Radiance

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.]