Radiance

“I don’t get it. If you’ve seen the footage, if you’ve seen those scraps, then you’ve seen how it ends. You’ve seen her just…whoosh. Vanish. You want me to pull a body out of a hat? How about a rabbit, too?”

“If you like.” Melancholia shook her shaved head. “I don’t understand you. At this very moment, every conceivable resource lies in your hands to solve the central mystery of your whole wretched life. We thought you’d be…driven to succeed. We thought you’d be relieved.”

I looked up helplessly at the glowglass painting, that sad sack of a man tying his coppermelt belt of planets no mortal or god could resist round the waist of a cunt who’d use it every chance she got.

“It was a nice idea,” I said.

“What was?”

“On Uranus, a year is a life. Eighty-four years. Born in the winter, young in the springtime, still going strong in the summer, old in the autumn. It’s the only planet where you can do that. It’s perfect. It’s beautiful. It’s downright artistic. Goddammit.”

“This is everything we have on her,” Melancholia said quietly. She put her hand on a stack of files. Impressive enough, I guess. Thorough. But it looked pathetic to me. “I assume you don’t need any film archives. I don’t think we could add anything to your collection.” I don’t blush. Never have. But if I did, I think the sore, just-punched feeling I had then would have done it.

“Probably not.”

“There’s a cannon leaving once the All-Clear sounds.” Of course—she wouldn’t arrange business during services. “It’ll take you to Pluto. One of the Clamshell’s crewmembers is living there; in some state of dissolution, we understand. He is going by a false name, rarely finds himself lucid, wants merely to be left alone. You two should find much in common. It’s all in the file. You’ll have plenty of reading time on the road.” Melancholia paused. Ran her hand over her bald monk-head. “Come on,” my boss whispered. She put her fingers round my wrist, avoiding the glove. “Didn’t you ever want to know how the story ended?”

I took the file. I got into the lift with Cythera Brass. She looked so smug I could have popped her one. As the bubble doors slid shut, I heard the crackle of that radio rig coming on. The first breathless lines of this month’s instalment of How Many Miles to Babylon?, a wireless soap loved by everyone but me, wound down after us, chasing us through Melancholia Tower.

Oh, Vespertine, I will find you, even on the onyx towers of Erishkegal! Do not lose hope! One more night and we will be together at last…Alas, the nights on Venus are as long as years…

There’s nothing the rich don’t skim off the top.

All-Clear

The morning’s Uranus is chosen by lot. He wears a funhouse-mirror version of the Imperial Crown, but where the Black Prince’s Ruby and Lizzie One’s best pearls ring the original, his glows with brazen electric bulbs: stars, winking on and off. He dons a coat of furpack and rain slicker blackfalse which reeks of the sweat of other Uranuses and their blood. Faces have been drawn onto the ’false in chalk and oil: Titans and gods in stick figures. Anonymous hands clamp a white collar round his throat: rings.

Uranus is joyful. His congregation throws blue paint onto his face. It drips down onto his cheeks, beads on his eyelashes. He puts his arms out, beckoning magnanimously—it is always smooth and sure, this motion. Uranus, every Uranus, has seen it done many times before it falls to him to perform.

Women and men come to him. Twenty-seven. Titania and Oberon and Puck wear shimmery greenfalse and brambles in their hair. Ariel and Umbriel, long silver veils and wild red leotards beneath. The maidens, then: great Miranda clothed in sails, Juliet strapped with golden daggers, Cordelia and Ophelia, Cressida and Portia, Desdemona and Bianca all dance painfully en pointe, their mad hair loose and long. Prospero strides with staff and book. Little children play the small moons: Belinda, Sycorax, Ferdinand, Setebos, Stephano, Mab, Trinculo, Francisco, Margaret, Rosalind, Caliban, Perdita, gambolling behind him like medieval dancers after Death. A toddling Cupid fires an empty amber bow over and over at everyone he sees. Uranus, ringed by his moons, his harem, his family.

The satellites throw garlands of rainpearls, dried crocus shrimp, morels, and the wild rubicund varuna flower that grows on the snowdunes of King George’s Sea, Oceana Telchine, the Fury’s Pond, and Herschellina, the vast dark waters of this world.