Radiance

When she lifted her new face from its hook, I saw another lying beneath it. I startled at it as though it were my own face, and I knew that against its dark beauty my contrariness had already crumbled. It was a plague doctor’s mask, black, a beak so thick and long it would cover half my chest. Bubbles of green glass cupped the eye sockets; in threads of tiny emeralds the Totentanz—the old Germanic dance of death—whirled around the shaft of that long hooked mouth, the savagely angular cheekbones, as if a mask could starve. A sparkling green pope skipped after a king spun after a peasant leapt after a child in malachite rags gambolled after a maiden whose long ultramarine hair rippled and ran along the edges of the mask’s face; all cavorting, careening, capering after Death, who jigged upon the brow, partnered in own his dance with his scythe, his leg lifted in a flamenco stride, his bone hands clapping the beat of a human heart as it sped or slowed to nothing. A fan of stark shear-blades gave the mask a brutal tiara. I put my fingers against its slick lightless face, the shimmer of the prancing child, his little arms straining toward the maiden dancing out of reach before him; but she did not spare a single glance backward, her green, living breast surging forward, forward, her arms open, taut, eager, stretching toward Death, her eyes shining only for Him.

“Hundred bucks, one-eighty for both,” said the mask-seller.

Safe inside that emerald Totentanz I swam within the rhotic rumble of the Depot: the sound of clothes moving against the people inside them; the bell-toll of station announcements; the luggage porters’ shabby uniforms; the beggar children asking not for coins but for news of Earth, some sugary morsel of life back home to scurry away with to some hovel and pore over with a pervert’s concentration.

Our escorts were, of course, unforgivably late, which I suppose one must expect when they are sent by a fellow who calls himself a Mad King, but it was no less irritating for being supposed. What use is it to detail the hours spent waiting? At six o’clock in the evening a klaxon sounded and the whole of the Depot surged to one side—How Many Miles to Babylon? was coming through on the public antenna, as clear as it was going to get, come one, come all. Sit together, draw close, Vespertine is in trouble again and it feels like being alive. I saw Violet El-Hashem, my ancient shipmate, position a chair so that she could watch the Plutonians gathering at the radio, to see her audience in the flesh for the first time. An old episode, either repeated or new to this furthest of the outer planets. Or perhaps arranged by her studio so that she could have this moment in the cold while plastic cups of cider went round the throng. I felt a bizarre, unwanted pang of missing her; I put it away like an old handkerchief.

Madame Brass, a shark in woman’s skin, unable to hold herself still and do nothing, even for a moment, questioned any passersby too slow to escape her: We are for Setebos Hall, is there a road, a public conveyance? At what hour do the trains stop running? I let her. I excel at doing nothing. It is, you might say, my hobby. But she got no satisfaction from the parade of masked Plutonians. A man in a creased and beastly blood-red boar mask shook his head and held up his hands. Do not ask—better yet, do not go. A flatiron-chinned copper bauta with a frozen tricorne of split pomegranates begged off: No one goes there unless summoned. If you have not been summoned, thank your stars and keep your head down. A woman in a wine-dark moretta with the circles of heaven painted on it and a body so lovely that you could see her shape even under her pillowed snowsuit actually crossed herself.

Our small talk was too small to relate. Cythera Brass and I had long ago exhausted our stores of acceptable conversation, but our interpersonal cisterns had been briefly topped off by the landing, disembarkation, the tuba and the masks, the finding of fault with Americans and their goings-on, and the unloading of our mysterious cargo, which turned out to be mail: impossibly precious on the outer planets and yet impossibly quotidian. My post is worth all the diamonds in antique Africa; yours is scrap for the furnace grate. I care nothing for some Venusian bastard sending money to the bottom of the solar barrel or a Martian mother complaining about her daughter’s choice in men, in career, in dress, in every little thing—oh, but she tucked in her recipe for lime pie! Well, then! I still do not care.