Radiance

After that, Cristabel got to talking about cloud surfing on Titan when she was young. The clouds on Titan get so heavy sometimes that you can hop out of a glider and surf them all the way down to the surface. Crissy never saw a blue sky until she was thirteen! She still wears sunglasses all the time. Her eyes never got strong enough for sunlight without cloud cover to diffuse it. Even the Venusian twilight was too much. She loves film, I think, because it makes everything look silver and soft again, like it did back home. She said, “The clouds fold over you like your mother tucking you into the biggest, softest bed in the world.”

CYTHERA: And how would you describe Mr Varela that night? Happy? Distracted? Did he socialize with the others?

ERASMO: Sure. I suppose.

CYTHERA: Do you remember anything in particular before…[papers shuffling] quarter of two in the morning? That was when it started, wasn’t it?

ERASMO: What you have to understand about Max is that he’s a technician with a leading man’s soul. He’s Henry V, but his England is electricity. If Aylin had asked him about his childhood, he’d have regaled us for hours—and we’d have been totally absorbed, because he was wonderful, really magnetic. But he had to be asked, or he would just sulk. He grew up on Earth, you know. Only one of us who did.

CYTHERA: So did I.

ERASMO: Well, you two would have a lot to talk about. You can also tell him that if I see him again I shall drown him in a ditch.

CYTHERA: Why?

ERASMO: You were asking if Max socialized. He did, in his way. He jawed with Horace and Cristabel about lenses. He cuddled Mari while she sang about Sancho Panza and tried to slip Arlo a punch line on the sly—but old Covington didn’t want any help. Oh…and he got into it with Dr Nantakarn. But they’d both been drinking.

CYTHERA: What did they argue about?

ERASMO: Callowhale anatomy. Max kept saying they were basically a series of balloons, just sacs of fluid, more like plants than anything we’d recognize as an animal. Retta wasn’t having a bit of it. She had a theory that they’re actually cetaceans, that if you could cut one open—God, with what? Bulldozers?—if you could cut one open you’d find something not very different than a humpback whale, just much, much bigger. She’s published papers, so you can imagine how bent out of shape she got after a little of that vile moss-gin when some theatre kid started telling her callowhales are basically houseplants. Max sort of sneered that maybe we’d get lucky out here and she could be the first to autopsy one. Retta just swigged from her flask, winked at Santiago, and said, “It’s my lifelong ambition.”

CYTHERA: Did Varela argue with Severin that night?

ERASMO: Not that night, no.

CYTHERA: And the sounds began…around 0045. Correct?

ERASMO: [very quietly, imploringly] I don’t want to talk about the sounds.

CYTHERA: I’m afraid you have to. They’re a significant factor in all this.

ERASMO: What if I just cut to the end—this isn’t a novel, I don’t need to keep you in suspense.

CYTHERA: [papers shuffling] “…we secured the foodstuffs in lockers in case local fauna came sniffing around for crisps and bunked down around midnight. I don’t really know how long it was, half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Something like that. Half an hour to forty-five minutes later I heard something. It was really, really quiet. Sort of a scratching sound, like somebody rubbing two pieces of burlap together. My brother Franco went outside to investigate.” That’s Konrad Sallandar from craft services. [more shuffling] “I went to bed before everyone else so I could study my maps and just…get a break from all of them. Artistic types don’t really talk. They just wait for their turn to tell a story. It’s amazing, but I’m an introvert. I’m not trained up for that level of social interaction. I’d say I turned my light out around 2330, Earth clock. So I was almost asleep when I heard it. It wasn’t loud—not then. Just the softest noise. Like somebody breathing. Somebody with a bit of a chest cold. I remember looking at my watch, so I can definitively say I first heard it at 0043.” That’s Aylin Novalis. Do I need to go on?

ERASMO: No. Christ, no, please, stop.

CYTHERA: Did you hear something that night?

ERASMO: Yes.

CYTHERA: Did Severin?

ERASMO: We all heard it. I don’t know what fucking time it started. I stuck my head out of the tent and I started giggling. I couldn’t help it; I get the giggles when I’m nervous. Heads popped up out of all the other tents and it looked like a Whack ’Em game at the fair. Once they saw me giggling they all started in, too, and pretty soon we were rolling in the sand. We weren’t scared. You hear funny things on funny planets. In the dark, in the middle of a swamp.

CYTHERA: Once you got yourselves under control, did the sound stop?

ERASMO: No.

CYTHERA: What did it sound like, to you?