Radiance

CYTHERA: Cross of Stone. 1919.

ERASMO: I love that flick.

CYTHERA: I was one of Queen Matilda’s handmaidens. You can only see me in the background of one shot.

ERASMO: I knew you looked familiar.

CYTHERA: Don’t be absurd. You couldn’t possibly remember.

ERASMO: Cyth, my love, it is my job to see the smallest details of a film. You wore that ridiculous headdress with two points on it like antelope horns. You tore your veil halfway through the scene but kept your game face on quite admirably.

My point is, if you’ve worked on a movie, you know what it’s like, the night before you start filming on location. There’s an energy bouncing all around like balloons fizzing out. Everyone needs their sleep but no one wants to be the first to go. We just wanted to wallow in that wonderful moment before everything started, because in that moment, we all believed the movie was perfect. All we had to do was go and get it. No one had fucked up a shot or wasted film or started giggling in the middle of a line yet.

So what was the mood? What did we do? We actually sat around an actual campfire and told stories. Arlo tried to tell a joke again. [pause] Did you know him?

CYTHERA: I did.

ERASMO: Did you ever manage to hear him tell a whole joke all the way through?

CYTHERA: [laughs softly] Once. But it was a really short one.

ERASMO: Tell me.

CYTHERA: It was at a company picnic out by the Sea of Serenity. We played cricket against Plantagenet—it’s not all tactical strikes, as you so bluntly put it. Arlo and I were both hopeless. You’d think the Australian would’ve put up a better show than me. The Seneca nation has never had a team and never will. But Arlo made me look aces. After we lost, we were lying on the grass and he turned to me and said: So, two fish are floating in a tank and one turns to the other and says, ‘Hey, do you know how to drive this thing?’ I think I actually applauded.

ERASMO: Good for him. Well, he kept on at the one about the mummy snake and the baby snake, but it was no go. The weather was calm; no storm clouds. We ate bacon sandwiches with hot mustard and roasted sausages over the fire. Aylin Novalis, our guide, asked Mariana about growing up on Mercury. Aylin had never been, which shocked me. Mercury is practically right next door! So Mariana told her all about it.

“I was born in Nefertem, a small town not far from Trismegistus in the Tropic of Gemini, the temperate zone between the hot side of the planet and the cold side. My parents raised dragons. Most everyone in Nefertem did.”

“It’s my lifelong ambition to see one of those up close,” our best boy Santiago said. Now, as far as I can tell, everything imaginable was Santiago Zhang’s lifelong ambition. Did you eat real camel once? He’d practically leap into the air and tell you it was his lifelong ambition to eat real camel. Pilot a ship the whole length of the Orient Express? By god, it was Iggy’s lifelong damned ambition to shoot a rocket down the ice road like a billiard ball.

Mariana said, “Go to a damn zoo sometime, Iggy.” Everybody laughed. She told us what they looked like, the native Mercurial beasties. Komodo dragons crossed with zebras crossed with otters, with the personality of a drunken granddad set in his ways. Have you seen one?

CYTHERA: I have a hacienda on Mercury. They taste marvellous with a béarnaise sauce.

ERASMO: Aren’t you a delight? [sounds of swallowing, a water glass being set down roughly] I bet you never rode one, though. Mari did, when she was little. She wasn’t supposed to, but she made her parents save one from the slaughterhouse so she could have a pet. She rode it around the ranch and called it Sancho Panza. Taught herself to sing leaning against Sancho Panza’s back and singing nursery songs with dragon slipped in to all the lyrics. Twinkle, twinkle little dragon, won’t you come and pull my wagon. Up above the world so high, Sancho Panza in the sky…

Mari had such a pretty voice. But girls who can sing tenor don’t get a lot of work. It’s soprano or bust. So she hired on with Edison Corp. Learned the tech so she could help other people sing.

“What happened to Sancho Panza?” Cristabel asked her.

“Same thing that happened to half of them in the twenties,” Mari said, and you could tell she was still a little heartbroken over it. “Who knew a dragon could get whooping cough?”

After that, Cristabel got to talking about cloud surfing on Titan when she was young. The clouds on Titan get so heavy sometimes that you can hop out of a glider and surf them all the way down to the surface. Crissy never saw a blue sky until she was thirteen! She still wears sunglasses all the time. Her eyes never got strong enough for sunlight without cloud cover to diffuse it. Even the Venusian twilight was too much. She loves film, I think, because it makes everything look silver and soft again, like it did back home. She said, “The clouds fold over you like your mother tucking you into the biggest, softest bed in the world.”

CYTHERA: And how would you describe Mr Varela that night? Happy? Distracted? Did he socialize with the others?

ERASMO: Sure. I suppose.

CYTHERA: Do you remember anything in particular before…[papers shuffling] quarter of two in the morning? That was when it started, wasn’t it?

ERASMO: What you have to understand about Max is that he’s a technician with a leading man’s soul. He’s Henry V, but his England is electricity. If Aylin had asked him about his childhood, he’d have regaled us for hours—and we’d have been totally absorbed, because he was wonderful, really magnetic. But he had to be asked, or he would just sulk. He grew up on Earth, you know. Only one of us who did.

CYTHERA: So did I.

ERASMO: Well, you two would have a lot to talk about. You can also tell him that if I see him again I shall drown him in a ditch.