Radiance (17 page)

ANNOUNCER:
Will Tybault escape the clutches of his nemesis? Can the Ninja-Nuns of Nanking resist their terrible bloodlust? Will Vespertine marry the devious Doctor Gruel or will her loyal lover reach her in time? Who
is
the Invisible Hussar? Will these long-suffering sweethearts—one untamed spirit enamoured of the stars; one true man, devoted to King, Country, and Mother Earth—find each other at last, or will they yearn on in vain? Find out now!
     Come with me to the rough-and-tumble worlds of Venus and Earth in the early days of the Diaspora, a fantastical journey into that special place in the heart where history meets the imagination, hard science meets flights of fancy, love leads the way, and the impossible becomes—for a moment—true, on …
How Many Miles to Babylon?
     [theme music]

 

From the Personal Reels of Percival Alfred Unck

[SEVERIN UNCK walks hand in hand with CLOTILDE CHARBONNEAU down Usagi Avenue in Tithonus. Christmas lanterns glitter all around them. The Actaeon Theatre is visible behind them, searchlights swinging wildly over the night sky. CLOTILDE and SEVERIN are bundled in thick coats. Identical furs frame their faces. PERCIVAL UNCK walks backward down the street, filming them as steadily as his camera Clara will allow. SEVERIN sucks the filling from a street vendor's
blin
. CLOTILDE'S face is sullen. She scratches at ruby earrings. She will leave them within a month.]

PERCIVAL

How did you like the picture, pumpkin?

SEVERIN

I'm not a pumpkin!

CLOTILDE

Are so. If we put a candle in your head you'd be a jack-o'-lantern.

SEVERIN

Ew! There's no room in my head for a candle, Mama.

PERCIVAL

All right, you are definitely not a pumpkin, and we will definitely not put any candles in your head or make a tart out of you or turn you into a coach at midnight. Now, did you like your papa's movie? He made it just for you, his first one for children.

SEVERIN

[long pause] No.

PERCIVAL

But you were so wonderful in it, darling! Didn't you have fun filming your little bit? Isn't it nice to see yourself on that big giant screen?

SEVERIN

[bursts into tears] I'm sorry, Papa! But there just aren't such things as octopuses that talk or wear spectacles and spats in real life. It's only Uncle Talmadge in a suit with sequins stuck on him. I shall never meet a talking octopus like Mr Bergamot, never, never! [Tears roll down SEVERIN's cheeks and into her
blin
. She dries her face on one furry sleeve, sniffing in the cold.] It's just a lot of silliness.

 

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.”