Radiance

Hey, little guy. It’s good now. It’s fine now. I’m here. My name’s Severin. You can call me Rinny if you like that better.

I stumbled out of the Astor and onto Caroline Street, into the blue fog and the smell and the wet, snowed-in trash. Into the bells bonging out my missed midnight appointment. Coughing, crying like a damned widow, wiping sour, half-digested port wine slime from my mouth. The glowglass alley pulsed grape to apricot. Juliet and Titania, coupla old crescent hags, judged me from the heavens. Umbriel sloshed up slowly under the girls, the lights of Wunda coming on across its blasted moonface. All those moons. The sky over Uranus always looked like a bloody traffic jam to me. Venus doesn’t have any moons. The sky is unbroken. Perfect. A sky that can’t look back.

Tears froze on my face. Very unmanly. But of the things I’ve lost, manliness left first and easiest.

Radiant Car’s a horror flick, is what it is. An old Gothic screamer with tits just barely kept in check by veils and corsets and the rating system. A girl went into the dark and met a monster there. So simple. So easy to fill the seats with that kind of thing.

So easy to empty them with the truth.

I wasn’t even allowed to enjoy my misery. Caroline Street gagged on the mobs getting riled up for All-Clear. Nothing but elbows and eyeshadow. A car pulled up alongside me, a gorgeous red Talbot that would part the seas anywhere else, but the All-Clear has no respect for vehicles. See, old buddy Uranus, he got a day as short as your mama’s skirt. Humans don’t like it. Keeping a seventeen-hour day jitters you up like bad cocaine. Feels like you’ve got engines behind your eyes burning out your fluids. Like you carried the sun with you all this way, and lord but the old bitch hates being ignored. At this distance, she’s not much more than a foggy streetlight through the snow and the fumes. Jupiter’s bigger and badder and brighter. But the lady does like things done her way. Thing of it is, seven hours is just too big a gap to be able to make it up with a nice Martian nap at 12:01 Greenwich. You notice seven hours when they don’t come home from the bar. So they built us a fake day out of the outworld twilight that goes on forever. Ignore that little splatter of phlegm in the sky; the glowglass will tell the hours: bright in the morning, dim in the evening. If you know what’s good for you, you let your neon tenement tuck you in with a cup of warm shut-your-mouth at 2100 sharp. These All-Clear kids, though. They sleep the short sleep. In their clock-addled heads, they’ve gone Uranian. They keep the seventeen-hour day, sped up, catnapping, caffeine-surfing, cramming their living and sleeping and joyful noise into a horrid squeezebox. And at 1700, that no-man’s time in which their midnight ticks over while the rest of the world grinds home to supper, they begin their dalliance with the Uranian clock. They’re all dead asleep by the time most of TD is tucking into the evening’s drink, and up again for work and wickedness when everybody’s babies are snoozing away the lightless night. The All-Clear rings out at midnight proper, midnight mean time, and in their dawn and our dead of nothing, they have their church. God is in the overlap, they say.

And when the All-Clear sounds, Bedlam would call it madness. They dance this no-skill-required rabbit-jumping dance and shove stimulants up their noses, down their throats, in their arms, under their tongues, anywhere a fix will fit. They wear big glittery fish-fin masks dripping with snowmelt and those wizened little glass pearls that fall out of the sky in the gorgeous, higrav spring monsoons. Rainpearls. Or so I hear. I arrived in winter, and it’ll be another twenty years before I see the crocus shrimp mass on King George’s Sea.

I tried the All-Clear when I first got here. You always gotta try the local madness once. It gave me a heart murmur. There’s an awful little pantomime right before it ends. Like one of those old Punch and Judy shows. The whole thing is pretty low-rent, but religion usually is. Takes some piss-poor manners to worship a planet. It’s already doing everything it can for you.