it is to see the truth. I looked quickly round the ballroom instead. What luck! The gun lay under one of the banquet tables. Kicked there? Hidden deliberately? Dropped in the turmoil of it all? I sent Makoto to retrieve it, as he and Nigel were the only ones I felt certain about. Nigel was telling me about moustache wax when the gun went off, and Mack was fresh off the rocket. He didn’t know any of us well enough to care whether we lived or died, and besides, who would want something this drastic for their debut?

.22 Perun, walnut grip. Martian, I thought, but that didn’t mean anything. We’d all been to Mars. There wasn’t much to do there but shoot kangaroos.

Hartford raised his hand like a little boy in class. “Mary, whoever did this probably ran off at once. Why do we have to hang about watching you play detective? We’ve all seen it, love. Let’s be sensible: make a search party, comb the ship. Staying stuffed up in here won’t help anyone.”

“Hartford, if I thought you had the sense God gave a gumdrop, I’d let you ‘comb the ship’ to your heart’s content. What, pray tell, would you be searching for? The murder weapon—” I sniffed the Perun’s barrel to be sure; indeed, freshly fired. “—is here. The body is here. The first people to the scene—and therefore those nearest to the ballroom when our Thad was shot, and the closest thing we’ve got to witnesses—are here. You don’t get blood all over yourself when you shoot a man in the back; tearing up the laundry for a stained dinner jacket won’t do a lick of good. So why don’t you button up your expensive little mouth and let the adults talk?”

He did just that. I won’t say I didn’t get a wallop of satisfaction out of it. That vicious gossip hound Algernon B stood next to Hart, looking as though he were about to get on socially with an aneurysm. Sweat wriggled off his bald head and steamed up his glasses. He put his head between his knees. But if sweating makes you guilty, they were all in on it. Gin-sweats, stroke-sweats, beef-sweats, murder-sweats—who could tell the difference? I scanned their faces. I can do this, I thought. With everything I know about them, about Thaddeus, about deduction—at least the celluloid kind—I can figure it out.

“I’m leaving,” Freddy said. His face went red as a stoplight. “You’re nothing but a nasty, two-bit has-been with a flat ass and the clap, and you can’t keep me here.”

“So am I,” cried Dante de Vere. The pair of them stormed up to me, as though I’d never stared down a man who wanted my kidneys for earrings before.

I didn’t budge. “Mr Edison!” I roared. “You had a dispute with the deceased over unpaid fees for sound recording on Miranda, did you not?”

He recoiled. I don’t suppose anyone had roared at Franklin Edison since he crashed his tricycle into a swing set. But then, I did have the .22. Roaring has more oomph with a Martian pistol behind it. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mary. I have disputes with everyone over unpaid fees for sound recording. If I started killing anyone who owes me money, the Moon would be a ghost town inside of a week.”

“What about you, Dante? He fired you from Death Comes at the Beginning. No one’s called you for so much as a footman’s role since.”

“Mary! I had no idea you thought of me that way—as so ruthless or so abject. I was with Maud, stargazing, just out there on the starboard rail. We heard the shot—we’re perfectly innocent. I loved Thad, you know that. He looked after my dogs when I was on location.”

This gave me an idea. I pounced upon it before it could get away. “I have a question. If I feel you have answered honestly, I shall let you go on your way. Who among us loved Thaddeus Irigaray? I believe that may tell us more than asking who hated him.” Proper Maxine Mortimer, from first syllable to last. “I certainly did,” I answered first. And it was true. He’d kept me in steady work for a decade and let me bring my cat on set. Hell, he’d proposed eight times. When Laszlo Barque left him, he stayed in my guest room for a month.

No one else spoke up. Percy stared determinedly at his feet. Maud and Dante looked quite thoroughly bored, smoking together by the piano. Finally, Maud stubbed out her cigarette and said, “All right, fine, I loved him. He looked after me post my little spot of nastiness with Oxblood. I was supposed to get the Mortimer contract, you know. The studio wanted me. But Thad wanted…I don’t know, I suppose he wanted a blonde.” She hurried to correct the bitter edge in her voice. “But no hard feelings! Why, that was ages ago.”

Freddy’s mouth kept running away from him. It twitched; it grimaced. It wanted to say something his brain knew it oughtn’t. He was drunk as a lord, careening from side to side, as though that great huge ballroom were too small for him, that coarse, awful elephant of a man.

“How about you, Penny?” Freddy hissed. Penelope Edison looked as though she were going to split apart at the seams. She kept rubbing her arms as though she were freezing to death. She stared at her husband, such a horrible stare, full of pleading and misery. Helpless tears started rolling down her face and they didn’t look like they’d ever stop. “Penny? Cat got your tongue? Who do you love, Pen? Me? Percy? How about Algernon over there? Or that sad sack of shit?” And he pointed to the ruin of Thaddeus Irigaray.

“Please, Freddy,” she whispered. I have never seen anything quite so wretched as Penelope Edison weeping.

“Please what? I didn’t do anything. But if somebody asks a question, it’s only polite to answer. And being polite is so important, isn’t it? If I forget one little P in an ocean of Qs, it’s the end of the goddamned world, but you can just stand there and quiver and not answer the fucking question?”

“Freddy, stop.” Percy put a hand on his shoulder and Edison swung wild, whacked him right in the eye. Percy doubled over, holding his face. “Fred! I’m trying to help you!”

“You need help, not me,” Freddy snarled back. “After everything I’ve given you people! Without me, without my family, you cunts are just flouncing around on a stage in hell with nobody fucking watching. And what do I get back? What’s my fabulous fee for making your entire disgusting existence possible?” He crossed to the body in two enormous strides and kicked Thaddeus’s shoulder, kicked him over onto his back, and kept on kicking him. Thad’s poor limp arm fell onto the floor.

Everyone started hollering, grabbing Edison, and gnashing their teeth—but all Maxine Mortimer saw was Thad’s left hand, the one poor softhearted Mary had worried would go all pins and needles on him. He’d curled his fingers into a fist. He had something in there, clutched in his bloody fingers. Nobody else saw it. They were too busy wrestling a drunk tycoon, sliding around in a good man’s death.

“That garbage shit-fucking cocksucker fucked my wife,” wailed Freddy, dogpiled under the biggest stars in Tinseltown. “That’s who loved him. My Penny. That’s who!”

Penny shook her head back and forth, her mouth hanging open, not breathing. She flopped onto the floor. “I didn’t…” she gasped. “I didn’t…”

No, she didn’t. Penelope Edison most certainly did not. She couldn’t have. Not in a year of Easters. What the hell was going on here?

“Jesus, someone get her a paper bag,” Maud Locksley said.

“Tell them!” shrieked Edison. The King of Sound and Colour was bawling his eyes out in a pool of cold blood. “That fucking whore snuck around on me while I was in Elish for the Worlds’ Fair! And when I got back, you were all slim and trim again, weren’t you, you bitch, you goddamned gold-digging Jezebel—”

It was going so well. Just like a movie. Right now, in my stateroom, in the silence of the deep, woeful night, I think it was going so well because…that’s what happens in a movie. I cast a spell, and for a moment, just a moment, life had a script. The detective locks the door and names the suspects and, eventually, someone confesses. That’s how the whole business works. It’s instinct. Freddy couldn’t resist it. Or Percy couldn’t. Couldn’t resist the desire to crawl inside the script. It’s safe in there. Nice. Warm. The script will look after you.

But Percy stopped it.

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

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

He’s lying.

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

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

“Whose gun was it?” I asked.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a photograph. Of a baby girl.

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

Kansas

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

Security clearance required.

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

ERASMO: We did. We just…got distracted. Look, I know you think we’re a great fat lot of useless drama society layabouts, but we are, each and every one of us, professionals. We stabilized the situation very quickly. Dr Nantakarn had a mobile ICU already set up in advance of the dives we had planned. Retta isolated Anchises and put gloves on him so he couldn’t infect anyone else. She took Mari in hand, sliced that thing right out of her palm, and bandaged it up before Konrad and Franco could get breakfast cleared away. Gave her morphine for the pain. Mari was pretty doped up. She slept it off in the medical tent while we discussed what to do about Horace.

Venusian freshwater wells are deep. To get past the saltwater you have to really burrow down. We had a boom mic and a small crane. Nothing nearly long enough. Max said…he said Horace was already buried. We could cap the well, carve his name on it. It would be a beautiful grave. He was trying to be kind. Maximo’s kindness can be morbid. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just let Horace rot down there, getting chewed on by who knows what blind, awful worms live in Venus’s underbelly. I have too good an imagination. I could see it, some horrid night-eel laying eggs in his eye sockets…I couldn’t leave him down there in the dark. He deserved a better final scene than that. Besides…he could have been alive. What if he’d only broken a leg? Both legs? What if he was slowly bleeding to death down there?

Well, the only other option was the diving cables. We had two suits left: one for the diver and one for the cameraman, and heaps of breathing tubes. We could lower someone down, just as we would from the gondola into the Qadesh. I thought it should be me. Look at me—I’m the obvious choice. I’m a big man, I’m strong, I could carry Horace back up, easy. Like a fireman. I could carry them all back.

But Iggy killed that idea. “These village wells, they narrow as they go down. You could get stuck, and, you know, we have to lower you and haul you and the body—and Horace—back up. We have no climbing equipment. No cleats or crampons. The tube could snap. We could drop you. You’re the heaviest one of us, Raz. The lightest should go.”

And all eyes turned to Arlo.

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

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

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

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

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

ERASMO: Huh. I can see that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CYTHERA: What time did Mr Covington begin his descent?

ERASMO: I’d say around 1100. It was stickily warm; the air didn’t seem to move at all. We helped Arlo waddle into the town centre, to the mouth of the well. He stood there like a comic book hero amidst all that wreckage, all those mangled, mutilated houses, with his diving helmet tucked under his arm like Barracuda the Brave from that old Capricorn cartoon The Arachnid vs. The Seven Seas. He smiled at us, and I knew he was terrified, so it must have cost him something to flash that astonishing supernova grin our way. He was just trying to tell us everything was gonna be okay.

“Hey,” Arlo said. “So there’s this mummy snake and this baby snake and the baby snake says, ‘Mumsy, are we poisonous?’ and the mummy says, ‘Yes, sweetums, but why do you ask?’ and the baby says, ‘Because I just bit myself!’”

It’s not a great joke. But we laughed like he was headlining at Carnegie Hall.

CYTHERA: Did Severin record any of this?

ERASMO: [laughs] Are you joking? Of course she did. Severin and Crissy set up two cameras, one on our faces and one for the wide shot. It’s a pretty amazing scene. If everything had gone differently, I think we’d be munching hors d’oeuvres at Academy Awards pre-parties right now, instead of these, frankly, dreadful biscuits and this abomination disguising itself as tea. Even after, in the darkroom, Crissy and I thought it was something else. The shards of Adonis casting hard, sharp shadows, the well in the centre of the shot, Arlo doing his Barracuda the Brave shtick, the breathing tube and diving cables tied tight around his chest, then a pan around Maximo, Santiago, Konrad, Franco, and Severin. All of us braced against the stone wall of the well like we meant to play tug-of-war with the public waterworks.

Arlo tested the Ekho mic. The radio crackled on. “Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen! Gather in, pour yourself a cup of something nice, and sit back for another instalment of the solar system’s favourite tale of adventure, romance, and intrigue on How Many Miles Before Arlo Smashes His Skinny Arse to Bits? Okay, down I go! Don’t forget to make a wish!”

I turned away when he jumped in. I’d seen that once already.

As soon as Arlo saying wish whined out on the radio, the static boomed out its usual unintelligible hissing, then a voice exploded out of the white noise. This time we could all hear the words perfectly clearly: Somewhere the sun is shining, but here it don’t do nothing but rain…

It was Mariana’s and Cristabel’s voices. Singing “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain,” exactly the way they did on our first night at the Waldorf in White Peony Station. But it came showering down from everywhere, knotted up in ribbons of static, out of the sky, out of the trees, up from the mud and the water.

CYTHERA: How did Ossina react to that?

ERASMO: The same way we all did: it scared the tits off us. But we had Arlo hanging off of our belts—if we lost our composure, he’d fall. It was so loud! All any of us wanted to do was put our hands over our ears. We took turns, so the rest could still let the cable out slowly. Arlo called up every ten metres or so. And between his reedy voice threading out of the field radio, other voices began to pop up out of the sea of white noise like…like lobster cages with monsters inside.

“Ten metres down! Nothing to see, just brick. Some very exciting mould.”

And Max’s voice would float behind: Heaven knows what she has known; my mind she has mated and amazed my sight…

“Twenty metres! Can you imagine being the fellas who had to dig this thing out in the first place? Boy do I love taxes, accounts payable, and central heating.” Then Severin’s voice spooled out of the dusk: I used to look up at night and dream of the Solar System…

“Fiftyish and all’s well! I’m not gonna call out the metres anymore. It’s getting hard to tell. I was counting the bricks, but they’ve gone now, and I probably had it wrong, anyway. It’s not like I have a ruler. I’ll just keep talking. It can’t be that much longer.” Maximo’s baritone snapped and sizzled out of the air: I tell my baby it never rains on Venus, I tell my baby the sky is pink as a kiss… “So…how do you get a dog to stop digging in the garden? You confiscate his shovel.” A little girl’s voice battered our eardrums from the sky: They are all telling the story to me… “What do you call a four-hundred-pound gorilla? Sir. Or anything he wants. Or the next big thing at Plantagenet Pictures, am I right? This is wonderful. I can just pretend you’re all laughing. So much easier when there’s only mud to give you a bit of side-eye. Ooh, there’s a snail. Sort of. It’s hot pink. And has little feet. You could probably make a joke out of that. What do you call a snail with feet?” Begone, deceiver! I shall marry Doctor Gruel at the stroke of dawn!

CYTHERA: Even for Arlo, that’s a terrible punch line.

ERASMO: The punchline was “A crawlusc.” Which is also not spectacular. No, the field radio started losing its connection with Arlo, and other broadcasts sort of sagged in over his. Seventy-six megahertz is just a frequency—and a popular one. We hadn’t picked anything up since we got out to Adonis, so we didn’t think frequency traffic would be a problem. But the Ekho mic couldn’t quite hold its own once Arlo had gone down past…well, I don’t know. Like I said, he stopped telling us his measurements past fifty metres.

CYTHERA: You can’t possibly remember all this so well.

ERASMO: I can. We were rolling film the whole time; recording sound, too. I listened to it about a thousand times on the trip back. Before Max went on his little crusade. I remember it like it’s written on that wall over there.

The tube bottomed out at one hundred and eighty metres, give or take. Arlo called up: “Don’t worry! I think I can jump down from here if I disconnect the tube!”—Behold, this is not a hospital, but my ship!—“…climb back up with Horace in the sling; it’s only a bit of a drop to the bottom.”

We all yelled at him not to disconnect, but he couldn’t hear us, I’m sure he couldn’t. We could barely hear ourselves. We heard him drop, grunt, and brush himself off. He said, “It’s pretty dry down here. I thought this was a well? There’re puddles, but nothing else. Maybe there’s a sluice gate somewhere? But, Raz…I don’t see Horace. I’ll keep looking! It’s huge down here. There’re drawings on the walls. Like feathers and tic-tac-toe hash marks and, I don’t know, maybe horses. Or snail shells. It looks like those caves in France. I can barely see the ceiling. Did Adonis have a cistern? If not, they were done for anyhow. It’s dry as a bone down here. Not a drop to drink. Christ, it just goes on and on, like Kansas…”

“What’s Kansas?” Severin yelled over the unbearable noise. The miserable static picked up that word from the radio and flung it out over the Qadesh, up into the dim gold clouds. It detonated softly, like fireworks going off in the next town over.

Kansas, Kansas, Kansas.

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[A black cloth lies over the lens. A demand to shut the damn thing off has been made and ignored, but the cloth makes Clara look benign. Shapes move indistinctly across the room. SEVERIN UNCK, sixteen years old, sits in silhouette, her hair longer than it will ever be again.]

PERCIVAL UNCK

It’s for your own good, my little hippopotamus.

SEVERIN

Don’t call me that. There are more lies in this house than wallpaper. Don’t pile on any new ones. The roof won’t stand the weight.

PERCIVAL

Ada said you can stay with her until this has all blown over. We’ll go after the New Year’s parade. If you’d rather a flat in the city, perhaps we can come to some arrangement…

SEVERIN

What about Mary?

PERCIVAL

Mary’s shooting on location this year.

SEVERIN

[begins to cry] Why? Papa, I want to stay here. This is my home. Don’t you love me?

PERCIVAL

I am disruptive to your life right now. And…you are disruptive to mine. I love you, but there’s a great deal of trouble at the moment.

SEVERIN

Oh, there’s always trouble. There’s always something. Some reason I’m inconvenient. Some excuse to stay away. What kind of trouble now?

PERCIVAL

People…people are saying I shot someone.

SEVERIN

[SEVERIN pulls away.] Uncle Thad? [Percival does not answer.] Did you?

PERCIVAL

Rinny, it’s very complicated…

SEVERIN

Oh my god.

PERCIVAL

{He reaches out for her, his shadow for her shadow.] Darling, listen.

SEVERIN

No, don’t touch me. Call Ada. I won’t stay in this house another second.

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream:

The House, the Eye, and the Whale

Once upon a time, in the Land of Milk and Desire, there lived a boy who had outsmarted his birthright. Whether he knew it or not, this is a very dangerous thing to do. A birthright can’t be cut off like a bit of fingernail—it hangs about, sullen, limping through the years with two wooden legs and a clay hand, waiting, slinking, sniffing for a chance to get in the game again.

Only once did Anchises, whom everyone called Doctor Callow, tell a grown person about the workings of his heart. When he was eight and believed that his biggest wishes-which-were-not-really-wishes were behind him, little Doctor Callow went to see a witch (who was not really a witch, but an ornery old woman who had once made her living as an ostentatious fortune teller in Judgment-of-Paris, one of the great cities of the southern part of the Land of Milk and Desire, very far from Adonis, a city where the laws against conflict are so strict that the slightest bickering over a supper bill is cause for expulsion). The witch’s name was Hesiod—though it wasn’t, really. She had been born Basak Uzun, but began trying to escape her name as soon as her mouth got big enough to say it. She tried on many new names before she saw “Hesiod” in a beautiful book about the ancient days of Home, a place she had never seen and would never see. The name sounded to her like yellow sunlight on brown, dry earth, and she took it the way some young persons take trinkets when a shopkeeper’s back is turned, even though it was a boy’s name. She didn’t find that out until much later, and by then, she didn’t care. Hesiod fell in love with a dashing diver and came away from Judgment-of-Paris to homestead in Adonis, a place so new at the time that it didn’t have a name. When her beloved died at sea—brushed ever so lightly, as lightly as a lover, by the frond of a callowhale—Hesiod returned to her old ways, for telling fortunes is a hard habit to break.

Anchises strung six trout-which-were-not-really-trout on a heavy rope and brought them along to pay for his fortune. Hesiod’s hut, its veranda washed by salt wind, its windows pink sea glass, sat, quite satisfied with itself, by the shore of the Qadesh. Anchises knocked three times, which is traditional. Hesiod answered him, her long grey hair plaited with cacao-husks and ocean daisies (which are not really daisies, but livid, lilac, languorous anemones that can survive for six days without water). Doctor Callow presented his gift of fish.

Hesiod plucked out one of the fish’s eyes and ate it without a word. It must have tasted good, as eyes go, for she shrugged and let him into her house, sat him on a driftwood-which-was-not-really-driftwood chair, and pulled out her cards. She spread them on the table in a graceful fan, like a casino girl (which Hesiod had also been when she was young). The witch-who-was-not-really-a-witch had a crystal ball, too, but she never used it and it wore a perfect coat of dust. It was just for show, but people like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball.

“What’s your name?” said Hesiod gruffly. She wasn’t really gruff, but people like a grouchy witch. A friendly one couldn’t possibly know anything about the world.

“Doctor Callow,” answered the boy proudly.

“No it isn’t,” snorted the old woman.

His little shoulders fell. “It’s Anchises Kephus, ma’am,” he mumbled.

“That’s fine, boy. I can always spot another scrap who’s shucked their name. If a name doesn’t fit you, best leave it on the road for someone else who’ll like it better.”

The witch-who-wasn’t-really-a-witch and the boy-who-was-really-a-boy sat without talking or moving for quite a while. Anchises didn’t know how to explain his life to her. It sounded silly when he tried to make words out of it. He had become very good at figuring things out without asking adults about anything, and he found it hard—painful, even—to change his ways now. He was eight years old, and that, he thought, was a long time to get used to living a certain way.

Hesiod coughed and pulled a cigarette (which was not really a cigarette, but a shag made of black, bilious, brackish callowkelp, more expensive than beer from Home, wrapped up in newsprint) out of her deep bosom. She lit it, and the room filled with a scent like sumac and ozone and coffee and possibilities. “You have to ask a question, you know.” She chuckled. “It costs a lot more than fish for the kind of fortune where you don’t say anything.”

Anchises took a breath as big as his eight years. “I think that I have a curse, Miss Hesiod. Maybe it’s not a curse—maybe it’s no different than being born with yellow hair, or something. But I don’t have yellow hair; I have this. I think I’ve had it since I was little—littler than I am now, I mean. This is what I think the curse is, ma’am: Anything I wish for doesn’t come true.”

Before Doctor Callow’s words came out of his mouth, they felt as heavy and swirling and important and salty as the Qadesh. But with every word he said to Hesiod, he hated the sound of his voice in the smoky hut and the words it was making even more. These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

“Oh, you silly little turtle. All children think that. Hell, I think that, sometimes.” Witches, even those who aren’t really witches, like to swear, and their customers like it, too. As a rule, Hesiod tried to keep to no fewer than four profanities per visit.

The boy gritted his teeth. “No, that’s not what I mean. I’ve had a long time to go over it—and I did go over it, carefully, like the men from Prithvi testing callowmilk for alkalinity. I do have a curse! Listen to me, I brought you fish!” Anchises calmed himself down, which was not easy for him, then or later. “These are things I know about it so far: It doesn’t matter if I want it very much or not much at all. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big thing or a little thing. I have to say the wish out loud or it doesn’t count—if I just think about it, nothing happens—but I don’t have to say any particular magic words. It’s enough to say I’d like rice-suckers for supper tonight, or I really want…” But he couldn’t say anything he really wanted, because he was so afraid the curse wouldn’t know the difference between wishing and an example of a wish he might make, and already he wouldn’t be getting rice-suckers for dinner, which he loved. He said the next part as quickly as he could, in case saying it at a normal speed would make it all come undone. “And if I am very careful and wish for the exact opposite of the thing I want, I get what I wanted in the first place, which I guess is called a loophole.”

Hesiod smoked her cigarette-that-wasn’t-really-a-cigarette thoughtfully. “How big can you do? If you wished for the sun to come up tomorrow, would the world end?”

“I don’t know, I’d never dare!”

“You never know unless you try.” The crone shrugged.

“I think…I think it’s just things to do with me. Or, at least, people I know,” he added hastily, thinking of the girl with the black ponytail. “It’s localized phenomena,” he whispered, lifting a phrase from one of his textbooks.

“Big words from a little man. If you’ve got this all figured out, what do you need me for? Have you got a question, or haven’t you?”

“Yes! Hold on! Jeez!” It was all getting away from him, skidding out from under his feet like red sand. Anchises shoved his hand in his shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, on which he had written his question in neat, round letters, in case he got confused or upset. “What Is Going to Happen to Me?” he read slowly, evenly. “Is This Going to Happen Forever? Is It a Real Loophole? What Can I Do So It Goes Away?” He looked up at the fleshy lilac flowers in Hesiod’s hair and her big cataracted eyes. “Am I gonna be okay?”

Hesiod thought of fortune cards no differently than she thought of casino cards: each had a value, which changed according to its position on the table, and when it was laid down near other cards, their combined values made a winning or a losing hand. She dealt three cards from her deck as quick as breathing.

The House. The Eye. The Whale.

The House had a hut on it that looked a lot like Hesiod’s hut, only made up all of locks: locks for doors, locks for windows, a lock-thatched roof. The house stood, all locked up, under a sky full of stars, and in some of the stars, faces with suspicious eyes glared down. The Eye had three old ladies on it. They all had white hair that hung down like pillars to the ground. They wore silver, and they wore blindfolds. The middle one had an eyeball in her outstretched hand, from a green eye. The Whale had a callowhale on it, but it was not like Anchises’s drawing of a callowhale. It looked like a stone wrapped up in grass, only the leaves of the grass were shaped like peacock feathers, and they had eyes in them, too.

Hesiod burped. She liked to burp almost as much as she liked to swear, but her customers didn’t like the burping as much.

“Fucking hell, kidlet,” she sighed. Her breath smelled sour. “Just because things don’t go your way doesn’t mean you’re cursed. You think I didn’t wish to get old with my Iskender and have a bunch of babies and enough milk money for a house with central heating? You think I didn’t wish to be happy? You think any of the countries that landed here didn’t wish they could have it all to themselves and kick everyone else out? The world is made of wishing, Anki; just every bastard wishing all the time, and it’s a dog’s work to tell who gets their wishes and who doesn’t, because everyone’s wishes bash into each other a thousand times a minute, and it’ll get sorted out in hell if it ever does. If you wished the sun would come up tomorrow, it’d knock into a million other sad sacks wishing it wouldn’t, and no matter what happened come dawn, you couldn’t say who got their way. But mostly nobody gets their way. They wish for good and they get a handful of shit, and I know you’re young, but you’re old enough to get right with that. If you got that curse, baby boy, we all got it. I don’t want to hear you bitch before you get your beard. You got no idea how hard you can lose your wishes. You’re young enough to think there’s logic to time and events and desire. It’s cute, but I don’t go in for cute at my age.”

Anchises didn’t blink. “What do the cards say?” he said, stonily, his cheeks burning.

Hesiod burped again. “They say you’re never gonna get what you want, and you’ll just have to live with it like everyone else.”

Outside, beyond the glowing crimson breakers, the seals-which-were-not-really-seals barked out their rough songs like dinner bells, and never again did Doctor Callow tell a grown-up person what he knew.

As the years of July passed by, Anchises grew older—and more and more possessed by the desire to see the face of a callowhale. It was not only that no one had, but that little Doctor Callow was convinced that anything with a face had to be alive, alive the way he was, the way his parents and the foreman at the Prithvi factory and the cacao-dancers at the Nutcake Festival and the slick-suited politicians in White Peony Station were; the way the girl with the black ponytail no longer was. A face was where you kept your aliveness. It was the part of you that showed sorrow and laughing and anger and embarrassment and surprise. Other parts felt those things, but your face announced them. What did a surprised callowhale look like? How about sad? How about if you told one a joke, a really good joke, the best joke in the world, and it laughed? He had to know. At ten years old, Anchises felt that if he died without knowing, the bones of his face would be knotted up with grief. Anyone who dug him up a hundred years later would look at his skull and say: This man died missing the better part of his soul.

But he was only ten, and he did not yet have his own diving bell.

As Adonis began to look forward to the Nutcake Festival of the crisp, cold, lean year of July thirteenth, three things happened, one after the other. Like dreams following sleep, each one ended in wishes our Doctor Callow did not mean to make, and like morning following dreams, each wish drew borders round the territories of the rest of his life.

The village elders of Adonis put their shaggy heads and tight-stitched wallets together to plan something special for the Nutcake Festival that year, as it was the tenth Nutcake, and also because that year had not been so kind as July third: the amphorae were only three-quarters full, the cows-which-were-not-really-cows were surly and recalcitrant, and every other cacao-husk had no nut in it. Everyone needed cheering up. The elders sent away to Parvati, another village in the Land of Milk and Desire, deep in the lushest and loveliest jungles of the interior, for seven barrels of cider (which was not really cider, but heady, hearty, heavenly stuff the colour of a flamingo’s feathers for which Parvati was already becoming famous, as it was brewed from apples which are not really apples, but crisp, colossal, crystallized berries that grow only in the most protected and shadowy forests of the Land of Milk and Desire). They sent to the village of Dahomey on the slopes of Mount Neith where wild frangipani grows (which are not really frangipani, but fragrant, feral, fecund flowers the colour of sunset that smell like bread baking and are only the female of the species) for twelve mature Samedi moths, which are the males of the same species of the frangipani-which-is-not-really-frangipani. Every summer the frangipani-that-are-not-really-frangipani blossoms open up on the mountainside and thousands of great glossy black-green moths-that-are-not-really-moths fly out of their mothers and into the world. A single wing of the Samedi moth, properly roasted over a low, grass-fed fire, can feed twenty, with scraps left for the hounds. And, finally, the elders of Adonis sent to White Peony Station for three precious treasures, so dear they could not be purchased, only lent at robber’s prices, with thrice-signed bonds assuring their return in pristine condition. One treasure was white, the second silver, the third black. One enormous, the second awfully loud, the third nothing much to look at, but more dear than the other two combined.

The first treasure, white and enormous, was a projection screen.

The second, silver and awfully loud, was a film projector.

The third, black and not much to look at, was a movie, its spools of film closed tightly into canisters like holy jars of spices buried within the pyramids back Home.

The elders kept the name of the film secret, so that everyone who was not an elder could have the pleasure of finding out what it was just as the cider was going to their heads and the world seemed very fine indeed. They had debated long and hard over which movie to request from White Peony Station—a movie the children would like, but that would not bore the adults too much, that would neither be too sad nor too cloying, too pretentious nor too stupid. Only five people in Adonis had ever seen a movie before, and all in their youths, when they had first arrived in White Peony Station, or Aizen-Myo Sector, or Judgment-of-Paris, or even back Home. Adonis was normally too small and busy for such diversions. Finally, they settled upon a film by Percival Unck, whose name the old timers remembered blazing from the marquees of those White Peony and Aizen-Myo movie halls. This film was called The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh, and it had an octopus in it.

Little Doctor Callow, along with his mother, who was pregnant again, and his father, and his baby sister, and the twins, thrilled with anticipation. Anchises ranged far and wide into the hills to find cacao-husks that rattled with seeds inside. He put his pole into the water off of the swimming dock, caught four lovely fish, and smoked the wine-dark trout himself. He chased cassowaries off of their nests, ignoring their squawks and caterwauling, bolting from a hen hollering Cao ni nainai de, ni ge wangbadan gouzazhong! Sizei, ni geiwo gun huilai, wo nie si nige guisunzi!, and carried home as many eggs as he could in an apron made from the bottom of his school shirt. All the other children did their share, wandering the jungle paths in the autumn dusk, giggling in the gloaming, chasing after wild piglets (which are not really piglets, but skinny, six-legged, spicy-tasting black miniature deer, with long searching snouts and longer teeth). Anchises tried to outdo them all, combing the beach for live scallops (which are not really scallops, and taste like slightly bitter mangoes), and clams (which are not really clams, but squirting, sallow, shell-dwelling molluscs whose meat is poisonous except in autumn).

After a long day of digging up clams-which-were-not-really-clams and prying whelks-which-were-not-really-whelks free of rocks, Anchises saw something on the magenta-mauve sand. It stopped him in his steps. It stopped his breath in his chest. He knew what it was faster than he would have known his own face in a mirror. He had drawn a picture of one a long time ago, had seen it so clearly in his head it had been like a photograph.

It was a callowhale frond.

The thing was the colour of copper and as long as three fishing boats. It lay on the beach like a dead serpent out of the corner of some old map. Fine, long hairs and thick viney stalks draped off of it, and each hair and stalk forked off into fringes like coral or ferns. Flaps of skin like flowers and leaves, silvery and mossy like verdigris, flopped helplessly in the foamy, calm water. A huge gas bladder, drained and wrinkled and empty, was sinking slowly into the wet sand. Anchises thought he could see dim lights flickering inside it, lights like eyes opening deep beneath the skin of the balloon, if it was really skin. None of the seabirds (which are not really seabirds) or scuttling crabs (which are not really crabs) would come near it.

Anchises stared at the frond for a long time. The lights burst weakly inside it, hot green and searing blue. It was still warm. It was still wet. It smelled like a thousand things at once, so many that he could not sort the stink into its parts in order to say later what it had been like. Its shadow stretched deep and wide.

“Hello,” said Doctor Callow, and in that moment he truly could not recall any other name anyone might have called him in the history of the world. “Hi.”

The frond did not reply. The lights, if there were lights, did not grow brighter or dimmer. The sea-stench of the thing did not grow less or more powerful. Was its callowhale still alive? Was it sick? Was it in pain? The boy had never heard of a beached frond. Fronds did not come off like hair in a brush. Divers who accidentally touched one came home bruised, as though they had boxed a train. Or with missing hands. Or missing eyes. Or crisscrossed with scars from wounds they had never suffered. Or not at all.

Doctor Callow put out his hand hesitantly. His bare hand—he did not have divers’ gloves or a mesh suit, only his pink, fleshy fingers. He held them above the skin of the great frond. He felt nothing but the warmth rising from it like tea-steam. He took his hand away and smelled it; it smelled like him, nothing more. He tried again, going a bit closer to that copper-coloured callowflesh. Nothing—and so he drew closer still, inching forward, the rest of his body eager, impatient. When he finally allowed his fingers to fall just above the body of the frond-flesh, Doctor Callow gasped. A sort of rusty, electric, half-sour crackling blossomed between him and it. It pushed up weakly against him, invisibly. It made colours in his mind, colours without names. His whole body felt it, firing off whatever involuntary reactions it could think of: goose bumps, shivers, sweat, stomach fluttering, heart racing, pupils dilating to great black holes in his face, hair standing erect, and other parts of him erect, too. But it didn’t hurt. He still had both hands, both eyes. No bruises or scars. It felt good, even, though it felt like something that shouldn’t, like putting his fingertips in the wax of his father’s candles. Maybe because it was dying. Maybe because it didn’t have its whale anymore.

Doctor Callow closed his eyes. He was not quite brave enough to actually touch it. So he just let his arm go slack.

It fell onto the flesh of the callowhale frond with a soft wet smack.

Doctor Callow felt as though he were swimming in the rusty-sour electric crackle, in the nameless colours. He felt as though he had never really been warm in his whole life, even though the Land of Milk and Desire is a hot and wet and heavy place. He laughed and he cried a little. He petted it like a dog. He was so shivery and prickly and hard and short of breath his everything ached. But he would have traded every ease he’d known for that ache and called it a bargain. The boy who loved callowhales stroked the severed arm of his beloved. He whispered to it. And, after a long while, little Doctor Callow curled up in a coppery curve of the frond; pulled the fine, soft hairs over him; and fell asleep in its dying embrace. The last of the ghostlights flashed on his dreaming skin.

“I wish,” he whispered as he drifted toward the cliff edge of sleep, “I wish that I’ll never see your face, that I’ll never look you in the eye, that I’ll never know you at all.”

Every night after that, while the callowhale frond rotted, he slept in its great sagging coils and told no one. The rot, as it relaxed and bloomed, smelled to him like his mother’s callowmilk bisque; and Hesiod’s cigarettes; and the tops of the twins’ heads when they were first born; and thick, good paper that had been drawn on over and over and over so that it was all black from corner to corner.

When a notice went up in the town square calling Adonites of all ages to audition for a secret Festival scheme specially prepared by the elders, Anchises scrupulously avoided wanting it too much. He told everyone it was silly and he didn’t want a part even a little bit. He reported at the correct hour with a mask of uncaring plastered to his face; and thus, when the schoolteacher in charge of the whole mysterious business chose him, along with three other children, a nice lady diver with extremely straight hair, and a tall, rangy-looking milkman, he could not suppress his shock. Doctor Callow ran around in a circle, his little heart unable to stand in one place when so much was happening.

And so Doctor Callow got to see the movie early. They all walked down the beach for several miles until they could be sure that no one back home could see the lights. Then, huddled together, they watched The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh so that they could play parts from it at the Festival. It was the third movie in the Mr Bergamot franchise, and suddenly the children in the cast became consumed with speculation as to what might have happened in the other films. But Doctor Callow didn’t care about that. He watched in a rictus of wonder as people who were not actually there at all moved and danced silently in silver. He shushed the seals when they barked so as to hear the silence better—and to better see the face of the girl who made Fate laugh.

The girl was called Chamomile, and though she was played by two different actresses, the boy whose wishes could not come true only saw one. When Chamomile was little, the actress who played her was a small, dark, sullen child with raggedy hair and a sour expression on her face. She looked unhappy all the time, but when she danced or walked, her body seemed to have all the joy her face forgot. She wasn’t in the movie very long—Chamomile grew up some and an older, brighter, sprightlier girl took over. In her big scene, little Chamomile made a dress out of poppies and ran around a field of wheat (Anchises had no idea what wheat was—it looked like hairy, overgrown rice, he supposed) with patchwork wolf ears stuck to her head, until she ran smack into a tall, severe, beautiful lady with a crown on her head and a long black dress that showed enough of the curves of her breasts that Doctor Callow blushed all the way down to his toes. A title card showed: Better run, Your Majesty, or I’ll eat you all up! Chamomile growled like a wolf, showing her small, even teeth, and the lady laughed.

The rest was all about older Chamomile, and how Fate helped her do fantastic things because Chamomile had made her laugh, which is a hard thing to do, Anchises agreed. Chamomile escaped a wicked prince who wanted to marry her, and went down to the Chalet Under the Sea where she made friends with a gentleman octopus named Mr Bergamot and a seahorse named Mrs Oolong, and together they had terrific adventures battling submarines and manta rays, and in the end Chamomile turned into a mermaid and didn’t marry anyone but became the Queen of the Ocean anyway.

Afterward, Anchises could talk of nothing but the little girl who put on wolf’s ears and the poppy dress. The others teased him about it and said he should take his pretty face and go find her back Home. Wouldn’t he like to meet her and see if she had worked out how to smile yet? Maybe if he threw a coin in the well and made a wish…

“No!” Anchises cried on the dark beach, quite terrified. “No, I never, ever want to meet her, not ever! I hope I’ll never see her in real life, not even once, not even for a minute!”

And he ran back toward Adonis with his heart screaming inside him.

On the night of the Nutcake Festival, Adonis ate itself silly, cider and moth-steaks and fried nutcake and callowmilk meringue and piglet pies and cassowary custard. By the time the projector had been set up and the screen stretched flat without a wrinkle and benches arranged in rows in front of the tower of diving bells that marked the centre of Adonis, the whole of the village was groaning, patting their bellies, and telling old Home jokes about chickens and roads and horses with long faces walking into bars, even though no one could quite agree on what a chicken was, or a horse, for that matter. A road is like a river, right? Like a canal. There is more water than earth in the Land of Milk and Desire, where a current is ever so much better than a wheel. Hesiod herself was as happy as a taxman, burping and yelling and singing in Turkish in a voice so deep and sweet even the English speakers cried a little.

Finally, a hush fell. Sometimes, without anyone saying so, folk know it’s time for the show. A fiddle picked up—and then a viola, and a big warbly bass, followed by a zither, a balalaika, and a koto. A clarinet and an oboe joined in. Above them floated a single lonely trumpet. Below them moaned the big belly of a tuba. It was a motley orchestra, all the instruments Adonis had. They began to play a lively march, which the men in White Peony Station had assured the elders was the very one played by the big-city orchestras when The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh premiered in the theatres there. (It wasn’t, really. It was, in fact, the opening march from another movie entirely, The Miranda Affair, but only one person in Adonis would ever come to know that.)

And when the title cards came up, with their lovely white writing on black backgrounds, Anchises and the others would say the lines aloud, so that the movie was not silent at all.

Better run, Your Majesty, or I’ll eat you all up!

I’d rather marry a mushroom!

Oh, how I should like to see how the fish live under the sea!

Anchises said Mr Bergamot’s lines. He put on a deep voice like he thought an octopus—a hideous creature he could not imagine being real—might have. Once, he said his line through a bowl of water, which made everyone laugh. He felt wriggly all over when they laughed, like bathing in the Qadesh. When Mr Bergamot danced on-screen in his eight shining spats, Anchises danced a little, too, and that made them laugh again. It was wonderful.

You’re a funny-looking fish.

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.

I love you bigger than the ocean.

But when it came to the climactic scene, the one where Mr Bergamot and Mrs Oolong and Chamomile are swimming through a shipwreck on the run from the vicious manta ray Dr Darjeeling and all hope is nearly lost, the girl in pigtails who was supposed to say Chamomile’s lines had fallen asleep at the tuba player’s feet.

The schoolteacher shoved Anchises forward to say her line, even though that was a bit confusing, as he was a boy, and he had the next line, too. He tried to make his voice high and soft like a girl’s, like he imagined Chamomile’s would sound.

I wish the night would end and I could see the sunlight again. I wish I could stay here forever with you under the sea.

The blood drained from Doctor Callow’s face. He clapped his hand over his mouth.

Far offshore, the red Qadesh trembled.

The night ended in the Land of Milk and Desire. But it did not end in Adonis. It did not end for Anchises.

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[The screen is dim. SEVERIN UNCK has awakened from dark dreams in the middle of the night. She is five years old. Her father sits on her bed, an enormous wrought-iron bower of briars piled high against the lunar autumn with embroidered quilts and an infinitude of pillows. SEVERIN drowns in it; she is a tiny ship adrift on the sea of linen. PERCIVAL UNCK wraps his long arms around his daughter.]

PERCIVAL

Don’t fear, my little hippopotamus. Dreams can be frightening, but they can’t hurt you.

SEVERIN

They can! Oh, they can, Papa. [She begins to weep quietly.]

PERCIVAL

Tell your papa what you dreamt that was so terrible. When something is very awful indeed, so awful you can’t bear it, there’s a magic trick you can do. Tell the something’s story from start to finish, and by the time you get to the end, you will often find you can bear it quite well, and perhaps it was never so bad in the first place.

SEVERIN

I dreamt I grew up and I was all alone. I was the loneliest girl in the whole world.

PERCIVAL

Is that all?

SEVERIN

It’s a lot! I was in a little black room and everywhere I went I took the black room with me, and no one could get in, and I couldn’t get out.

PERCIVAL

That’s a very short story. I don’t know if the magic works when the story’s so short. Do you feel better?

SEVERIN

No. I shall never feel better again.

PERCIVAL

But you will, my love. The sun will come up and shine his brightest at the scary old beasties that scamper round your poor head, and everything will be right as rainbows. That’s what the sun is for.

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask

Doctor Callow’s Dream:

Teatime for Mr Bergamot

There are stories so old and strong that they travelled from Home to the Country of Seeing and Being Seen, the Land of Wild Rancheros, the Land of Purple Corn, and the Land of Milk and Desire. The stories were stowaways: they hid in the ships with settlers, only coming out to breathe and stretch when absolutely necessary. And when the ships made landfall, the stories, having conserved their energy, burst free and ran wild, changing into local clothes and dancing up on stages and wearing flowers in their hair. Stories are like that. They love havoc, especially their own.

Many of these stories involve sleep. That is because we are all afraid of sleeping. We know it deep in our blood and our marrow. A panther, a bear, a Cro-Magnon may find a child while she’s sleeping. And so we tell tales of a girl who pricked her finger on a navigational array and fell asleep for a hundred years. A girl who ate an apple that wasn’t really an apple and fell into a deep sleep until a handsome businessman with a Kleen-Krop patent came along and kissed her awake again. A wise scientist who gave away all his notes for free, so his assistant put him to sleep in a tree forever.

It was like that for Anchises. For Doctor Callow.

He didn’t prick his finger or eat an apple—a real apple or otherwise. He didn’t give away his magic books.

It was only that he had a hundred fine, long, coppery-golden hairs tangled in among his own, stuck to his skin, snagged in his boots. It was only that he smelled like sumac and ozone and coffee and possibilities; and his mother’s callowmilk bisque; and Hesiod’s cigarettes; and the tops of the twins’ heads when they were first born; and thick, good paper that had been drawn on over and over and over so that it was all black from corner to corner. It was only that he hadn’t been hungry for moth-steaks or fried nutcake or piglet pies or cassowary custard and had stuffed himself with callowmilk meringue and sweet callowmilk cheese with apricot (which is not really apricot, but a charcoal-coloured, crunchy, caramelly fruit that shrinks away from any human hand that tries to grasp it) and callowmilk pandowdy and blancmange and callowpudding and zabaglione and callownog, everything with cream and milk and cheese in it, everything with callowmilk thick and spicy and pale folded in and poured over it. He had eaten like he had never really known how to eat before. He had eaten like his bones were hollow.

In stowaway stories like these, the solution is often simple. Too simple for anyone to think of until later, when the kingdom is asleep and the spinning wheels are all burnt up and there are dwarves building a coffin of glass and a wizard has been buried in the foundations of a castle. Oh. Oh. I should have known it. If only I had known.

A mother knows the smell of her young. Even when she is sick, even when she is mad, even when she cannot see her own hand before her, she knows her child. Her poor, tiny child—what can have gone wrong with this one? He’s so little, impossibly little—no child so thin can be healthy. What can she do, what can she possibly do to make him grow? To make him strong, to make him right? Nothing could be more important than a child so ill he only has four pitiful, withered fronds and a tubule that looks like it couldn’t hold a mouthful of milk.

Oh little calf, little bull, come to our breast. We did not see you there. It isn’t your fault, poor lamb. We have only ourselves to blame. Hold still. Don’t squirm. We will make it better. We will kiss it and kiss it and kiss it and kiss it until it doesn’t hurt anymore. Until nothing can hurt anymore.

Little Doctor Callow did not fall asleep for a hundred years. He fell asleep for ten. But he did not sleep a person’s sleep. A person did not tuck him in and tell him: Close your eyes, my darling—don’t open them; don’t even peek. Say your prayers. Count sheep-which-are-not-really-sheep. Hush now. Soft now. He slept the sleep of a callowhale. And, in sleep, a callowhale may move, may quiver. The sleep of a callowhale is not like our languorous, thick, sprawling, deathlike primate slumber. It is not really sleep at all. It is a spiky, spinning sword tip pricking the surface of the world a hundred times in a hundred places (though it is really an infinite, intangible intaglio of prickings) but never cutting.

It is not really sleep. It is not really milk. It is not really a whale.

Place a strip of film in a projector. Run it forward. Stop. Run it backward. Stop. Run it forward again. Now take it out and put it back in horizontally. Diagonally. Folded in half. Folded three times. Four. Twelve. One thousand and four. Put it in front of the light. Run it forward. Stop. Run it backward.

That is how a callowhale sleeps. It is like sleeping. It is also like jumping. It is a sleep like a panther.

But always, always, a callowhale dreams.

This is what Doctor Callow dreamed at his spinning wheel, in his glass coffin, in the roots of his tree:

Whales travel in pods. So did Doctor Callow. The sea he travelled in was every colour. He felt no arms or legs, though he knew he had them. He felt no effort in swimming. He felt large. Doctor Callow dove and spun through the waves, and each wave was a country like his own beloved Land of Milk and Desire, but he did not stop, could not stop, to look at them.

Beside him swam a whale, which was not really a whale but a dark, sullen child with raggedy hair and a sour expression. She wore a dress of poppies on her body that was a whale’s body but also a child’s body, like his own. She turned to him in the Sea of Every Colour and said:

Better run, Your Majesty, or I’ll eat you all up.

He swam harder after her. Harder and harder. She was so fast.

Come find me in two years, she called back over her flippers that were not really flippers.

But I’ve found you now, he answered her.

And then she was sitting at the bottom of the Sea of Every Colour, her lacy dress spread out all around her, the orange flowers opening and closing like bloody kisses. The water carried her hair up, fanning it around her head like a black serpent-crown. She drew in the sand of the ocean floor with a stick. This is what she drew:

She looked up at him.

Are we going to live here forever? she asked.

I think so.

The little girl sighed. Bubbles flowed out of her mouth. I miss someone.

I miss lots of someones, Doctor Callow said, into the sea.

The girl nodded. Do you know what this place is?

It’s where the callowhales live.

Yes, the girl said, though he could not tell if she was happy about it.

Chamomile?

That’s not my name.

What is your name?

Severin.

Severin?

Yes?

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

Severin started. She gave him a strange, searching expression. Her voice sharpened, grew older. Why did you say that?

I don’t know. It seemed like a good thing to say.

You said it like you were quoting something. What’s Kansas? Is it a planet?

Doctor Callow suddenly felt confused. He forgot how to swim in the Sea of Every Colour and dropped abruptly to the sand beside Severin. I think so? Maybe? It sounds nice.

Maybe it’s one of the other places.

What other places?

Mr Bergamot lives everywhere.

What are you talking about?

She gestured to the callowhales overhead, as massive as suns, and circling, circling forever. Mr Bergamot loves teatime. At teatime he eats worlds. And egg salad.

I’m lonely, whispered Doctor Callow.

Don’t be. There’s a million million worlds to play with.

I’m lonely, he whispered again, because he didn’t know what else to say.

That’s okay, Severin Unck answered. She put her small hand on his. The colours of the Sea-which-wasn’t-really-a-Sea got so bright Severin and Doctor Callow had to shut their eyes, which were not really their eyes. Doctor Callow looked up through the waves-which-were-not-really-waves and saw a callowhale—thousands of callowhales—soaring through the surf. They looked back at him as one creature, their infinite faces-which-were-not-really-faces as radiant as the spasms of stars, as the first frame of a film that is perfect, that is impossible, that is complete.

That’s okay, Severin said. I’m here. There’s no place like Home.