Radiance

She had 769 faces in the bank, she said, and was working on Number 770. She kept a little notebook with a green velvet cover that had all her Systems inside. But she wouldn’t write in a face until she had it deep down, locked up and loaded into the bones of her face. As I was only little, I couldn’t be expected to have so many, but no time like the present! If I applied myself, I might have as many as twenty under my belt by the time school started in the fall. Try Number 123, Attentive Reporter. Or Number 419, I Know Whodunit but I Won’t Say Yet, No Sir. And Number 42, Is That for Me?, useful for class birthday parties and being asked to jump rope with the bigger girls. Don’t think school isn’t a movie set, kid. It’s the most cutthroat location you’ll find ’til you work for your father. You’ll be competing for roles and you won’t even know what they are, or when auditions are over and you’re stuck with what you’ve got. I’d shoot for Professional Understudy. That way you can move from clique to clique undetected. Play chess until you can beat the club champion—but don’t move in for the kill. Let her have her pride. Move on and learn how to outqueen the queen bee.

Pretend you’re Madame Mortimer, she told me. Perfect your disguise case and you can go anywhere.

I remember touching her green velvet notebook. It had a brass lock on the side. I thought it must contain everything you could ever need to know about being alive. I was sure Mary had a System for anybody I wanted to be somewhere in that book.

She and my father weren’t well matched, though. That’s what happens when you let your kid pick your wife. He’s lucky I didn’t pick the dinosaur from Attack of the Cryptolizards, a B-flick my Uncle Gaspard made on the cheap and I loved like most children love their blankets.

Obviously, Gaspard Almstedt wasn’t really my uncle. He was Ada Lop’s agent’s lover, which made him family. Eventually, Madame Mortimer packed up her things and moved on to her next case, citing a need to hunt down Number 771 on Neptune, where the gravity changed the whole muscle sequence of smiling. In her wake, my father fell hard for Ms Lop.

Ada Lop, born Adelaida Loparyova, got her start in the business as a ballerina, although she was never one of the pink and rose-scented set. [Footage of Ada Lop’s performance with the Bolshoi plays beneath SEVERIN’S words.] Instead she tore her tulle to pieces at the culmination of Giselle and streaked her body with ugly black paint like blood. She kept the paint in little packets sewn into her leotard until the moment at hand. The first time, this was rebellion on her part—a statement about the stagnation of the ballet world, performing the same handful of very pretty but stultifying shows on a long loop—but it caused such a storm that she was compelled by her directors to repeat it night after night, to increasing and passionate crowds. She repeated it until she hated it. Until the tears were real. Until her body revolted and developed an allergy to the pigment in her leotard, and she retired up to the Moon and onto the screen, as so many dancers did in those early days. It is now simply part of the ballet. You’d be hard pressed to find a Giselle mounted anywhere outside of Nekyia that does not conclude with a young woman doing serious damage to her costume. The Plutonians are all decadents, anyway: the planet of the lotus-eaters.