Radiance

urder mystery after the body gets discovered; no more than you can say love in a romantic flick until the end, until it’s a bullet firing, the bullet you’ve had on deck since the scene-one-take-one clapper smacked its lips. You circle it. You stalk it. But you don’t call it out.

MAKO: But everyone will know who it’s meant to be. What’s the point of being coy?

UNCK: Coyness is what makes it art, darling. Otherwise…otherwise it’s nothing but a funeral.

[long pause] We’ll call her something else. Hell, I named her once, I can do it again. Something bombastic, something mythic, something Venusian. All the names have to come back to Venus in the end. I remember what you said when we were writing Rocketship Banshee—we went up to that cabin on the Sea of Fertility and trotted out our old dance, writing movies instead of fucking. Two rooms, two typewriters, the blue cassia forests, moon-daisies by the door. We swam naked in the bitter silver sea and you floated on your back under the Earthlight with water running off your colloidal blue breasts and said: Names aren’t loners, they’re connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny. You wouldn’t just let me name our hero John and his demon bride Molly.

MAKO: This is different.

UNCK: We’ll call her Ares. I gave her a boy’s name the first time around, so why not this time? It’s perfect. Ares went and shagged Venus when he should have stuck to what he was good at, which was fighting with anyone who’d put up half a fist. Good, right? Yeah. Yeah.

MAKO: Let her have her name, Percy. Let everyone have her own name. She’d hate you for changing it. You know that.

UNCK: [Clears his throat several times. His voice quavers.] I don’t want to. I don’t want to write it at the top of every page. I don’t want to have to say it. Every day. All day. I don’t want to have to call some nobody actress by my daughter’s name.

MAKO: Too bad. It’s my script, too. I’m not your secretary. Her name is Severin. You don’t get to turn her into one of our demon brides.

[Sounds of typewriter keys and cigarettes extinguishing, lighting, smoke exhaling.]

UNCK: Fine. Fine. You win. Severin bloody Unck forever and ever amen.

Back to it. Once we’ve got the world created—Sky, Earth, clamshell—we move on to more important business. The Plot at Hand. We switch scenes entirely. I want to go full noir: neon fritzing signs reflected in rainy streets on Luna. Unless it shouldn’t be Luna. Could do somewhere more interesting. They get vicious storms on Uranus. Wrath of God-type stuff. We shot something in Te Deum once, didn’t we? What was it? Thief of Light? The Oberon Assassin? Christ, I can never remember. We’ve made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant. But TD is a spectacular city, really. All those coloured towers—bioluminescent, you know—thick as a fat man’s fingers, stubbing up pink and purple and hot green to the stars. Cheap as hell, too. Pubs everywhere like mushrooms in the morning. Good gravity, at least in the winter.

MAKO: If you insist on shooting on location, at a minimum we’ll need permits for Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter. We’re fine for principal photography on Luna, obviously. Venus?

UNCK: Oh, Vince, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. Isn’t there somewhere on the Moon we can dress for Venus? We have enough seas. I’ll hose down half the globe if it means I don’t have to go to Venus. Or we could try Earth. Glum old Earth. Moscow, maybe. Or Chicago. Could try Australia, but the red tape is absolutely frightful. Melbourne, perhaps. I can’t stand Sydney. We almost did Hope Has No Master down there, remember? Looks quite a bit like the older parts of Mars. Then again, Mars actually gave us a better deal, when you figure in the tax incentives. Guan Yu is a fabulous town. You can see Mons Olympus from every balcony.

MAKO: But ultimately, we want a city. Deep in a city. Noir has to have a city. And a detective. I presume we’re talking about Anchises.

UNCK: I know, I know. Who else could it be? If we don’t produce him pretty quickly, everyone’ll just be waiting for his entrance. We’re telling a story everyone already knows. We gotta outrace their memory.

MAKO: I think he’s living back on Venus, now. Shouldn’t be too hard to find him, if we want the man himself.

UNCK: Christ, no, he’s not gonna play himself! I’m not a masochist. Let him rot in those stinking swamps. I’ll make him better than he ever was. Our great detective…and he’s an amnesiac. Looking for his memory. Piecing his life together—and he can’t do that without finding her. It writes itself. He hunts down the story, and he is the story. Get him a trench coat and a hat with a brim so sharp it’ll cut the night. A revolver strapped to his hip, something big and mean looking. Fucking never stop raining on him. If I see a dry patch on that lantern jaw, so help me. We can even afford a voice-over if we want it.

[indistinct]

UNCK: Well, I don’t particularly give a shit, Vince. Where’s your obsession with authenticity now? Severin made talkies. It practically has to have sound.

MAKO: [long sigh] I’ll talk to Freddy. So…our man needs a love interest. Someone more mysterious than he is. Long legs, long hair, long gazes. If you don’t put someone on-screen who loves him, the audience won’t know they’re supposed to.

UNCK: Yes, now you’re talking. A proper dame, in stockings and a dress tighter than a close-up shot. Smoky, broken eyes. Not the innocent kind, though. A fatale. As if I know how to make any other kind of heroine. You’d think after all these years I’d be able to manage one Ophelia amidst all of my Lady Macs. But no. It’s just not in me.

MAKO: You know, I don’t think we have to go to Venus at all. Our detective will know he needs to go, he’ll know it’s waiting up there, just sitting on the answers he wants like a stinking orange dragon, but he won’t be able to face the idea of it. Of those red shores. Of the sound of the whales. Of going home. [wry laughter] Of course, you know Severin would hate every second of it.

UNCK: [long pause] She’s not here. She started out like a heroine in one of my films. Why should she end up as anything else?

The Deep Blue Devil:

Come Find Me

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

It was closing in on midnight, the kind of midnight you only get on Uranus after a three-day bender. Ultramarine fog reeking of ethanol and neon and some passing whore’s rosewater. Snow piled up like bodies in the street. Twenty-seven moons lighting up what oughta be a respectable witching hour so you can’t help but see yourself staring back in every slick glowpink skyscraper. And the rings, always the rings, slashing down the sky, slashing down the storm, spitting shadows at the fella humping his carcass down Caroline Street, hat yanked down over his bloodshot eyes, coat hugged tight, shoes that need shining and a soul that needs taking in hand.

That’d be me. Anchises St. John, private nothing.

You can look at yourself everywhere you turn in Te Deum. The whole city is your shaving glass. Stare yourself down, scrunch up your eyes, and drag a dull blade down your cheek. The wall of the pub next to me flushed leek-green and I saw those sickly rings slicing across the skyline, disappearing through my neck and punching out again, a pure white shiv. I hear they used to make a big fuss over the light in Italy, painters and that crowd. Well, I’ve been to Italy, and the old girl’s got nothing to teach Uranus. A leprechaun would get a headache out here. It’s the algae that does it. Algae in the ice, in the dirt, in the glass, in the big black dichroic swell of King George’s Sea. They didn’t build Te Deum, nor Herschel City, nor Harlequin. Didn’t have to. They grew these stained-glass slum-gardens like mushrooms on a dead log. Salted the sea with a confetti of exotic hydrocarbons and up they sprung: unpredictable, enormous, disorganized—unless you dig an anemone’s sense of feng shui. That’s all they are. Anemones as hard as a man and as big as his ego. They only look li