ERASMO: [unresponsive]
CYTHERA: Well, we’ll get to that. Can you take me through the landing and establishment of base camp? In your own words.
ERASMO: [long pause] [When he speaks again, it is in a whisper.] When I shut my eyes I see the film we meant to make. It was something elegant. Something accessible but still stylized, beautiful, satisfying. We saw a mystery in Adonis—the village that vanished. The movie would be like one of those wonderful scenes at the end of a Madame Mortimer flick, where she tells a room full of suspicious types how it all went down and you feel…you feel like you were groping around in the dark and your hand finally found a light switch. And the light comes on and it’s such a relief to see that those awful, frightening shapes in the shadows were just boxes of old clothes and a chest of drawers and a staircase. Our movie was meant to be a light switched on. It was our baby. We’d flip the switch and show how two hundred people could up and disappear in a night and leave nothing but wreckage. There was a solution, obviously. We just had to find it.
CYTHERA: The lighting master, Mr Varela, has indicated that a rough edit was completed at some point? Is this true?
ERASMO: Don’t. Don’t talk to me about Max. I don’t want to hear his name. Yes. We had enough footage for a feature. (Well, I say enough. You never have enough.) Not enough to make Radiant Car the way we’d broken it coming home from Enki. But enough for something. Cristabel and I worked on it in the Clamshell darkroom, cutting like Fates. Putting her together again. It was good in there, in the darkroom. Cristabel and I didn’t have to look at each other. Didn’t have to look at anyone else. Shadows and red light and little Anchises sitting in the corner not making a peep. Just looking at us and listening to us playing back the sound of screaming in the wind. If we stopped working, we’d have to look at everyone else. At Maximo and Santiago staring at nothing and Aylin and the Sallandars, at the crew who’d been gambling and drinking and swimming their brunches off in White Peony and were too polite to ask what happened. Their politeness just wrecked me. The only one of the lot who even seemed to care where the hell Severin went was the ship’s cat. Mr Tobias kept yowling and clawing up her berth. Just kept looking for her.
If not for Maximo, I’d have come home with a movie and you wouldn’t give two dry shits who died. Because the story’s better if people died for it. Disaster sends ticket sales through the roof. It’s a better mystery, a better story, if it hurt to make it. If not for Max, I’d just load up a reel and I wouldn’t have to try to say all this with words like a caveman poking at a rock wall with a damned stick.
I wonder…I wonder if I’d have been able to forget if it had happened somewhere else. If Horace had gotten torn up by a slickboar on Ganymede. If Arlo had drowned on a Nereid hunt off Enki. If an Edison man had shot Mari in a Tithonus back alley. If I didn’t have to drink Severin’s death every day, if I didn’t need that whale slime just to keep puttering along. I imagine other deaths for her quite a bit, you know. Uranian influenza. Trampled in the Phobos food riots. Strangled by a mad Belt miner. It’s a morbid hobby. It keeps me going. But a death is a death. It’s a thing you can’t get around. It just sits there like a fat arsehole in black pyjamas, eats all your food, drinks all your wine, and demands you call it mister for the privilege. I could handle a death. I could live with a death. Cook for both of us. Clean up after it. Pay its way. But I don’t get that luxury.
CYTHERA: The landing, Mr St. John.
ERASMO: I know. I know you want a simple accounting. Put it to bed, Raz. But the thing is, you already have the simple accounting. You know what happened. I know it. That’s not the mystery. You ask me to take you through it as though you don’t already have fourteen versions typed up neatly on your desk. As if it’s not public record. The facts are easy. See? I’ll do them standing on my head. I can recite them like a poem. Anything is a poem if you say it often enough. My poem goes: I loved a girl and she left me. You know that one?
CYTHERA: [sounds of china clinking, spoons knocking against cups, knives scraping against bread] Shut the door when you leave, Jane. We’ll take lunch at one o’clock. Now, back to the landing…?
ERASMO: [long pause] We landed in White Peony Station on the seventeenth of November, 1944.
CYTHERA: Earth time.
ERASMO: Yes. We kept to the home clock throughout. I won’t be giving you any headaches with a November sixteenth that lasts a year. We weren’t staying; no need to synchronize our watches with the local time in Wonderland. November sixteenth means autumn, and on Venus autumn means permanent dusk. No dawn ’til spring. Our rendezvous with our liaison, Aylin Novalis, at the Waldorf on Idun Avenue, went off fine.
Principal photography commenced on the seventeenth—interviews, man-on-the-street stuff with every crazy person who thought that Adonis had been taken by aliens, or God, or Hathor Callowmilk Corporation, or that the villagers had succumbed to religious mania and killed themselves at the climax of some orgiastic cannibalistic ritual coinciding with the Venus-Mercury alignment. The utter bullshit we heard, Miss Brass, I cannot begin to tell you. Every shade and flavour.
We spent three nights in the hotel—the ship’s crew, too. Everything was beautiful, though mostly broken and very damp. Some of the ceiling tiles had fallen down into the lobby. I remember the pink stone columns out front were all sort of pockmarked from the salt air. They looked like an old man’s skin. Even inside, there was pale white moss everywhere like velvet, on the chairs, on the bar, on the walls, on the beds. I think we checked in on a Tuesday. Like today. I suppose that makes it an anniversary. I’ll expect cake with lunch, Miss Brass. And a candle.
Anyway, on our last night in White Peony Station, everyone got out one last pretty thing to wear before we all had to start living in our hiking kit and waterproof socks. We all drank a great deal and gorged on ice cream like a gang of kids after school. Even Arlo seemed to have a good time. He kept trying to remember these dumb jokes, but he couldn’t get them right. So there’s this mummy snake and this baby snake and the mummy snake says, “Honey, I just bit myself!” No, wait, the baby snake says, “Mumsy, are we poisonous?” Wait, shit…
The ceiling dripped onto the plastic tubs we’d hauled over a hundred thousand kilometres, and before I finished my Quandong Ripple my spoon had grown a little fur of moss on it as well. Mariana and Cristabel sang “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain” up at a big mouldy baby grand while Aylin played, and pretty well, too. Crissy wore silver sequins. Mariana had a lavender flower in her hair. Maximo fired back with “It Never Rains on Venus” in his old rye-whiskey baritone, and you’d have thought no one in that shabby hotel bar had ever realised the irony of that tune before, the way we laughed while the chandeliers leaked onto our heads. They all tried to get Rinny to sing, but they took the wrong tack. I know my girl. She’ll sing you the moon—no kid raised in a theatre can turn down applause any more than they can turn down a meal. But Van Rooyen—that was our navigator—wanted to hear “Callisto Lullaby.” Too bad, Roo! That’s from Thief of Light and Severin would rather take an ice pick to the eye than do anything even the littlest bit Percy-adjacent, so she demurred. I don’t think I ever saw her demur before. It was interesting. Didn’t look quite right on her.
That was the worst Waldorf from Mercury to Pluto, but it felt like the most exciting place we could possibly be. Just us, the old crew. Except Cristabel, who we nabbed right out of film school, before anyone else could snap her up, and Franco, who was barely in long pants, we’d all been together since Saturn. We’d all fucked one another and cried over one another and gotten right with one another again. Maximo taught me how to juggle. I taught Santiago how to play the squeezebox and order a cocktail in eleven languages. Mariana and Severin swam together every morning at dawn in any town with so much as a puddle. Just the two of them, their arms flashing up in the mist, two dark heads like seals heading out to sea.