Radiance

AMANDINE

[She is quiet for a long moment.] I think we are all suckling at a teat we do not understand. We need callowmilk. We cannot live without it. We cannot inhabit these worlds without it. But we made a bargain without thinking, because the benefits seemed to be endless and the cost nothing but a few divers, a few accidents—what’s that next to what we stood to gain? My god, it was nothing, nothing at all. All these empty worlds could be ours—no one living there, no one to make us feel ashamed. Not like the New World, with its inconvenient millions. A true frontier, without moral qualms. You must admit how compelling that is. Whole planets just waiting there for us, gardens already planted and producing. A little gravity wobble this way or that; a slightly unpleasant tang to the air; oh, perhaps we can’t have as much hot buttered corn on the cob as we’d like—but they were so ready for us. Edens full of animals and plants, but no folk.

Except the callowhales. We don’t even know what they are, not really. Oh, I went to school. I’ve seen the diagrams. But those are only guesses! No one has autopsied one—or even killed one. It cannot even be definitively said whether they are animal or vegetable matter. The first settlers assumed they were barren islands. Huge masses lying there motionless in the water, their surfaces milky, motley, the occasional swirl of chemical blue or gold sizzling through their depths. But as soon as we figured out how unbelievably useful they were, we decided they didn’t matter. Not like we mattered. Beneath the waterline they were calm, perhaps even dead leviathans—Taninim, said neo-Hasidic bounty hunters; some sort of proto-pliosaur, said the research corps. The cattle of the sun. Their fins lay flush against their flanks, horned and barbed. Their eyes stayed perpetually shut—hibernating, said the scientific cotillion. Dreaming, said the rest of us.

And some divers claim to have heard them sing—or at least that’s the word they give to the unpredictable vibrations that occasionally shiver through the fern-antennae. Like sonar, those shivers are fatal to any living thing caught up in them. Unlike sonar, the unfortunates are instantly vaporised into their constituent atoms. Yet the divers say that from a safe distance, their echoes brush against the skin in strange and intimate patterns, like music, like lovemaking. The divers cannot look at the camera when they speak of these things, as though the camera is the eye of God and by not meeting His gaze, they may preserve their virtue. The vibrations are the colour of need, they whisper.

Of course, no one works as a callowdiver forever. We aren’t built for it. The Qadesh or the callowhales or maybe just Venus itself, the whole world; something does us in. Everyone goes milk-mad eventually, a kind of silky, delicate delirium that just unzips us, long and slow, until we fall down babbling about the colour of need. We say the callowhales are not alive like we are alive. But I say: Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly “nurse.” What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? And what do they mate with? It would have to be something big. The size of a city, maybe…

[The indistinct crackle of the radio broadcast from home suddenly spikes in volume—Au revoir, mes enfants! À la prochaine fois! Bonsoir! Bonsoir! À bientôt!—then cuts abruptly to silence. Within Enki, the lights go dark.]

AMANDINE

Welcome to the end of the world.

Look at Her Face

Look at her face. It is your face. She is the mask you wear. Look, and you can see the film she wants to make being born across her features. Across your features. It has not happened yet; it doesn’t even have a title. It is less than a full idea. But it is there in her set chin and her narrowed eyes. She frowns sourly in black and white, and her disapproval of such fancies—her father’s fancies: disappeared heroines and eldritch locations where something terrible has surely occurred—shows in the wrinkle of her brow, the tapping of her fingernails against the atomizer as bubbling storms lap their glass cupola and armoured penance-fish nose the flotation arrays, their jaw-lanterns flashing.

Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? There are children. The ghost-voice of Amandine comes over the phonograph as the final shot of And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly flickers silver-dark and the floating Neptunian pleasure domes recede. Everyone knew where Severin was bound next, long before principal photography ever began. You could see it on her face. To Venus, and Adonis; to the little village rich in milk and children that vanished two decades after its founding, while the callowhales watched offshore, impassive, unperturbed. You would have gone, too. You would have yearned to go. Chasing after an ending to a story already in progress. An ending means there is order in the universe, there is a purpose to events. There is a reason to do things, an answer to be found, a solution key at the back of the book that maps to the problems posed. Find one ending, a real ending, and the universe is redeemed, ransomed from death—but death

can never be that ending. It is a cheat, a quick shock, but no story truly ends with a death. A death only begs more questions, more tales.

Across your ribs her ship speeds over the ice road as fast as it can go. You almost want to cheer it on—but it speeds toward cessation, toward negation, toward sound and darkness and a final, awful image flickering in the depths.

But you can see her thinking, see her new film, her last film, taking shape behind her eyes.

They are documentaries, yes. They are also confessional poems. She is her father’s girl, though she would rather no one guess.

Severin asked the great question: Where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know an answer. But it can never be her answer. We offer it anyway.

Adonis returned to his mother: the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld, the Queen of the Final Cut.

The Miranda Affair

(Capricorn Studios, 1931, dir. Thaddeus Irigaray)

Cast:

Mary Pellam: Madame Mortimer

Annabelle August: Wilhelmina Wildheart

Igor Lasky: Kilkenny

Jacinta LaBianca: Yolanda Brun

Barnaby Sky: Laszlo Barque

Arthur Kindly: Harold Yellowboy

Giovanni Assisi: Dante de Vere

Helena Harlow: Maud Locksley

Father Patrick: Hartford Crane

[INT. The observation carriage of the good ship Pocketful of Rye, barrelling down the icy, starry tracks of the Orient Express. Ferns and chaises and brandy and cigarettes in gold cases. Io looms overhead, volcanoes glowering, electric cities glittering and blinking. The Pocketful of Rye is thundering through Grand Central Station, the heart of the Jupiter System, a thick knot of gravitational whirlpools thrusting the ship toward beautiful and dangerous Miranda, moon of a thousand seductions.