Radiance (23 page)

As the morning crept in, we watched the carnival bridge between Pluto and its moon brighten in the sky, a harlequin umbilicus. Its light haloed and twisted in the freezing air, brightening the hills around us. The slabs of ice, the long black cliffs falling off into shallows, the glassy seas took on that same rainbow halo, that prism-corona, rimmed in shimmering St. Elmo's fire. That mad bridge called Styx was their sun, its waxing and dimming cutting a rough day and night out of the single black cloth provided by this miserly world. The long cries of untamed buffalo echoed on the pampas and the ruffs of our own mounts rippled in reply, each individual bristle glowing with its own savage colour. Though the carriage possessed a curling horn through which we might have spoken to the twins, asked after all that we saw, silence was strictly observed until the great house reared into view.

Cythera, in a rare unguarded moment, had fallen asleep and allowed her head to droop, ever so lightly and hesitantly, onto my shoulder. Infanta juice dribbled off her chin and dried on her collarbone, like a fingerprint, faintly shuddering with phosphorescence. I stared at it for a moment. The mark writhed and bubbled in my vision, a sweet, painless acid burning into her body, altering her, filling her with light. And then, as the carriage pranged upon an outcropping of black rock, the light on Cythera's skin guttered out and became once again no more than crusted sap and spittle. I roused her then to see what waited for us like an open mouth: a house alive, a house beating against the ancient glaciers like Hades' own pulse, a house no more a house than those four cerulean lizards were buffalo.

My pupils contracted with pugilistic force. Within a crystal dome as wide and high as Vesuvius, a volcano of light released its heart's blood in gouts and arterial sprays. Like a terrible wedding cake, it rose in tiers of porphyries and agate and deep red wood. The castle began with elephants: a ring of carved stone beasts, their trunks raised, tusks displayed, legs fused together to make a glimmering wall of violet rock. Cathedral windows rose from their heads; candlelight and shadows moved within them. Above the windows rose green stone griffins, their paws outstretched, their haunches flowing into one another, delicate balconies hanging from their chests. Up and up it went, in rings of black unicorns thrusting their horns into the air like spiked ramparts, red polished wood bears, and weathered grey walruses. The whole structure was crowned with a small ring of smoky quartz girls sitting with their legs kicking out over the great menagerie, laughing in stone, their crystal chins in their crystal hands. Within their circle a Ferris wheel turned, empty but lit, an absurd diadem for that maddened and maddening place. Light dripped from every crease in the rock, the wood, the glass.

I was dazzled. I covered my face with my hands.

“Home,” said a voice, and the voice belonged to one of the buffalo. Her feathers ruffled in the black wind.

*   *   *

In that haze we entered Setebos Hall, the castle of Prospero, through the bodies of the elephants, dragged and prodded by Mariner and Boatswain, their masks catching and exploding every candelabra's exhalation until their faces seemed to become stars. Even within the crystal dome they did not remove those masks, whether due to some Yankee affectation or personal deformity or local custom, I shall hazard no guess. I cannot begin to recount the stairs and hallways we sped down and through—they streamed by in a rich, jagged blur. Wild laughter and music echoed from deep within the hall, but the passageways we ran along were utterly empty.

Now that I am closed into my bedchamber, surrounded by deep ochre silks and curtains and writing with ink of that same sunrise shade, I recall only the throne room. I can call it only that. In our headlong flight we passed by a pair of open doors and looked within—we are human, we must always look. The room thronged with people, pulsed with warmth stolen from some impossible engine made to fight the awful extropy of Pluto's strict climes. Masks moved and spun like a field of un-sane flowers; some bore not only masks on their persons but wings and tails protruding from their bodies. And how those bodies writhed, how they arched and shook! In the midst of it all, on a tall black chair tipped with garnet pomegranates and silk asphodel and cascades of ribbons, sat a man who wore a mask made to look precisely like a human face. Not his own—not the face of Maximo Varela, for I know now it was none other than he—but the face of Severin Unck, moulded in resin and satin and paint, as perfect as the first moment I saw her, brow as clear, colour as bright, pride as pointed in those high, high cheeks.

My flower-fattened belly lurched in horror and fascination; my skull seemed to
wriggle
within my skin. The body beneath the mask was a man's—lithe, healthful, ageless, and beautiful, but male, dressed in a magician's motley colours, a tunic tight at the waist and thigh, blossoming at the shoulders. The black hair that fringed the mask was longer than Severin had ever worn it, cascading in curls as thick as any Juliet's on any stage, a savage woman's hair, a Medusa's, a lion's. Bubbles of music popped and frothed around me. He rose from his throne. A youth and a maid, lying sprawled at his feet, trailed their hands after him, willing him to stay. Severin's face floated to me, moving through dancers and prowlers and pipers and hounds. As if no other soul in that place existed, the Mad King of Pluto took me into his arms, crushing me to him, whispering into my ear in a deep voice I knew out of the depths of my memory—a rough voice, a fragile voice, the wrong voice, not hers at all, but bearing the words I had so yearned to hear her say:

Anchises, Anchises, you've come home.

 

From the Personal Reels of Percival Alfred Unck

[SEVERIN UNCK stands amid a tangle of cables on the set of
The Abduction of Proserpine
. Vampire extras mill around her, touching up their makeup, chatting, taking their teeth out to smoke. She is very small, perhaps four or five. She wears a black dress with a black bow and black stockings. Her face is painted deathly white. She looks up at a demonic ice dragon with sword whiskers and icicle teeth, a massive puppet managed by the renowned TALMADGE BRACE and his team. She does not see her Uncle Madge pulling on the puppet's works. It towers over her. She stares at its tinfoil eyes intently, quietly, hands clasped behind her back. She rocks up on her toes.]

SEVERIN

Did you eat that big old city all up?

[The ice dragon nods solemnly. His lines creak.]

SEVERIN

What a bad thing you are. You ought to be punished.

[The ice dragon nods again. TALMADGE works his lines and pulleys just out of frame, slumping the creature's snow-puff shoulders in deep shame. He can barely suppress his amusement.]

SEVERIN

Why did you do it? If you were really so keen, I should think you'd have waited till the city fattened up a bit. It couldn't have filled you up! It was only little.

[TALMADGE cannot answer; the beast will never have a voice, so he had no reason to devise one to match its vast crinoline body.]

SEVERIN

Daddy says the settlers dug too deep and woke the ancient heart of Pluto. But you have wet glue on your nose, so I don't think you are the ancient heart of Pluto.

[The ice dragon shakes with TALMADGE'S silent laughter. Severin reaches up and wipes away the glue with her thumb. She whispers into the puppet's huge, glitter-spackled nostril.]

SEVERIN

I forgive you. I get hungry, too.

 

And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly

(Oxblood Films, 1941, dir. Severin Unck)

(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 8, SIDE 1, COMMENCE 0:12)

 

SC1 INT. LOCATION #19 NEPTUNE/ENKI—STORM OBSERVATION DECK, DAY 671. NIGHT [29 NOVEMBER, 1939]

[FADE IN on a balcony crusted with salt and electric green coral. Its coils and floral motifs and columns recall the balustrades of New Orleans. Rust-bound lanterns hang on long, Marleyesque chains, casting white-blue light onto the churning cobalt sea that covers the whole of the unspeakably vast surface of Neptune. A semipermeable glass bell encloses the balcony; rain spatters onto the crystal and rolls down, but wisps of marine wind are allowed through—nothing, however, compared to the gales outside, which would murder any human in their path in the space of a thunderclap. The soft, grinding, gentle rumbling of Enki moving through its equatorial circuit underlines every spoken word.]

SEVERIN UNCK

The city of Enki is also a ship, perhaps the greatest ship ever sailed. She circumnavigates her planet once a decade, following a lugubrious echo of the Gulf Stream that flows more or less true, avoiding with grace the white and squalling knot of the mother storm from which all the other cyclones of this world descend. This balcony and thousands like it blister the exterior walls of the Neptunian capital. Whatever else occurs in this city—whatever work, whatever ambition, whatever decadence—its souls always return to these lookouts: a pilgrimage, a comforting hearth, a night watch. They come to see the storm. To stare it down. Whether for an hour or eight—or, in the cases of some old-timers, every moment not spent sleeping or eating—Enki-siders are drawn to this primeval sight of their world contorted, writhing in her constant oceanic distress, to bear witness to the eternal maelstrom that is the ancient heart of Neptune.

[All the camera can see is blue. Monstrous waves lash an indigo sky oppressed by clouds. Whitecaps crest and shatter; shadows of kelp forests the size of Asia skitter and dance. But there is no scale, can be no scale, because there is no land in sight. It could be the Pacific; it could be Lake Geneva. But it is neither. Only when a fishing vessel drifts into frame and, a moment later, the body of some unphylumed leviathan breaks the surface off its portside, geysering the sea into the methane-rich air, is there a moment of sickening understanding. There are cities on Earth smaller than that barnacled beryline beast.]

SEVERIN (V.O)

Enki is a nomad; she follows the tide. There are, of course, other ships on this sea: Manannan, Snegurochka, Ys, Lyonesse, Sequana. But Enki dwarfs them all.

[SEVERIN rests her hand on the balcony rail. Coral crinkles and drifts away under her fingers. She looks exhausted—dark rings around her eyes, a thinness to her skin.]

SEVERIN

Silence is the rarest commodity in Enki. The ear never rests; the engines that roar life into the city call and answer, call and answer, without ceasing.

And yet, from home? Nothing. Though nominally a French colony, Neptune will pass behind the sun tonight, disappearing from radio contact with Earth for an estimated seventy-two years. The voices will stop. The only news will come from lonely ships creeping through the black on the longest of roads. They will not hear any rumbling of war, any rattling of Viennese sabres or English guns. If the government in Paris changes once again, they will learn too late for it to matter much. No one will know whether Tybault will defeat the Invisible Hussar this time, or whether Doctor Gruel will succeed at last in making Vespertine his bride and his victim. It will all happen without us.

I say
us
. There is, of course, a passenger liner leaving before the lines go dark. A last chance to jump ship for civilization. The truth is, I have not yet decided whether I will be on it. My crew is going home. Tickets in their breast pockets, cabins reserved, champagne already chilling in silver buckets below polished portholes. Mariana, Amandine, Max, Margareta, Santiago, Horace, Konrad. Even my Raz has tired of kicking snowballs around on the frozen arse-end of the universe.

But me? Me, I don't know. I find myself at the end of this journey I mapped out after the death of dear Uncle Thaddeus—how many uncles have I had? I think every man on the moon has been my fuddy old uncle at one time or another. I suppose it has all been a funeral march to outlast the dreams of Hades. Saturn back to Mars and out again to Neptune. And I do not know if I am done. There is always somewhere further to go. Until there isn't.