Radiance

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 center 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.