Radiance

“That will be all, Cythera. Thank you,” the figure said. A woman’s voice. Easy bull’s-eye: Hungarian by way of Saturn. Not just Saturn, but Enuma Elish. My old instincts rubbed their cricket legs together to spite me. An upper-crust capital madam—but her consonants were a little too practiced. She wasn’t born to it, I reckoned. “You can wait outside.”

Miss Enuma Elish emerged. Shaved head. Short, hard, squared off, a boss like a shotgun. I’d have called her a gymnastic fifty, but living out here ages you fast. Guessing gets pointless. She was wrapped up tight as a mummy, but I could see the thick quality of her suit. It practically flexed at me. Three silver clamps up the ridge of each ear. A tiny speck of rainpearl in each nostril. Huh, creaked my crickets, waving their antennae. She’s All-Clear. Top of the world, dripping money, not a dumb kid or a junkie, but All-Clear, nonetheless.

The boss kept mum. She moved some papers around on her coffin of a desk. It must kill her not to be down there with the crowds, I thought.

I took that away from her. By not showing up.

“I just told your girl,” I said. My voice skittered out over the glass floor. “I told her. I don’t want the gig. It doesn’t matter what the price tag is. I don’t want it. So why don’t you go down there and be with your kin? An hour left. That’s ages.”

The boss gave me a look that clearly communicated how ignorant I was on every possible topic. “This is not a negotiation, Mr St. John. The commission is as follows: In exchange for a sum of nine hundred thousand pounds sterling plus expenses, you will investigate the disappearance of and uncover the current whereabouts—”

“Lady, it’s not a negotiation because I don’t want the shit you’re peddling! Save your breath!”

“—the current whereabouts, if any, of Severin Unck, a young woman who disappeared some eighteen years ago near the village of Adonis, on the White Peony archipelago in the northern hemisphere of Venus, which falls into something of a grey area between the Chinese and Canadian sectors.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” I hissed. I well and truly hated her now. That’s all it takes. Say the word. Any one of them: Adonis. White Peony. Severin Unck. How could this shaved bitch say her name? Fuck her for saying it. I hadn’t said it in three years and it was mine to say more than anyone’s.

The boss circled round her desk, coming to lean against its heavy frame. She tented her fingers. Her face caught the harlequin lights. Her cheekbones had unbelievable angles, like a martyr’s statue. “I am quite certain that you do, Mr St. John. I, and the interests I represent, feel you are uniquely situated to carry out our investigation. I will be clear: We expect success. We expect resounding success. We expect—I will be plain—a body. We are open as to its state. Alive or dead, partitioned or whole. Aware or…well…whatever one might consider to be the opposite of awareness. That gives you a fairly wide playing field.”

“That’s fucking grotesque, but as I won’t be doing it, I’ll let it slide.”

She chuckled. Her hushed Saturnine vowels cajoled; her Hungarian consonants sneered. “But who else? Who else could we find on any world, under any rock, who knows the subject so intimately? Who would be so motivated to uncover the truth as Anchises St. John, the orphan of Adonis, the boy who saw it all? The boy with the hands that sing?” She grabbed for my gloved hands, faster than my filed-down neurons could answer. Her skin was cold, even through the leather. I snatched my fists away.

The boss frowned. She stepped back, rocking on her heels, a prizefighter. Round one wasn’t going her way, but she’d played this ring before. She spat her words at me, rat-a-tat. “You have no memory before the age of ten. Your parents are recorded as Peitho and Erzulie Kephus on the 1940 Venusian census—Ottoman subjects, taxes delinquent by quite a bit and for quite a while. But they might as well be characters in a novel for all the connection you feel to them. You don’t use the name they gave you. Severin saddled you with that clunker of a first name the day you met. Your surname is your adopted father’s. You spent your teenage years on Luna—but not in Tithonus, in Ibis. A pleasant enough seaside town, but more importantly, one with a renowned hospital specializing in—”

“Stop.”