Radiance

The Deep Blue Devil: Come Find Me

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Portrait with Saturn.

Well, fuck me sideways.

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

And I did want to see her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ve seen it. Who hasn’t seen it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t earned anything yet.

Come find me in two years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody makes talkies anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So easy to empty them with the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Butter.

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

Good dog. Sit up. Shake a paw.