Radiance

The callowhale tries to snarl, but she had only ever been drawn smiling, so that children would love her. She smiles and smiles, and in her singsong advertising jingle voice she trills, “She stank of death and life and a million never-sleeping eyes! Don’t give me your smug primate smirks, Anchises St. John! You touched our dying limb and took our spores into your tiny, insufficient flesh. A new star guttered in the dream-net of the callowhales. It wanted to live, but it had no vigour. We felt you in us; we thought you were part of us, lost, dying. We came for you, and destroyed the cage you languished in. Only afterward did we understand our mistake. We are very embarrassed about it. But your parents should have taught you to keep your hands to yourself! You touched Severin’s face in gratitude; Mariana struck you in fear—new stars guttering into very little of note on the edges of our dreams. We would not be fooled twice. We ignored them. Told them we were on to their tricks. But Severin came so close, right into my parlour, and her stink woke me like burnt bacon. I told her to go away, and she did. I am not sorry! She is small and I am big. She drank my milk without asking. I will not be made to apologize!”

“What about me?” asks Mariana Alfric. “I didn’t come close. I didn’t get a chance.”

Calliope shrugs her cheerfully drawn shoulders. “You let that doctor cut us out of you. You could no longer live separately. When our child died, you died. It had already converted much of your fluid and tissue. Children are so hungry in their first hours.”

“Your child?” gasps the sound engineer.

“What did you think it was? A disease? A wound? You guzzle our milk and think we never bear young?”

“Ooh!” exclaims Mr Bergamot. The animated octopus slides off his mossy sofa and draws himself up onto his tip-tentacles. “May I have the seafloor? I’m quite keen on marine biology, you know.”

“By all means.” Anchises gracefully relinquishes the Myrtle Lounge bar.

“Lemme help!” squeals Marvin the Mongoose, and scampers away from Violet’s lap.

The mongoose and the octopus clear their throats. They run through a quick warm-up: Do re mi fa so la ti do! Do ti la so fa mi re do! Mr Bergamot produces a harmonica from goodness-knows-where, lays down an establishing A note, and snaps his suckers to a quickstep beat.

“The Lifecycle of the Callowhale!” the mongoose and the octopus sing in unison. And they begin to soft-shoe up and down the bar.

“A callowhale isn’t much of a whale,” sings Mr Bergamot in the key of G.

“Not a bug!” belts out Marvin.

“Not a cat!”

“Not a fungus or a snail!”

The octopus knots four tentacles together into a square while turning cartwheels with the rest. A light clicks on inside the square of suckers, though the Waldorf owns no projector. The film merrily commences, and all watch in wonder as an on-screen Calliope dances on her tail. Mr Bergamot sings his verse:

The great callowhale’s got no stop and no start

Just a hundred million brains and a million hundred hearts

Hundreds of tiny callowhale shapes appear with cheerful popping sound effects, all squeezed into Calliope’s big body. Marvin the Mongoose sings his turn:

They’re all dressed up with everywhere to go

They might look funny but boy, how they grow!

In the film, Calliope sprouts a red bow on the side of her ever-smiling head and a string of pearls round her neck. A knock sounds—is it a date? No! It’s a little boy! It is, in fact, Anchises, drawn like a lovable scamp in a Sunday comic strip. He holds up a squirming mass of fiddleheads and fronds like flowers. Calliope blushes: For me? And then Mr Bergamot and his mongoose assistant burst into a flurry of tap dancing, four tappity-spats and two sets of clackety-claws going a mile a minute.

If you’re having trouble with the maths

Come consult our helpful graphs!

The graph’s bars spring up, fountains erupting from the blowholes of two miniature Calliopes. The tallest bears the title, “How Important a Callowhale Is to the Continued Function of the Multiverse.” A very short, squat one, little bigger than an exclamation point, reads: “How Important You Are to the Continued Functioning of the Multiverse.” A pitiful slide whistle sounds its note, and then they’re off again. Marvin turns a somersault and warbles:

Just think of a long shiny pin!

The music scratches to a halt. Mr Bergamot protests, “A pin! Now that’s just silly!”

“Not as silly as an octopus playing the harmonica,” the mongoose rejoins. A rimshot echoes down the Waldorf staircase from nowhere. The octopus and mongoose join arms and serenade the lounge together:

Now think of a long shiny pin!

Stuck down through batting and muslin!

Cotton and linen, silk, lace, and wool, too!

There’s so much that fantastic pin can punch through!