Radiance

SEVERIN

I do admit that. If it makes you happy.

AMANDINE

But not totally vanished. Something is always left behind. The ruins, yes, the loss, that horrid fluid splashed everywhere—but something else, too. It happens in the space of a night. Three times now. Radio silence, then a city cut out of the very earth. And in its place…something new. I have heard that in Proserpine it was a voice. If you go there, if you stand where those people must have stood, under the twilit sky, you can hear a voice. A woman’s voice.

SEVERIN

[She arches an eyebrow.] Yes. I’ve seen the movie, you know.

ERASMO

But Percy got it from somewhere. He didn’t make it up. Vince brought in the dragons and the vampires and all that, but Percy wanted to make that movie because the story was floating around already. I heard it on the backlots. I’ve heard it everywhere. A voice repeating one word.

ERASMO AND AMANDINE

Kansas.

SEVERIN

But no one is allowed to actually enter Proserpine. How would anyone know that there’s a voice saying that? Or saying anything? It’s nonsense, anyway. What the hell is a Kansas?

ERASMO

In Enyo, on Mars…oh Rinny, don’t look at me like that! What better night could there be to share ghost stories round a fire? And what better fire than a city lit up to celebrate going into the dark? Weird things do happen, you know. Not everything in the universe is cinema verité!

SEVERIN

You’re not really going to tell a ghost story, are you? Maybe I’ll go see how the Neptunian Crime Spree Hour of Fun is shaping up.

ERASMO

Shush. You don’t get a vote. So. Enyo was a Martian trading post near the Chinese-Russian border—surrounded by kangaroo ranches and brothels and dice halls and mining stakes. Good times for all! And in one night—gone. Windows smashed, buildings shattered, as though someone pulled them up by the roofs and dropped them. Callowmilk, or something like it, splashed twenty feet high, like blood spatter or graffiti. No bodies. No blood. But something else.

[ERASMO stops. He pinches SEVERIN’S knee and grins sidelong at her.] Want me to stop? [She says nothing. Her lips part slightly.] Very well. Let the record show Miss Unck wants to hear a ghost story. This one even less reliable than the voice shouting Kansas at the outer reaches of space. I have heard it said—only a few times, but I’ve heard it—that in the centre of town where the pump used to be, the Martian constables found a reel. A movie reel. Just sitting in the dust, covered in milk.

SEVERIN

And? What was on it?

AMANDINE

I’ve heard about the reel, too. People say a thousand things. It’s the destruction of the town. Or it’s some print of a porno the miners loved. A woman crying. Forty minutes of blackness. Worse. Better. Who can know? Who has the reel now? No one even claims to have seen it, only heard from someone who met someone in a Depot queue who had a family friend in Martian salvage and demolition. Enyo is the sort of thing you thrill about late at night, when shadows feel like electricity on your skin.

But then there’s Adonis. Adonis is different.

[ERASMO drinks his pink lady; he lets AMANDINE take the story.]

It wasn’t a trading post or a farm town. It wasn’t just getting started. It was a whole colony—gone. Divers mostly, like most settlements on Venus. Slaves to the great callowhales, like the rest of us. But in Adonis they built a lovely hotel and carousel for the tourists who came to get their catharsis revved up as the divers risked their lives to milk our benevolent, recalcitrant mothers in their eternal hibernation. I have heard it was a good place. A sweet village on the shores of the Qadesh, plaited grease-weed roofs and doors hammered from the chunks of raw copper you can just walk around and pick up off the Venusian beaches. They lived; they ate the local cacao; and they shot, once or twice a year, a leathery ’tryx from the sky, enough to keep them all in fat and protein for months. There’s good life to be had on Venus. I almost went there instead of Halimede. But in the end, I wanted to fly. Maybe, if I had not flown, I would have found my way to Adonis and helped build the carousel. Then I would have been stuck. Because, just like Enyo and Proserpine, one day—pop! All gone. Houses, stairs, meat-smoking racks, diving bells.

[SEVERIN drinks her saltbeer. You can see her thinking, some new and massive idea taking shape behind her eyes. ERASMO chews on the crust of a crab-heart trifle, mesmerized by AMANDINE’S voice. AMANDINE casts her eyes downward within the equine blinders knotted to her head.]

All gone except for the something new. Only this time, it’s not a reel and it’s not a voice. It’s a little boy, left behind. They say he’s still there. I’ve heard it on the radio, so it’s as true as anything is. He’s stuck, somehow, in the middle of where the village used to be, just walking around in circles. Around and around, like a skip on a phonograph. They can’t get him to talk. He doesn’t eat or drink. He never even stops to sleep. He’s just…there. He’s been there a year already. Like a projection. But flesh.

ERASMO

What do you think happened, Amandine? Don’t listen to Rin, just…what do you think?