Radiance (38 page)

CYTHERA:
How did Ossina react to that?

ERASMO:
The same way we all did: it scared the tits off us. But we had Arlo hanging off of our belts—if we lost our composure, he'd fall. It was so loud! All any of us wanted to do was put our hands over our ears. We took turns, so the rest could still let the cable out slowly. Arlo called up every ten metres or so. And between his reedy voice threading out of the field radio, other voices began to pop up out of the sea of white noise like … like lobster cages with monsters inside.
     “Ten metres down! Nothing to see, just brick. Some very exciting mould.”
     And Max's voice would float behind:
Heaven knows what she has known; my mind she has mated and amazed my sight …
     
“
Twenty metres! Can you imagine being the fellas who had to dig this thing out in the first place? Boy do I love taxes, accounts payable, and central heating.” Then Severin's voice spooled out of the dusk:
I used to look up at night and dream of the Solar System …
     “Fiftyish and all's well! I'm not gonna call out the metres anymore. It's getting hard to tell. I was counting the bricks, but they've gone now, and I probably had it wrong, anyway. It's not like I have a ruler. I'll just keep talking. It can't be that much longer.” Maximo's baritone snapped and sizzled out of the air:
I tell my baby it never rains on Venus, I tell my baby the sky is pink as a kiss …
“So … how do you get a dog to stop digging in the garden? You confiscate his shovel.” A little girl's voice battered our eardrums from the sky:
They are all telling the story to me …
“What do you call a four-hundred-pound gorilla? Sir. Or anything he wants. Or the next big thing at Plantagenet Pictures, am I right? This is wonderful. I can just pretend you're all laughing. So much easier when there's only mud to give you a bit of side-eye. Ooh, there's a snail. Sort of. It's hot pink. And has little feet. You could probably make a joke out of that. What do you call a snail with feet?”
Begone, deceiver! I shall marry Doctor Gruel at the stroke of dawn
!

CYTHERA:
Even for Arlo, that's a terrible punch line.

ERASMO:
The punchline was “A crawlusc.” Which is also not spectacular. No, the field radio started losing its connection with Arlo, and other broadcasts sort of
sagged
in over his. Seventy-six megahertz is just a frequency—and a popular one. We hadn't picked anything up since we got out to Adonis, so we didn't think frequency traffic would be a problem. But the Ekho mic couldn't quite hold its own once Arlo had gone down past … well, I don't know. Like I said, he stopped telling us his measurements past fifty metres.

CYTHERA:
You can't possibly remember all this so well.

ERASMO:
I can. We were rolling film the whole time; recording sound, too. I listened to it about a thousand times on the trip back. Before Max went on his little crusade. I remember it like it's written on that wall over there.
     The tube bottomed out at one hundred and eighty meters, give or take. Arlo called up: “Don't worry! I think I can jump down from here if I disconnect the tube!”—
Behold, this is not a hospital, but my ship!—“…
climb back up with Horace in the sling; it's only a bit of a drop to the bottom.”
     We all yelled at him not to disconnect, but he couldn't hear us, I'm sure he couldn't. We could barely hear ourselves. We heard him drop, grunt, and brush himself off. He said, “It's pretty dry down here. I thought this was a well? There're puddles, but nothing else. Maybe there's a sluice gate somewhere? But, Raz … I don't see Horace. I'll keep looking! It's
huge
down here. There're drawings on the walls. Like feathers and tic-tac-toe hash marks and, I don't know, maybe horses. Or snail shells. It looks like those caves in France. I can barely see the ceiling. Did Adonis have a cistern? If not, they were done for anyhow. It's dry as a bone down here. Not a drop to drink. Christ, it just goes on and on, like Kansas…”
     “What's Kansas?” Severin yelled over the unbearable noise. The miserable static picked up that word from the radio and flung it out over the Qadesh, up into the dim gold clouds. It detonated softly, like fireworks going off in the next town over.
     
Kansas, Kansas, Kansas
.

 

From the Personal Reels of Percival Alfred Unck

[A black cloth lies over the lens. A demand to
shut the damn thing off
has been made and ignored, but the cloth makes Clara look benign. Shapes move indistinctly across the room. SEVERIN UNCK, sixteen years old, sits in silhouette, her hair longer than it will ever be again.]

PERCIVAL UNCK

It's for your own good, my little hippopotamus.

SEVERIN

Don't call me that. There are more lies in this house than wallpaper. Don't pile on any new ones. The roof won't stand the weight.

PERCIVAL

Ada said you can stay with her until this has all blown over. We'll go after the New Year's parade. If you'd rather a flat in the city, perhaps we can come to some arrangement …

SEVERIN

What about Mary?

PERCIVAL

Mary's shooting on location this year.

SEVERIN

[begins to cry] Why? Papa, I want to stay here. This is my home. Don't you love me?

PERCIVAL

I am disruptive to your life right now. And … you are disruptive to mine. I love you, but there's a great deal of trouble at the moment.

SEVERIN

Oh, there's always trouble. There's always
something.
Some reason I'm inconvenient. Some excuse to stay away. What kind of trouble now?

PERCIVAL

People … people are saying I shot someone.

SEVERIN

[SEVERIN pulls away.] Uncle Thad? [Percival does not answer.] Did you?

PERCIVAL

Rinny, it's very complicated …

SEVERIN

Oh my god.

PERCIVAL

{He reaches out for her, his shadow for her shadow.] Darling, listen.

SEVERIN

No, don't touch me. Call Ada. I won't stay in this house another second.

 

The Deep Blue Devil
The Man in the Malachite Mask
Doctor Callow's Dream:
The House, the Eye, and the Whale

Once upon a time, in the Land of Milk and Desire, there lived a boy who had outsmarted his birthright. Whether he knew it or not, this is a very dangerous thing to do. A birthright can't be cut off like a bit of fingernail—it hangs about, sullen, limping through the years with two wooden legs and a clay hand, waiting, slinking, sniffing for a chance to get in the game again.

Only once did Anchises, whom everyone called Doctor Callow, tell a grown person about the workings of his heart. When he was eight and believed that his biggest wishes-which-were-not-really-wishes were behind him, little Doctor Callow went to see a witch (who was not really a witch, but an ornery old woman who had once made her living as an ostentatious fortune teller in Judgment-of-Paris, one of the great cities of the southern part of the Land of Milk and Desire, very far from Adonis, a city where the laws against conflict are so strict that the slightest bickering over a supper bill is cause for expulsion). The witch's name was Hesiod—though it wasn't, really. She had been born Basak Uzun, but began trying to escape her name as soon as her mouth got big enough to say it. She tried on many new names before she saw “Hesiod” in a beautiful book about the ancient days of Home, a place she had never seen and would never see. The name sounded to her like yellow sunlight on brown, dry earth, and she took it the way some young persons take trinkets when a shopkeeper's back is turned, even though it was a boy's name. She didn't find that out until much later, and by then, she didn't care. Hesiod fell in love with a dashing diver and came away from Judgment-of-Paris to homestead in Adonis, a place so new at the time that it didn't have a name. When her beloved died at sea—brushed ever so lightly, as lightly as a lover, by the frond of a callowhale—Hesiod returned to her old ways, for telling fortunes is a hard habit to break.

Anchises strung six trout-which-were-not-really-trout on a heavy rope and brought them along to pay for his fortune. Hesiod's hut, its veranda washed by salt wind, its windows pink sea glass, sat, quite satisfied with itself, by the shore of the Qadesh. Anchises knocked three times, which is traditional. Hesiod answered him, her long grey hair plaited with cacao-husks and ocean daisies (which are not really daisies, but livid, lilac, languorous anemones that can survive for six days without water). Doctor Callow presented his gift of fish.

Hesiod plucked out one of the fish's eyes and ate it without a word. It must have tasted good, as eyes go, for she shrugged and let him into her house, sat him on a driftwood-which-was-not-really-driftwood chair, and pulled out her cards. She spread them on the table in a graceful fan, like a casino girl (which Hesiod had also been when she was young). The witch-who-was-not-really-a-witch had a crystal ball, too, but she never used it and it wore a perfect coat of dust. It was just for show, but people like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball.

“What's your name?” said Hesiod gruffly. She wasn't really gruff, but people like a grouchy witch. A friendly one couldn't possibly know anything about the world.

“Doctor Callow,” answered the boy proudly.

“No it isn't,” snorted the old woman.

His little shoulders fell. “It's Anchises Kephus, ma'am,” he mumbled.

“That's fine, boy. I can always spot another scrap who's shucked their name. If a name doesn't fit you, best leave it on the road for someone else who'll like it better.”

The witch-who-wasn't-really-a-witch and the boy-who-was-really-a-boy sat without talking or moving for quite a while. Anchises didn't know how to explain his life to her. It sounded silly when he tried to make words out of it. He had become very good at figuring things out without asking adults about anything, and he found it hard—painful, even—to change his ways now. He was eight years old, and that, he thought, was a long time to get used to living a certain way.

Hesiod coughed and pulled a cigarette (which was not really a cigarette, but a shag made of black, bilious, brackish callowkelp, more expensive than beer from Home, wrapped up in newsprint) out of her deep bosom. She lit it, and the room filled with a scent like sumac and ozone and coffee and possibilities. “You have to ask a question, you know.” She chuckled. “It costs a lot more than fish for the kind of fortune where you don't say anything.”

Anchises took a breath as big as his eight years. “I think that I have a curse, Miss Hesiod. Maybe it's not a curse—maybe it's no different than being born with yellow hair, or something. But I don't have yellow hair; I have this. I think I've had it since I was little—littler than I am now, I mean. This is what I think the curse is, ma'am: Anything I wish for doesn't come true.”

Before Doctor Callow's words came out of his mouth, they felt as heavy and swirling and important and salty as the Qadesh. But with every word he said to Hesiod, he hated the sound of his voice in the smoky hut and the words it was making even more. These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they
felt
before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

“Oh, you silly little turtle. All children think that. Hell,
I
think that, sometimes.” Witches, even those who aren't really witches, like to swear, and their customers like it, too. As a rule, Hesiod tried to keep to no fewer than four profanities per visit.