Radiance

[SEVERIN looks out at the storm. Foam spatters across the glass bell.] Atlantis, that great floating city where humans got so beautiful and so wise, so strong and so able that they invented civilization. Invented being alive, in the sense of plumbing and temples with friezes and taxation and clay laws and hecatombs and public sporting events. And the sea took it back, if that is how you want to tell it, how you want it to be told to you, because, well…because humans feel uneasy in tales without punishment. No good thing can last forever, because people are terrible and we have this feeling, we all have this feeling, that if not for that essential terribleness we could have gotten further by now. Done better. Done more. We have failed collectively since Plato first choked on an olive. So it’s no surprise when we fail individually—when we shirk duty, when we hate our parents, when we run away, when we get drunk every night, when we lose love…when we lose love. Because by all rights we should be living in the crystal palaces of Atlantis or in the Tower of Babel’s penthouse apartments, right? Comparatively, our private blunders are insignificant. Just part of the general pattern of human awfulness. We map our little disasters onto a beautiful picture of a great one, so that there’s continuity. So that there’s balance. We fail because we always fail. It’s not our fault. For evidence, see the paradise we lack.

But there never was any Atlantis, my darlings. Nor Babel, nor Shangri-La. There was Santorini and the Visigoths and the Great Vowel Shift, but you wouldn’t have liked living in ancient Santorini one little bit. And Proserpine failed because it’s bloody hard to farm anything but flowers on Pluto, and quakes can crack up anywhere there’s a crust and a core.

AMANDINE

But you admit that cities have vanished. And there are no stories of finding the people, only the wreckage.

SEVERIN

I do admit that. If it makes you happy.

AMANDINE

But not totally vanished. Something is always left behind. The ruins, yes, the loss, that horrid fluid splashed everywhere—but something else, too. It happens in the space of a night. Three times now. Radio silence, then a city cut out of the very earth. And in its place…something new. I have heard that in Proserpine it was a voice. If you go there, if you stand where those people must have stood, under the twilit sky, you can hear a voice. A woman’s voice.

SEVERIN

[She arches an eyebrow.] Yes. I’ve seen the movie, you know.

ERASMO

But Percy got it from somewhere. He didn’t make it up. Vince brought in the dragons and the vampires and all that, but Percy wanted to make that movie because the story was floating around already. I heard it on the backlots. I’ve heard it everywhere. A voice repeating one word.

ERASMO AND AMANDINE

Kansas.

SEVERIN

But no one is allowed to actually enter Proserpine. How would anyone know that there’s a voice saying that? Or saying anything? It’s nonsense, anyway. What the hell is a Kansas?

ERASMO

In Enyo, on Mars…oh Rinny, don’t look at me like that! What better night could there be to share ghost stories round a fire? And what better fire than a city lit up to celebrate going into the dark? Weird things do happen, you know. Not everything in the universe is cinema verité!

SEVERIN

You’re not really going to tell a ghost story, are you? Maybe I’ll go see how the Neptunian Crime Spree Hour of Fun is shaping up.

ERASMO

Shush. You don’t get a vote. So. Enyo was a Martian trading post near the Chinese-Russian border—surrounded by kangaroo ranches and brothels and dice halls and mining stakes. Good times for all! And in one night—gone. Windows smashed, buildings shattered, as though someone pulled them up by the roofs and dropped them. Callowmilk, or something like it, splashed twenty feet high, like blood spatter or graffiti. No bodies. No blood. But something else.

[ERASMO stops. He pinches SEVERIN’S knee and grins sidelong at her.] Want me to stop? [She says nothing. Her lips part slightly.] Very well. Let the record show Miss Unck wants to hear a ghost story. This one even less reliable than the voice shouting Kansas at the outer reaches of space. I have heard it said—only a few times, but I’ve heard it—that in the centre of town where the pump used to be, the Martian constables found a reel. A movie reel. Just sitting in the dust, covered in milk.

SEVERIN

And? What was on it?

AMANDINE