Radiance

ERASMO: Without one second of argument. He’s your family—that’s what he said. You don’t turn your back on family. I don’t know. Maybe he lost a brother way back. Maybe his mum abandoned him. Maybe you don’t know him that well. But I’ll tell you for nothing that in that moment, I loved Arlo Covington like mad. He didn’t even dawdle. Suited up right away—we had to strap down the suit a little to fit him. He kept the diving bell on, to protect his head, in case he fell. We rigged up a sling for Horace out of one of the hammocks and some gaffer tape, secured a lantern to Arlo’s belt, and strapped Mariana’s pride and joy to his chest. If she hadn’t been surfing the morphine coast she would have lost her mind. Send her baby down a big black hole? No chance. See, she’d brought along a brand-new Edison-brand prototype wireless microphone. For field and stress testing.

CYTHERA: That would be the Type I Ekho Ultra-Mic?

ERASMO: You’ve got it. Mariana wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. She had to keep notes on everything she did with it for the company back home. She kept saying it was worth more than the Clamshell, though that strikes me as bullshit—It looked like a little tin lunchbox. We needed it. What if something went wrong? We were happy to stroll around White Peony with parasols and a song in our hearts, but going…inside Venus—we couldn’t let Arlo do that without some way to tell us if something went wrong. We gaffered the Ekho around his chest and tuned our field radio to seventy-six megahertz so we could pick up his broadcast. I cranked the volume up all the way and hoped to heaven we’d hear Arlo over the white noise.

CYTHERA: What time did Mr Covington begin his descent?

ERASMO: I’d say around 1100. It was stickily warm; the air didn’t seem to move at all. We helped Arlo waddle into the town centre, to the mouth of the well. He stood there like a comic book hero amidst all that wreckage, all those mangled, mutilated houses, with his diving helmet tucked under his arm like Barracuda the Brave from that old Capricorn cartoon The Arachnid vs. The Seven Seas. He smiled at us, and I knew he was terrified, so it must have cost him something to flash that astonishing supernova grin our way. He was just trying to tell us everything was gonna be okay.

“Hey,” Arlo said. “So there’s this mummy snake and this baby snake and the baby snake says, ‘Mumsy, are we poisonous?’ and the mummy says, ‘Yes, sweetums, but why do you ask?’ and the baby says, ‘Because I just bit myself!’”

It’s not a great joke. But we laughed like he was headlining at Carnegie Hall.

CYTHERA: Did Severin record any of this?

ERASMO: [laughs] Are you joking? Of course she did. Severin and Crissy set up two cameras, one on our faces and one for the wide shot. It’s a pretty amazing scene. If everything had gone differently, I think we’d be munching hors d’oeuvres at Academy Awards pre-parties right now, instead of these, frankly, dreadful biscuits and this abomination disguising itself as tea. Even after, in the darkroom, Crissy and I thought it was something else. The shards of Adonis casting hard, sharp shadows, the well in the centre of the shot, Arlo doing his Barracuda the Brave shtick, the breathing tube and diving cables tied tight around his chest, then a pan around Maximo, Santiago, Konrad, Franco, and Severin. All of us braced against the stone wall of the well like we meant to play tug-of-war with the public waterworks.

Arlo tested the Ekho mic. The radio crackled on. “Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen! Gather in, pour yourself a cup of something nice, and sit back for another instalment of the solar system’s favourite tale of adventure, romance, and intrigue on How Many Miles Before Arlo Smashes His Skinny Arse to Bits? Okay, down I go! Don’t forget to make a wish!”

I turned away when he jumped in. I’d seen that once already.

As soon as Arlo saying wish whined out on the radio, the static boomed out its usual unintelligible hissing, then a voice exploded out of the white noise. This time we could all hear the words perfectly clearly: Somewhere the sun is shining, but here it don’t do nothing but rain…

It was Mariana’s and Cristabel’s voices. Singing “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain,” exactly the way they did on our first night at the Waldorf in White Peony Station. But it came showering down from everywhere, knotted up in ribbons of static, out of the sky, out of the trees, up from the mud and the water.

CYTHERA: How did Ossina react to that?