Radiance

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 metres, 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