Radiance

  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.”

  Callio
pe 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

  Transcript from 1946 debriefing interview with Erasmo St. John, property of Oxblood Films, all rights reserved.

  Security clearance required.

  CYTHERA BRASS: Session four, day three. This will be our last session, I think. How do you feel about that, Mr St. John?

  ERASMO: Dandy.

  CYTHERA: I’ve enjoyed talking to you.

  ERASMO: Then you are out of your mind. There is nothing enjoyable in this. It’s just eating ashes.

  CYTHERA: Who checked on Mariana, after you lost contact with Arlo?

  ERASMO: Severin and I. Rinny took care of everyone who would let her.

  CYTHERA: And what was Miss Alfric’s condition?

  ERASMO: She was gone. Dissolved into long, stringy fern blades and spores and mud and withered leafy things. She hadn’t run off. The pin in her knee from when she tried to ride Sancho Panza one last time was lying in the muck. No blood. Just…muck.

  CYTHERA: Do you have any thoughts on the infection vector? Severin and Mariana both touched Anchises, but neither the child nor Unck had that kind of catastrophic reaction. In fact, Severin had much more contact than Alfric.

  ERASMO: How should I know? Talk to Retta.

  CYTHERA: Dr Nantakarn. [sounds of papers shuffling, file folders moving against each other.] It is the opinion of this doctor that, once transmitted, the infection entered a state of dormancy in the Adonis subject. Neither Alfric nor Unck seemed to be contagious—it is possible that they would have become so given enough time. I can offer no firm reasoning as to why Unck showed no ill effects without the ability to take post-contact blood samples. Perhaps she had an immunity. Perhaps symptoms develop at different rates depending on any number of metabolic, environmental, or genetic factors. Perhaps it just liked her better.

  ERASMO: I don’t know. Mari was fine until we cut it out of her. Well, not fine, but other than the fronds, she had no pain, no fever. But I think…sometimes I think it killed her because she hit Anchises. It defended itself. Reacted in fear. Severin just held him while he slept. It didn’t have to be afraid of her. I don’t know. I didn’t have any time to think about the science of it.

  CYTHERA: You had decided to break camp.

  ERASMO: Yes. Three people were dead. We panicked. And we were still out of sync with our own soundtrack. We heard Max reciting Shakespeare to the boy hours after he stopped. Forward and backward. I was securing the gondola in the wind and I could hear Cristabel singing I left my sugar standing in the rain and she melted away…all couched in the static, sunk deep in it, the song a pin down at the bottom of the ocean. Crissy started clawing up her arms with her fingernails. Santiago…well, you must know. The night Severin disappeared, he took one of the machetes and hacked that Type I Ekho Ultra Mic into a hundred vicious pieces and started swallowing them one by one. Konrad stopped him before he finished his bowlful of knives, but Retta had to open up his gut as soon as we got back to White Peony. He was going into shock, bleeding into his stomach, his teeth ground half off, his tongue sliced almost in half. I never heard him speak again. Never saw him blink. He just turned off all over.

  We were finished. We could take the kid back to White Peony and get a few more interviews with people who had a cousin’s cousin’s dog in Adonis and we’d have a movie in six months. We could heal. Everything else could be edited in, fixed in post. We had enough film shot on site to make it look like we’d been there for ages. Like we’d been thorough.

  CYTHERA: Why do you think Severin went out on that dive? After everything that had happened, everyone she’d lost, why would she go out alone?

  ERASMO: She didn’t go out alone. I went with her. I know the cameraman is invisible, but come on. Give me a little credit for existing. Rin decided to go out to the callowhales because we were leaving.

  [clears throat]

  I’ve had a lot of time. Just…time. Life is long. You come to theories over time, and over time theories become convictions. And it’s my conviction that Severin only went to Venus at all to make that dive. She wanted to see the callowhales. That’s it. The kid, the village, sure. But the callowhales…they’re the only unexplainable thing we found on seventy worlds. She wanted them. Maybe they wanted her. No one wanted her to go, and they all tried—she came out in her mesh suit sporting a shiner that said just how hard Maximo had tried. But I think she made up her mind that night on Neptune when the lights went out. She was going to touch one. She was going to fly through the night and the heavens to the one magical thing in creation and grab onto it for dear life.

  You’ve seen the shot. There’s nothing more to a dive than that. You take the boat out and go down. Aylin manned the hoses up top. What I remember isn’t that moment in the red dark, that moment when she was there and then she wasn’t. I’ve seen that happen so many times on film it’s like I don’t even remember it myself anymore. What I remember is the night before.

  We were lying on our cot with Anchises between us, for all the world like a family. We were gonna take him home and raise him—we hadn’t talked about it yet, but we were going to. Just like Rin was going to go see
the callowhales. She stroked his hair while he slept against her breast and she said, “There used to be a story. A Greek story, so you know it’s good. About three sisters. They were actually the sisters of the Gorgons, too. You know, Medusa. They were called the Graeae. Sometimes they’re painted as beautiful, sometimes as horrible and hideous. They have long white hair and they’re never apart. They have one eye and one tooth between them. They share it. Pop it out of one sister’s socket and into the other. I think about them a lot. I used to dream about them when I was little, when I first read about them. Oh, didn’t I say? Perseus comes along and kills them on his way to killing the Gorgons. That’s how it goes—as soon as there’s anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it. I used to dream about it. About the eye. In my dream I was waiting for my father to give it to me. I was blind and cold and I wanted so badly to play with it. And now…and now when I think about it, I think we’re all Graeae. We live in a universe of lenses. We watch and watch. We all share one eye between us, the big black camera iris. We wait for our turn to see what someone else saw on a screen. And then we pass it on. All I’ve ever wanted was just to play with it. I still feel like I’m in that dream, jumping up and trying to grab onto the eye, and I can’t reach it.”

  She fell asleep almost before she finished saying I can’t reach it. I watched her. And I could see…little bronze threads on her cheek, tiny fronds, by her hairline, growing like gold veins across her face.

  And months later when I touched Anchises’s poor hand, I heard her say it again. One eye. And then giggle like she was three and say oh wow, oh wow oh—and then nothing.

  And that’s the end of it—nothing. I didn’t hit her over the head with a tripod and dump her body, though I heard that said plenty once we got back. Always suspect the boyfriend. Maximo didn’t bury her in the delta. I loved a girl and she left me. I don’t know where she is. I want to know. I want to know. But I was there and I still don’t.