Radiance

Titania steps out of the dance, though her stepping out is part of the dance and not separate from it. Her fairy crown flickers with shards of glowglass. Her green gown, cut like clinging leaves, shows the same crude sketching as Uranus’s raincoat: the great canyons of the moon Titania; the thriving farms and mining cities spreading over her hip, her breast, her back. She offers her hand to Uranus; he presses it to his cheek. She is lush and fertile; he is the god of air and cold. She bows to him, he to her. They dance, not in the cavorting, half-extemporized orgy of the other moons, but formally, as folk danced back home before these two—whoever they may be tonight or on other nights—shut their eyes and fired themselves at the reaches of the heavens. They are careful; they hold each other stiff and far apart, their feet precise. He leads, she follows. Uranus speaks in a slurry, the local mine-and-dice argot: a sing-song stew fashioned out of the Queen’s English, Manchurian, Russian, Punjabi, French, and anything else, picked up like toys, gnawed, shaken, held to the ear.

URANUS TO TITANIA: Aye-o, me larkhee, difujin moya, me mademoibelle, je lay on me side for thee, tbye, sur-la-vous. Scamp me round, q’est que yes?

TITANIA TO URANUS: Oye sohneya, me bolshy hazy ta. Je spin thee round-rosie, je never fall down.

URANUS: Gander all these melly platypups we made with us! Ain’t us proud. Ain’t us trop-gros Grand Papa.

TITANIA: Akara-thee lie on me full, heavy nicht on heavy vert. Thee dole me stars, je dole thee ’ren.

URANUS: ’Fess now, quoi ren do Moonmama and Grand Papa love plus-most?

ALL: Uranian ’ren! ’Ren quoi turn aback on dodder-Ertha. Aye-o me babba! We are no earthserfs. Titans we are, nowforever.

URANUS: Est thee lonely, difujin moya? Est thee lonely, me ren? Out in the noir and the shiver?

TITANIA: Longside all these coeurs a-beat? Never.

ALL: Never again.

PART TWO

  

THE BLUE PAGES

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.

—Orson Welles

Many cities of men the traveller saw, and learned

the turnings of their streets and of their minds.

Many sufferings he learned as well,

drifting heartsick upon the endless open sea,

striving to keep his life within his breast

and bear his comrades home.

But he could not lift their stars from their shoulders,

not even with his whole strength.

Recklessness destroyed them all,

those blind fools who in madness

devoured the Cattle of the Sun—

and so it was that bright god removed from them

their homecoming.

—Homer, The Odyssey

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

 (Oxblood films, dir. Severin Unck) 

SC2 EXT. ADONIS—DAY 6 POST PLANETFALL 23:14 [30 NOVEMBER, 1944]

[EXT. Former site of the Village of Adonis, on the Shores of the Sea of Qadesh, Night.

SEVERIN UNCK and her CREW have lit the cracked braziers of the village; this is the only light source, but it is ample. Callowbrick flames flicker ghostlike over what was once the centre of town, Ahab Square—whose name provides a neat indicator of the general humour to be found in callowhale villages such as this, all over Venus. The ruins of Adonis’s dwellings and public buildings are visible as tall shadows, unsettling shapes, no longer recognizable as human habitation, their angles stove inward and burst open to become the shattered bones of a place once living. Lashes of a milky substance splash foliage, ruins, beach, roads. A light rain falls.

Dead Adonis, laid out in state on the beachhead, possessed of one single mourner. The great ocean provides a score for this starlit landfall. In the old days a Foley boy would thrash rushes against the floor of the theatre to simulate the colossal, dusky red tide of the Sea of Qadesh, the great waterway that flows through all the corners of Venus, having no beginning and no end. The audience would squint in the dark, trying to see some sense of scarlet in the monochrome waves, emerald in the undulating cacao-ferns. The black silk balloon of the Clamshell’s amphibious dinghy crinkles and billows lightly on the strand.