Radiance

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.

All-Clear

The morning’s Uranus is chosen by lot. He wears a funhouse-mirror version of the Imperial Crown, but where the Black Prince’s Ruby and Lizzie One’s best pearls ring the original, his glows with brazen electric bulbs: stars, winking on and off. He dons a coat of furpack and rain slicker blackfalse which reeks of the sweat of other Uranuses and their blood. Faces have been drawn onto the ’false in chalk and oil: Titans and gods in stick figures. Anonymous hands clamp a white collar round his throat: rings.

Uranus is joyful. His congregation throws blue paint onto his face. It drips down onto his cheeks, beads on his eyelashes. He puts his arms out, beckoning magnanimously—it is always smooth and sure, this motion. Uranus, every Uranus, has seen it done many times before it falls to him to perform.

Women and men come to him. Twenty-seven. Titania and Oberon and Puck wear shimmery greenfalse and brambles in their hair. Ariel and Umbriel, long silver veils and wild red leotards beneath. The maidens, then: great Miranda clothed in sails, Juliet strapped with golden daggers, Cordelia and Ophelia, Cressida and Portia, Desdemona and Bianca all dance painfully en pointe, their mad hair loose and long. Prospero strides with staff and book. Little children play the small moons: Belinda, Sycorax, Ferdinand, Setebos, Stephano, Mab, Trinculo, Francisco, Margaret, Rosalind, Caliban, Perdita, gambolling behind him like medieval dancers after Death. A toddling Cupid fires an empty amber bow over and over at everyone he sees. Uranus, ringed by his moons, his harem, his family.

The satellites throw garlands of rainpearls, dried crocus shrimp, morels, and the wild rubicund varuna flower that grows on the snowdunes of King George’s Sea, Oceana Telchine, the Fury’s Pond, and Herschellina, the vast dark waters of this world.

Titania steps out of the dance, though her stepping out is part of the dance and not separate from it. Her fairy crown flickers with shards of glowglass. Her green gown, cut like clinging leaves, shows the same crude sketching as Uranus’s raincoat: the great canyons of the moon Titania; the thriving farms and mining cities spreading over her hip, her breast, her back. She offers her hand to Uranus; he presses it to his cheek. She is lush and fertile; he is the god of air and cold. She bows to him, he to her. They dance, not in the cavorting, half-extemporized orgy of the other moons, but formally, as folk danced back home before these two—whoever they may be tonight or on other nights—shut their eyes and fired themselves at the reaches of the heavens. They are careful; they hold each other stiff and far apart, their feet precise. He leads, she follows. Uranus speaks in a slurry, the local mine-and-dice argot: a sing-song stew fashioned out of the Queen’s English, Manchurian, Russian, Punjabi, French, and anything else, picked up like toys, gnawed, shaken, held to the ear.

URANUS TO TITANIA: Aye-o, me larkhee, difujin moya, me mademoibelle, je lay on me side for thee, tbye, sur-la-vous. Scamp me round, q’est que yes?

TITANIA TO URANUS: Oye sohneya, me bolshy hazy ta. Je spin thee round-rosie, je never fall down.

URANUS: Gander all these melly platypups we made with us! Ain’t us proud. Ain’t us trop-gros Grand Papa.

TITANIA: Akara-thee lie on me full, heavy nicht on heavy vert. Thee dole me stars, je dole thee ’ren.

URANUS: ’Fess now, quoi ren do Moonmama and Grand Papa love plus-most?

ALL: Uranian ’ren! ’Ren quoi turn aback on dodder-Ertha. Aye-o me babba! We are no earthserfs. Titans we are, nowforever.

URANUS: Est thee lonely, difujin moya? Est thee lonely, me ren? Out in the noir and the shiver?

TITANIA: Longside all these coeurs a-beat? Never.

ALL: Never again.