VESPERTINE: [sounds of whistling wind and clanking metal] Begone, deceiver! I shall marry Doctor Gruel at the stroke of dawn! He is my one true love! How I adore his warty chin and heavy fists! I grow faint at the thought of his hunchback; I dream of nothing but his scarred and hairy brow! I will never love another for all my days! [long, mournful groan over clanking engine parts]
ANNOUNCER: Meanwhile, we find our stalwart hero, Tybault, having defeated a band of mercenaries and black alchemists bent on inciting war with Austria at any cost, recovering from his grievous wounds in a mysterious hospital, attended by buxom masked nurses and a physician revealed last week to be none other than his sworn enemy: the Invisible Hussar!
THE INVISIBLE HUSSAR: [music cue #3: minor key crescendo 2] Yes, it is I! None other could vanquish the Hero of the Crimea! And these masked beauties are my sisters, the Ninja-Nuns of Nanking! They thirst for the blood of good men. I really don’t know how long I can hold them back. But first, you must witness the magnitude of your defeat! Behold, this is not a hospital, but my ship! [sounds of howling space winds] You have slept soundly, my old foe, with the help of my sisters’ potions. We will soon rendezvous with my comrades—Doctor Gruel and his band of banditos! [music cue #4: minor key crescendo 6]
ANNOUNCER: Will Tybault escape the clutches of his nemesis? Can the Ninja-Nuns of Nanking resist their terrible bloodlust? Will Vespertine marry the devious Doctor Gruel or will her loyal lover reach her in time? Who is the Invisible Hussar? Will these long-suffering sweethearts—one untamed spirit enamoured of the stars; one true man, devoted to King, Country, and Mother Earth—find each other at last, or will they yearn on in vain? Find out now!
Come with me to the rough-and-tumble worlds of Venus and Earth in the early days of the Diaspora, a fantastical journey into that special place in the heart where history meets the imagination, hard science meets flights of fancy, love leads the way, and the impossible becomes—for a moment—true, on…How Many Miles to Babylon?
[theme music]
From the Personal Reels of
Percival Alfred Unck
[SEVERIN UNCK walks hand in hand with CLOTILDE CHARBONNEAU down Usagi Avenue in Tithonus. Christmas lanterns glitter all around them. The Actaeon Theatre is visible behind them, searchlights swinging wildly over the night sky. CLOTILDE and SEVERIN are bundled in thick coats. Identical furs frame their faces. PERCIVAL UNCK walks backward down the street, filming them as steadily as his camera Clara will allow. SEVERIN sucks the filling from a street vendor’s blin. CLOTILDE’S face is sullen. She scratches at ruby earrings. She will leave them within a month.]
PERCIVAL
How did you like the picture, pumpkin?
SEVERIN
I’m not a pumpkin!
CLOTILDE
Are so. If we put a candle in your head you’d be a jack-o’-lantern.
SEVERIN
Ew! There’s no room in my head for a candle, Mama.
PERCIVAL
All right, you are definitely not a pumpkin, and we will definitely not put any candles in your head or make a tart out of you or turn you into a coach at midnight. Now, did you like your papa’s movie? He made it just for you, his first one for children.
SEVERIN
[long pause] No.
PERCIVAL
But you were so wonderful in it, darling! Didn’t you have fun filming your little bit? Isn’t it nice to see yourself on that big giant screen?
SEVERIN
[bursts into tears] I’m sorry, Papa! But there just aren’t such things as octopuses that talk or wear spectacles and spats in real life. It’s only Uncle Talmadge in a suit with sequins stuck on him. I shall never meet a talking octopus like Mr Bergamot, never, never! [Tears roll down SEVERIN’s cheeks and into her blin. She dries her face on one furry sleeve, sniffing in the cold.] It’s just a lot of silliness.
The Deep Blue Devil:
The Dame in Question
Case Log: 14 December, 1961
“Mr St. John, my name is Cythera Brass,” said the dame in question, shaking my hand like an adman while the Talbot drove itself calm as you please through a particularly obnoxious All-Clear mob and into the money-gargling heart of the Te Deum business district.
She let me eat. She let me drink. I feel about the same describing that as I do describing a quality fuck. It’s private, you pervert, take a hike. What I do with my gullet is my business. I mumbled my name back at Cythera Brass. I don’t care to say it too often. I barely live in that name. Hangs on me like someone else’s coat. It’s a name with too much room in it for a chap like me. Too famous, too fancy, too much chance of someone looking me up and down and belching out the dreaded: Oh, you’re him. But Miss Brass, she already knew who I was. She wouldn’t’ve come to scarf me up if I wasn’t who I was, so she and I, we could just sit tight, each knowing what we knew. Except she had me at a disadvantage, as I didn’t know a blessed thing about her. I hate that. Goes against my nature. I’m a hoarder of information.
“You American?” I asked her. Slugged back more of her bourbon.
She nodded; barely moved her chin, but it was a nod. “Seneca.”
Right. Sure. I’d thought Sioux, but hell, Americans all sound the same to me. “I went to the Nation once, when I was a kid. Toured the League halls and grounds. Shook hands with a coupla judges. Liked it better than the States, myself.”
“Mmmm,” answered that long-legged dame, without taking her eyes off a fish-masked fella jumping around outside the limousine like a particularly unnecessary exclamation point.
“I’m nothing, me. Don’t even know what ball I got myself born on. Spent time on Venus, obviously. Good long spate on the Moon, which was miserable as a year of Lent. Just about everywhere else, too. If you count up all the orbits on which I’ve hung my hat, I’ve been a subject of four different Crowns; a citizen of China, France, and Argentina; and a serf on Io—which I think technically made me Italian—but only for a month.”
Look at me. Hoarder of information, spilling my worthless biography to a lady just because her pretty bronze knees looked like a premonition of kingdom come. I didn’t have to say anything. I coulda soaked up the Talbot and the quiet and the drink. Cythera Brass had it all in a file somewhere anyway. She was the kind of broad whose job it was to keep files. To keep the secrets in a straight line and working toward payday. And still, I sat there on leather the colour of chicken fat trying to get her to like me.
“Listen,” I said. The slick of her booze greased my head. “I know it’s a lot of money and I’m broke. But I don’t want the job. I’ve got no gut for travelling anymore, and I just don’t care about what you care about. I don’t want to know. I’m not curious. You’d think I would be, yeah? But I’m not. I’m good. I am right with the Lord my God on this. Frankly, I don’t like to work at all when I can avoid it. I came here to stick it out. Just plunk down in the snow and ride out the long year. Should be enough. Eighty-four Earth years for each natural year out here on the snowball. Maybe I got it in me to see it through to spring. Maybe summer’ll gimme a lick and a slap. Summer on Uranus. That’d be something. But maybe not. I’m not fussed if it’s not in the cards. Look—” I grabbed her hand suddenly, panicked. I don’t know why I did it. She looked down at my paw like a Sasquatch with the clap had gotten ahold of her. “Look, you might call it sixty years or fifty or, given my habits, twenty, but the way Uranus sees it, big-picture-wise, I got less than a year to live. And I find that just peachy, Cyth. I find that comforting. I need that comfort. I don’t want it fucked by running around with aims or ambitions or plans beyond my next fifteen rounds with sleep. Don’t you take my year from me, Miss Brass. It’s mine.”