Radiance

UNCK: Christ, no, he’s not gonna play himself! I’m not a masochist. Let him rot in those stinking swamps. I’ll make him better than he ever was. Our great detective…and he’s an amnesiac. Looking for his memory. Piecing his life together—and he can’t do that without finding her. It writes itself. He hunts down the story, and he is the story. Get him a trench coat and a hat with a brim so sharp it’ll cut the night. A revolver strapped to his hip, something big and mean looking. Fucking never stop raining on him. If I see a dry patch on that lantern jaw, so help me. We can even afford a voice-over if we want it.

[indistinct]

UNCK: Well, I don’t particularly give a shit, Vince. Where’s your obsession with authenticity now? Severin made talkies. It practically has to have sound.

MAKO: [long sigh] I’ll talk to Freddy. So…our man needs a love interest. Someone more mysterious than he is. Long legs, long hair, long gazes. If you don’t put someone on-screen who loves him, the audience won’t know they’re supposed to.

UNCK: Yes, now you’re talking. A proper dame, in stockings and a dress tighter than a close-up shot. Smoky, broken eyes. Not the innocent kind, though. A fatale. As if I know how to make any other kind of heroine. You’d think after all these years I’d be able to manage one Ophelia amidst all of my Lady Macs. But no. It’s just not in me.

MAKO: You know, I don’t think we have to go to Venus at all. Our detective will know he needs to go, he’ll know it’s waiting up there, just sitting on the answers he wants like a stinking orange dragon, but he won’t be able to face the idea of it. Of those red shores. Of the sound of the whales. Of going home. [wry laughter] Of course, you know Severin would hate every second of it.

UNCK: [long pause] She’s not here. She started out like a heroine in one of my films. Why should she end up as anything else?

The Deep Blue Devil:

Come Find Me

Case Log: 14 December, 1961

It was closing in on midnight, the kind of midnight you only get on Uranus after a three-day bender. Ultramarine fog reeking of ethanol and neon and some passing whore’s rosewater. Snow piled up like bodies in the street. Twenty-seven moons lighting up what oughta be a respectable witching hour so you can’t help but see yourself staring back in every slick glowpink skyscraper. And the rings, always the rings, slashing down the sky, slashing down the storm, spitting shadows at the fella humping his carcass down Caroline Street, hat yanked down over his bloodshot eyes, coat hugged tight, shoes that need shining and a soul that needs taking in hand.

That’d be me. Anchises St. John, private nothing.

You can look at yourself everywhere you turn in Te Deum. The whole city is your shaving glass. Stare yourself down, scrunch up your eyes, and drag a dull blade down your cheek. The wall of the pub next to me flushed leek-green and I saw those sickly rings slicing across the skyline, disappearing through my neck and punching out again, a pure white shiv. I hear they used to make a big fuss over the light in Italy, painters and that crowd. Well, I’ve been to Italy, and the old girl’s got nothing to teach Uranus. A leprechaun would get a headache out here. It’s the algae that does it. Algae in the ice, in the dirt, in the glass, in the big black dichroic swell of King George’s Sea. They didn’t build Te Deum, nor Herschel City, nor Harlequin. Didn’t have to. They grew these stained-glass slum-gardens like mushrooms on a dead log. Salted the sea with a confetti of exotic hydrocarbons and up they sprung: unpredictable, enormous, disorganized—unless you dig an anemone’s sense of feng shui. That’s all they are. Anemones as hard as a man and as big as his ego. They only look like casinos or banks or dancehalls. Just the littlest bit alive, but nothing to lose sleep over.

If you have any sleep to lose. I like the idea of sleep, myself. Sounds like a nice place to visit.

So there I was, on Caroline Street, the hairiest street in the rowdiest city on the snowball. A good place to get forgotten. I was unshaved, unwashed, unslept, unwell, profoundly unsober, and had thus achieved all my aims in life. I had on the only suit I still owned under my jacket, a conservative raisin-coloured number with a chartreuse tie. And gloves, always gloves, even if the cold didn’t slap me around like a whining brat, always gloves. I have a trunk of leather gloves lined with fleece and hydrostatic furpack. Yeah, leather. My only luxury. None of that brownfalse rubbish they say is just as good. Made special on Mars, where you gotta bat away steers like bottle flies. I need them thick, but they’re never thick enough.