ERASMO: Is that what the others said? That I forced him?
CYTHERA: I’m asking you. I’m having some trouble with the notion, Mr St. John, because Arlo hated confined spaces. He worked on the Oxblood accounts by the lake in Usagi Park so he didn’t have to suffer in his own office. And you’re telling me he cheerfully went along with a plan that required him to jump into a pit in the ground.
ERASMO: Without one second of argument. He’s your family—that’s what he said. You don’t turn your back on family. I don’t know. Maybe he lost a brother way back. Maybe his mum abandoned him. Maybe you don’t know him that well. But I’ll tell you for nothing that in that moment, I loved Arlo Covington like mad. He didn’t even dawdle. Suited up right away—we had to strap down the suit a little to fit him. He kept the diving bell on, to protect his head, in case he fell. We rigged up a sling for Horace out of one of the hammocks and some gaffer tape, secured a lantern to Arlo’s belt, and strapped Mariana’s pride and joy to his chest. If she hadn’t been surfing the morphine coast she would have lost her mind. Send her baby down a big black hole? No chance. See, she’d brought along a brand-new Edison-brand prototype wireless microphone. For field and stress testing.
CYTHERA: That would be the Type I Ekho Ultra-Mic?
ERASMO: You’ve got it. Mariana wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. She had to keep notes on everything she did with it for the company back home. She kept saying it was worth more than the Clamshell, though that strikes me as bullshit—It looked like a little tin lunchbox. We needed it. What if something went wrong? We were happy to stroll around White Peony with parasols and a song in our hearts, but going…inside Venus—we couldn’t let Arlo do that without some way to tell us if something went wrong. We gaffered the Ekho around his chest and tuned our field radio to seventy-six megahertz so we could pick up his broadcast. I cranked the volume up all the way and hoped to heaven we’d hear Arlo over the white noise.
CYTHERA: What time did Mr Covington begin his descent?
ERASMO: I’d say around 1100. It was stickily warm; the air didn’t seem to move at all. We helped Arlo waddle into the town centre, to the mouth of the well. He stood there like a comic book hero amidst all that wreckage, all those mangled, mutilated houses, with his diving helmet tucked under his arm like Barracuda the Brave from that old Capricorn cartoon The Arachnid vs. The Seven Seas. He smiled at us, and I knew he was terrified, so it must have cost him something to flash that astonishing supernova grin our way. He was just trying to tell us everything was gonna be okay.
“Hey,” Arlo said. “So there’s this mummy snake and this baby snake and the baby snake says, ‘Mumsy, are we poisonous?’ and the mummy says, ‘Yes, sweetums, but why do you ask?’ and the baby says, ‘Because I just bit myself!’”
It’s not a great joke. But we laughed like he was headlining at Carnegie Hall.
CYTHERA: Did Severin record any of this?
ERASMO: [laughs] Are you joking? Of course she did. Severin and Crissy set up two cameras, one on our faces and one for the wide shot. It’s a pretty amazing scene. If everything had gone differently, I think we’d be munching hors d’oeuvres at Academy Awards pre-parties right now, instead of these, frankly, dreadful biscuits and this abomination disguising itself as tea. Even after, in the darkroom, Crissy and I thought it was something else. The shards of Adonis casting hard, sharp shadows, the well in the centre of the shot, Arlo doing his Barracuda the Brave shtick, the breathing tube and diving cables tied tight around his chest, then a pan around Maximo, Santiago, Konrad, Franco, and Severin. All of us braced against the stone wall of the well like we meant to play tug-of-war with the public waterworks.
Arlo tested the Ekho mic. The radio crackled on. “Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen! Gather in, pour yourself a cup of something nice, and sit back for another instalment of the solar system’s favourite tale of adventure, romance, and intrigue on How Many Miles Before Arlo Smashes His Skinny Arse to Bits? Okay, down I go! Don’t forget to make a wish!”
I turned away when he jumped in. I’d seen that once already.
As soon as Arlo saying wish whined out on the radio, the static boomed out its usual unintelligible hissing, then a voice exploded out of the white noise. This time we could all hear the words perfectly clearly: Somewhere the sun is shining, but here it don’t do nothing but rain…
It was Mariana’s and Cristabel’s voices. Singing “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain,” exactly the way they did on our first night at the Waldorf in White Peony Station. But it came showering down from everywhere, knotted up in ribbons of static, out of the sky, out of the trees, up from the mud and the water.
CYTHERA: How did Ossina react to that?
ERASMO: The same way we all did: it scared the tits off us. But we had Arlo hanging off of our belts—if we lost our composure, he’d fall. It was so loud! All any of us wanted to do was put our hands over our ears. We took turns, so the rest could still let the cable out slowly. Arlo called up every ten metres or so. And between his reedy voice threading out of the field radio, other voices began to pop up out of the sea of white noise like…like lobster cages with monsters inside.
“Ten metres down! Nothing to see, just brick. Some very exciting mould.”
And Max’s voice would float behind: Heaven knows what she has known; my mind she has mated and amazed my sight…
“Twenty metres! Can you imagine being the fellas who had to dig this thing out in the first place? Boy do I love taxes, accounts payable, and central heating.” Then Severin’s voice spooled out of the dusk: I used to look up at night and dream of the Solar System…
“Fiftyish and all’s well! I’m not gonna call out the metres anymore. It’s getting hard to tell. I was counting the bricks, but they’ve gone now, and I probably had it wrong, anyway. It’s not like I have a ruler. I’ll just keep ta
lking. It can’t be that much longer.” Maximo’s baritone snapped and sizzled out of the air: I tell my baby it never rains on Venus, I tell my baby the sky is pink as a kiss… “So…how do you get a dog to stop digging in the garden? You confiscate his shovel.” A little girl’s voice battered our eardrums from the sky: They are all telling the story to me… “What do you call a four-hundred-pound gorilla? Sir. Or anything he wants. Or the next big thing at Plantagenet Pictures, am I right? This is wonderful. I can just pretend you’re all laughing. So much easier when there’s only mud to give you a bit of side-eye. Ooh, there’s a snail. Sort of. It’s hot pink. And has little feet. You could probably make a joke out of that. What do you call a snail with feet?” Begone, deceiver! I shall marry Doctor Gruel at the stroke of dawn!
CYTHERA: Even for Arlo, that’s a terrible punch line.
ERASMO: The punchline was “A crawlusc.” Which is also not spectacular. No, the field radio started losing its connection with Arlo, and other broadcasts sort of sagged in over his. Seventy-six megahertz is just a frequency—and a popular one. We hadn’t picked anything up since we got out to Adonis, so we didn’t think frequency traffic would be a problem. But the Ekho mic couldn’t quite hold its own once Arlo had gone down past…well, I don’t know. Like I said, he stopped telling us his measurements past fifty metres.
CYTHERA: You can’t possibly remember all this so well.
ERASMO: I can. We were rolling film the whole time; recording sound, too. I listened to it about a thousand times on the trip back. Before Max went on his little crusade. I remember it like it’s written on that wall over there.
The tube bottomed out at one hundred and eighty metres, give or take. Arlo called up: “Don’t worry! I think I can jump down from here if I disconnect the tube!”—Behold, this is not a hospital, but my ship!—“…climb back up with Horace in the sling; it’s only a bit of a drop to the bottom.”
We all yelled at him not to disconnect, but he couldn’t hear us, I’m sure he couldn’t. We could barely hear ourselves. We heard him drop, grunt, and brush himself off. He said, “It’s pretty dry down here. I thought this was a well? There’re puddles, but nothing else. Maybe there’s a sluice gate somewhere? But, Raz…I don’t see Horace. I’ll keep looking! It’s huge down here. There’re drawings on the walls. Like feathers and tic-tac-toe hash marks and, I don’t know, maybe horses. Or snail shells. It looks like those caves in France. I can barely see the ceiling. Did Adonis have a cistern? If not, they were done for anyhow. It’s dry as a bone down here. Not a drop to drink. Christ, it just goes on and on, like Kansas…”
“What’s Kansas?” Severin yelled over the unbearable noise. The miserable static picked up that word from the radio and flung it out over the Qadesh, up into the dim gold clouds. It detonated softly, like fireworks going off in the next town over.
Kansas, Kansas, Kansas.