Radiance

And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly

(Oxblood Films, 1941, dir. Severin Unck)

(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 8, SIDE 1, COMMENCE 0:12)

SC1 INT. LOCATION #19 NEPTUNE/ENKI—STORM OBSERVATION DECK, DAY 671. NIGHT [29 NOVEMBER, 1939]

[FADE IN on a balcony crusted with salt and electric green coral. Its coils and floral motifs and columns recall the balustrades of New Orleans. Rust-bound lanterns hang on long, Marleyesque chains, casting white-blue light onto the churning cobalt sea that covers the whole of the unspeakably vast surface of Neptune. A semipermeable glass bell encloses the balcony; rain spatters onto the crystal and rolls down, but wisps of marine wind are allowed through—nothing, however, compared to the gales outside, which would murder any human in their path in the space of a thunderclap. The soft, grinding, gentle rumbling of Enki moving through its equatorial circuit underlines every spoken word.]

SEVERIN UNCK

The city of Enki is also a ship, perhaps the greatest ship ever sailed. She circumnavigates her planet once a decade, following a lugubrious echo of the Gulf Stream that flows more or less true, avoiding with grace the white and squalling knot of the mother storm from which all the other cyclones of this world descend. This balcony and thousands like it blister the exterior walls of the Neptunian capital. Whatever else occurs in this city—whatever work, whatever ambition, whatever decadence—its souls always return to these lookouts: a pilgrimage, a comforting hearth, a night watch. They come to see the storm. To stare it down. Whether for an hour or eight—or, in the cases of some old-timers, every moment not spent sleeping or eating—Enki-siders are drawn to this primeval sight of their world contorted, writhing in her constant oceanic distress, to bear witness to the eternal maelstrom that is the ancient heart of Neptune.

[All the camera can see is blue. Monstrous waves lash an indigo sky oppressed by clouds. Whitecaps crest and shatter; shadows of kelp forests the size of Asia skitter and dance. But there is no scale, can be no scale, because there is no land in sight. It could be the Pacific; it could be Lake Geneva. But it is neither. Only when a fishing vessel drifts into frame and, a moment later, the body of some unphylumed leviathan breaks the surface off its portside, geysering the sea into the methane-rich air, is there a moment of sickening understanding. There are cities on Earth smaller than that barnacled beryline beast.]

SEVERIN (V.O)

Enki is a nomad; she follows the tide. There are, of course, other ships on this sea: Manannan, Snegurochka, Ys, Lyonesse, Sequana. But Enki dwarfs them all.

[SEVERIN rests her hand on the balcony rail. Coral crinkles and drifts away under her fingers. She looks exhausted—dark rings around her eyes, a thinness to her skin.]

SEVERIN

Silence is the rarest commodity in Enki. The ear never rests; the engines that roar life into the city call and answer, call and answer, without ceasing.

And yet, from home? Nothing. Though nominally a French colony, Neptune will pass behind the sun tonight, disappearing from radio contact with Earth for an estimated seventy-two years. The voices will stop. The only news will come from lonely ships creeping through the black on the longest of roads. They will not hear any rumbling of war, any rattling of Viennese sabres or English guns. If the government in Paris changes once again, they will learn too late for it to matter much. No one will know whether Tybault will defeat the Invisible Hussar this time, or whether Doctor Gruel will succeed at last in making Vespertine his bride and his victim. It will all happen without us.

I say us. There is, of course, a passenger liner leaving before the lines go dark. A last chance to jump ship for civilization. The truth is, I have not yet decided whether I will be on it. My crew is going home. Tickets in their breast pockets, cabins reserved, champagne already chilling in silver buckets below polished portholes. Mariana, Amandine, Max, Margareta, Santiago, Horace, Konrad. Even my Raz has tired of kicking snowballs around on the frozen arse-end of the universe.

But me? Me, I don’t know. I find myself at the end of this journey I mapped out after the death of dear Uncle Thaddeus—how many uncles have I had? I think every man on the moon has been my fuddy old uncle at one time or another. I suppose it has all been a funeral march to outlast the dreams of Hades. Saturn back to Mars and out again to Neptune. And I do not know if I am done. There is always somewhere further to go. Until there isn’t.

[PAN LEFT to the warmly lit interior of Enki’s starboard hull. Women in dresses with iridescent hoopskirts wide enough to conceal small armies raise their hands to the glass; rain drives down across their dry palms. The women, men, and children all wear shades of blue and green, sea shades, full-fathom colours, the turquoise of each rosette, the emerald of each brooch painted onto the film frame by frame, as Virago Studios did in the old days, as Clotilde Charbonneau did. The clothes were chosen for the evening’s celebration: old-fashioned, seventy years out of date, dug out of grandmothers’ trousseaus and costume trunks, just as their own clothes, made new today, will be seventy years past la mode when Earth comes round again. Chandeliers dangle like seabirds and music can be heard, harpsichords and strings and drums made tinny by the thickness of glass.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

Tonight, Enki is dancing. Before Tritonrise, I will dance as well. This is not a night to stay in, curled up with a pipe and a book and a snifter. This is the end of the world, but the beginning of the world, as well. This is Cinderella’s ball. And at midnight, Neptune will flee her Prince into the gloaming, leaving the nameless, lonesome shoe of her last broadcasts abandoned on the steps of the stars.

And what broadcasts: They have killed a Nereid, and she was full of roe.

[DISSOLVE TO a fishing vessel, approximately the size of the Isle of Wight, crawling with thousands of Nereid-men, the broad-muscled, ice-bearded career hunters who have tracked and killed the creature being hauled on board with cranes and hydraulic lifts.]

They may never catch another in their lifetimes, but for them this once is enough. They are Ahabs without rancour, living for the chase, men and women whose hearts quicken only at the eardrum-shattering bassoon song of their prey.

[The storm batters them mercilessly; still the fishermen heave and ho as the dark mass of the Nereid rolls, obscenely, onto the decks. CUT TO: the flensing plain, a white expanse of artificial sand and salt crystals on Enki’s lower levels. Despite her size, the Nereid looks bereft and helpless in the blazing lights, naked and abandoned by whatever god rules these dragons. She is quite dead. She is icthyosauran: a long neck ending in two heads, each covered in sea detritus and pink Neptunian lampreys, her four eyes blue, lifeless, but strangely primate-like in that cetacean head. The black-green body, the myriad flippers, the vestigial legs, the orange sailfin, the tail tapering for an imperial mile. Her bulk swallows the lens. The image jiggles with the slightly uncanny effect of coloured paints hovering over the black and white footage, never quite sinking through. The Nereid-men open their catch with equipment meant for industrial forestry—just a small gash at first, they can manage no more. But from this gash the deluge comes, magenta roe, quivering, each egg as big as a dancing girl, tumbling like awful Easter eggs across the flensing floor. The Nereid-men cheer; tears course down their cheeks amongst the ruby muck of countless unborn calves. CUT TO SEVERIN.]

SEVERIN

The Nereid-men have made their fortune tonight. The Nereid has lost hers. And if Paris or London or Nanjing expresses concern for the conservation of these astonishing animals—for all xenofauna—after tonight, it will not be heard.

[CUT FROM the Nereid-men sharpening long knives to a YOUNG BOY cleaning his pocketknife. He empties his pockets, counts his coins, then counts again.]

There are no rules at the end of the world. Everything is permitted. [SEVERIN smiles with one side of her mouth.] The people of Enki have spent weeks painstakingly hammering out the rules for a ritual of rulelessness. Parliamentary procedure was decorously observed. [SEVERIN produces a beautifully typeset broadsheet. She reads out its contents.] The final official broadcast from Paris will play until orbit silences it at approximately forty-six minutes past midnight. For a period of not more than seventy-two minutes afterward—one for each year the Earth will slip beyond notice—law and order shall be suspended. Post-hoc prosecutions will blind themselves to all incidents save the most egregious crimes of murder and rape, grievous harm to Enki or her essential mechanisms, or injury to children. To this end, firearms must be turned over to the constabulary, as ballistics are, at best, unpredictable bedfellows. Rank shall not be enforced or acknowledged. Stores of food and alcohol shall be open to the public. All other contraband will fall under the discretion of its purveyors, and the council certainly knows nothing about the identity or location of such persons. Those not wishing to partake in the festivities may enclose themselves in the southern sphere of the city, whose gates will close at twenty minutes to midnight and not reopen until morning under any circumstances.

The list goes on.

It is not yet nine in the evening. The public announcement system pulses a warm and comforting stream of French. They have read us a bit of Molière and Voltaire, some Victor Hugo, some Chrétien de Troyes, a bit of Apollinaire and Balzac. They have sung us “La Marseillaise” seven times, by my count. They have exhorted us to remember the ideals of the French Republic and the glory of Jeanne d’Arc, Charlemagne, the Sun King.

[A MAN’S VOICE crackles over the shot of SEVERIN on the balcony.]

RADIO FRANÇAISE

Rappeler qui vous êtes. N’oubliez pas d’où vous venez. Nous ne vous oublierons pas. Nous vous attendons pour vous. Terre est votre maison pour toujours. La France est toujours votre mère. Le Soleil est encore Roi sur tout … Remember who you are. Don’t forget where you come from. We will not forget you. We will be waiting for you. Earth is always your home. France is always your mother. The Sun is still King over all.

SEVERIN

I recognize the voice: Giraud Lourdes, who fell off the Moon, as they say. Monsieur Lourdes failed so utterly on-screen that he suffered a most modern form of professional disgrace—he returned to Earth. And then became Chaunticleer, the voice of Radio Française, reading the news each morning and telling his tall tales every Wednesday night.

He is a bigger man than his sweet, soft voice might suggest. A thick red moustache. A preference for purple cravats. A weakness for women, poetry, and marzipan. These are the things that make up the beginnings of a person. But for me he is only those things. I met him just two or three times as a child and I remember nothing else. And now I can add to that list that his is the voice Paris chose to sing Neptune to sleep, for it is easier for Paris to pretend that they will go to sleep for seventy years than face the fact that when they come back into the fold, they will be no more French than England. So Giraud uses his seductive vowels to plead with a planet to behave itself while the cat’s away, to freeze itself in time, to lie still, to change not. He sings it, he recites it. The violins of a Berlioz concerto whisper: Hush now, my far-off children. Prick your fingers on the spindle of our voice. Be the kingdom that fell asleep for a hundred years and woke unchanged.

But who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?

[CUT TO: SEVERIN, ERASMO ST. JOHN, and AMANDINE NGUYEN recline on black-and-white chaises, watching the party flicker and move within the oily, distorted storm glass separating the observation balcony from the interior of Enki proper. AMANDINE belongs to a levitator cult based on the tiny moon of Halimede, where the wind hardly blows at all. She is a titanium sculptor; she practices a sexual variant of Samayika meditation. Her hair is lashed with traditional leather whips that hang down around her face like wires or liquorice. Her skin is dyed green, as is the custom on Halimede. The gravity of Neptune does not allow her to practice her faith here. She seems to stretch upward slightly with every movement, as though her body remembers its home, where it floats instead of merely sitting. SEVERIN drinks clay cups of creamy saltbeer with the levitator. ERASMO nurses a pink lady that looks rather orange. The lights of Enki turn their faces into a play of shadows.]

AMANDINE

I have sometimes wondered if we will make it.

SEVERIN

What do you mean?

AMANDINE

[She shrugs.] Perhaps when Earth peeks around the Sun again Enki will be gone. Lyonesse, too, and Manannan. Halimede might become a ghost moon. Or maybe we will all just … float. Like the Flying Dutchman, skeleton ships following the current forever, with only spirits as cargo. It has happened before. Places have vanished. Proserpine. Enyo. Adonis, now. We send up cities like fireworks, but there is a tax, I think. The empty worlds we expand to fill … sometimes the emptiness takes something back. To keep the books balanced, maybe.

SEVERIN

Colonies fail. It happens.

ERASMO

You know better than that. Colonies fail because crops fail, or supply ships don’t come in time, or some Babylon-fanatic fancies himself a warlord and straps on bandoliers. Proserpine didn’t fail. It was ripped to pieces. The foundations of the houses shattered. A thousand people vanished. It’s been twenty years and nothing grows there, not even infanta.

AMANDINE

I’ve heard it was worse than that.

SEVERIN

Stop it, both of you. [She moves her hands as if to clear the fact of Proserpine out of their little oceanic bubble like cigarette smoke.] You haven’t the first idea what does or doesn’t grow on Pluto. You’re just telling slumber party stories. Besides, what planet is there without a mysteriously vanished colony to pull in the tourist cash? Slap up a couple of alien runes on a burned-out doorframe and people will stream in from every corner of space. Might as well call them all New Roanoke and have done with it.

[SEVERIN loads a lump of af-yun into her netted atomizer. ERASMO takes a pink lady from a tray of sweets and quaffables, raises it to his lips and manages to frown around the cocktail glass’s rim. SEVERIN’S voice begins, unconsciously, to pick up the shy, breathy Halimede accent of her companion, mirroring without noticing, her lunar syllables disappearing beneath the Francophone sea of the Neptunian dialect.]

We like these stories because they aren’t really stories about losing things. They’re stories about finding them. Because everything gets found, sooner or later. Everything gets remembered. Eventually, somebody did find Proserpine, and took it all apart, and put it back together to make new cities on Pluto and Charon. It comforts us, tells us there are no lost children anywhere, not really. Not even cities. It’s all just Atlantis in another dress.

[SEVERIN looks out at the storm. Foam spatters across the glass bell.] Atlantis, that great floating city where humans got so beautiful and so wise, so strong and so able that they invented civilization. Invented being alive, in the sense of plumbing and temples with friezes and taxation and clay laws and hecatombs and public sporting events. And the sea took it back, if that is how you want to tell it, how you want it to be told to you, because, well … because humans feel uneasy in tales without punishment. No good thing can last forever, because people are terrible and we have this feeling, we all have this feeling, that if not for that essential terribleness we could have gotten further by now. Done better. Done more. We have failed collectively since Plato first choked on an olive. So it’s no surprise when we fail individually—when we shirk duty, when we hate our parents, when we run away, when we get drunk every night, when we lose love … when we lose love. Because by all rights we should be living in the crystal palaces of Atlantis or in the Tower of Babel’s penthouse apartments, right? Comparatively, our private blunders are insignificant. Just part of the general pattern of human awfulness. We map our little disasters onto a beautiful picture of a great one, so that there’s continuity. So that there’s balance. We fail because we always fail. It’s not our fault. For evidence, see the paradise we lack.

But there never was any Atlantis, my darlings. Nor Babel, nor Shangri-La. There was Santorini and the Visigoths and the Great Vowel Shift, but you wouldn’t have liked living in ancient Santorini one little bit. And Proserpine failed because it’s bloody hard to farm anything but flowers on Pluto, and quakes can crack up anywhere there’s a crust and a core.

AMANDINE

But you admit that cities have vanished. And there are no stories of finding the people, only the wreckage.

SEVERIN

I do admit that. If it makes you happy.

AMANDINE

But not totally vanished. Something is always left behind. The ruins, yes, the loss, that horrid fluid splashed everywhere—but something else, too. It happens in the space of a night. Three times now. Radio silence, then a city cut out of the very earth. And in its place … something new. I have heard that in Proserpine it was a voice. If you go there, if you stand where those people must have stood, under the twilit sky, you can hear a voice. A woman’s voice.

SEVERIN

[She arches an eyebrow.] Yes. I’ve seen the movie, you know.

ERASMO

But Percy got it from somewhere. He didn’t make it up. Vince brought in the dragons and the vampires and all that, but Percy wanted to make that movie because the story was floating around already. I heard it on the backlots. I’ve heard it everywhere. A voice repeating one word.

ERASMO AND AMANDINE

Kansas.

SEVERIN

But no one is allowed to actually enter Proserpine. How would anyone know that there’s a voice saying that? Or saying anything? It’s nonsense, anyway. What the hell is a Kansas?

ERASMO

In Enyo, on Mars … oh Rinny, don’t look at me like that! What better night could there be to share ghost stories round a fire? And what better fire than a city lit up to celebrate going into the dark? Weird things do happen, you know. Not everything in the universe is cinema verité!

SEVERIN

You’re not really going to tell a ghost story, are you? Maybe I’ll go see how the Neptunian Crime Spree Hour of Fun is shaping up.

ERASMO

Shush. You don’t get a vote. So. Enyo was a Martian trading post near the Chinese-Russian border—surrounded by kangaroo ranches and brothels and dice halls and mining stakes. Good times for all! And in one night—gone. Windows smashed, buildings shattered, as though someone pulled them up by the roofs and dropped them. Callowmilk, or something like it, splashed twenty feet high, like blood spatter or graffiti. No bodies. No blood. But something else.

[ERASMO stops. He pinches SEVERIN’S knee and grins sidelong at her.] Want me to stop? [She says nothing. Her lips part slightly.] Very well. Let the record show Miss Unck wants to hear a ghost story. This one even less reliable than the voice shouting Kansas at the outer reaches of space. I have heard it said—only a few times, but I’ve heard it—that in the centre of town where the pump used to be, the Martian constables found a reel. A movie reel. Just sitting in the dust, covered in milk.

SEVERIN

And? What was on it?

AMANDINE

I’ve heard about the reel, too. People say a thousand things. It’s the destruction of the town. Or it’s some print of a porno the miners loved. A woman crying. Forty minutes of blackness. Worse. Better. Who can know? Who has the reel now? No one even claims to have seen it, only heard from someone who met someone in a Depot queue who had a family friend in Martian salvage and demolition. Enyo is the sort of thing you thrill about late at night, when shadows feel like electricity on your skin.

But then there’s Adonis. Adonis is different.

[ERASMO drinks his pink lady; he lets AMANDINE take the story.]

It wasn’t a trading post or a farm town. It wasn’t just getting started. It was a whole colony—gone. Divers mostly, like most settlements on Venus. Slaves to the great callowhales, like the rest of us. But in Adonis they built a lovely hotel and carousel for the tourists who came to get their catharsis revved up as the divers risked their lives to milk our benevolent, recalcitrant mothers in their eternal hibernation. I have heard it was a good place. A sweet village on the shores of the Qadesh, plaited grease-weed roofs and doors hammered from the chunks of raw copper you can just walk around and pick up off the Venusian beaches. They lived; they ate the local cacao; and they shot, once or twice a year, a leathery ’tryx from the sky, enough to keep them all in fat and protein for months. There’s good life to be had on Venus. I almost went there instead of Halimede. But in the end, I wanted to fly. Maybe, if I had not flown, I would have found my way to Adonis and helped build the carousel. Then I would have been stuck. Because, just like Enyo and Proserpine, one day—pop! All gone. Houses, stairs, meat-smoking racks, diving bells.

[SEVERIN drinks her saltbeer. You can see her thinking, some new and massive idea taking shape behind her eyes. ERASMO chews on the crust of a crab-heart trifle, mesmerized by AMANDINE’S voice. AMANDINE casts her eyes downward within the equine blinders knotted to her head.]

All gone except for the something new. Only this time, it’s not a reel and it’s not a voice. It’s a little boy, left behind. They say he’s still there. I’ve heard it on the radio, so it’s as true as anything is. He’s stuck, somehow, in the middle of where the village used to be, just walking around in circles. Around and around, like a skip on a phonograph. They can’t get him to talk. He doesn’t eat or drink. He never even stops to sleep. He’s just … there. He’s been there a year already. Like a projection. But flesh.

ERASMO

What do you think happened, Amandine? Don’t listen to Rin, just … what do you think?

AMANDINE

[She is quiet for a long moment.] I think we are all suckling at a teat we do not understand. We need callowmilk. We cannot live without it. We cannot inhabit these worlds without it. But we made a bargain without thinking, because the benefits seemed to be endless and the cost nothing but a few divers, a few accidents—what’s that next to what we stood to gain? My god, it was nothing, nothing at all. All these empty worlds could be ours—no one living there, no one to make us feel ashamed. Not like the New World, with its inconvenient millions. A true frontier, without moral qualms. You must admit how compelling that is. Whole planets just waiting there for us, gardens already planted and producing. A little gravity wobble this way or that; a slightly unpleasant tang to the air; oh, perhaps we can’t have as much hot buttered corn on the cob as we’d like—but they were so ready for us. Edens full of animals and plants, but no folk.

Except the callowhales. We don’t even know what they are, not really. Oh, I went to school. I’ve seen the diagrams. But those are only guesses! No one has autopsied one—or even killed one. It cannot even be definitively said whether they are animal or vegetable matter. The first settlers assumed they were barren islands. Huge masses lying there motionless in the water, their surfaces milky, motley, the occasional swirl of chemical blue or gold sizzling through their depths. But as soon as we figured out how unbelievably useful they were, we decided they didn’t matter. Not like we mattered. Beneath the waterline they were calm, perhaps even dead leviathans—Taninim, said neo-Hasidic bounty hunters; some sort of proto-pliosaur, said the research corps. The cattle of the sun. Their fins lay flush against their flanks, horned and barbed. Their eyes stayed perpetually shut—hibernating, said the scientific cotillion. Dreaming, said the rest of us.

And some divers claim to have heard them sing—or at least that’s the word they give to the unpredictable vibrations that occasionally shiver through the fern-antennae. Like sonar, those shivers are fatal to any living thing caught up in them. Unlike sonar, the unfortunates are instantly vaporised into their constituent atoms. Yet the divers say that from a safe distance, their echoes brush against the skin in strange and intimate patterns, like music, like lovemaking. The divers cannot look at the camera when they speak of these things, as though the camera is the eye of God and by not meeting His gaze, they may preserve their virtue. The vibrations are the colour of need, they whisper.

Of course, no one works as a callowdiver forever. We aren’t built for it. The Qadesh or the callowhales or maybe just Venus itself, the whole world; something does us in. Everyone goes milkmad eventually, a kind of silky, delicate delirium that just unzips us, long and slow, until we fall down babbling about the colour of need. We say the callowhales are not alive like we are alive. But I say: Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly “nurse.” What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? And what do they mate with? It would have to be something big. The size of a city, maybe …

[The indistinct crackle of the radio broadcast from home suddenly spikes in volume—Au revoir, mes enfants! À la prochaine fois! Bonsoir! Bonsoir! À bientôt!—then cuts abruptly to silence. Within Enki, the lights go dark.]

AMANDINE

Welcome to the end of the world.