Radiance

Now, look at my hand. I will hold it up. And look at yours. How many of you wear gloves? One glove? Two? More and more, every year. For the space is not smooth that darkly floats between our earth and its morning star—Lucifer’s star, in eternal revolt against the order of heaven. It is thick, it is swollen, its disrupted proteins skittering across the black like foam—like milk spilled across the stars. And in this quantum milk, how many bubbles may form and break; how many abortive universes gestated by the eternal sleeping mothers may burgeon and burst? Perhaps Venus is an anchor, where all waveforms meet in a radiant scarlet sea, where the milk of creation is whipped to a froth, and we have pillaged it, gorged upon it, all unknowing. Perhaps in each bubble of milk is a world suckled at the breast of a pearlescent cetacean. Perhaps there is one where Venus is no watery Eden as close as a sister, but a distant inferno of steam and stone, lifeless, blistered. Perhaps you have drunk the milk of this world—or perhaps I have, and destroyed it with my digestion. Perhaps a skin of probabilistic milk, dribbling from the mouths of babes, is all that separates our world from the others. Perhaps the villagers of Adonis drank so deeply of the primordial milk that they became as the great mothers.

I dream of the sea. Always the sea.

Perhaps we are all only pieces. But we are stitching ourselves together, into something resembling a prologue.

Go out into the Fair. Into the light. Breathe the lunar air. Eat, drink, and be happy, for you have reached the end—which is not really the end.

The Howler and the Lord of the World

FILM REEL FROM THE ENYO SITE ON MARS

[INT. A cinema. The seats glow a deep, heart-like red. Cherubs with the heads of fish frame the screen. SEVERIN UNCK sits in one of the seats, soaking wet. She looks confused, upset. She shivers; her teeth chatter. She turns to see if anyone else is in the theatre, but she is alone. When she turns back, MR BERGAMOT is seated next to her, a green cartoon octopus wearing spats and a monocle.]

SEVERIN

Uncle Talmadge?

MR BERGAMOT

I’m afraid not. But this was my favourite of all the bodies you remember. I like his appendages. [MR BERGAMOT flourishes his tentacles.] Can I get you some popcorn?

SEVERIN

Who are you?

BERGAMOT

Who you came for. You stuck a bloody great camera in my face, remember?

SEVERIN

Sorry.

BERGAMOT

No, you’re not.

SEVERIN

I’m sorry it hurt you.

BERGAMOT

We were already hurt. Would you like to watch a movie?

SEVERIN

Always.

[A film begins on the huge screen. The camera swoops down out of the starry sky to the surface of Pluto. It is not our Pluto. There are no flowers, no cities, no glowing carousel bridge to Charon. This Pluto is tiny, without an atmosphere, a mass of blasted craters. A YOUNG GIRL walks through the barren rocks. Her hair is white, with bronze kelp growing out of her scalp alongside it. Her skin is made of scratched ice. She is crying. Blood drips from the hem of her dress.]

SEVERIN

Who is she?

BERGAMOT