Radiance (44 page)

“I killed you,” Maximo insists. “It was all that we had of you, and I burned it. I turned the big spotlight on it and it burned and I made that child bleed and I didn't care. I killed the heart of you. But the static burned out, too. No more roe. No more twinkling dragons. No more mothers leaving.

“We have all come here to mend. But there's no forgiveness in the Wizard's bag for me.” Varela blinks and shakes his head, as though he doesn't quite know why he'd said that last bit.

Severin stubs out her cigar on her filmstrip-hand. A glowing hole pops into life in her palm, like an open mouth. “You're right,” she says. “There isn't. No heart, no courage, no brains for you, Max. And no supper, either.” She considers carefully, a rakish Rhadamanthus, before delivering her judgment. “Go sit in the corner. That's your punishment.”

And so he does. The King of Pluto faces the wall.

“I never seriously considered Varela a suspect,” Anchises informs the room.

“That's not what you said at Setebos Hall.” Cythera snorts.

“I am wiser by far now. No, the evidence leads us to one conclusion: Calliope is the villain in our midst. I accuse you, callowhale! What say you?”

The callowhale tries to snarl, but she had only ever been drawn smiling, so that children would love her. She smiles and smiles, and in her singsong advertising jingle voice she trills, “She stank of death and life and a million never-sleeping eyes! Don't give me your smug primate smirks, Anchises St. John!
You
touched our dying limb and took our spores into your tiny, insufficient flesh. A new star guttered in the dream-net of the callowhales. It wanted to live, but it had no vigour. We felt you in us; we thought you were part of us, lost, dying. We came for you, and destroyed the cage you languished in. Only afterward did we understand our mistake. We are very embarrassed about it. But your parents should have taught you to keep your hands to yourself! You touched Severin's face in gratitude; Mariana struck you in fear—new stars guttering into very little of note on the edges of our dreams. We would not be fooled twice. We ignored them. Told them we were on to their tricks. But Severin came so close, right into my parlour, and her stink woke me like burnt bacon. I told her to go away, and she did. I am not sorry! She is small and I am big. She drank my milk without asking. I will not be made to apologize!”

“What about me?” asks Mariana Alfric. “I didn't come close. I didn't get a chance.”

Calliope shrugs her cheerfully drawn shoulders. “You let that doctor cut us out of you. You could no longer live separately. When our child died, you died. It had already converted much of your fluid and tissue. Children are so hungry in their first hours.”

“Your
child
?” gasps the sound engineer.

“What did you think it was? A disease? A wound? You guzzle our milk and think we never bear young?”

“Ooh!” exclaims Mr Bergamot. The animated octopus slides off his mossy sofa and draws himself up onto his tip-tentacles. “May I have the seafloor? I'm quite keen on marine biology, you know.”

“By all means.” Anchises gracefully relinquishes the Myrtle Lounge bar.

“Lemme help!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose, and scampers away from Violet's lap.

The mongoose and the octopus clear their throats. They run through a quick warm-up:
Do re mi fa so la ti do! Do ti la so fa mi re do!
Mr Bergamot produces a harmonica from goodness-knows-where, lays down an establishing A note, and snaps his suckers to a quickstep beat.

“The Lifecycle of the Callowhale!” the mongoose and the octopus sing in unison. And they begin to soft-shoe up and down the bar.

“A callowhale isn't much of a whale,” sings Mr Bergamot in the key of G.

“Not a bug!” belts out Marvin.

“Not a cat!”

“Not a fungus or a snail!”

The octopus knots four tentacles together into a square while turning cartwheels with the rest. A light clicks on inside the square of suckers, though the Waldorf owns no projector. The film merrily commences, and all watch in wonder as an on-screen Calliope dances on her tail. Mr Bergamot sings his verse:

The great callowhale's got no stop and no start

Just a hundred million brains and a million hundred hearts

Hundreds of tiny callowhale shapes appear with cheerful popping sound effects, all squeezed into Calliope's big body. Marvin the Mongoose sings his turn:

They're all dressed up with everywhere to go

They might look funny but boy, how they grow!

In the film, Calliope sprouts a red bow on the side of her ever-smiling head and a string of pearls round her neck. A knock sounds—is it a date? No! It's a little boy! It is, in fact, Anchises, drawn like a lovable scamp in a Sunday comic strip. He holds up a squirming mass of fiddleheads and fronds like flowers. Calliope blushes:
For me?
And then Mr Bergamot and his mongoose assistant burst into a flurry of tap dancing, four tappity-spats and two sets of clackety-claws going a mile a minute.

If you're having trouble with the maths

Come consult our helpful graphs!

The graph's bars spring up, fountains erupting from the blowholes of two miniature Calliopes. The tallest bears the title, “How Important a Callowhale Is to the Continued Function of the Multiverse.” A very short, squat one, little bigger than an exclamation point, reads: “How Important You Are to the Continued Functioning of the Multiverse.” A pitiful slide whistle sounds its note, and then they're off again. Marvin turns a somersault and warbles:

Just think of a long shiny pin!

The music scratches to a halt. Mr Bergamot protests, “A pin! Now that's just silly!”

“Not as silly as an octopus playing the harmonica,” the mongoose rejoins. A rimshot echoes down the Waldorf staircase from nowhere. The octopus and mongoose join arms and serenade the lounge together:

Now think of a long shiny pin!

Stuck down through batting and muslin!

Cotton and linen, silk, lace, and wool, too!

There's so much that fantastic pin can punch through!

One of the Calliopes leaps off the graph. Her nose sharpens to a wicked silver point. She dives down from the x-axis and the image shifts: a whale shearing through quilts and blankets and veils, sending up splashes of thread behind her.

The pin holds it together, so nice and so neat

That is a pin everyone wants to meet!

The spaces between Mr Bergamot's tentacles fill with stars, with worlds none of the living or the dead have seen before, shuffling together like cards, like the squares of a quilt, lying one atop the other. All the while the bouncing cartoon callowhale dives through them.

Well, that silk is a universe and so are the laces

The cotton and linen are vast starry spaces

Where nothing goes quite as it goes where you go

And no one you'll meet will be someone you know

And the fantastic pin that we mentioned before?

Is a callowhale swimming through infinite doors

The stars coalesce into a cheerleader with GO WHALES! stamped on her megaphone. She throws nebulae into the air like pom-poms.

So cheer on the whales and treat them with care

Don't tease and don't poke, don't startle or stare

Without them, the silk would slide right off the linen

And who knows what trouble we all would be stuck in!

The cheerleader frowns and explodes into a puff of animated smoke. The slide whistle slides again. Mr Bergamot takes over once more, and the image he holds changes to Calliope with an enormous thermometer in her mouth and a cold compress on her head.

Now sometimes a whale can get hurt or get sick

Though their hearts are so strong and their skin is so thick.

But we can't go without, not for one single day

So they make a new whale to play callowcroquet!

A baby whale appears in a shower of glittery fireworks. It wears a lacy bonnet and shakes a rattle with its fin. Calliope and her baby wind up a pair of croquet mallets and whack Jupiter and Saturn through identical hoops.

Marvin the Mongoose, darling of Capricorn Studios, brings it home, while Bergamot's tentacles fill with smiling faces:

Oh, the life of a great callowhale is amazing!

We hope you'll forgive us our upside-down phrasing

And the next time your loved one gets vaporised flat

Just remember the pin, and that will be that.

A smattering of awkward applause picks up. The octopus relaxes his arms, the filmstrip clicks off, and our performers bow. But Marvin can't resist starting up again, high-kicking into a reprise:

If our song has got you spinning

Just go back to the beginning!

OH! A callowhale isn't much of a whale!

Not a bug! Not a cat! Not a fungus or a snail!

“May I ask a question?” Arlo interrupts the mongoose's encore.

“Yes, of course. I'm so sorry,” Cythera says, and she means it.

“I understand the girls. But what did you do to me and Horace? We never touched the kid. We drank bottled water. We never did anything.”

Calliope the Carefree Callowhale blushes, two perfect magenta circles blazing on her turquoise face.

“We ate you,” she says sheepishly.

 

From the Personal Reels of Percival Alfred Unck

[MARY PELLAM, dressed in a black leotard and stockings, her clavicle and shoulder blades moving as delicately as swan bones beneath her skin, applies makeup in her gilded mirror. SEVERIN UNCK watches her, recording every stroke of the liner crayon with her dark pupils.]

SEVERIN

I don't want you to go.

[PERCIVAL UNCK balances his camera, Clara, on a dressing table with small blue horses painted all over it. He steps into frame and kisses Severin on the forehead before bending to hoist her up onto his hip.]

PERCIVAL

Mummy and Papa have to go to rehearsal. She's going to be Isis in
The Golden Ass
, which is a
bit
naughty for your age, I think, but you can watch it when you're … let's say eight. There's a donkey in; he'll make you laugh. Mummy is going to come in at the end and save the day. Won't that be wonderful? She'll wear a lovely big crown with an asp on it and carry heaps of roses in her arms. [pause] An asp is a poisonous snake. But very holy.

SEVERIN

I don't want you to
go
.

MARY

You can come along if you like, darling. You had loads of fun when we were rehearsing
The Great Train Robbery
.

SEVERIN

I ate candy and rode the train. But it was dark in there. In the …

PERCIVAL

In the soundstage, Rinny. [His eyes sparkle. He presses his daughter's small chin with his thumb.] Rehearsal is just practicing, my precious little hobgoblin. Mummy must practice being both Egyptian
and
a goddess, which is very hard to do at the same time! Why, it's like rubbing the top of your head and patting your belly at once. A soundstage is nothing to be afraid of, moppet. Just imagine Rehearsal has a capital R. Rehearsal is like a planet Mummy and I go to, like Earth or Mars. It's a dark cool planet with a lot of lights and people and toys and trains and candy, and when you go there you get to be somebody else and talk funny and dance a bit and say and do everything three times, because that's the law. Planets always have their own funny laws, don't they?

SEVERIN

Yes. I hate it.

PERCIVAL

Well, on Rehearsal, it's the law that you can only cry if Papa tells you to, or sing a song if Papa tells you to, and you can only fall down and hurt yourself if Papa tells you to do it
very
tragically, like Eurydice when the serpent bit her. Remember Eurydice?

SEVERIN

She let me wear her hat.

MARY

And Eurydice got right up and had a coffee when Papa said, “Cut!” didn't she? [SEVERIN nods reluctantly.] She was perfectly all right! My, my, we are just all over serpents today, aren't we? Come on, kitten! You and me are Egypt-bound!

 

The Graeae