Radiance

During the whole of that frozen, dark transit through the glittering, howling autumnal moorlands of the trans-Neptunian wastes, as the ice road hung thin and ragged as funereal curtains beyond the portholes, I had been keeping studiously to myself within the confines of our slim vessel as it passed through that singularly lonesome expanse of darkness and, whilst the blue and ghostly shades of morning at the edge of civilization roused the passengers, drew within sight of the melancholy face of Pluto.

Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.

“There is naught on Pluto but magicians, Americans, and the mad,” rasped the old woman who had settled in beside me in the Obolus cantina, a lavishly appointed, elegant space filled topful with the intolerably irritating chime of cutlery and soft whisperings. She needn’t have troubled me; there was room enough for her to encamp at a table of her own and gum at her crumpets whilst leaving me in peace. I despised her for failing to do so and turned up the corner of my greatcoat against any further conversation. It is always damnably cold on these ships. At the evening receptions, the décolletages of all the earnest and well-meaning ladies prickle with gooseflesh and the throats of the paler girls sheen a trembling, vampiric blue. The crone with whom I unwillingly shared my morning meal, however, did not worry herself with the chill. She wore red and violet, and she had pinned in her white hair black silk calla lilies with long, viridescent stamens thrusting suggestively upward, as though her head were a radio array tuned every direction at once. She smelled sour—but then, so did I. So did the blue-necked ladies dancing in their rosettes and pink damask. Everyone reeks after six months on the Orient Express. There is no hiding our animal nature out here on the ice road. Crone, maiden, paladin, my own unhappy self: not a one of us smells better than a week-dead lion on the veldt.

“Is that so?” I groused at her, nose plunged deep into my tea, praying for her to return to the counter for more of today’s pastry (sugared gardenias in a glazed puff globe), more of today’s jam (fig-candleberry), more of anything but my attention. My own flaky globe and pot of jam sat unmolested before me—how quickly I had forgotten my previous starvations, privations, depredations, and come to that unimaginable point wherein I refused the obscenely precious food supplied by our invisible, unmentionable hosts at Oxblood Films. The price of my breakfast, which only increased with every day further distant from any place where a gardenia or a candleberry could grow, could purchase a small estate in the less fashionable bands of the Kuiper Belt, yet I could hardly taste it. The past coated my tongue and robbed the present from me—and yet I own no nobility on that account. Give me a little bacon and milk and I become, inevitably, a decadent like all the rest of them.

I wondered what use our hosts could have for this doddering old woman, what favour she had done or would do them, to earn passage. I had grudgingly reached first-name terms with most of the other passengers, but for six months, this baggage of a woman had declined to share her name with anyone at all. Perhaps she had once been a starlet. Perhaps I would recognize her younger self, if presented with evidence of those lilies in red hair thick as blood and life. Her voice had that old-fashioned, hard-edged showman’s twang, that affected, too-bright accent of the Nation of Theatre, as though all plays came from a single strange planet where you could pick up, without meaning to, the local dialect. That voice had no relation to her broken body, to the lump in her back or the long, sad draperies of her skin. Her voice was a wholly separate being, one flush and good and bright and subtle. She was all voice. In the dark, I might have worshipped her.

“Oh yes,” she said, crunching a sugared gardenia between her shockingly white teeth. An addict, then. Af-yun turns the teeth a lambent, unsettling, inhuman white, so white it edges into lavender, into a colour as clean as death. That’s what comes of eating the muck scraped off of Venus’s underside, of breathing the stars’ putrescence.

I will not say my teeth are brown.

“The question is,” the crone chortled in that surprisingly rich, full, clotted-cream voice, spilling bits of flower and pastry down the front of her red gown, “which one are you? I’m American, which doesn’t bode well for you, I’m afraid. Well, I’m American now, in any event. Morocco never treated me as well as I deserved, so I saw no reason to stand by my man. Pluto is the end of everything. Last Chance Gulch. For me, that spells home.”