Radiance (8 page)

Fortified with a secret blend of spices and vitamins, callowmilk products don't just taste good, they taste
better
than dairy products, more wholesome, richer, cleaner, and better for you! We know you care about your family's health—and so do we.

[A nutritional graph shows briefly, the bars of the chart represented by cartoon callowhales with cheery grins and spouts of water bursting from friendly blowholes in varying, informational heights.]

Just one serving of Prithvi products at every meal provides a wallop of protein, fat, immunoboosters, ultra-calcium, and plain, old-fashioned deliciousness. In recent taste tests, mothers preferred Prithvi milk over our competitors nearly two to one. Those are numbers we can be proud of. And it doesn't stop at the supper table!

[An array of PDSH products flashes before the camera in new, redesigned packaging.]

Our callowmilk proves itself over and over, as a foodstuff, industrial lubricant, fuel additive, fertility aid, antibiotic, anaesthesia, base for many indoor and outdoor paints, recreational hallucinogen, and coal substitute. When dried and moulded, it produces excellent building materials and its proteins provide fibre for the most fashionable fabrics. And, of course, callowmilk is the only source for the all-important bone density supplement and radioactivity prophylactic, without which humanity would still be bound to one lonely planet.

[The buxom mother tucks her children into bed one by one, finishing with the baby in its bassinet. Her face shows infinite love and careful concern.]

Yes, Prithvi Brand Concentrated Callowmilk truly is the stuff of life. We take our duty as stewards of this priceless substance seriously. You can taste our commitment in every sip.

[A bottle of classic Prithvi Callowmilk on a black starfield, the label showing the same genial, comic callowhale blowing a fountain of milk out of its grinning blue head.]

Prithvi Brand Concentrated Callowmilk: You can't leave home without it. See your local recruiter for information about lucrative opportunities in Prithvi's Offshore Operations Sector!

 

From the Personal Reels of Percival Alfred Unck

SEVERIN UNCK

Daddy, why won't the movies talk to me?

[PERCIVAL UNCK laughs and crouches down next to his dark-haired gamine child. His beard is thin along his jawbone. She pats the silk projection screen with her hands, imploring it to speak.]

PERCIVAL UNCK

Do you remember Uncle Freddy, from the Christmas party?

SEVERIN

He gave me a wind-up pony.

PERCIVAL

Yes. Well. Uncle Freddy has enough money to buy all the wind-up ponies you can think of, because his grandfather invented the moving picture camera and several other devilishly useful gadgets, plus a few things he didn't really invent but told everyone he did anyway, including a machine that could record sound and make the movies talk.

[SEVERIN lights up, as though she expects that now her father will reveal to her a world of speaking movies she had heretofore been denied.]

PERCIVAL

Oh, my wee small baroness, don't look at me that way.

[He takes his daughter in his arms. Her dress crinkles loudly as the petticoat brushes the microphone.]

PERCIVAL

Baby girl, do you remember the bandit in
Thief of Light
? How he wanted to keep everything locked away in his great lonely house, the crown jewels and the Miraculous Machine and Mina Ivy most of all?

SEVERIN

Yes, Papa. He was bad. And he had a mask.

PERCIVAL

Well, Uncle Freddy is like that. Only the crown jewels are audio patents, and the Miraculous Machine is a stack of colour film patents, and Mina Ivy is a world where a girl in a movie could sing to you in a red dress.

 

Self-Portrait with Saturn

(Tranquillity Studios, 1936, dir. Severin Unck)

(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 1, SIDE 1, COMMENCE 0:37)

 

SC1 INT. LOCATION #3 NAVIGATIONAL CABIN—DAY 483 AFTERNOON [3 SEPTEMBER, 1935]

[FADE IN: Pilot's nave of the good ship
Stone in Swaddling Clothes
, 1600 hours. Six hanging lanterns are tuned to low afternoon. Portholes show the glittering ice flow of the Orient Express speeding before and behind: Earth's affectionate nickname for the steady, stalwart currents and eddies of ether and frozen debris cradling the
Swaddling Clothes
in advantageous gravitational tracks and the kind of acceleration no engine could muster. Jupiter shines ahead: Grand Central Station. There the long silver craft will loop around and lurch forward with renewed, breakneck momentum, the final leg to Saturn little more than a controlled fall from Jupiter's great height. But the giant planet is still small, no bigger than a lonely cellar light bulb in the distance. Readouts display all well. Lights pulse on and off, slow and steady, the heartbeat of the ship.

SEVERIN UNCK curls up in the plush astronomer's chair with a globe of cider to suck and a knob of af-yun palmed in her large hand. A casual habit now, but one she will never quite kick. She chews tiny peels of it as she talks, carving them free with a dark fingernail. Most prefer to smoke it, but the fumes would interfere with the instruments. She wears a pearl-grey sari; her eyes sport heavy black shadow and liner thick as a zebra stripe. Her short hair has gone frizzy from the static charge in her cabin and she looks tired. Tired but excited. Scrupulously maintained shipboard muscles show in her arms, her stomach, and the stony calves she dangles over the arm of the chair. Exercise on Earth and exercise in transit do not make the same bodies. SEVERIN has spent half her life in the sky. There is a
longness
to her, a hyper-Vitruvian extension anyone would recognize. Her skin is the odd blue of all natives of Earth's Moon, the natural result of long-term exposure to the colloidal silver present in the entire lunar water supply. It appears on black and white film as the distinct soft charcoal grey sported by every star and starlet since the first ingénue took a bow with the Earth rising behind her.

Nine months on the ice road this time. Only another fortnight to go. Nine months with the same twenty-seven souls: her seven-member skeleton film crew and the twenty-strong mummers' troupe SEVERIN hoofed to Saturn as a show of goodwill to the locals. Entertainment is as dear as bread on the outer planets.

Her delivery is natural and thoughtful, as though she has just pulled up that velvet chair to have a chat with us. Almost out of frame, a multicoloured script rests on the floor of the nave. The original draft pages are white; new scenes and major edits are a range of colours: blue, red, green, gold, pink, lavender. On film, they all flatten to silver and black. She turns the pages with a casual, dangling toe. It's a subtle movement, but it's there. It has a rhythm. A little dance between her body and the script. Whatever we are about to hear, however casual it sounds, none of it is unplanned, unedited, or unrewritten from the first earnest pause to the last well of tears.

SEVERIN adjusts George's aperture. Her face comes very close to the camera—we can see the bags under her eyes and the first lines starting at the corners of her lids. For a moment, it is possible to imagine what she will look like as an old woman. Satisfied, she slots a sound cylinder into place and rests her feet against the long-distance radio. The film fuzzes and judders with the motion of the ship as Severin records the opening monologue of her first and perhaps most personal film.

SEVERIN smiles.]

SEVERIN

I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system. I know, I know—who didn't? But your own dreams always seem so special, so terribly
yours
, until you grow up and figure out they're just like everyone else's. How perfect and beautiful and silent and dead each planet hung in my heart! All nine names, written in squiggly, shaky handwriting, glowing inside me.

[FADE to a series of drawings. They are the works of a child, but an exceptional child, who might make something of herself someday. The beginnings of an understanding of chiaroscuro, a hard handle on perspective. A male hand turns each drawing aside. It wears a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. The child's planets go by in schoolhouse order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars and the asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Forests stick out from the surface of the Moon like sunbeams; flowers ring Pluto like a doll's curls. Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the eternal hurricane, glowers red on the face of Jupiter. The crayon strokes slash so deep they almost rip through the paper. Venus is pink and green and ringed with a hoop of whales joined tail to tail, a kindergartner's idea of whales: big tails shaped like wide lowercase m's, flumes spouting merrily from blowholes, jolly grins with disconcertingly human teeth.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

I imagined them all empty and waiting for me, gorgeous, radiant playground worlds: the red plains of Mars, Neptune's engorged oceans, still pools in the jungles of Venus, Pluto's lilies shining violet and white. They turned in the dark without sound, like a movie. No one lived there; no one could. When
I
stepped on them I would be the first, a pioneer-girl with a whip and a gun, like Vespertine Hyperia in the old radio dramas.

That notion lasted longer than it should have. When my father took me to Mercury for principal photography on
The Hermit of Trismegistus
, I reasoned that Mars still held herself pure for me. When he bundled Maud Locksley to Mars for
Atom Riders of Ma'adim
, I knew that Saturn, at least, would cast her rings around me and hold me close. When I got to the outer planets for the first time, well, no one even looked out the windows to see ringrise anymore. Someone snapped off a picture of me standing in the observation car and crying like an idiot. I've still got it pasted on the inside of George's case. I look at it sometimes, try to
really
look. To remember everything I hoped the solar system would be. Self-portrait with Saturn. The photographer sold a copy of that miserable snapshot to
Limelight
and I hated myself for forgetting that I have never been unwatched, unwitnessed, unrecorded in my whole life.

[CUT BACK to SEVERIN, sipping from a cider globe. She looks out the porthole and speaks in profile. Dollops of ice cascade past. They look like stars, more like stars than the stars themselves. The camera can barely pick up those dim stellar pinpricks washed out by the greater light of the ship and a million glassy cold shards.]

SEVERIN

This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes. Pilot, lighting designer, director of photography, production assistant, sound engineer, astronomer, local guide. You pay Mr Edison through gritted teeth and try to recover your finances by launch. You choose good kids, strong and a little gullible and intrepid as Argonauts. You check their references and they're just as bright and perfect as stained glass. You get them all in a tin can together, set the clock for nine months transit on a favourable orbital window, and pour out the last real bourbon you'll see for a year. Settle in for a long sail in the dark. And the first thing your kids do when the cameras are off and our big dumb blue mama is drifting away in the portholes is lean in close with eager puppy eyes and say:
Come on, Severin, you can tell us now—who's your mother, really?

But it doesn't matter, that's what the rags don't get. And my crew does read the rags, sucks them down like sweets.

Let me tell you something terrifying, instead.

When I was seven, I saw Mary Pellam in
The Seduction of Madame Mortimer—
do you remember that series? Madame Mortimer, lady detective, having lost an eye on Uranus in
The Saturnine Solution,
finally meets her match in the dashing person of the master criminal Kilkenny, known to me as Igor Lasky, actor, Lothario at large, and frequent occupant of our liquor cabinet and back bedroom. Oh, how I loved those murder flicks! And Madame Mortimer best of all, with her bouncing blond curls and cruel laugh and hidden pistols and leaps of pristine logic. Madame always got her man. This was after Clotilde Charbonneau left us
quite
bereft and ran off with Clarence Feng, darling of the Red Westerns. Papa and I were both disconsolate. And I looked at my father and I pointed at the screen and I said:
I want
her
for my new mother
.