Radiance (28 page)

CYTHERA:
[laughs softly] Once. But it was a really short one.

ERASMO:
Tell me.

CYTHERA:
It was at a company picnic out by the Sea of Serenity. We played cricket against Plantagenet—it's not all tactical strikes, as you so bluntly put it. Arlo and I were both hopeless. You'd think the Australian would've put up a better show than me. The Seneca nation has never had a team and never will. But Arlo made me look aces. After we lost, we were lying on the grass and he turned to me and said:
So, two fish are floating in a tank and one turns to the other and says, ‘Hey, do you know how to drive this thing?'
I think I actually applauded.

ERASMO:
Good for him. Well, he kept on at the one about the mummy snake and the baby snake, but it was no go. The weather was calm; no storm clouds. We ate bacon sandwiches with hot mustard and roasted sausages over the fire. Aylin Novalis, our guide, asked Mariana about growing up on Mercury. Aylin had never been, which shocked me. Mercury is practically right next door! So Mariana told her all about it.
     “I was born in Nefertem, a small town not far from Trismegistus in the Tropic of Gemini, the temperate zone between the hot side of the planet and the cold side. My parents raised dragons. Most everyone in Nefertem did.”
     “It's my lifelong ambition to see one of those up close,” our best boy Santiago said. Now, as far as I can tell, everything imaginable was Santiago Zhang's lifelong ambition. Did you eat real camel once? He'd practically leap into the air and tell you it was his lifelong ambition to eat real camel. Pilot a ship the whole length of the Orient Express? By god, it was Iggy's lifelong damned ambition to shoot a rocket down the ice road like a billiard ball.
     Mariana said, “Go to a damn zoo sometime, Iggy.” Everybody laughed. She told us what they looked like, the native Mercurial beasties. Komodo dragons crossed with zebras crossed with otters, with the personality of a drunken granddad set in his ways. Have you seen one?

CYTHERA:
I have a hacienda on Mercury. They taste marvellous with a béarnaise sauce.

ERASMO:
Aren't you a delight? [sounds of swallowing, a water glass being set down roughly] I bet you never rode one, though. Mari did, when she was little. She wasn't supposed to, but she made her parents save one from the slaughterhouse so she could have a pet. She rode it around the ranch and called it Sancho Panza. Taught herself to sing leaning against Sancho Panza's back and singing nursery songs with dragon slipped in to all the lyrics.
Twinkle, twinkle little dragon, won't you come and pull my wagon. Up above the world so high, Sancho Panza in the sky …
     Mari had such a pretty voice. But girls who can sing tenor don't get a lot of work. It's soprano or bust. So she hired on with Edison Corp. Learned the tech so she could help other people sing.
     “What happened to Sancho Panza?” Cristabel asked her.
     “Same thing that happened to half of them in the twenties,” Mari said, and you could tell she was still a little heartbroken over it. “Who knew a dragon could get whooping cough?”
     After that, Cristabel got to talking about cloud surfing on Titan when she was young. The clouds on Titan get so heavy sometimes that you can hop out of a glider and surf them all the way down to the surface. Crissy never saw a blue sky until she was thirteen! She still wears sunglasses all the time. Her eyes never got strong enough for sunlight without cloud cover to diffuse it. Even the Venusian twilight was too much. She loves film, I think, because it makes everything look silver and soft again, like it did back home. She said, “The clouds fold over you like your mother tucking you into the biggest, softest bed in the world.”

CYTHERA:
And how would you describe Mr Varela that night? Happy? Distracted? Did he socialize with the others?

ERASMO:
Sure. I suppose.

CYTHERA:
Do you remember anything in particular before … [papers shuffling] quarter of two in the morning? That was when it started, wasn't it?

ERASMO:
What you have to understand about Max is that he's a technician with a leading man's soul. He's Henry V, but his England is electricity. If Aylin had asked him about his childhood, he'd have regaled us for hours—and we'd have been totally absorbed, because he was wonderful, really magnetic. But he had to be
asked
, or he would just sulk. He grew up on Earth, you know. Only one of us who did.

CYTHERA:
So did I.

ERASMO:
Well, you two would have a lot to talk about. You can also tell him that if I see him again I shall drown him in a ditch.

CYTHERA:
Why?

ERASMO:
You were asking if Max socialized. He did, in his way. He jawed with Horace and Cristabel about lenses. He cuddled Mari while she sang about Sancho Panza and tried to slip Arlo a punch line on the sly—but old Covington didn't want any help. Oh … and he got into it with Dr Nantakarn. But they'd both been drinking.

CYTHERA:
What did they argue about?

ERASMO:
Callowhale anatomy. Max kept saying they were basically a series of balloons, just sacs of fluid, more like plants than anything we'd recognize as an animal. Retta wasn't having a bit of it. She had a theory that they're
actually
cetaceans, that if you could cut one open—God, with what? Bulldozers?—if you could cut one open you'd find something not very different than a humpback whale, just much, much bigger. She's published papers, so you can imagine how bent out of shape she got after a little of that vile moss-gin when some theatre kid started telling her callowhales are basically houseplants. Max sort of sneered that maybe we'd get lucky out here and she could be the first to autopsy one. Retta just swigged from her flask, winked at Santiago, and said, “It's my lifelong ambition.”

CYTHERA:
Did Varela argue with Severin that night?

ERASMO:
Not that night, no.

CYTHERA:
And the sounds began … around 0045. Correct?

ERASMO:
[very quietly, imploringly] I don't want to talk about the sounds.

CYTHERA:
I'm afraid you have to. They're a significant factor in all this.

ERASMO:
What if I just cut to the end—this isn't a novel, I don't need to keep you in suspense.

CYTHERA:
[papers shuffling] “… we secured the foodstuffs in lockers in case local fauna came sniffing around for crisps and bunked down around midnight. I don't really know how long it was, half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Something like that. Half an hour to forty-five minutes later I heard something. It was really, really quiet. Sort of a
scratching
sound, like somebody rubbing two pieces of burlap together. My brother Franco went outside to investigate.” That's Konrad Sallandar from craft services. [more shuffling] “I went to bed before everyone else so I could study my maps and just … get a break from all of them. Artistic types don't really talk. They just wait for their turn to tell a story. It's amazing, but I'm an introvert. I'm not trained up for that level of social interaction. I'd say I turned my light out around 2330, Earth clock. So I was almost asleep when I heard it. It wasn't loud—not then. Just the softest noise. Like somebody breathing. Somebody with a bit of a chest cold. I remember looking at my watch, so I can definitively say I first heard it at 0043.” That's Aylin Novalis. Do I need to go on?

ERASMO:
No. Christ, no, please, stop.

CYTHERA:
Did you hear something that night?

ERASMO:
Yes.

CYTHERA:
Did Severin?

ERASMO:
We all heard it. I don't know what fucking time it started. I stuck my head out of the tent and I started giggling. I couldn't help it; I get the giggles when I'm nervous. Heads popped up out of all the other tents and it looked like a Whack 'Em game at the fair. Once they saw me giggling they all started in, too, and pretty soon we were rolling in the sand. We weren't scared. You hear funny things on funny planets. In the dark, in the middle of a swamp.

CYTHERA:
Once you got yourselves under control, did the sound stop?

ERASMO:
No.

CYTHERA:
What did it sound like, to you?

ERASMO:
Like a radio stuck between stations. It was diffuse, coming from everywhere at once. But it was still very, very distant. You had to shush everyone to hear it. Mariana checked her mics but everything was dark, wrapped up, A-OK. So we all went back to bed and didn't give it another thought.

CYTHERA:
And the next morning?

ERASMO:
Up at 0600. Toast and sausages and Venusian coffee and not a worry in the world or a sound in the sky, except those mad black birds that sing in Mandarin.

CYTHERA:
And this is December second, the first day of actual filming. The day Severin made contact with the boy.

ERASMO:
Anchises.

CYTHERA:
That's not his name, you know.

ERASMO:
It has been for a year. That's long enough to stick to his ribs.

CYTHERA:
Do you want to know his legal name?

ERASMO:
[surprised snort] Actually, yes. I'd like that.

CYTHERA:
It's Turan Kephus.

ERASMO:
[long pause] He likes Anchises.

CYTHERA:
Tell me your first impressions of him.

ERASMO:
I told you already—we spent most of the morning setting up cameras and lighting rigs. Horace and I set up coverage. Mari's equipment didn't seem to like the humidity—she was way behind schedule. We all kept busy … because if you looked at him once, you'd never stop.

CYTHERA:
Walking in circles?

ERASMO:
You've seen the film. But in real life it was … it was just awful. That poor boy. He'd been like that for years, but he still looked like a child. Like all the photos we'd collected of Adonis before the … event. The disaster. It was a genuinely unexplainable thing. Severin kept saying somebody must be feeding him. But I don't know. Every once in a while he would kind of … wink out. Like a shutter clicking. And then he'd come back, so fast you told yourself it was nothing, it was just
you
blinking, moron. Until we watched the dailies.
     It got to me. I felt sick. I felt like I'd run at full speed straight into a brick wall. We'd come all the way across space to see him, and he was exactly like the stories. Exactly like the photographs. There was no new information. Everybody exaggerates; everyone embellishes. But Anchises was just so bizarre that you couldn't top him.

CYTHERA:
What time did Severin make contact?

ERASMO:
Around 1300, I think. The light was perfect; the light is always perfect on Venus. Max didn't think she should touch him. He said, “Just try talking first. We have all the time in the world.” And Dr Nantakarn said something about trauma victims and how you couldn't predict their reactions to human touch. I wasn't really listening. Rinny was
definitely
gonna hug that kid, so I didn't consider it an important debate. Rinny didn't like
being
hugged all that much, but she was a great practitioner of hugging others. She liked to initiate the whole process. When she was younger, she said it could fix anything, if you timed a hug right and were really good at it. And she was. Really good at it.
     Later, she revised that to “almost anything.”
     But she did try talking to him first. I don't remember what she said. Generically soothing stuff. She could be so comforting, if you really needed it. Needed her. Not if you'd just had a bad day or lost your watch or something. She didn't have a lot of pity for the little tragedies. But if you got stuck in a big one, you'd want her there to kiss it better. [clears throat] Right. So she said a few sweet nothings and then she went in for the hug, and then all hell broke loose.

CYTHERA:
What particular kind of hell?

ERASMO:
The kid started screaming bloody murder. I thought for a moment he was going to blink out again, to get away from Severin, but she held him still. Held him while he shrieked and shook and clawed at her. Like that girl in the story. Who holds onto Tam Lin 'til the wicked fairies have all marched by. What's her name?

CYTHERA:
Janet.

ERASMO:
[chair squeaks] That was quick. Under other circumstances, I think you might be an interesting person to know, Cyth. Janet. She held him like Janet, and at the same time the sound roared up again, nothing like the night before. Loud—and I mean marching band–loud. It was absolutely mechanical this time. Machine noise and voices. We didn't recognize them at first. We couldn't begin to understand words out of all that junked-up static—skipping, popping, screeching feedback, looped back on itself, the timbre fucked from top to bottom. But somewhere in there we could hear … voices. We were all pretty freaked out—but that kind of freaked out where you're excited and alive and so fucking curious your curiosity could punch a hole in the ground.

CYTHERA:
Can we discuss the boy's hand for a moment?

ERASMO:
[loud sigh] After all this time I still don't know what to say about his hand. It was disgusting, I can say that. I couldn't see it clearly, not right away. He was still hollering his head off. His eyes were absolutely wild. I saw a horse bolt during a fireworks show once. When the gauchos finally tracked her down, she was lying in a lake of her own sweat, panicked entirely out of her ability to stand on her own four legs. And her eyes, her poor eyes, looked like Anchises's eyes. Irises spinning in their whites.
     Anchises held up his hand—
the
hand—to Severin like he meant to strike her, but she didn't recoil. I was so proud of her. I would have flinched. All I could think was:
He has a mouth in his hand
. But it wasn't a mouth. Later he let us all examine it as much as we liked. With gloves and masks, mind you. We didn't just shove our thumbs in. He had a gash in his palm that didn't or couldn't or wouldn't heal, and the gash was full of horrid squirming bits of flesh, like tiny tentacles, but so fine. Silky. Wet. Greenish-bronze. And alive: they moved by themselves, stretching out of him. Severin just kept telling him how everything was fine as paint. Giving him her best Face Number 124: Adoring Mother. Instead of hitting her, he touched her cheek with that ruin of a hand. It was such a tender gesture, so … adult. And when he touched her it all shut off. He stopped screaming and the static stopped screeching and he let her scoop him up in her arms. She carried him away from the Memorial and then Margareta conducted her examination while Rinny cradled him in her lap.
     Anchises slept in our tent for the next three days. We tried to get him to talk, but he wouldn't. Just clung to Rin like she was something new to circle round. We sat by the fire singing all the songs we could think of to the kid. Maximo took him for walks and kept up this constant patter, hoping he'd do the primate thing and start trying to mimic the big monkeys.