Radiance

I’m sorry it hurt you.

BERGAMOT

We were already hurt. Would you like to watch a movie?

SEVERIN

Always.

[A film begins on the huge screen. The camera swoops down out of the starry sky to the surface of Pluto. It is not our Pluto. There are no flowers, no cities, no glowing carousel bridge to Charon. This Pluto is tiny, without an atmosphere, a mass of blasted craters. A YOUNG GIRL walks through the barren rocks. Her hair is white, with bronze kelp growing out of her scalp alongside it. Her skin is made of scratched ice. She is crying. Blood drips from the hem of her dress.]

SEVERIN

Who is she?

BERGAMOT

That’s me. My big-screen debut. Callowhales exist throughout everything that has ever existed or will exist. We look different in each place where existence occurs. Think of them as sets, if it helps. Vast, infinite, enclosed realities where anything may occur, yet actions taken in one—say, The Atom Riders of Mars or Universe 473a—do not affect any other—say, Universe 322c or The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh. A hundred million sets together make a grand studio. The whole of existence.

On your set, we look like callowhales. That has proven somewhat unfortunate. Our milk was not meant to be ice cream. In another six or seven generations, humans are going to look very interesting. But we do not interfere. We do not resist the progression of events on any single set.

On another set, we look like mountains. That is safer. In another, we look like several hammers in one particular woodworker’s shed. The woodworker likes sandalwood best. He doesn’t know why he never chooses to use those particular hammers. On the set you are seeing now, we look like her.

SEVERIN

What happened to you?

BERGAMOT

What happened to me happened on another lot entirely. There, we look like the colour red. I became very sick. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one did anything to make it happen, at least not on purpose. For us, causality is meaningless. A cow kicked over a pot of glue—perhaps that killed a callowhale. Perhaps it did not, bu

t will 1.5 million years from now. I began to cough. My coughs have echoes upon echoes. You get sick, too—think of me as having the measles. I am young; the stronger among us would not even notice the measles. I ran away from being sick. This is where I stopped running. I was so tired.

[The YOUNG GIRL falls to the stony ground of that Plutonian wasteland. The scene changes. The YOUNG GIRL falls to the ground on Mars. This Mars is not our Mars, either. There are no kangaroos sunning themselves on Mount Penglai, no mango sellers, no moonflowers. Nothing but dust and red sky. The air is poisonous. The YOUNG GIRL crawls, dragging her fingernails on the rocks. She dies slowly. She dies crying and shrieking. By the end, her mouth is full of red dust.]

BERGAMOT

That is where I died.

SEVERIN

[squinting] Is that Mangala Valles?

BERGAMOT

Yes. But a different Mangala Valles. In the place I am showing you, no one can live anywhere but Earth.

[The camera shows a solar system without electric lights—save on one glowing world. Dark Mars, Neptune, Venus, the Moon, all many, many miles further apart than we know them to be. No Orient Express, no Grand Central Station, no bright cannons firing into the black. All those worlds, dead and empty, with no air, no oceans, no rivers, no trees. SEVERIN covers her mouth with her hands.]

SEVERIN

Oh…Oh, God. What an awful, lonely place. No buffalo, no Enki floating on the ocean, no circuses on Saturn, no movies on the Moon. How can a place like that be? How can they bear it?

BERGAMOT

Have you ever seen a movie?

SEVERIN