Radiance

[PAN LEFT to the warmly lit interior of Enki’s starboard hull. Women in dresses with iridescent hoopskirts wide enough to conceal small armies raise their hands to the glass; rain drives down across their dry palms. The women, men, and children all wear shades of blue and green, sea shades, full-fathom colours, the turquoise of each rosette, the emerald of each brooch painted onto the film frame by frame, as Virago Studios did in the old days, as Clotilde Charbonneau did. The clothes were chosen for the evening’s celebration: old-fashioned, seventy years out of date, dug out of grandmothers’ trousseaus and costume trunks, just as their own clothes, made new today, will be seventy years past la mode when Earth comes round again. Chandeliers dangle like seabirds and music can be heard, harpsichords and strings and drums made tinny by the thickness of glass.]

SEVERIN (V.O.)

Tonight, Enki is dancing. Before Tritonrise, I will dance as well. This is not a night to stay in, curled up with a pipe and a book and a snifter. This is the end of the world, but the beginning of the world, as well. This is Cinderella’s ball. And at midnight, Neptune will flee her Prince into the gloaming, leaving the nameless, lonesome shoe of her last broadcasts abandoned on the steps of the stars.

And what broadcasts: They have killed a Nereid, and she was full of roe.

[DISSOLVE TO a fishing vessel, approximately the size of the Isle of Wight, crawling with thousands of Nereid-men, the broad-muscled, ice-bearded career hunters who have tracked and killed the creature being hauled on board with cranes and hydraulic lifts.]

They may never catch another in their lifetimes, but for them this once is enough. They are Ahabs without rancour, living for the chase, men and women whose hearts quicken only at the eardrum-shattering bassoon song of their prey.

[The storm batters them mercilessly; still the fishermen heave and ho as the dark mass of the Nereid rolls, obscenely, onto the decks. CUT TO: the flensing plain, a white expanse of artificial sand and salt crystals on Enki’s lower levels. Despite her size, the Nereid looks bereft and helpless in the blazing lights, naked and abandoned by whatever god rules these dragons. She is quite dead. She is icthyosauran: a long neck ending in two heads, each covered in sea detritus and pink Neptunian lampreys, her four eyes blue, lifeless, but strangely primate-like in that cetacean head. The black-green body, the myriad flippers, the vestigial legs, the orange sailfin, the tail tapering for an imperial mile. Her bulk swallows the lens. The image jiggles with the slightly uncanny effect of coloured paints hovering over the black and white footage, never quite sinking through. The Nereid-men open their catch with equipment meant for industrial forestry—just a small gash at first, they can manage no more. But from this gash the deluge comes, magenta roe, quivering, each egg as big as a dancing girl, tumbling like awful Easter eggs across the flensing floor. The Nereid-men cheer; tears course down their cheeks amongst the ruby muck of countless unborn calves. CUT TO SEVERIN.]

SEVERIN

The Nereid-men have made their fortune tonight. The Nereid has lost hers. And if Paris or London or Nanjing expresses concern for the conservation of these astonishing animals—for all xenofauna—after tonight, it will not be heard.

[CUT FROM the Nereid-men sharpening long knives to a YOUNG BOY cleaning his pocketknife. He empties his pockets, counts his coins, then counts again.]