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.
PART TWO
THE BLUE PAGES
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
—Orson Welles
Many cities of men the traveller saw, and learned
the turnings of their streets and of their minds.
Many sufferings he learned as well,
drifting heartsick upon the endless open sea,
striving to keep his life within his breast
and bear his comrades home.
But he could not lift their stars from their shoulders,
not even with his whole strength.
Recklessness destroyed them all,
those blind fools who in madness
devoured the Cattle of the Sun—
and so it was that bright god removed from them
their homecoming.
—Homer, The Odyssey
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
(Oxblood films, dir. Severin Unck)
SC2 EXT. ADONIS—DAY 6 POST PLANETFALL 23:14 [30 NOVEMBER, 1944]
[EXT. Former site of the Village of Adonis, on the Shores of the Sea of Qadesh, Night.
SEVERIN UNCK and her CREW have lit the cracked braziers of the village; this is the only light source, but it is ample. Callowbrick flames flicker ghostlike over what was once the centre of town, Ahab Square—whose name provides a neat indicator of the general humour to be found in callowhale villages such as this, all over Venus. The ruins of Adonis’s dwellings and public buildings are visible as tall shadows, unsettling shapes, no longer recognizable as human habitation, their angles stove inward and burst open to become the shattered bones of a place once living. Lashes of a milky substance splash foliage, ruins, beach, roads. A light rain falls.
Dead Adonis, laid out in
state on the beachhead, possessed of one single mourner. The great ocean provides a score for this starlit landfall. In the old days a Foley boy would thrash rushes against the floor of the theatre to simulate the colossal, dusky red tide of the Sea of Qadesh, the great waterway that flows through all the corners of Venus, having no beginning and no end. The audience would squint in the dark, trying to see some sense of scarlet in the monochrome waves, emerald in the undulating cacao-ferns. The black silk balloon of the Clamshell’s amphibious dinghy crinkles and billows lightly on the strand.
SEVERIN steps into frame, into the diffident, limping light, her bobbed hair sweat-curled in the wilting wind. She has thrown the exhibition costume into an offscreen campfire and is clothed now in her accustomed trousers and black aviator’s jacket.
Other shapes move with busy intensity as the CREW sets up camp. SEVERIN holds her hand out like she would to a horse or a dog—walking carefully, quietly—but she does not walk toward a horse or a dog. SEVERIN looks uncertainly over her shoulder at the long snarl of sea behind them—and at ERASMO ST. JOHN, temporarily trusted with the care and feeding of George. He says something to her offscreen—he must, because she cocks her head as though considering a riddle and says something back to him. Her mouth moves, but the microphones have not been set up yet. Her lips make words the audience can never quite read.
A SMALL BOY walks in circles around the stub of what was once a Divers Memorial. All such villages have a Memorial: a cairn of diving bells bolted together on a pedestal in the town square, one for each diver who perished fast to a whale, lost in pursuit of the precious pale gold of callowmilk. Adonis’s monument has its bells no longer, vanished with the population, but the pedestal remains. The boy stares down as he turns and turns, endlessly. His hands flicker and blur as if he is signing something, or writing on phantom paper. He wears an adult’s diving costume, its brass bell attached firmly round his neck. Its folds and grommets drag against him, slow him down.