I took the file. I got into the lift with Cythera Brass. She looked so smug I could have popped her one. As the bubble doors slid shut, I heard the crackle of that radio rig coming on. The first breathless lines of this month’s instalment of How Many Miles to Babylon?, a wireless soap loved by everyone but me, wound down after us, chasing us through Melancholia Tower.
Oh, Vespertine, I will find you, even on the onyx towers of Erishkegal! Do not lose hope! One more night and we will be together at last…Alas, the nights on Venus are as long as years…
There’s nothing the rich don’t skim off the top.
All-Clear
The morning’s Uranus is chosen by lot. He wears a funhouse-mirror version of the Imperial Crown, but where the Black Prince’s Ruby and Lizzie One’s best pearls ring the original, his glows with brazen electric bulbs: stars, winking on and off. He dons a coat of furpack and rain slicker blackfalse which reeks of the sweat of other Uranuses and their blood. Faces have been drawn onto the ’false in chalk and oiclass="underline" Titans and gods in stick figures. Anonymous hands clamp a white collar round his throat: rings.
Uranus is joyful. His congregation throws blue paint onto his face. It drips down onto his cheeks, beads on his eyelashes. He puts his arms out, beckoning magnanimously—it is always smooth and sure, this motion. Uranus, every Uranus, has seen it done many times before it falls to him to perform.
Women and men come to him. Twenty-seven. Titania and Oberon and Puck wear shimmery greenfalse and brambles in their hair. Ariel and Umbriel, long silver veils and wild red leotards beneath. The maidens, then: great Miranda clothed in sails, Juliet strapped with golden daggers, Cordelia and Ophelia, Cressida and Portia, Desdemona and Bianca all dance painfully en pointe, their mad hair loose and long. Prospero strides with staff and book. Little children play the small moons: Belinda, Sycorax, Ferdinand, Setebos, Stephano, Mab, Trinculo, Francisco, Margaret, Rosalind, Caliban, Perdita, gambolling behind him like medieval dancers after Death. A toddling Cupid fires an empty amber bow over and over at everyone he sees. Uranus, ringed by his moons, his harem, his family.
The satellites throw garlands of rainpearls, dried crocus shrimp, morels, and the wild rubicund varuna flower that grows on the snowdunes of King George’s Sea, Oceana Telchine, the Fury’s Pond, and Herschellina, the vast dark waters of this world.
Titania steps out of the dance, though her stepping out is part of the dance and not separate from it. Her fairy crown flickers with shards of glowglass. Her green gown, cut like clinging leaves, shows the same crude sketching as Uranus’s raincoat: the great canyons of the moon Titania; the thriving farms and mining cities spreading over her hip, her breast, her back. She offers her hand to Uranus; he presses it to his cheek. She is lush and fertile; he is the god of air and cold. She bows to him, he to her. They dance, not in the cavorting, half-extemporized orgy of the other moons, but formally, as folk danced back home before these two—whoever they may be tonight or on other nights—shut their eyes and fired themselves at the reaches of the heavens. They are careful; they hold each other stiff and far apart, their feet precise. He leads, she follows. Uranus speaks in a slurry, the local mine-and-dice argot: a sing-song stew fashioned out of the Queen’s English, Manchurian, Russian, Punjabi, French, and anything else, picked up like toys, gnawed, shaken, held to the ear.
URANUS TO TITANIA: Aye-o, me larkhee, difujin moya, me mademoibelle, je lay on me side for thee, tbye, sur-la-vous. Scamp me round, q’est que yes?
TITANIA TO URANUS: Oye sohneya, me bolshy hazy ta. Je spin thee round-rosie, je never fall down.
URANUS: Gander all these melly platypups we made with us! Ain’t us proud. Ain’t us trop-gros Grand Papa.
TITANIA: Akara-thee lie on me full, heavy nicht on heavy vert. Thee dole me stars, je dole thee ’ren.
URANUS: ’Fess now, quoi ren do Moonmama and Grand Papa love plus-most?
ALL: Uranian ’ren! ’Ren quoi turn aback on dodder-Ertha. Aye-o me babba! We are no earthserfs. Titans we are, nowforever.
URANUS: Est thee lonely, difujin moya? Est thee lonely, me ren? Out in the noir and the shiver?
TITANIA: Longside all these coeurs a-beat? Never.
ALL: Never again.
PART TWO
THE BLUE PAGES
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
—Orson Welles
Many cities of men the traveller saw, and learned
the turnings of their streets and of their minds.
Many sufferings he learned as well,
drifting heartsick upon the endless open sea,
striving to keep his life within his breast
and bear his comrades home.
But he could not lift their stars from their shoulders,
not even with his whole strength.
Recklessness destroyed them all,
those blind fools who in madness
devoured the Cattle of the Sun—
and so it was that bright god removed from them
their homecoming.
—Homer, The Odyssey
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
(Oxblood films, dir. Severin Unck)
SC2 EXT. ADONIS—DAY 6 POST PLANETFALL 23:14 [30 NOVEMBER, 1944]
[EXT. Former site of the Village of Adonis, on the Shores of the Sea of Qadesh, Night.
SEVERIN UNCK and her CREW have lit the cracked braziers of the village; this is the only light source, but it is ample. Callowbrick flames flicker ghostlike over what was once the centre of town, Ahab Square—whose name provides a neat indicator of the general humour to be found in callowhale villages such as this, all over Venus. The ruins of Adonis’s dwellings and public buildings are visible as tall shadows, unsettling shapes, no longer recognizable as human habitation, their angles stove inward and burst open to become the shattered bones of a place once living. Lashes of a milky substance splash foliage, ruins, beach, roads. A light rain falls.
Dead Adonis, laid out in state on the beachhead, possessed of one single mourner. The great ocean provides a score for this starlit landfall. In the old days a Foley boy would thrash rushes against the floor of the theatre to simulate the colossal, dusky red tide of the Sea of Qadesh, the great waterway that flows through all the corners of Venus, having no beginning and no end. The audience would squint in the dark, trying to see some sense of scarlet in the monochrome waves, emerald in the undulating cacao-ferns. The black silk balloon of the Clamshell’s amphibious dinghy crinkles and billows lightly on the strand.
SEVERIN steps into frame, into the diffident, limping light, her bobbed hair sweat-curled in the wilting wind. She has thrown the exhibition costume into an offscreen campfire and is clothed now in her accustomed trousers and black aviator’s jacket.