Radiance

Yes, I despised her. But I am a strange creature. I am strange even to myself. There is no specialness in my ashen feelings toward Miss Brass. I despise myself as well, and all my works. It does no good. No matter how I practice my despising, I remain Anchises, and my works keep working.

“Wake up,” I barked, and though I did not mean to bark, I was not sorry. “We make Charon orbit in ten hours.”

She stirred beneath those soft green linens. My Sin filled the air.

I spoke more softly, then. I doubt she heard me. “By the way, I think I just had breakfast with Violet El-Hashem.”

21 February, 1962. Noon (thereabouts). Pluto, High Orbit.

Shall we have trumpets? Shall we have banners? Shall we have garlands and chords and bursts of coloured flame to announce our presence, descending in a slow angelic spiral from high Plutonian orbit down, down, down into the fields of pale flowers that soften the face of that little lonely world and her twin?

Perhaps a little trumpeting. Perhaps a little flame.

Night is Pluto’s native crop. I thought myself darkness’s man, but I had never even kissed her cheek until the sun set on that flower-choked world. Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat. Night wed me and bedded me, widowed me and murdered me and resurrected me whole a thousand times over with each hour. I saw before me, in that selfsame hall that had boasted our Christmas ball, beyond the veins of frost forking through the glass panes, a carousel hanging in space. Severin never came here. The one world she missed in all her profligate travels. At last, I shall have something she did not.

I will warn you now, Reader: Pluto is a place too mad for metaphor. What is there can only be what it is: a world far gone, decayed from the moment of its birth, lost in the unfathomable tides of these black rivers, so far from the sun that is our heart that it is, quite plainly, a place of delirium and dissolution.

It is a bestiary of the grotesque.

It is a Jacobean horror-hall.

It is a brothel of the undead.

It is so beautiful.

Welcome to America, to the Grand Experiment’s last light bulb, left burning long after the household has locked up and fled.

Your Friend Pluto!

(Patriot Films, 1921)

[VISUAL DAMAGED, UNSUITABLE FOR VIEWING.]

VOICE-OVER

Welcome to the American sector!

Feast your eyes on glorious Pluto, her wild frontier, her high standard of living, her rugged, hardworking citizens, her purple mountains majesty! Ride the mighty buffalo! Marvel at the bustling industry of the great cities of Jizo and Ascalaphus! Climb the peaks of Mt. Orcus and Mt. Chernobog!

Congratulations! You have chosen to stake a claim on your corner of the bountiful Plutonian pampas and start a new life here on the Little Free World. Out here, the old empires fear to tread! On Pluto a man can make his own fate and no one will trouble him to get on his knees and kiss a crown.

A joint venture of Uncle Sam and the Iroquois League, Pluto and Charon are a wholly self-sufficient binary system—we gotta be! Our unbeatable location requires a special kind of soul: an enterprising, fearless, burly, bootstrap-pulling sort of man with a high tolerance for cold and work ethic to beat a Puritan senseless. We here on Pluto are delighted to welcome you into our family. We only take the best, and you have been specially chosen for one of our provisional citizenship programs, entitled to benefits and privileges that remain the envy of the nine worlds. Please refer to your complimentary deep-freeze rated pocket-size Constitutions for a full accounting of these rights—as well as inspiration, comfort, and the sense of profound well-being conferred by the presence of that most exceptional document.

No matter your nation of origin, you are now a part of the great American project—and if that doesn’t make you proud, I don’t know what will! In its short time on the interplanetary stage, Pluto has produced, abetted, or sheltered first-class poets like Miss Dickinson and Mr Frost, inventors such as Mr Tesla and Mr Marconi, titans of industry and politics with names as grand as Morgan, Rockefeller,

and the great Emperor Norton II, as well as architects by the bushel who have put the streetscapes of Vienna and Venice to shame. Now you can stand tall among their number and make your mark on this miraculous planet.

Now that you and Pluto have made a proper acquaintance, you’ll find in your intake portfolio a region assignment, dependent on your skills and background, as well as where folks are needed most. Are you bound for the ivory waves of blossoms on Pluto Actual, or the lucrative mines of Charon? Or perhaps you’re headed for the fashionable districts and urban excitement of Styx, the Great Bridge! Homesteads are available in all three regions; assignments may be revisited every five years.

Whatever your destiny, Citizen, a life like no other awaits you!

Each new Plutonian citizen is furnished with sufficient materiel for the construction of a dwelling, a sturdy and reliable Bunyan Brand Heating System with a free backup generator, seeding for a fast-fertilizing infanta crop, two shotguns, and basic-model breathing masks for the whole family. The rest is up to you! The extraordinary properties of the unique infanta blossom mean that no soul on Pluto will go hungry—easy to grow and easy to harvest, each flower provides a complete nutritional profile, save for folate, riboflavin, Vitamin A, and iron. Our scientists are discovering new and useful qualities of this wonderful species day by day! Don’t eat them all at once!

Now, a day on Pluto comes out to a week back home, and a year lasts about two hundred and forty-eight Earth years, but lucky for you, good old corn-fed Frank McCoy, John Smoke Johnson, and the crew of the Red Jacket made worldfall smack in the middle of spring—a twenty-year span we call the Rose of May. We won’t see winter in our lifetimes, no sir. And now that summer is on the horizon, it’s a perfect time to put down roots. Summer on Pluto is a balmy life indeed—and there’s a whole lifetime of summer for your pleasure. The lagoons of Tawiskaron call to bathing beauties and fishermen alike; watching the magnificent Sunday Sunsets from the balconies of Mormo will take your breath away. Nowhere in the solar system is a world more blessed, more genteel, with a richer portion of God’s bounty. No more must man labour under the Union Jack or the Red Hammer, Vienna’s long arm, or Nanjing’s watchful gaze. In point of fact, the passage of the Sun between Earth and Pluto some years back means that those lace-cuffed dinosaurs aren’t watching much of anything but their afternoon tea. We won’t be getting word from the Old Worlds until round about the year 2112, so sit back, relax, pour yourself a whiskey and ice, and blow them a real nice kiss.

Please note that Proserpine and her environs are off-limits to all non-police personnel. The incident there is considered concluded by all involved, and no outbuildings or further items of interest remain. All relevant structures have been subsequently dismantled, recycled into building materials, and used in nearly every Plutonian city as a gesture of solidarity and collective mourning. We declare openly our hostility to treasure hunters, occultists, and other bandits who come to raid our sweet, peaceful land for purely imaginary secrets. There is no mystery; colonies fail. Seek that mother of the Plutonian experiment in the ironworks of Mormo, in the bricks of Niflheim, in the roof tiles of Elysium, in the spires of Tawiskaron and the cobblestones of Lamentation, in the great citadels and their deep foundations.

We are all Proserpine.