I, naturally, did not share her sentiment. We would disembark at midnight tomorrow and already my feet itched for earth, my heart for silence, for the surcease of the endless thrum of engines in the walls, the constant hum and rumble that maddened me, made my blood ricochet up and down my spine, no less than the equally endless need for the smallest of talk shared between the few rarefied passengers, all of us avoiding the plain fact of the ghastly waste of this ship, its food and fuel and polish spent on sixteen nervous, uncertain souls.
“If you have information on Varela, I will certainly hear it,” I allowed, knowing I might as well accept my defeat. I would be her creature until lunch service, and probably dinner, too. She would never let me be.
The crone with the bronzed voice looked out the bolted porthole at the growing spheres of Pluto and Charon, opals hanging in the stony blackness, clouds like hands clutching their few, scattered continents, clutching warmth, clutching life. When she spoke, the pitch of her voice plucked at my sinews. It was as familiar as my own shadow, yet I could not, could not recall where I had heard it before. Its rhythms changed, peaked, rolled—and I felt as though my mother were telling me a tale before bedtime, though I have no memory of my mother and would not know her if she called my name from the depths of hell.
“Once upon a time, a man, weary of both body and soul, shipwrecked upon a faraway isle. This isle dwelt in the midst of an endless, wine-dark sea whose depths were strewn with stars and horned leviathans and secrets kept by unguessable fathoms—and upon this isle it was always night. This man possessed in his heart and his hands the power to command light and force it to follow his will, but this power no longer comforted him, for he had once been charged with the protection of a maid both good and beautiful, and had lost her. But the whispers of the world said that he had done more than lose her, that he had killed her with his own hand. In shame, this man threw his name, the name of a man who could cast an innocent girl into darkness, underfoot and trampled upon it. From the moment his foot touched the sweet-smelling shores of that faraway isle, he called himself Prospero, a name so famous he could bury himself within it. He put upon his head a jester’s crown and on his feet the belled dancing shoes of a fool, and spoke only madness to any who came before him, begging him to perform his old feats of light and shadow. Yet even this did not bring him the oblivion he craved, the anonymity of the guilty or the rest of the defeated. The more absurd his speech, the more frenzied his dance, the more he behaved like a jungle creature in a man’s skin, the more he found himself sought after by the folk of Pluto, for whom amusement is the only currency.
“On that lawless carnival isle, the castle of Prospero became a constant Saturnalia, a house on a high icy hill where unholy lights flashed and burst through the permanent night of that world of phantasms. Even to breathe the air of those halls was to become intoxicated. To light a single lantern was to invite ghosts and will-o’-the-wisps and sirens from every gable and eave. Into this miasma the man thought he could finally disappear. But word reached the great Emperor of the shadowy isle that wonders unheard-of were afoot in the house of Prospero, a house which was quickly becoming a kingdom unto itself. The Emperor donned a mask, the face of a black coatl whose tongue dripped with nightrubies, and went to the revels to see for himself. What he saw there no man can say, yet when he emerged, he had made Prospero his only heir, and placed the coatl crown on that poor magician’s grieving head.
“This is the isle toward which our pretty silver ship flies, for whose sake our golden sails catch the sun’s good wishes and bear us both across the starry, frozen wasteland between our former lives and the End of All. And the man I speak of is Maximo Varela: Prospero, the Mad King of Pluto. I wish you your fill of him—you will have it, I’m sure, and more.”
The old woman looked back to me and laughed like a young girl. A flush rode high on her cheeks. She clapped her hands, applauding herself. “I reckon I’m as good as I ever was, don’t you? Give me a script; I’ll eat you alive and you’ll love every moment. Now clear off and quit bothering an old woman at her breakfast.”
I returned to my quarters in a consternation of curiosity and black dread. I felt, far beneath the polished green floorboards, the fragrant Ganymedean banyan with its glinting golden grain, the pneumatic array gasping into life, the intimate suckle of gravity cupping the Obolus and drawing it down, down into its long well. Very soon my work would have to begin, truly begin, rather than remaining comfortably far off, like a suit in a closet with all its attendant discomfort, ready to be worn sometime soon, but not today.
The smell of our staterooms flowed over me: sweat, skin, stale breath, lavender, talc, shoe polish, typewriter ribbons, last week’s peach-xochipilli preserves left uncovered on a night table. Above and below it all, penetrating every surface, every linen and lantern glass, was that perfume I had grown to both loathe and long for, Madame Zed’s latest vicious, stinking, delicious golden bottle: My Sin. It smelled like a forest of fallen women.
I looked down at the shape of Cythera Brass, the source of My Sin, in the emerald sheets of her bunk. She wore that witch’s unguent so often I was convinced that even her marrow would stink of its musk and spice. From her alone I had never smelled—from Uranus past Neptune’s unhinged orbit—even the slightest noxious emanation. Any foulness of air in our quarters belonged to myself alone. I smelled only My Sin on her, only that alien wood where a creature like her might cut her teeth. My warden, my minder, my leash. Her long, lovely limbs lost in sleep—but not so lost that she did not wrap her arms around her shoulders, her head sunk in her chest, guarding and girding herself even in dreaming. I despised her: for her orderliness, her efficiency, her beauty, her imperturbable calm, her—quite correct—disdain of my person, her loyalties, and her constant reminder that I was being tolerated only for the work I could perform. All aboard presumed her my wife, for she kept closer to me than any lover, always at my elbow, my side, practically barracked in my waistcoat pocket. I had risen inhumanly early in order to escape her company at breakfast—but one can never escape the quiet, implacable hell of company.
I did, in a moment of extreme and regrettable sobriety, try to kiss Cythera at the little Christmas ball held in the starboard conservatory. Shards of the ice road swirled and banged beyond panes of submarine glass overhead. Pine boughs hung festively all about—though of course not actual pine. Our yuletide green had been knitted out of jute and wire and shredded dresses by the Udolpho triplets, those wanton Martian contortionists and—as I had discovered—wanted counterfeiters, from Guan Yu. Each of the nine women aboard had donated a green gown to the effort. We whirled away under Cythera’s lime spangled flapper-fringes, Harper Ibbott’s hunting cloak, every girl’s bright emerald and olive hoopskirts cut and ruched into garlands. We were a strange lot, the Obolus cargo, some famous, most not, all vibrating with the things we did not tell each other. Cythera seemed happy for once, in a long, ghost-grey sigh of a dress, assaying a Charleston, singing carols. True to the word of our mutual masters, Miss Brass had brought along a steamer of intoxicants and exotics that would turn a pirate into a teetotaller, but in those early days I had hatched the comical notion that I would do my job well. I spent my nights reading and rereading the histories and reports provided by Oxblood, staring at photographs as though my gaze could set them ablaze; coming close, I thought, to connections that danced just beyond the reach of my deprived, shrivelled brain, which had thrived on liquor, opiates, and hallucinogens. I could see her, I could see Severin, big and dark as a heart, at the nexus of some glowing web whose edges I was so close to touching.