Radiance (19 page)

URANUS TO TITANIA:
Aye-o, me larkhee, difujin moya, me mademoibelle, je lay on me side for thee, tbye, sur-la-vous. Scamp me round, q'est que yes?

TITANIA TO URANUS:
Oye sohneya, me bolshy hazy ta. Je spin thee round-rosie, je never fall down.

URANUS:
Gander all these melly platypups we made with us! Ain't us proud. Ain't us trop-gros Grand Papa.

TITANIA:
Akara-thee lie on me full, heavy nicht on heavy vert. Thee dole me stars, je dole thee 'ren.

URANUS:
'Fess now, quoi ren do Moonmama and Grand Papa love plus-most?

ALL:
Uranian 'ren! 'Ren quoi turn aback on dodder-Ertha. Aye-o me babba! We are no earthserfs. Titans we are, nowforever.

URANUS:
Est thee lonely, difujin moya? Est thee lonely, me ren? Out in the noir and the shiver?

TITANIA:
Longside all these coeurs a-beat? Never.

ALL:
Never again.

 

PART TWO

THE BLUE PAGES

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.

—Orson Welles

Many cities of men the traveller saw, and learned

the turnings of their streets and of their minds.

Many sufferings he learned as well,

drifting heartsick upon the endless open sea,

striving to keep his life within his breast

and bear his comrades home.

But he could not lift their stars from their shoulders,

not even with his whole strength.

Recklessness destroyed them all,

those blind fools who in madness

devoured the Cattle of the Sun—

and so it was that bright god removed from them

their homecoming.

—Homer,
The Odyssey

 

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

(Oxblood films, dir. Severin Unck)

SC2 EXT. ADONIS—DAY 6 POST PLANETFALL 23:14 [30 NOVEMBER, 1944]

[
EXT. Former site of the Village of Adonis, on the Shores of the Sea of Qadesh, Night.

SEVERIN UNCK and her CREW have lit the cracked braziers of the village; this is the only light source, but it is ample. Callowbrick flames flicker ghostlike over what was once the centre of town, Ahab Square—whose name provides a neat indicator of the general humour to be found in callowhale villages such as this, all over Venus. The ruins of Adonis's dwellings and public buildings are visible as tall shadows, unsettling shapes, no longer recognizable as human habitation, their angles stove inward and burst open to become the shattered bones of a place once living. Lashes of a milky substance splash foliage, ruins, beach, roads. A light rain falls.

Dead Adonis, laid out in state on the beachhead, possessed of one single mourner. The great ocean provides a score for this starlit landfall. In the old days a Foley boy would thrash rushes against the floor of the theatre to simulate the colossal, dusky red tide of the Sea of Qadesh, the great waterway that flows through all the corners of Venus, having no beginning and no end. The audience would squint in the dark, trying to see some sense of scarlet in the monochrome waves, emerald in the undulating cacao-ferns. The black silk balloon of the
Clamshell
's amphibious dinghy crinkles and billows lightly on the strand.

SEVERIN steps into frame, into the diffident, limping light, her bobbed hair sweat-curled in the wilting wind. She has thrown the exhibition costume into an offscreen campfire and is clothed now in her accustomed trousers and black aviator's jacket.

Other shapes move with busy intensity as the CREW sets up camp. SEVERIN holds her hand out like she would to a horse or a dog—walking carefully, quietly—but she does not walk toward a horse or a dog. SEVERIN looks uncertainly over her shoulder at the long snarl of sea behind them—and at ERASMO ST. JOHN, temporarily trusted with the care and feeding of George. He says something to her offscreen—he must, because she cocks her head as though considering a riddle and says something back to him. Her mouth moves, but the microphones have not been set up yet. Her lips make words the audience can never quite read.

A SMALL BOY walks in circles around the stub of what was once a Divers Memorial. All such villages have a Memorial: a cairn of diving bells bolted together on a pedestal in the town square, one for each diver who perished fast to a whale, lost in pursuit of the precious pale gold of callowmilk. Adonis's monument has its bells no longer, vanished with the population, but the pedestal remains. The boy stares down as he turns and turns, endlessly. His hands flicker and blur as if he is signing something, or writing on phantom paper. He wears an adult's diving costume, its brass bell attached firmly round his neck. Its folds and grommets drag against him, slow him down.

SEVERIN calls to him. He does not flinch or stop. He does not look up. The camera watches him. SEVERIN watches him. Slowly, the CREW cease their activity and turn their gazes to the child. The footage crackles into life as the sound equipment comes online. SEVERIN squats down on her heels in a friendly, schoolteacherly fashion, still holding out her hand, beckoning. She tilts her head in an
aw, come on
gesture. Two kids in a garden. One wants to play. The other does not.]

SEVERIN

Hey, little guy … it's okay now. It's fine now. I'm here. My name's Severin. You can call me Rinny if you like that better.

[The BOY simply turns and turns and turns, over and over. His huge diving bell casts a shadow like a black spotlight. The film is damaged. It has always been damaged. It was damaged in the dailies. No one has ever seen it uncorroded. The BOY seems to leap forward and backward round the ruined Memorial, jumping in and out of reality as the print cuts in and out, in and out.

CUT TO: EXT. ADONIS, DAY. 07:45: MARIANA ALFRIC is screaming, clutching her hand to her breast
FILM DAMAGED FOOTAGE SPLICE CORRODED SKIP AFFECTED AREA SKIPPING SKIPPING UNABLE TO COMPENSATE ERROR 143 SEE ARCHIVIST FOR ASSISTANCE
]

 

Production Meeting,
The Deep Blue Devil
The Man in the Malachite Mask

(Tranquillity Studios, 1960, dir. Percival Unck)

Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako

MAKO:
No, no, Percy, listen to me. It's not working.
     All right, it's
working
, but it's not
right
. The noir setup has a certain energy, I agree, but it sits pretty heavy on the action. Though I like making Cyth Brass a secretary. We should keep that. She'll probably sue us for defamation. But we said we'd give him a love interest, not a probation officer! And what are we going to do when we get to Venus? And we do have to get to Venus, I promise. You can dawdle all you like, but it's there in the middle of the story, throwing its gravity around, warping everything toward it. The point is, what kind of hardboiled finale did you mean to stick on it? Shootout at Adonis? Breathless bullets and betrayal and a fedora on her grave? Is that what you think happened? That she's buried in a swamp somewhere with a hole in her head? If you go with noir, you're building in a certain expectation of violence. Of death.

PERCIVAL UNCK:
Varela has said she's dead all along.

MAKO:
And Erasmo has said she isn't. You said you'd rather not have death, but you're stuffing it in from all sides. And … Severin's outside the scope of the story. She can't help it. That's all a script like that will let her be. An object on a mantle that has to go off by the third act. A gun that must be fired. She's not a person, the way you've got it set up, with your broads and bitches and dark streets at the edge of space. She's just a goal.

UNCK:
Not a goal, Vince. A Grail.

MAKO:
Sure. Fine,
Percival
. A Grail. Very clever. Very subtle. But a Grail isn't an alive thing. It has no blood but the blood of another; it has no life but the life it grants. Its job is to sit there and … be a Grail. To be sought. That doesn't sound like anyone we know. And, frankly, it's all a bit pedestrian for you. For us. I think you're holding back. I know I am. Because … because we think she'd want us to. To double down on the kind of stories
she
liked to tell. Really, how different is your Te Deum from the actual digs? Barely a streak of grime out of place. It's just … events that could really happen taking place in a real city. That's not you. That's not me. That's
her
.

UNCK:
But it did really happen. In a real city. Just not
that
city.

MAKO:
When has that ever slowed us down? We put vampires in
The Abduction of Proserpine
! That was a real thing that happened in a real city. And Proserpine is a real city that really disappeared off the map of Pluto, I think it's fair to point out, not so different from Adonis. We shovelled in vampires by the coven and we didn't even blink. We just ordered up a vat of fake blood and started stitching capes.
     [Unck laughs, a laugh that is half a grunt.]
     Listen, I have an idea brewing. It's just a little shift, really. In perspective. In framing. Because noir isn't really a new thing at all. It's just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that's all. He's no less idealistic—there're good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That's
all
they're about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her.
     And really,
really
, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy. That's
our
house. So why don't we lose the trench coat and pick up a black cloak. Turn the Byronic all the way up. An ancestral curse, a mad lord, a brooding castle. Obsession, desire, secrets. It's all already there. And a ghost. Because the truth is … the truth is, this is all a ghost story. It always has been. We're pouring out a bowl of blood on the banks of the Styx, asking her to drink it and speak.

UNCK:
That's … not bad.

MAKO:
I know, dummy. It's my idea. Of course it's not bad. We've already sent him to Pluto. It's perfect. Nothing darker and more mysterious than that blasted place. For all anyone ever hears out of Pluto these days, it might as well be Hades itself. A whole planet that's nothing more than the haunted mansion on the hill. Lights in the dark. Sounds in the night.
     Percy … we owe her our best, not just our most polite. You and I, we're no good at telling a story straight. It won't come off right. Like a dog reciting a sonnet. Impressive, but how much better to let him howl? So, look. She's … she's captive in a black palace of a thousand rooms. Imprisoned by a terrible master. Behind briars, Sleeping Beauty in black lipstick. No one has seen her for years. She's a legend, a whisper in the taverns and the alleyways.

UNCK:
And a stranger comes to town.

MAKO:
A stranger with a hidden past. An unnatural secret. A concealed deformity?

UNCK:
And a curse, Vince. You've got to have a curse. It's the accessory the fashionable antihero cannot go without. How about … when asked, he must always tell the truth. It's not even much of a leap from the detective who must deliver the truth to his bosses. We've still got all the Pluto sets from
Proserpine
. And the Bertilak woods from
Sir Gawain on Ganymede
.