Radiance

The list goes on.

It is not yet nine in the evening. The public announcement system pulses a warm and comforting stream of French. They have read us a bit of Molière and Voltaire, some Victor Hugo, some Chrétien de Troyes, a bit of Apollinaire and Balzac. They have sung us “La Marseillaise” seven times, by my count. They have exhorted us to remember the ideals of the French Republic and the glory of Jeanne d’Arc, Charlemagne, the Sun King.

[A MAN’S VOICE crackles over the shot of SEVERIN on the balcony.]

RADIO FRANÇAISE

Rappelez qui vous êtes. N’oubliez pas d’où vous venez. Nous ne vous oublierons pas. Nous vous attendons pour vous. Terre est votre maison pour toujours. La France est toujours votre mère. Le Soleil est encore Roi sur tout… Remember who you are. Don’t forget where you come from. We will not forget you. We will be waiting for you. Earth is always your home. France is always your mother. The Sun is still King over all.

SEVERIN

I recognize the voice: Giraud Lourdes, who fell off the Moon, as they say. Monsieur Lourdes failed so utterly on-screen that he suffered a most modern form of professional disgrace—he returned to Earth. And then became Chaunticleer, the voice of Radio Française, reading the news each morning and telling his tall tales every Wednesday night.

He is a bigger man than his sweet, soft voice might suggest. A thick red moustache. A preference for purple cravats. A weakness for women, poetry, and marzipan. These are the things that make up the beginnings of a person. But for me he is only those things. I met him just two or three times as a child and I remember nothing else. And now I can add to that list that his is the voice Paris chose to sing Neptune to sleep, for it is easier for Paris to pretend that they will go to sleep for seventy years than face the fact that when they come back into the fold, they will be no more French than England. So Giraud uses his seductive vowels to plead with a planet to behave itself while the cat’s away, to freeze itself in time, to lie still, to change not. He sings it, he recites it. The violins of a Berlioz concerto whisper: Hush now, my far-off children. Prick your fingers on the spindle of our voice. Be the kingdom that fell asleep for a hundred years and woke unchanged.

But who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?

[CUT TO: SEVERIN, ERASMO ST. JOHN, and AMANDINE NGUYEN recline on black-and-white chaises, watching the party flicker and move within the oily, distorted storm glass separating the observation balcony from the interior of Enki proper. AMANDINE belongs to a levitator cult based on the tiny moon of Halimede, where the wind hardly blows at all. She is a titanium sculptor; she practices a sexual variant of Samayika meditation. Her hair is lashed with traditional leather whips that hang down around her face like wires or liquorice. Her skin is dyed green, as is the custom on Halimede. The gravity of Neptune does not allow her to practice her faith here. She seems to stretch upward slightly with every movement, as though her body remembers its home, where it floats instead of merely sitting. SEVERIN drinks clay cups of creamy saltbeer with the levitator. ERASMO nurses a pink lady that looks rather orange. The lights of Enki turn their faces into a play of shadows.]

AMANDINE

I have sometimes wondered if we will make it.

SEVERIN

What do you mean?

AMANDINE

[She shrugs.] Perhaps when Earth peeks around the Sun again Enki will be gone. Lyonesse, too, and Manannan. Halimede might become a ghost moon. Or maybe we will all just…float. Like the Flying Dutchman, skeleton ships following the current forever, with only spirits as cargo. It has happened before. Places have vanished. Proserpine. Enyo. Adonis, now. We send up cities like fireworks, but there is a tax, I think. The empty worlds we expand to fill…sometimes the emptiness takes something back. To keep the books balanced, maybe.

SEVERIN

Colonies fail. It happens.

ERASMO

You know better than that. Colonies fail because crops fail, or supply ships don’t come in time, or some Babylon-fanatic fancies himself a warlord and straps on bandoliers. Proserpine didn’t fail. It was ripped to pieces. The foundations of the houses shattered. A thousand people vanished. It’s been twenty years and nothing grows there, not even infanta.

AMANDINE

I’ve heard it was worse than that.

SEVERIN

Stop it, both of you. [She moves her hands as if to clear the fact of Proserpine out of their little oceanic bubble like cigarette smoke.] You haven’t the first idea what does or doesn’t grow on Pluto. You’re just telling slumber party stories. Besides, what planet is there without a mysteriously vanished colony to pull in the tourist cash? Slap up a couple of alien runes on a burned-out doorframe and people will stream in from every corner of space. Might as well call them all New Roanoke and have done with it.

[SEVERIN loads a lump of af-yun into her netted atomizer. ERASMO takes a pink lady from a tray of sweets and quaffables, raises it to his lips and manages to frown around the cocktail glass’s rim. SEVERIN’S voice begins, unconsciously, to pick up the shy, breathy Halimede accent of her companion, mirroring without noticing, her lunar syllables disappearing beneath the Francophone sea of the Neptunian dialect.]

We like these stories because they aren’t really stories about losing things. They’re stories about finding them. Because everything gets found, sooner or later. Everything gets remembered. Eventually, somebody did find Proserpine, and took it all apart, and put it back together to make new cities on Pluto and Charon. It comforts us, tells us there are no lost children anywhere, not really. Not even cities. It’s all just Atlantis in another dress.

[SEVERIN looks out at the storm. Foam spatters across the glass bell.] Atlantis, that great floating city where humans got so beautiful and so wise, so strong and so able that they invented civilization. Invented being alive, in the sense of plumbing and temples with friezes and taxation and clay laws and hecatombs and public sporting events. And the sea took it back, if that is how you want to tell it, how you want it to be told to you, because, well…because humans feel uneasy in tales without punishment. No good thing can last forever, because people are terrible and we have this feeling, we all have this feeling, that if not for that essential terribleness we could have gotten further by now. Done better. Done more. We have failed collectively since Plato first choked on an olive. So it’s no surprise when we fail individually—when we shirk duty, when we hate our parents, when we run away, when we get drunk every night, when we lose love…when we lose love. Because by all rights we should be living in the crystal palaces of Atlantis or in the Tower of Babel’s penthouse apartments, right? Comparatively, our private blunders are insignificant. Just part of the general pattern of human awfulness. We map our little disasters onto a beautiful picture of a great one, so that there’s continuity. So that there’s balance. We fail because we always fail. It’s not our fault. For evidence, see the paradise we lack.

But there never was any Atlantis, my darlings. Nor Babel, nor Shangri-La. There was Santorini and the Visigoths and the Great Vowel Shift, but you wouldn’t have liked living in ancient Santorini one little bit. And Proserpine failed because it’s bloody hard to farm anything but flowers on Pluto, and quakes can crack up anywhere there’s a crust and a core.

AMANDINE

r /> But you admit that cities have vanished. And there are no stories of finding the people, only the wreckage.