CYTHERA: And how would you describe Mr Varela that night? Happy? Distracted? Did he socialize with the others?
ERASMO: Sure. I suppose.
CYTHERA: Do you remember anything in particular before…[papers shuffling] quarter of two in the morning? That was when it started, wasn’t it?
ERASMO: What you have to understand about Max is that he’s a technician with a leading man’s soul. He’s Henry V, but his England is electricity. If Aylin had asked him about his childhood, he’d have regaled us for hours—and we’d have been totally absorbed, because he was wonderful, really magnetic. But he had to be asked, or he would just sulk. He grew up on Earth, you know. Only one of us who did.
CYTHERA: So did I.
ERASMO: Well, you two would have a lot to talk about. You can also tell him that if I see him again I shall drown him in a ditch.
CYTHERA: Why?
ERASMO: You were asking if Max socialized. He did, in his way. He jawed with Horace and Cristabel about lenses. He cuddled Mari while she sang about Sancho Panza and tried to slip Arlo a punch line on the sly—but old Covington didn’t want any help. Oh…and he got into it with Dr Nantakarn. But they’d both been drinking.
CYTHERA: What did they argue about?
ERASMO: Callowhale anatomy. Max kept saying they were basically a series of balloons, just sacs of fluid, more like plants than anything we’d recognize as an animal. Retta wasn’t having a bit of it. She had a theory that they’re actually cetaceans, that if you could cut one open—God, with what? Bulldozers?—if you could cut one open you’d find something not very different than a humpback whale, just much, much bigger. She’s published papers, so you can imagine how bent out of shape she got after a little of that vile moss-gin when some theatre kid started telling her callowhales are basically houseplants. Max sort of sneered that maybe we’d get lucky out here and she could be the first to autopsy one. Retta just swigged from her flask, winked at Santiago, and said, “It’s my lifelong ambition.”
CYTHERA: Did Varela argue with Severin that night?
ERASMO: Not that night, no.
CYTHERA: And the sounds began…around 0045. Correct?
ERASMO: [very quietly, imploringly] I don’t want to talk about the sounds.
CYTHERA: I’m afraid you have to. They’re a significant factor in all this.
ERASMO: What if I just cut to the end—this isn’t a novel, I don’t need to keep you in suspense.
CYTHERA: [papers shuffling] “…we secured the foodstuffs in lockers in case local fauna came sniffing around for crisps and bunked down around midnight. I don’t really know how long it was, half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Something like that. Half an hour to forty-five minutes later I heard something. It was really, really quiet. Sort of a scratching sound, like somebody rubbing two pieces of burlap together. My brother Franco went outside to investigate.” That’s Konrad Sallandar from craft services. [more shuffling] “I went to bed before everyone else so I could study my maps and just…get a break from all of them. Artistic types don’t really talk. They just wait for their turn to tell a story. It’s amazing, but I’m an introvert. I’m not trained up for that level of social interaction. I’d say I turned my light out around 2330, Earth clock. So I was almost asleep when I heard it. It wasn’t loud—not then. Just the softest noise. Like somebody breathing. Somebody with a bit of a chest cold. I remember looking at my watch, so I can definitively say I first heard it at 0043.” That’s Aylin Novalis. Do I need to go on?
ERASMO: No. Christ, no, please, stop.
CYTHERA: Did you hear something that night?
ERASMO: Yes.
CYTHERA: Did Severin?
ERASMO: We all heard it. I don’t know what fucking time it started. I stuck my head out of the tent and I started giggling. I couldn’t help it; I get the giggles when I’m nervous. Heads popped up out of all the other tents and it looked like a Whack ’Em game at the fair. Once they saw me giggling they all started in, too, and pretty soon we were rolling in the sand. We weren’t scared. You hear funny things on funny planets. In the dark, in the middle of a swamp.
CYTHERA: Once you got yourselves under control, did the sound stop?
ERASMO: No.
CYTHERA: What did it sound like, to you?
ERASMO: Like a radio stuck between stations. It was diffuse, coming from everywhere at once. But it was still very, very distant. You had to shush everyone to hear it. Mariana checked her mics but everything was dark, wrapped up, A-OK. So we all went back to bed and didn’t give it another thought.
CYTHERA: And the next morning?
ERASMO: Up at 0600. Toast and sausages and Venusian coffee and not a worry in the world or a sound in the sky, except those mad black birds that sing in Mandarin.
CYTHERA: And this is December second, the first day of actual filming. The day Severin made contact with the boy.
ERASMO: Anchises.
CYTHERA: That’s not his name, you know.
ERASMO: It has been for a year. That’s long enough to stick to his ribs.
CYTHERA: Do you want to know his legal name?
ERASMO: [surprised snort] Actually, yes. I’d like that.
CYTHERA: It’s Turan Kephus.
ERASMO: [long pause] He likes Anchises.
CYTHERA: Tell me your first impressions of him.
ERASMO: I told you already—we spent most of the morning setting up cameras and lighting rigs. Horace and I set up coverage. Mari’s equipment didn’t seem to like the humidity—she was way behind schedule. We all kept busy…because if you looked at him once, you’d never stop.
CYTHERA: Walking in circles?
ERASMO: You’ve seen the film. But in real life it was…it was just awful. That poor boy. He’d been like that for years, but he still looked like a child. Like all the photos we’d collected of Adonis before the…event. The disaster. It was a genuinely unexplainable thing. Severin kept saying somebody must be feeding him. But I don’t know. Every once in a while he would kind of…wink out. Like a shutter clicking. And then he’d come back, so fast you told yourself it was nothing, it was just you blinking, moron. Until we watched the dailies.
It got to me. I felt sick. I felt like I’d run at full speed straight into a brick wall. We’d come all the way across space to see him, and he was exactly like the stories. Exactly like the photographs. There was no new information. Everybody exaggerates; everyone embellishes. But Anchises was just so bizarre that you couldn’t top him.
CYTHERA: What time did Severin make contact?
ERASMO: Around 1300, I think. The light was perfect; the light is always perfect on Venus. Max didn’t think she should touch him. He said, “Just try talking first. We have all the time in the world.” And Dr Nantakarn said something about trauma victims and how you couldn’t predict their reactions to human touch. I wasn’t really listening. Rinny was definitely gonna hug that kid, so I didn’t consider it an important debate. Rinny didn’t like being hugged all that much, but she was a great practitioner of hugging others. She liked to initiate the whole process. When she was younger, she said it could fix anything, if you timed a hug right and were really good at it. And she was. Really good at it.
Later, she revised that to “almost anything.”
But she did try talking to him first. I don’t remember what she said. Generically soothing stuff. She could be so comforting, if you really needed it. Needed her. Not if you’d just had a bad day or lost your watch or something. She didn’t have a lot of pity for the little tragedies. But if you got stuck in a big one, you’d want her there to kiss it better. [clears throat] Right. So she said a few sweet nothings and then she went in for the hug, and then all hell broke loose.