Radiance

The Deep Blue Devil: The Dame in Question

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Talbot swung tight into a plaza. I was meant to meet my contact at the Tartarus Diner: not a dive, but not a proper sort of place, either. Clearly we had bypassed Tartarus and headed straight for HQ. Frozen fountains. Tall statue of a naked girl with her arms glued to her sides and her head thrown back so her body looked like a rocket ship. Ice junking up her feet like afterburn.

Melancholia.

The most expensive address in Te Deum—well, one of. Melancholia. There’s four of them, naturally, the Towers. The Humours: Sanguina, Cholera, Phlegma, Melancholia. Four fluorescent high-rises spiking TD like birthday candles. Twisted-up unicorn horns studded with bosses. Bosses run things. The rest of us get run. It’s the only rank that matters these days. You can dress it up as baronies or boyars or caliphates, but that’s just sticking lace and ribbons on a dinosaur and hoping he’ll take you to town. Is you a boss or isn’t you? That’s about the size of it.

I’d been inside Cholera once, for a game of quoits and an unhappy little blowjob. The walls were soft. Like lungs.

“It’s not me, Mr St. John,” Cythera Brass said in that wide-open voice. She poured herself out of the Talbot and came round to open my door—downright gentlemanly, this Iroquois maid. “You made your year. If it were up to me I’d let you lie in it.”

A bubble lift strung us up through Melancholia’s lavender spine. Up above the blue stink of Uranus’s cigar smoke. Through a dormant patch of glowglass I saw black sky and stars. Hard and bright as bullet holes. No moons. Something in my bones rightened up. My body knows that’s how a sky should dress. It poured over me like a hot shower.

The lift bonged out the penthouse, and Cythera Brass, not a molecule out of place, walked crisply out onto a huge checkerboard floor. Her heels smacked kisses on the glass squares. An office, big as a ballroom. Low buttressed ceilings crisscrossed with liquid glowglass patterns, tangerine into candy cane into St. Elmo’s Fire. At one end of the room sat a long black desk with a green lamp on it. A personal long-distance radio setup occupied substantial real estate in the north corner. Windows ate up the whole back wall, opening onto Epi ’Vard, way down below this hundred-story nest. Over the windows hung a painting—a glowglass painting. I’d never heard of anyone who could control glowglass well enough to do something like that. I gawked at it. The colours slid and ran: a lady with no clothes and long peacock-coloured hair. She didn’t use it to cover up, either, the way ladies in paintings like to do. She just stood there, bold naked, looking down at a bloody-bright man with more muscles than pride. He knelt rosily at her saffron feet, offering her a long coppery belt stuck all over with jewels: Hephaestus presenting the girdle to Aphrodite. When she wore that belt, not even the gods could keep it in their trousers. The gems swirled, oozing through every colour, every possible colour. And then, just for a moment, they weren’t gems. They were planets. They were moons. Then they oozed back into garnets and emeralds and opals. I felt sick. Coloursick. Uranian vertigo.

A figure turned toward me, hidden in the shadows of the far right side of the room. I focused on it. It wore brown. Grey. Black. My eyes held on for dear life to that drab spot in the darkness.

“That will be all, Cythera. Thank you,” the figure said. A woman’s voice. Easy bull’s-eye: Hungarian by way of Saturn. Not just Saturn, but Enuma Elish. My old instincts rubbed their cricket legs together to spite me. An upper-crust capital madam—but her consonants were a little too practiced. She wasn’t born to it, I reckoned. “You can wait outside.”

Miss Enuma Elish emerged. Shaved head. Short, hard, squared off, a boss like a shotgun. I’d have called her a gymnastic fifty, but living out here ages you fast. Guessing gets pointless. She was wrapped up tight as a mummy, but I could see the thick quality of her suit. It practically flexed at me. Three silver clamps up the ridge of each ear. A tiny speck of rainpearl in each nostril. Huh, creaked my crickets, waving their antennae. She’s All-Clear. Top of the world, dripping money, not a dumb kid or a junkie, but All-Clear, nonetheless.

The boss kept mum. She moved some papers around on her coffin of a desk. It must kill her not to be down there with the crowds, I thought.

I took that away from her. By not showing up.

“I just told your girl,” I said. My voice skittered out over the glass floor. “I told her. I don’t want the gig. It doesn’t matter what the price tag is. I don’t want it. So why don’t you go down there and be with your kin? An hour left. That’s ages.”

The boss gave me a look that clearly communicated how ignorant I was on every possible topic. “This is not a negotiation, Mr St. John. The commission is as follows: In exchange for a sum of nine hundred thousand pounds sterling plus expenses, you will investigate the disappearance of and uncover the current whereabouts—”

“Lady, it’s not a negotiation because I don’t want the shit you’re peddling! Save your breath!”

“—the current whereabouts, if any, of Severin Unck, a young woman who disappeared some eighteen years ago near the village of Adonis, on the White Peony archipelago in the northern hemisphere of Venus, which falls into something of a grey area between the Chinese and Canadian sectors.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” I hissed. I well and truly hated her now. That’s all it takes. Say the word. Any one of them: Adonis. White Peony. Severin Unck. How could this shaved bitch say her name? Fuck her for saying it. I hadn’t said it in three years and it was mine to say more than anyone’s.

The boss circled round her desk, coming to lean against its heavy frame. She tented her fingers. Her face caught the harlequin lights. Her cheekbones had unbelievable angles, like a martyr’s statue. “I am quite certain that you do, Mr St. John. I, and the interests I represent, feel you are uniquely situated to carry out our investigation. I will be clear: We expect success. We expect resounding success. We expect—I will be plain—a body. We are open as to its state. Alive or dead, partitioned or whole. Aware or … well … whatever one might consider to be the opposite of awareness. That gives you a fairly wide playing field.”

“That’s fucking grotesque, but as I won’t be doing it, I’ll let it slide.”

She chuckled. Her hushed Saturnine vowels cajoled; her Hungarian consonants sneered. “But who else? Who else could we find on any world, under any rock, who knows the subject so intimately? Who would be so motivated to uncover the truth as Anchises St. John, the orphan of Adonis, the boy who saw it all? The boy with the hands that sing?” She grabbed for my gloved hands, faster than my filed-down neurons could answer. Her skin was cold, even through the leather. I snatched my fists away.

The boss frowned. She stepped back, rocking on her heels, a prizefighter. Round one wasn’t going her way, but she’d played this ring before. She spat her words at me, rat-a-tat. “You have no memory before the age of ten. Your parents are recorded as Peitho and Erzulie Kephus on the 1940 Venusian census—Ottoman subjects, taxes delinquent by quite a bit and for quite a while. But they might as well be characters in a novel for all the connection you feel to them. You don’t use the name they gave you. Severin saddled you with that clunker of a first name the day you met. Your surname is your adopted father’s. You spent your teenage years on Luna—but not in Tithonus, in Ibis. A pleasant enough seaside town, but more importantly, one with a renowned hospital specializing in—”

“Stop.”

“The Deformed, Insane, and Infirm. St. Nepthys, was it? I believe Ibis also has a charming amusement park with a rollicking good roller coaster. And bumper cars. How nice for you! Who wouldn’t grow up into a fine young man given such idyllic circumstances? A splendid estate overlooking the Sea of Serenity. The very eyeball of the man on the moon. Toys and books and good, nourishing, Earth-grown food. Even an outpatient program! Ah, but you didn’t do well at St. Nepthys, did you? Well, who could? Nurses can be such a bother.”

“Stop.”

“So you ran away from your hospital and your guardian and the bumper cars and that steadfast little rollercoaster. And where did you land first? Come now, surely you remember.”

My face burned. The drinks I’d gulped down in the Talbot were in a hurry to come back up.

“Stop it. Just stop it.”

“Oh, but I’m sure you know better than me, Mr St. John. Where was it? Mars? No, no, that was later, after you dried out—the first time, anyway. What was your first stop?”

I gritted my teeth.

“Mercury. Trismegistus.”

“Oh, that’s right. The hacienda. Now, was that your first suicide attempt, or did we miss one back at old St. Neppie’s?”

“Enough.”

“Tell me, Mr St. John, what exactly is a callowhale?”

A man can only hear so much of his own history before he cries uncle. And that was my uncle, right there.

“That’s me, then,” I said cheerily, lifting my hat as I walked away from her. Fast but don’t flee, I thought. Fleeing doesn’t look good on anyone. I shot over my shoulder: “You have a nice morning, madam. I’ll see you in hell.”

“Mr St. John, get back here this instant or I’ll have you breaking your ribs in a titanium mine by glassup.” I froze. If you’d seen the inside of a Uranian mine, you’d freeze, too. “And I’ll find a foreman with a particularly oppressive home life to look after you.” She softened her voice, but not by much. “Don’t be an idiot. We will pay you more money than you’ve seen in your life. We will supply you with food. Drink. Transportation. The drug or drugs of your choice. Companionship, if you fancy it, though I’d recommend a bath first. A personal, dedicated radio unit so you never have to bother with Depot queues again—which is worth nearly half what we’re paying you to begin with. Cythera will go with you, of course—we are not fools. You need a governess. But, I promise, you can do this job fat, drunk, high, and fucked senseless, and afterward you can sleep with a security blanket made of money. Or you can do any number of less stimulating jobs digging out the marine tunnels or hauling sewage or mining the most poisonous thing I can think of this week. But you will leave my office employed.”

God, I just wanted to leave. Just let me leave. “Jesus, woman, why? I am as useless as a sack of nothing, you can see that. Your secretary, or whatever Miss Brass out there is, could see it.”

“Because I know you can do it with a needle in your arm and a fifth in your fist. You were a private eye on Callisto for seven years. It’s the longest you ever stayed put. You were good at it. You don’t like being good at things; it makes you stand out. But you couldn’t help being good at it. You tried to fail and for once you didn’t. But I guess regular meals and an apartment where the heat stayed on were too much for you, kiddo. We’re not offering any of that. We’re offering what you do want: enough money and vice to drink yourself to death in comfort after you’ve done with us.”

“Who is us? Who are the ‘interests you represent’? For that matter, who are you? What do I call you?”

The boss smiled, the smile of a boss who knew she’d won. It was a sick fucking smirk. “My name is irrelevant to you personally. You can call me Melancholia when you need to call me anything, which I do not expect to be often. Nor should it concern you who I represent. Do your job; get paid.”

“Not good enough.” Not good enough for her. Not if I had to hunt her down like a dog after a fox. I wanted to know who was up on the horses.

Melancholia sighed. She looked out the window at the blue froth of the All-Clear. Her sharp nose stood starkly against the bleeding colours. “Only four sequences of The Radiant Car Thy Sparrow Drew survived whatever happened, and they are quite badly damaged. I’m sure you’ve seen them. I represent a consortium of business interests loosely gathered under the tent of Oxblood Films. Oxblood underwrote all but one of Ms Unck’s movies. We own Radiant Car. We paid for it. In a very real sense, we own her. And we must insist upon recovering our property. Undiscovered footage may not even be out of the question.”

“It is.”

The boss shrugged. “If you say so. We will accept a body in lieu of a print. Either of these things would be beyond value as far as we are concerned.”

“I don’t get it. If you’ve seen the footage, if you’ve seen those scraps, then you’ve seen how it ends. You’ve seen her just … whoosh. Vanish. You want me to pull a body out of a hat? How about a rabbit, too?”

“If you like.” Melancholia shook her shaved head. “I don’t understand you. At this very moment, every conceivable resource lies in your hands to solve the central mystery of your whole wretched life. We thought you’d be … driven to succeed. We thought you’d be relieved.”

I looked up helplessly at the glowglass painting, that sad sack of a man tying his coppermelt belt of planets no mortal or god could resist round the waist of a cunt who’d use it every chance she got.

“It was a nice idea,” I said.

“What was?”

“On Uranus, a year is a life. Eighty-four years. Born in the winter, young in the springtime, still going strong in the summer, old in the autumn. It’s the only planet where you can do that. It’s perfect. It’s beautiful. It’s downright artistic. Goddammit.”

“This is everything we have on her,” Melancholia said quietly. She put her hand on a stack of files. Impressive enough, I guess. Thorough. But it looked pathetic to me. “I assume you don’t need any film archives. I don’t think we could add anything to your collection.” I don’t blush. Never have. But if I did, I think the sore, just-punched feeling I had then would have done it.

“Probably not.”

“There’s a cannon leaving once the All-Clear sounds.” Of course—she wouldn’t arrange business during services. “It’ll take you to Pluto. One of the Clamshell’s crewmembers is living there; in some state of dissolution, we understand. He is going by a false name, rarely finds himself lucid, wants merely to be left alone. You two should find much in common. It’s all in the file. You’ll have plenty of reading time on the road.” Melancholia paused. Ran her hand over her bald monk-head. “Come on,” my boss whispered. She put her fingers round my wrist, avoiding the glove. “Didn’t you ever want to know how the story ended?”

I took the file. I got into the lift with Cythera Brass. She looked so smug I could have popped her one. As the bubble doors slid shut, I heard the crackle of that radio rig coming on. The first breathless lines of this month’s instalment of How Many Miles to Babylon?, a wireless soap loved by everyone but me, wound down after us, chasing us through Melancholia Tower.

Oh, Vespertine, I will find you, even on the onyx towers of Erishkegal! Do not lose hope! One more night and we will be together at last … Alas, the nights on Venus are as long as years …

There’s nothing the rich don’t skim off the top.