Radiance

I don’t want to write about scrubbing blood off ebony with a wire brush. Or burning my buffalo fur in the engine room. But I do want to write this: While we were cleaning Thad up, I pried open his fist and swiped a wadded-up piece of paper out of the muck and the crusting blood. I didn’t look at it ’til I got it safely back to my room.

It’s a photograph. Of a baby girl.

I can’t be certain—babies all look a bit like one another. But I think she looks an awful lot like Severin.

Kansas

Transcript from 1946 debriefing interview with Erasmo St. John, property of Oxblood Films, all rights reserved.

Security clearance required.

CYTHERA BRASS: Session three, day two. Arlo Covington, C.P.A., Oxblood representative, instructed your crew to abandon the Adonis set. Why didn’t you follow his lead?

ERASMO: We did. We just…got distracted. Look, I know you think we’re a great fat lot of useless drama society layabouts, but we are, each and every one of us, professionals. We stabilized the situation very quickly. Dr Nantakarn had a mobile ICU already set up in advance of the dives we had planned. Retta isolated Anchises and put gloves on him so he couldn’t infect anyone else. She took Mari in hand, sliced that thing right out of her palm, and bandaged it up before Konrad and Franco could get breakfast cleared away. Gave her morphine for the pain. Mari was pretty doped up. She slept it off in the medical tent while we discussed what to do about Horace.

Venusian freshwater wells are deep. To get past the saltwater you have to really burrow down. We had a boom mic and a small crane. Nothing nearly long enough. Max said…he said Horace was already buried. We could cap the well, carve his name on it. It would be a beautiful grave. He was trying to be kind. Maximo’s kindness can be morbid. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just let Horace rot down there, getting chewed on by who knows what blind, awful worms live in Venus’s underbelly. I have too good an imagination. I could see it, some horrid night-eel laying eggs in his eye sockets…I couldn’t leave him down there in the dark. He deserved a better final scene than that. Besides…he could have been alive. What if he’d only broken a leg? Both legs? What if he was slowly bleeding to death down there?

Well, the only other option was the diving cables. We had two suits left: one for the diver and one for the cameraman, and heaps of breathing tubes. We could lower someone down, just as we would from the gondola into the Qadesh. I thought it should be me. Look at me—I’m the obvious choice. I’m a big man, I’m strong, I could carry Horace back up, easy. Like a fireman. I could carry them all back.

But Iggy killed that idea. “These village wells, they narrow as they go down. You could get stuck, and, you know, we have to lower you and haul you and the body—and Horace—back up. We have no climbing equipment. No cleats or crampons. The tube could snap. We could drop you. You’re the heaviest one of us, Raz. The lightest should go.”

And all eyes turned to Arlo.

CYTHERA: Did the background noise let up at all while this discussion took place?

ERASMO: No. Maybe? I’m not sure. It wasn’t constant. It surged and ebbed and surged again. But it never found a rhythm. If it had rhythm, we could have ignored it eventually, the way you learn to ignore the sounds of traffic late at night in Tithonus. But it never lulled, it just crackled and shrieked and garbled out those dreadful bursts of growling.

CYTHERA: And Covington agreed to go down after the cameraman?

ERASMO: After Horace. Surprisingly, yes. Everybody did the same mental maths: we couldn’t risk the doctor, there was no way I’d let Rin go, Mari was out cold, Crissy’s almost six foot of lean cheetah-girl muscle. We all had at least a stone on Arlo. If it had to be the lightest of us, he was it. You knew him—skinny as a jockey, and not so tall as all that. He was wiry, though. He must have done some sport or other—accountants don’t usually have that sort of whippy physique.

CYTHERA: Rowing, actually. He was on the Oxblood crew. Up every morning at four pulling oars across the Rainy Sea.

ERASMO: Huh. I can see that.

CYTHERA: You said he agreed to this plan? You didn’t coerce him?

ERASMO: Is that what the others said? That I forced him?

CYTHERA: I’m asking you. I’m having some trouble with the notion, Mr St. John, because Arlo hated confined spaces. He worked on the Oxblood accounts by the lake in Usagi Park so he didn’t have to suffer in his own office. And you’re telling me he cheerfully went along with a plan that required him to jump into a pit in the ground.