Radiance

  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.

  From the Personal Reels of

  Percival Alfred Unck

  [PERCIVAL UNCK films his daughter playing on the slopes of Mount Ampère. Blue alpine cassias twist up all around her, gnarled and stumped and prickly with translucent needles. They prefer the relative warmth of the valleys. The heights turn the endless forests of the Moon to hunched, baleful, contorted creatures. A thin scrim of snow crunches under SEVERIN UNCK’S small feet. She is dressed in her father’s idea of a mountain climber’s costume: lederhosen, stockings, buckled shoes, a ruffled shirt. Her long hair is ribboned into thick pigtails. Severin tries to entice her father into playing hide and seek, but though he is happy to seek her, he will not perform his part by hiding. He might miss something. Finally, the child gives up.]

  SEVERIN

  Daddy, you have to chase me! Don’t you know anything?

  PERCIVAL

  Oh, I’ll chase you, Rinny. I’ll chase you anywhere you run! And when I find you I will chomp you to bits like a bad old wolf!

  [Shrieks and giggles. SEVERIN runs behind a malevolently torsioned cassia. She peeks out again, brushing needles out of her hair.]

  SEVERIN

  But when you catch me and chomp me, after that you have to hide and I’ll chase you! That’s how you play, silly! And when I find you I’ll roar like a TIGER and scare you to DEATH.

  PERCIVAL

  [Laughing.] Shan’t! I have the camera, and whoever has the camera is King and gets to make the rules.

  SEVERIN

  [Leaps up, grasping at air. The image shakes as he yanks Clara up and out of reach.] Gimme! Give it to me! I want it!

  The Ingénue’s Handbook

  January 16, 1930, Definitely Three in the Morning

  The Butterfly Room, Aboard the Achelois, Sea of Tranquillity

  Place your bets, ladies and gentleman. We have a murderer on the ship and I intend to flush them out.

  The band finished playing at the stroke of midnight. Union musicians are just awful sticklers. The heaving mass of us tottered out of the ballroom and onto the decks of the Achelois, a glitter-mob of prodigious proportions. The night was warm; the wind blew toward Tithonus and not from, so the scents were pleasant instead of foul: the tang of salt-silver water, the sharp whips of pine forests on shore, spilled grenadine, and a hundred kinds of perfume, from Ye Olde No. 5 to Shalimar to that just-shagged musk that has no brand name, yet could never be mistaken for anything else. Nobody had the slightest inclination toward bed, so the bash went on outside while—this is important—the stewards shut up the ballroom for cleaning. We all hung off the railings, rainbow-tinsel-barnacle people, and all was right with the world so long as the world was nothing more than that beautiful boat sailing through the beautiful dark. Then the old dance began: people paired off and vanished two by two, sometimes three by three, and the decks grew more peaceful, emptier, sleepier. I was occupied with Nigel—oh, I know, it’s too dreadful, all those gorgeous glitterati and I end up sitting on the staircase talking to my ex! I felt really and truly forty for the first time. I didn’t want to sneak off behind the smokestack to canoodle with one of the pretty girls from contracts or even take a stab at snaring Wilhelmina Wildheart at long last. I just wanted to talk to someone who’s seen me with a runny nose and a bad cough and still thought I was all right. Nigel was always aces when I was sick. He’d pratfall by the bed and make my slippers talk like dolphins ’til I laughed, even though it made the cough worse.

  Digression! No! Mary! The reason I must make a note of the fact that I was talking to Nigel on the staircase is to establish that:

  I did not see Percy or Thad at all between the closing of the ballroom at midnight and twenty past one in the morning.

  N. and I were sitting in the aft stairwell, which adjoins the south wall of the ballroom, thus…

  We heard the gunshot immediately and bolted toward the grand entrance, which the stewards had opened
up with a quickness, however…

  A small number of people had already trampled all over the crime scene by the time I arrived.

  We heard a great deal of screaming and dropping one’s drinks and weeping. I ran pell-mell; the heel of my left shoe broke off, but I kept hobbling on until I swung wide round the great carved ballroom door—Thad had it brought over from Mars only last year. And I saw it all. I saw the whole ugly thing like a set dressed for shooting. Poor Thaddeus lying face down on his own ebony floor, bleeding like mad. It was ever so much more blood than in the movies. When you shoot someone on film it’s just a pinprick, really, and then a little trickle of red. They slump to the floor and it’s over ’til the next take. But Thad’s blood gushed out all over the place. People had stepped in it. Yolanda Brun was trying to wipe some off of her green silk slingback.

  I’ve said wrap parties obey no natural law. I’d been Madame Mortimer, at full tilt, only the week before. She roared up inside me, all pearl-handled soul and acid heart. Without a word, I walked up to one of the stewards (who’d gone about as pale as arsenic), took the key off his belt, shut and locked those grand Russian doors, and shoved a brass hat-rack through the handles for good measure.

  “If I may have your attention?” I put on my biggest, most booming voice, the one that had slapped the back row in the face at the Blue Elephant Theatre back in London. I locked down my tears—I’ll cry for you later, Thaddy baby. I promise. “Thank you. I’m afraid I can’t allow any of you to leave just yet. Everything we need to solve this awful mess is right here at our fingertips. There’s not a moment to be lost if we’re to uncover the truth.”

  You’d think I’d put them all in a cage and dangled the last rump roast in the universe outside the bars, the way they behaved. Shameful. But I stood my ground, and the stewards stood with me—whether because they knew who sliced their bread or because they appreciated the need to secure the scene of a crime before all the evidence gets simply fucked away by cretins, I’ve no idea. It would take a day to sail back to Grasshopper City, and by that time there wouldn’t be so much as a sip of evidence left for the police. I had to work quickly. For Thaddeus. He didn’t need my tears just then, he needed his heroine.

  I knew everyone I locked into the ballroom that night, some better, some worse: Yolanda Brun, Hartford Crane, Nigel Lapine, Freddy and Penelope Edison, Percival Unck, Algernon Bogatryov, Himura Makoto, Dante de Vere, and Maud Locksley. (I’d only met Makoto, Capricorn’s newest golden boy, that night, but we’d already made plans to shoot pheasant together on the weekend.) I don’t quite know what came over me in that moment, facing those people—people I had known most of my life, worked with, slept with, admired, loathed, envied, the whole handbag of human push-me-pull-you—but suddenly, watching Yolanda whine and pour club soda on her bloodstained shoe, I was positively sick to death of them all. I could have gaily tossed them all into the drink and poured myself a grapefruit juice without a wink of pity in my heart. I don’t know what got into me, except Maxine Mortimer and her damnable need to solve the puzzle.

  “Shut up, you puling, overstuffed veal calves,” I snarled, and even though it’s a line from Doom on Deimos, I delivered it better in 1930 than I ever did in 1925. “Have a little respect! Clear off! Give me some room!”

  They flattened against the wall like school kids at a dance. I examined Thaddeus. He still had his dinner jacket on. The shot had gone through his back, straight into his heart. His cigarette still burned itself down between the fingers of his right hand. His left arm was folded under his chest. The craziest thought popped into my silly head: His hand’s gonna fall asleep that way! He’ll be all pins and needles when he wakes up. I went to disentangle him. No! Maxine Mortimer snapped in my head. Don’t you dare move that body, you dozy cow! The further one gets from the body, the harder it is to see the truth. I looked quickly round the ballroom instead. What luck! The gun lay under one of the banquet tables. Kicked there? Hidden deliberately? Dropped in the turmoil of it all? I sent Makoto to retrieve it, as he and Nigel were the only ones I felt certain about. Nigel was telling me about moustache wax when the gun went off, and Mack was fresh off the rocket. He didn’t know any of us well enough to care whether we lived or died, and besides, who would want something this drastic for their debut?

  .22 Perun, walnut grip. Martian, I thought, but that didn’t mean anything. We’d all been to Mars. There wasn’t much to do there but shoot kangaroos.

  Hartford raised his hand like a little boy in class. “Mary, whoever did this probably ran off at once. Why do we have to hang about watching you play detective? We’ve all seen it, love. Let’s be sensible: make a search party, comb the ship. Staying stuffed up in here won’t help anyone.”

  “Hartford, if I thought you had the sense God gave a gumdrop, I’d let you ‘comb the ship’ to your heart’s content. What, pray tell, would you be searching for? The murder weapon—” I sniffed the Perun’s barrel to be sure; indeed, freshly fired. “—is here. The body is here. The first people to the scene—and therefore those nearest to the ballroom when our Thad was shot, and the closest thing we’ve got to witnesses—are here. You don’t get blood all over yourself when you shoot a man in the back; tearing up the laundry for a stained dinner jacket won’t do a lick of good. So why don’t you button up your expensive little mouth and let the adults talk?”

  He did just that. I won’t say I didn’t get a wallop of satisfaction out of it. That vicious gossip hound Algernon B stood next to Hart, looking as though he were about to get on socially with an aneurysm. Sweat wriggled off his bald head and steamed up his glasses. He put his head between his knees. But if sweating makes you guilty, they were all in on it. Gin-sweats, stroke-sweats, beef-sweats, murder-sweats—who could tell the difference? I scanned their faces. I can do this, I thought. With everything I know about them, about Thaddeus, about deduction—at least the celluloid kind—I can figure it out.

  “I’m leaving,” Freddy said. His face went red as a stoplight. “You’re nothing but a nasty, two-bit has-been with a flat ass and the clap, and you can’t keep me here.”

  “So am I,” cried Dante de Vere. The pair of them stormed up to me, as though I’d never stared down a man who wanted my kidneys for earrings before.

  I didn’t budge. “Mr Edison!” I roared. “You had a dispute with the deceased over unpaid fees for sound recording on Miranda, did you not?”

  He recoiled. I don’t suppose anyone had roared at Franklin Edison since he crashed his tricycle into a swing set. But then, I did have the .22. Roaring has more oomph with a Martian pistol behind it. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mary. I have disputes with everyone over unpaid fees for sound recording. If I started killing anyone who owes me money, the Moon would be a ghost town inside of a week.”

  “What about you, Dante? He fired you from Death Comes at the Beginning. No one’s called you for so much as a footman’s role since.”

  “Mary! I had no idea you thought of me that way—as so ruthless or so abject. I was with Maud, stargazing, just out there on the starboard rail. We heard the shot—we’re perfectly innocent. I loved Thad, you know that. He looked after my dogs when I was on location.”

  This gave me an idea. I pounced upon it before it could get away. “I have a question. If I feel you have answered honestly, I shall let you go on your way. Who among us loved Thaddeus Irigaray? I believe that may tell us more than asking who hated him.” Proper Maxine Mortimer, from first syllable to last. “I certainly did,” I answered first. And it was true. He’d kept me in steady work for a decade and let me bring my cat on set. Hell, he’d proposed eight times. When Laszlo Barque left him, he stayed in my guest room for a month.

  No one else spoke up. Percy stared determinedly at his feet. Maud and Dante looked quite thoroughly bored, smoking together by the piano. Finally, Maud stubbed out her cigarette and said, “All right, fine, I loved him. He looked after me post my little spot of nastiness with Oxblood. I was supposed to get the Mortimer contract, you
know. The studio wanted me. But Thad wanted…I don’t know, I suppose he wanted a blonde.” She hurried to correct the bitter edge in her voice. “But no hard feelings! Why, that was ages ago.”

  Freddy’s mouth kept running away from him. It twitched; it grimaced. It wanted to say something his brain knew it oughtn’t. He was drunk as a lord, careening from side to side, as though that great huge ballroom were too small for him, that coarse, awful elephant of a man.

  “How about you, Penny?” Freddy hissed. Penelope Edison looked as though she were going to split apart at the seams. She kept rubbing her arms as though she were freezing to death. She stared at her husband, such a horrible stare, full of pleading and misery. Helpless tears started rolling down her face and they didn’t look like they’d ever stop. “Penny? Cat got your tongue? Who do you love, Pen? Me? Percy? How about Algernon over there? Or that sad sack of shit?” And he pointed to the ruin of Thaddeus Irigaray.

  “Please, Freddy,” she whispered. I have never seen anything quite so wretched as Penelope Edison weeping.

  “Please what? I didn’t do anything. But if somebody asks a question, it’s only polite to answer. And being polite is so important, isn’t it? If I forget one little P in an ocean of Qs, it’s the end of the goddamned world, but you can just stand there and quiver and not answer the fucking question?”