Radiance (22 page)

“‘When I looked upon that new world, splendid in every way and in every way terrible, I looked upon a tiger with stars falling from his striped tongue. I looked and saw my true bridegroom—but would it also be my grave?'”

So said the crone, who appeared silently beside us as if she ran on wheels and not flight-swollen feet. I knew those words. Everyone knew them: episode one, series one, broadcast March 1914.

“It's bad taste to quote yourself, Violet,” I said, certain now in my guess. She merely snorted as that Plutonian Babylon rose up to envelop us. “The new Vespertine is shit,” I added, with the barest twitch of a smile. I took her hand in mind and kissed it as our engines roared into undeniable red life, braking into the thin atmosphere, skidding into the tiger feet first, eyes open.

24 February, 1962. Midnight. Setebos Hall.

This is how one becomes temporarily American: stuff yourself into the uttermost depths of the best cold-weather gear you've managed to borrow and hoard, hold your documentation before you like a knight's shield—
Yes, Officer, a bear and phoenix rampant indicates that I summered on Mars three years past; four panthers passant mark my sabbatical on Callisto; this single whale embowed shows me Venus-born
.
My passport is my troth; you may find upon it all my soul displayed
. Queue in the most disorderly fashion you can manage, always remembering to yell when you could just as easily whisper. Intrude upon the privacy of the gentleman beside you while he tries to enter the pleasant meditative trance any citizen of the Empire craves upon taking a number and waiting his turn in the embrace of bureaucracy. Ask him his name at least three times, his business, his romantic history, his dreams and hopes and failures, his favourite way of preparing beef when he can get it, how many bones he has broken, whether he prefers men or women or Proteans, if he has any plans for supper, and how many times he has seen
The Abduction of Proserpine
. Before allowing him to answer any of these questions, interrupt with your own chronicle of longings and losses and boeuf bourguignon. As you move through the queue and the queue moves through you, you will pass through little nations without number: Here, a lady in an atrocious plaid cloche has managed to get a tuba through the weight restrictions; a throng presses round her, throws her coins and bread, and, by god, she can make a tuba sound as mournful and subtle as it was never intended. A slim lad with a choirboy voice warbles extemporized lyrics to her weird, sad, lovely, bleating horn. There, six or eight travellers in white furs and sealskin wallop on their trunks with drummers' hands, hooting in rhythm and grinning. Though it is February, a family sings Christmas carols in a pretty, uneven harmony, then switches to the alphabet song and multiplication mnemonics, anything to pass the time and keep the little ones pleasant. And when your number is finally called, you show your worth, plead your case, watch a short informational film, and don your mask.

Everyone wears masks here. It is a Plutonian necessity, eminently practical, and, in the space of minutes, my own became dearer to me than a lover. They say the wind on Earth can steal your breath, but such phrases are quaint antiquities now. The mask is a semipermeable heat shield, cycling the warmth of your breath back into useful service, oxygenating the thin air, keeping the sensitive airways safe from the worst of the vicious Stygian cold. All one needs is a callowfibre mesh, a hypoallergenic liner, a secure strap, a simple filter, and flat-disc heating unit.

Naturally, Pluto has turned simple necessity into a seething mass of carnival masks to make any midnight masquerade blush.

In the receiving station alone I saw minotaurs with topaz-spangled horns, ravens beneath cascades of night feathers, leopards, maenads, stained-glass butterfly wings framing dark eyes behind turquoise panes, elephants with muralled ears and bladed tusks, gilded and tricorned
bauta
, onyx
moretta
painted with phosphorescent trailing vines, silver-lipped
volta
with sapphire teardrops at the corners of the eyes. My eyes became drunk as the Depot reeled with colour and frost, with sound and epileptic glittering.

I chose my own mask from a hawker hoisting dozens of them on long black poles like ears of dried corn. My contrary nature, riled by the odious flamboyance of the American stew around me, fixed on the simplest one I could see—plain white with a thin black mouth and pinholes of red in the knife-sharp hollows of the cheeks. It would suffice. Cythera selected a sun-queen's mask, golden rays and copper peacock feathers arrayed around a burnished, rounded face engraved with a detailed map of the Virgilian underworld. A cloisonné Lethe sliced across the patrician bridge of her new nose.

When she lifted her new face from its hook, I saw another lying beneath it. I startled at it as though it were my own face, and I knew that against its dark beauty my contrariness had already crumbled. It was a plague doctor's mask, black, a beak so thick and long it would cover half my chest. Bubbles of green glass cupped the eye sockets; in threads of tiny emeralds the
Totentanz
—the old Germanic dance of death—whirled around the shaft of that long hooked mouth, the savagely angular cheekbones, as if a mask could starve. A sparkling green pope skipped after a king spun after a peasant leapt after a child in malachite rags gambolled after a maiden whose long ultramarine hair rippled and ran along the edges of the mask's face; all cavorting, careening, capering after Death, who jigged upon the brow, partnered in own his dance with his scythe, his leg lifted in a flamenco stride, his bone hands clapping the beat of a human heart as it sped or slowed to nothing. A fan of stark shear-blades gave the mask a brutal tiara. I put my fingers against its slick lightless face, the shimmer of the prancing child, his little arms straining toward the maiden dancing out of reach before him; but she did not spare a single glance backward, her green, living breast surging forward, forward, her arms open, taut, eager, stretching toward Death, her eyes shining only for Him.

“Hundred bucks, one-eighty for both,” said the mask-seller.

Safe inside that emerald
Totentanz
I swam within the rhotic rumble of the Depot: the sound of clothes moving against the people inside them; the bell-toll of station announcements; the luggage porters' shabby uniforms; the beggar children asking not for coins but for news of Earth, some sugary morsel of life back home to scurry away with to some hovel and pore over with a pervert's concentration.

Our escorts were, of course, unforgivably late, which I suppose one must expect when they are sent by a fellow who calls himself a Mad King, but it was no less irritating for being supposed. What use is it to detail the hours spent waiting? At six o'clock in the evening a klaxon sounded and the whole of the Depot surged to one side—
How Many Miles to Babylon?
was coming through on the public antenna, as clear as it was going to get, come one, come all. Sit together, draw close, Vespertine is in trouble again and it feels like being alive. I saw Violet El-Hashem, my ancient shipmate, position a chair so that she could watch the Plutonians gathering at the radio, to see her audience in the flesh for the first time. An old episode, either repeated or new to this furthest of the outer planets. Or perhaps arranged by her studio so that she could have this moment in the cold while plastic cups of cider went round the throng. I felt a bizarre, unwanted pang of missing her; I put it away like an old handkerchief.

Madame Brass, a shark in woman's skin, unable to hold herself still and do nothing, even for a moment, questioned any passersby too slow to escape her:
We are for Setebos Hall, is there a road, a public conveyance? At what hour do the trains stop running?
I let her. I excel at doing nothing. It is, you might say, my hobby. But she got no satisfaction from the parade of masked Plutonians. A man in a creased and beastly blood-red boar mask shook his head and held up his hands.
Do not ask—better yet, do not go
. A flatiron-chinned copper
bauta
with a frozen tricorne of split pomegranates begged off:
No one goes there unless summoned. If you have not been summoned, thank your stars and keep your head down
. A woman in a wine-dark
moretta
with the circles of heaven painted on it and a body so lovely that you could see her shape even under her pillowed snowsuit actually crossed herself.

Our small talk was too small to relate. Cythera Brass and I had long ago exhausted our stores of acceptable conversation, but our interpersonal cisterns had been briefly topped off by the landing, disembarkation, the tuba and the masks, the finding of fault with Americans and their goings-on, and the unloading of our mysterious cargo, which turned out to be mail: impossibly precious on the outer planets and yet impossibly quotidian.
My
post is worth all the diamonds in antique Africa;
yours
is scrap for the furnace grate. I care nothing for some Venusian bastard sending money to the bottom of the solar barrel or a Martian mother complaining about her daughter's choice in men, in career, in dress, in every little thing—oh, but she tucked in her recipe for lime pie! Well, then! I still do not care.

In film, even in
realité
such as Severin's, these sorts of human intermissions are happily elided with jump-cuts or montages. Action to action, point of interest to point of interest, that's the way! In life they must be suffered, wallowed in. We waited into the night, sitting on our suitcases like refugees, not daring to leave the rendezvous point even to forage for a prepacked lichen-slab meal.

Our escorts arrived just after midnight. You will think I am joking when I say that we were collected by stagecoach. Stagecoach! After the Talbot limousine in Te Deum and the absurdly posh appointments of the
Obolus
, I was spoiled. It is easy to become spoiled—a little taste, a little ease, a little shaft of light let in and suddenly nothing is good unless it bests the last luxury. And now we were meant to travel as though the last hundred years had never occurred, as though this was that wretched preflight America of raccoon hats and pony expresses. Was this a colony or an amusement park full of animatronic Americans and roller coasters shaped like the Rocky Mountains? A stagecoach—and not
just
that, but a
buffalo-drawn
stagecoach, driven by twin girls with livid dyed-purple hair, uncut black rubies binding their chests like bandoliers, and identical fuchsia masks stippled with wild gold fairy tattoos and mouths painted in the shapes of orange starfish.

The buffalo were my first experience with the Plutonian sense of humour. I had seen vast herds of buffalo in my youthful travels to America—woolly and prodigiously bigheaded, -horned, and -hoofed. These animals that dragged their mistresses' coach behind them were in no sense buffalo, though the girls insisted on calling them that. They were, as best I can describe them, sleek blue lizards the size of cougars, their glassy night-eyes bulging like fish, their silver tongues lolling and lashing like whips, their three tails held curled and upright like scorpions, tipped in strange silver bulbs. They bore wild strips of honey-coloured fur running the lengths of their spines and six swinging mammalian breasts, each black nippled and heavy with milk that dribbled in magenta trails behind them like oil leaking from an engine.

Everyone calls them buffalo, in fact. They run wild over the whole of both planets, native fauna, their hoots and howls unnervingly wolf-like on the Plutonian moors. They are domesticable, barely, and I have heard it said that like parrots, the smartest of them can mimic human speech. Their meat, which I was to sample rather sooner than I liked, is somewhat softer than beef but not so sweet as chicken and has a peculiar, almost floral aftertaste. It did not agree with me and my indigestion was fierce—but I get ahead of myself. Four of these “buffalo” stood bridled to the black stagecoach. Two green callowlanterns hung from its roof, illuminating the constant night of Pluto.

The daughters of Prospero introduced themselves as Boatswain and Mariner; the buffalo as Sarah, Sally, Susie, and Prune. They told us sternly to keep the windows shut tight and not to trouble them with our problems, and handed us long goose-down coats (I shudder to think what Plutonian geese look like) to fit over our already thick, quilted, furred travelling clothes. Once inside it all I felt quite like a stuffed caterpillar. Boatswain (I think) assured us that the journey was not long, not long at all. The two of them repeated some phrases over and over, as though they could not quite believe they'd actually spoken.
Eat, eat, eat
, they said.
Not long, not long at all. Quiet now, quiet, quiet
. We ate. We kept quiet. Into our hands they pressed infanta flowers, petals heavy as eyelids, white-violet and wet with juice and pollen. I held mine gingerly, all my old longing to taste the thing pooling in my mouth, waiting and wanting. Offworld, no amount of money could purchase even one of these blooms, not even Oxblood money. The Americans would not part with them, even if the delicate flowers could survive transit. I devoured mine ravenously; I tore it with my teeth. It shredded like lacework, turning to sweet ash on my tongue, evaporating like fairy floss. It did not taste like honey or coffee or mother's milk. It tasted nothing like I had heard. I cannot even compare it to another taste—it was its own. I can only compare it nonsensically: It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.

The journey—which, in truth, took us through to dawn—unfolded over a long, flat countryside. Infanta blossomed everywhere, their perfume flooding through the mouths of our masks, stomping upon and drowning the last of My Sin with velvet shoes. I took deep, gulping breaths. The scent was so sweet I felt I was not inhaling it but
eating
it and gaining sustenance, but it left an aftertaste of unsettling, dank musk. Yet I drank and drank of the air and felt so drunk as to fall down flat. The fields of blossoms gave an illusion of fertility—what land could be lonely that gave birth to such wild and splendid things? And yet, as the hours drew on, their sameness began to look like
meanness
, a paucity of imagination in the core of the planet itself.