Radiance

And some divers claim to have heard them sing—or at least that’s the word they give to the unpredictable vibrations that occasionally shiver through the fern-antennae. Like sonar, those shivers are fatal to any living thing caught up in them. Unlike sonar, the unfortunates are instantly vaporised into their constituent atoms. Yet the divers say that from a safe distance, their echoes brush against the skin in strange and intimate patterns, like music, like lovemaking. The divers cannot look at the camera when they speak of these things, as though the camera is the eye of God and by not meeting His gaze, they may preserve their virtue. The vibrations are the colour of need, they whisper.

Of course, no one works as a callowdiver forever. We aren’t built for it. The Qadesh or the callowhales or maybe just Venus itself, the whole world; something does us in. Everyone goes milk-mad eventually, a kind of silky, delicate delirium that just unzips us, long and slow, until we fall down babbling about the colour of need. We say the callowhales are not alive like we are alive. But I say: Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly “nurse.” What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? And what do they mate with? It would have to be something big. The size of a city, maybe…

[The indistinct crackle of the radio broadcast from home suddenly spikes in volume—Au revoir, mes enfants! À la prochaine fois! Bonsoir! Bonsoir! À bientôt!—then cuts abruptly to silence. Within Enki, the lights go dark.]

AMANDINE

Welcome to the end of the world.

Look at Her Face

Look at her face. It is your face. She is the mask you wear. Look, and you can see the film she wants to make being born across her features. Across your features. It has not happened yet; it doesn’t even have a title. It is less than a full idea. But it is there in her set chin and her narrowed eyes. She frowns sourly in black and white, and her disapproval of such fancies—her father’s fancies: disappeared heroines and eldritch locations where something terrible has surely occurred—shows in the wrinkle of her brow, the tapping of her fingernails against the atomizer as bubbling storms lap their glass cupola and armoured penance-fish nose the flotation arrays, their jaw-lanterns flashing.