Radiance

In film, even in realité such as Severin’s, these sorts of human intermissions are happily elided with jump-cuts or montages. Action to action, point of interest to point of interest, that’s the way! In life they must be suffered, wallowed in. We waited into the night, sitting on our suitcases like refugees, not daring to leave the rendezvous point even to forage for a prepacked lichen-slab meal.

Our escorts arrived just after midnight. You will think I am joking when I say that we were collected by stagecoach. Stagecoach! After the Talbot limousine in Te Deum and the absurdly posh appointments of the Obolus, I was spoiled. It is easy to become spoiled—a little taste, a little ease, a little shaft of light let in and suddenly nothing is good unless it bests the last luxury. And now we were meant to travel as though the last hundred years had never occurred, as though this was that wretched preflight America of raccoon hats and pony expresses. Was this a colony or an amusement park full of animatronic Americans and roller coasters shaped like the Rocky Mountains? A stagecoach—and not just that, but a buffalo-drawn stagecoach, driven by twin girls with livid dyed-purple hair, uncut black rubies binding their chests like bandoliers, and identical fuchsia masks stippled with wild gold fairy tattoos and mouths painted in the shapes of orange starfish.

The buffalo were my first experience with the Plutonian sense of humour. I had seen vast herds of buffalo in my youthful travels to America—woolly and prodigiously bigheaded, -horned, and -hoofed. These animals that dragged their mistresses’ coach behind them were in no sense buffalo, though the girls insisted on calling them that. They were, as best I can describe them, sleek blue lizards the size of cougars, their glassy night-eyes bulging like fish, their silver tongues lolling and lashing like whips, their three tails held curled and upright like scorpions, tipped in strange silver bulbs. They bore wild strips of honey-coloured fur running the lengths of their spines and six swinging mammalian breasts, each black nippled and heavy with milk that dribbled in magenta trails behind them like oil leaking from an engine.

Everyone calls them buffalo, in fact. They run wild over the whole of both planets, native fauna, their hoots and howls unnervingly wolf-like on the Plutonian moors. They are domesticable, barely, and I have heard it said that like parrots, the smartest of them can mimic human speech. Their meat, which I was to sample rather sooner than I liked, is somewhat softer than beef but not so sweet as chicken and has a peculiar, almost floral aftertaste. It did not agree with me and my indigestion was fierce—but I get ahead of myself. Four of these “buffalo” stood bridled to the black stagecoach. Two green callowlanterns hung from its roof, illuminating the constant night of Pluto.

The daughters of Prospero introduced themselves as Boatswain and Mariner; the buffalo as Sarah, Sally, Susie, and Prune. They told us sternly to keep the windows shut tight and not to trouble them with our problems, and handed us long goose-down coats (I shudder to think what Plutonian geese look like) to fit over our already thick, quilted, furred travelling clothes. Once inside it all I felt quite like a stuffed caterpillar. Boatswain (I think) assured us that the journey was not long, not long at all. The two of them repeated some phrases over and over, as though they could not quite believe they’d actually spoken. Eat, eat, eat, they said. Not long, not long at all. Quiet now, quiet, quiet. We ate. We kept quiet. Into our hands they pressed infanta flowers, petals heavy as eyelids, white-violet and wet with juice and pollen. I held mine gingerly, all my old longing to taste the thing pooling in my mouth, waiting and wanting. Offworld, no amount of money could purchase even one of these blooms, not even Oxblood money. The Americans would not part with them, even if the delicate flowers could survive transit. I devoured mine ravenously; I tore it with my teeth. It shredded like lacework, turning to sweet ash on my tongue, evaporating like fairy floss. It did not taste like honey or coffee or mother’s milk. It tasted nothing like I had heard. I cannot even compare it to another taste—it was its own. I can only compare it nonsensically: It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.