Radiance

Please note that Proserpine and her environs are off-limits to all non-police personnel. The incident there is considered concluded by all involved, and no outbuildings or further items of interest remain. All relevant structures have been subsequently dismantled, recycled into building materials, and used in nearly every Plutonian city as a gesture of solidarity and collective mourning. We declare openly our hostility to treasure hunters, occultists, and other bandits who come to raid our sweet, peaceful land for purely imaginary secrets. There is no mystery; colonies fail. Seek that mother of the Plutonian experiment in the ironworks of Mormo, in the bricks of Niflheim, in the roof tiles of Elysium, in the spires of Tawiskaron and the cobblestones of Lamentation, in the great citadels and their deep foundations.

We are all Proserpine.

We ask that you respect the personal tragedy of that city’s loss as you would the widowhood of a dear grandmother—the lady would prefer not to discuss it, and it behoves us all to abide by her wishes.

Trespassers will be shot on sight.

Yes, we all pull together here on Pluto. Be a good neighbour and you’ll have good neighbours. Please report weekly to your local Depot for callowmilk and vitamin supplements, work assignments, and other sundry entertainments.

You can be anyone on Pluto. The possibilities are endless.

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask:

Totentanz

February 21, 1962. 4:34 p.m.

Pluto is such a small place. When you dance with the gas giants, you become accustomed to vastness. But this is a doll’s world. We circled the pale planet like a raven round a mouse scurrying over a grey and blasted heath. Down, down into the wishing well of its gravity, gravity like a handshake between Pluto and Charon, those dark, sullen twins, forever bound, waltzing without end on the edge of known space. Neither of them much bigger than Africa, wearing their tawdry bracelets of glaciers and black, brittle land—land covered in fields of infanta flowers so bright and broad I could see them as we spiralled off the ice road: swathes of light, faintly violet, faintly lime. I imagined that if I floated outside of the Obolus, I would have been able to smell them, their perfume permeating the empty void like a nervous lady announcing her presence.

I will tell you what I saw in my descent, for I have seen no photograph of it nor any film, only sound stages peopled with half-witted guesses, fancies far too sensible to match the original. Cythera stood by me at the porthole, each of us in our own way policing our faces so that the wonder we felt made no mark upon our cheeks. Pluto and Charon in a verdant jungle embrace: between them grew vines as thick and long and mighty as the Mississippi river, great lily-lime leaves opening, curling toward the distant star of the sun like grasping hands wider than Lake Erie. And upon them unspeakable blossoms, petals of lavender tallow, infanta greater than ships, obscene chrysanthemums pointing like radio antennae in every direction. Those mighty Mississip-vines lashed round both planets in a suckling clutch, so enmeshed that I could not say whose earth they grew in, just that whoever’s plant it was loved the other world so much that it could not let it go. And the Styx, the bridge of flowers! Towers and spires in Boschean number and Escherean style, torqued and corkscrewed by the currents of gravity and pollen that pooled between Pluto and Charon, their angles all out of proportion, sinuous, unreal, a hanging garden of architecture, upside down and right side up and protruding in every possible direction like broken, arthritic hands. Coloured lights glowed in warped windows. Tunnels of some sort of taffy-like glass ran like flying buttresses between the gnarled edifices. The braided bridge twisted like the very double helix of life, and on it life seemed to bristle, to boom. I felt sick. My breakfast moved in me no less than gravity.

“‘When I looked upon that new world, splendid in every way and in every way terrible, I looked upon a tiger with stars falling from his striped tongue. I looked and saw my true bridegroom—but would it also be my grave?’”

So said the crone, who appeared silently beside us as if she ran on wheels and not flight-swollen feet. I knew those words. Everyone knew them: episode one, series one, broadcast March 1914.

“It’s bad taste to quote yourself, Violet,” I said, certain now in my guess. She merely snorted as that Plutonian Babylon rose up to envelop us. “The new Vespertine is shit,” I added, with the barest twitch of a smile. I took her hand in mind and kissed it as our engines roared into undeniable red life, braking into the thin atmosphere, skidding into the tiger feet first, eyes open.

24 February, 1962. Midnight. Setebos Hall.