UNCK: And a stranger comes to town.
MAKO: A stranger with a hidden past. An unnatural secret. A concealed deformity?
UNCK: And a curse, Vince. You’ve got to have a curse. It’s the accessory the fashionable antihero cannot go without. How about…when asked, he must always tell the truth. It’s not even much of a leap from the detective who must deliver the truth to his bosses. We’ve still got all the Pluto sets from Proserpine. And the Bertilak woods from Sir Gawain on Ganymede.
MAKO: And Varela slots right in. He was always hip deep in a phantasmagoria anyway. You want to look that liar in the eye? Let’s do it. Maximo Varela did actually run off to Pluto when Oxblood turned him loose.
UNCK: And the end, Vince?
MAKO: How do all Gothics end? With magic. And with revenge.
The Man in the Malachite Mask:
My Sin
20 February, 1962. Early morning. Obolus cantina.
During the whole of that frozen, dark transit through the glittering, howling autumnal moorlands of the trans-Neptunian wastes, as the ice road hung thin and ragged as funereal curtains beyond the portholes, I had been keeping studiously to myself within the confines of our slim vessel as it passed through that singularly lonesome expanse of darkness and, whilst the blue and ghostly shades of morning at the edge of civilization roused the passengers, drew within sight of the melancholy face of Pluto.
Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.
“There is naught on Pluto but magicians, Americans, and the mad,” rasped the old woman who had settled in beside me in the Obolus cantina, a lavishly appointed, elegant space filled topful with the intolerably irritating chime of cutlery and soft whisperings. She needn’t have troubled me; there was room enough for her to encamp at a table of her own and gum at her crumpets whilst leaving me in peace. I despised her for failing to do so and turned up the corner of my greatcoat against any further conversation. It is always damnably cold on these ships. At the evening receptions, the décolletages of all the earnest and well-meaning ladies prickle with gooseflesh and the throats of the paler girls sheen a trembling, vampiric blue. The crone with whom I unwillingly shared my morning meal, however, did not worry herself with the chill. She wore red and violet, and she had pinned in her white hair black silk calla lilies with long, viridescent stamens thrusting suggestively upward, as though her head were a radio array tuned every direction at once. She smelled sour—but then, so did I. So did the blue-necked ladies dancing in their rosettes and pink damask. Everyone reeks after six months on the Orient Express. There is no hiding our animal nature out here on the ice road. Crone, maiden, paladin, my own unhappy self: not a one of us smells better than a week-dead lion on the veldt.
“Is that so?” I groused at her, nose plunged deep into my tea, praying for her to return to the counter for more of today’s pastry (sugared gardenias in a glazed puff globe), more of today’s jam (fig-candleberry), more of anything but my attention. My own flaky globe and pot of jam sat unmolested before me—how quickly I had forgotten my previous starvations, privations, depredations, and come to that unimaginable point wherein I refused the obscenely precious food supplied by our invisible, unmentionable hosts at Oxblood Films. The price of my breakfast, which only increased with every day further distant from any place where a gardenia or a candleberry could grow, could purchase a small estate in the less fashionable bands of the Kuiper Belt, yet I could hardly taste it. The past coated my tongue and robbed the present from me—and yet I own no nobility on that account. Give me a little bacon and milk and I become, inevitably, a decadent like all the rest of them.
I wondered what use our hosts could have for this doddering old woman, what favour she had done or would do them, to earn passage. I had grudgingly reached first-name terms with most of the other passengers, but for six months, this baggage of a woman had declined to share her name with anyone at all. Perhaps she had once been a starlet. Perhaps I would recognize her younger self, if presented with evidence of those lilies in red hair thick as blood and life. Her voice had that old-fashioned, hard-edged showman’s twang, that affected, too-bright accent of the Nation of Theatre, as though all plays came from a single strange planet where you could pick up, without meaning to, the local dialect. That voice had no relation to her broken body, to the lump in her back or the long, sad draperies of her skin. Her voice was a wholly separate being, one flush and good and bright and subtle. She was all voice. In the dark, I might have worshipped her.
“Oh yes,” she said, crunching a sugared gardenia between her shockingly white teeth. An addict, then. Af-yun turns the teeth a lambent, unsettling, inhuman white, so white it edges into lavender, into a colour as clean as death. That’s what comes of eating the muck scraped off of Venus’s underside, of breathing the stars’ putrescence.
I will not say my teeth are brown.
“The question is,” the crone chortled in that surprisingly rich, full, clotted-cream voice, spilling bits of flower and pastry down the front of her red gown, “which one are you? I’m American, which doesn’t bode well for you, I’m afraid. Well, I’m American now, in any event. Morocco never treated me as well as I deserved, so I saw no reason to stand by my man. Pluto is the end of everything. Last Chance Gulch. For me, that spells home.”
I made a noise in my throat that could be interpreted as agreement, rebuttal, amusement, disgust, or commiseration—I have perfected this noise. I consider it vital, for rarely do I wish to say anything to another person which a well-timed grunt cannot replace.
My tormentor, however, wheedled on as though I had clasped her to my chest and implored her to speak, speak now, speak forever, speak until the sun gutters and the snow road melts! “But you are a young man. Only the young are so rude and unpleasant. There’s no fortune to be made on Pluto, if that’s your mind. Someone ought to have told you.”
“I have business.”
“With whom? The buffalo?”
I sighed and fixed her with a black gaze. I have perfected that gaze also—it is necessary in Te Deum and elsewhere. If you cannot wither a man with your eyes you will be withered by his fists. Yet my best back-alley glare did not move that ridiculous soul whom I by now had to admit had become my breakfast companion. “With Maximo Varela, if you insist on prying into my affairs. Though it has been indicated to me that he is no longer going by that name.”
The woman snorted. Even her snort had melody. Incredulity shaped itself upon her face. “That…that he is not.”
“We are to be met at the Depot by his daughters and escorted safely to his house, though neither the house, nor the daughters, nor the Depot, nor the meeting are any concern of yours.”
Her rheumy eyes swam with dark mirth. “Poor lamb,” she crooned, and patted my hand in a grandmotherly fashion. “What a pity we wasted this voyage in not knowing one another. I might have told you tales. I might have told your fortune. I might have told you to yourself. People used to listen to me, oh how they used to listen! Hung on every word. I made gold out of horseshit in my day, my boy. Imagine what I could have done with you.”