Radiance

The boss circled round her desk, coming to lean against its heavy frame. She tented her fingers. Her face caught the harlequin lights. Her cheekbones had unbelievable angles, like a martyr’s statue. “I am quite certain that you do, Mr St. John. I, and the interests I represent, feel you are uniquely situated to carry out our investigation. I will be clear: We expect success. We expect resounding success. We expect—I will be plain—a body. We are open as to its state. Alive or dead, partitioned or whole. Aware or…well…whatever one might consider to be the opposite of awareness. That gives you a fairly wide playing field.”

“That’s fucking grotesque, but as I won’t be doing it, I’ll let it slide.”

She chuckled. Her hushed Saturnine vowels cajoled; her Hungarian consonants sneered. “But who else? Who else could we find on any world, under any rock, who knows the subject so intimately? Who would be so motivated to uncover the truth as Anchises St. John, the orphan of Adonis, the boy who saw it all? The boy with the hands that sing?” She grabbed for my gloved hands, faster than my filed-down neurons could answer. Her skin was cold, even through the leather. I snatched my fists away.

The boss frowned. She stepped back, rocking on her heels, a prizefighter. Round one wasn’t going her way, but she’d played this ring before. She spat her words at me, rat-a-tat. “You have no memory before the age of ten. Your parents are recorded as Peitho and Erzulie Kephus on the 1940 Venusian census—Ottoman subjects, taxes delinquent by quite a bit and for quite a while. But they might as well be characters in a novel for all the connection you feel to them. You don’t use the name they gave you. Severin saddled you with that clunker of a first name the day you met. Your surname is your adopted father’s. You spent your teenage years on Luna—but not in Tithonus, in Ibis. A pleasant enough seaside town, but more importantly, one with a renowned hospital specializing in—”

“Stop.”

“The Deformed, Insane, and Infirm. St. Nepthys, was it? I believe Ibis also has a charming amusement park with a rollicking good roller coaster. And bumper cars. How nice for you! Who wouldn’t grow up into a fine young man given such idyllic circumstances? A splendid estate overlooking the Sea of Serenity. The very eyeball of the man on the moon. Toys and books and good, nourishing, Earth-grown food. Even an outpatient program! Ah, but you didn’t do well at St. Nepthys, did you? Well, who could? Nurses can be such a bother.”

“Stop.”

“So you ran away from your hospital and your guardian and the bumper cars and that steadfast little rollercoaster. And where did you land first? Come now, surely you remember.”

My face burned. The drinks I’d gulped down in the Talbot were in a hurry to come back up.

“Stop it. Just stop it.”

“Oh, but I’m sure you know better than me, Mr St. John. Where was it? Mars? No, no, that was later, after you dried out—the first time, anyway. What was your first stop?”

I gritted my teeth.

“Mercury. Trismegistus.”

“Oh, that’s right. The hacienda. Now, was that your first suicide attempt, or did we miss one back at old St. Neppie’s?”

“Enough.”

“Tell me, Mr St. John, what exactly is a callowhale?”

A man can only hear so much of his own history before he cries uncle. And that was my uncle, right there.

“That’s me, then,” I said cheerily, lifting my hat as I walked away from her. Fast but don’t flee, I thought. Fleeing doesn’t look good on anyone. I shot over my shoulder: “You have a nice morning, madam. I’ll see you in hell.”

“Mr St. John, get back here this instant or I’ll have you breaking your ribs in a titanium mine by glassup.” I froze. If you’d seen the inside of a Uranian mine, you’d freeze, too. “And I’ll find a foreman with a particularly oppressive home life to look after you.” She softened her voice, but not by much. “Don’t be an idiot. We will pay you more money than you’ve seen in your life. We will supply you with food. Drink. Transportation. The drug or drugs of your choice. Companionship, if you fancy it, though I’d recommend a bath first. A personal, dedicated radio unit so you never have to bother with Depot queues again—which is worth nearly half what we’re paying you to begin with. Cythera will go with you, of course—we are not fools. You need a governess. But, I promise, you can do this job fat, drunk, high, and fucked senseless, and afterward you can sleep with a security blanket made of money. Or you can do any number of less stimulating jobs digging out the marine tunnels or hauling sewage or mining the most poisonous thing I can think of this week. But you will leave my office employed.”

God, I just wanted to leave. Just let me leave. “Jesus, woman, why? I am as useless as a sack of nothing, you can see that. Your secretary, or whatever Miss Brass out there is, could see it.”

“Because I know you can do it with a needle in your arm and a fifth in your fist. You were a private eye on Callisto for seven years. It’s the longest you ever stayed put. You were good at it. You don’t like being good at things; it makes you stand out. But you couldn’t help being good at it. You tried to fail and for once you didn’t. But I guess regular meals and an apartment where the heat stayed on were too much for you, kiddo. We’re not offering any of that. We’re offering what you do want: enough money and vice to drink yourself to death in comfort after you’ve done with us.”

“Who is us? Who are the ‘interests you represent’? For that matter, who are you? What do I call you?”

The boss smiled, the smile of a boss who knew she’d won. It was a sick fucking smirk. “My name is irrelevant to you personally. You can call me Melancholia when you need to call me anything, which I do not expect to be often. Nor should it concern you who I represent. Do your job; get paid.”

“Not good enough.” Not good enough for her. Not if I had to hunt her down like a dog after a fox. I wanted to know who was up on the horses.

Melancholia sighed. She looked out the window at the blue froth of the All-Clear. Her sharp nose stood starkly against the bleeding colours. “Only four sequences of The Radiant Car Thy Sparrow Drew survived whatever happened, and they are quite badly damaged. I’m sure you’ve seen them. I represent a consortium of business interests loosely gathered under the tent of Oxblood Films. Oxblood underwrote all but one of Ms Unck’s movies. We own Radiant Car. We paid for it. In a very real sense, we own her. And we must insist upon recovering our property. Undiscovered footage may not even be out of the question.”

“It is.”

The boss shrugged. “If you say so. We will accept a body in lieu of a print. Either of these things would be beyond value as far as we are concerned.”

“I don’t get it. If you’ve seen the

footage, if you’ve seen those scraps, then you’ve seen how it ends. You’ve seen her just…whoosh. Vanish. You want me to pull a body out of a hat? How about a rabbit, too?”

“If you like.” Melancholia shook her shaved head. “I don’t understand you. At this very moment, every conceivable resource lies in your hands to solve the central mystery of your whole wretched life. We thought you’d be…driven to succeed. We thought you’d be relieved.”