Radiance

That’s me. My big-screen debut. Callowhales exist throughout everything that has ever existed or will exist. We look different in each place where existence occurs. Think of them as sets, if it helps. Vast, infinite, enclosed realities where anything may occur, yet actions taken in one—say, The Atom Riders of Mars or Universe 473a—do not affect any other—say, Universe 322c or The Girl Who Made Fate Laugh. A hundred million sets together make a grand studio. The whole of existence.

On your set, we look like callowhales. That has proven somewhat unfortunate. Our milk was not meant to be ice cream. In another six or seven generations, humans are going to look very interesting. But we do not interfere. We do not resist the progression of events on any single set.

On another set, we look like mountains. That is safer. In another, we look like several hammers in one particular woodworker’s shed. The woodworker likes sandalwood best. He doesn’t know why he never chooses to use those particular hammers. On the set you are seeing now, we look like her.

SEVERIN

What happened to you?

BERGAMOT

What happened to me happened on another lot entirely. There, we look like the colour red. I became very sick. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one did anything to make it happen, at least not on purpose. For us, causality is meaningless. A cow kicked over a pot of glue—perhaps that killed a callowhale. Perhaps it did not, but will 1.5 million years from now. I began to cough. My coughs have echoes upon echoes. You get sick, too—think of me as having the measles. I am young; the stronger among us would not even notice the measles. I ran away from being sick. This is where I stopped running. I was so tired.

[The YOUNG GIRL falls to the stony ground of that Plutonian wasteland. The scene changes. The YOUNG GIRL falls to the ground on Mars. This Mars is not our Mars, either. There are no kangaroos sunning themselves on Mount Penglai, no mango sellers, no moonflowers. Nothing but dust and red sky. The air is poisonous. The YOUNG GIRL crawls, dragging her fingernails on the rocks. She dies slowly. She dies crying and shrieking. By the end, her mouth is full of red dust.]

BERGAMOT

That is where I died.

SEVERIN

[squinting] Is that Mangala Valles?

BERGAMOT

Yes. But a different Mangala Valles. In the place I am showing you, no one can live anywhere but Earth.

[The camera shows a solar system without electric lights—save on one glowing world. Dark Mars, Neptune, Venus, the Moon, all many, many miles further apart than we know them to be. No Orient Express, no Grand Central Station, no bright cannons firing into the black. All those worlds, dead and empty, with no air, no oceans, no rivers, no trees. SEVERIN covers her mouth with her hands.]

SEVERIN

Oh…Oh, God. What an awful, lonely place. No buffalo, no Enki floating on the ocean, no circuses on Saturn, no movies on the Moon. How can a place like that be? How can they bear it?

BERGAMOT

Have you ever seen a movie?

SEVERIN

You’re joking.

BERGAMOT

Do you know what a movie is, though?

SEVERIN

Is this a riddle?

BERGAMOT

A movie is a ribbon. A long, long ribbon with thousands of pictures on it. Each one slightly different, so that when you run through the pictures very fast, they look like they’re moving. But when the movie is playing, the thousands of pictures are all still there on the ribbon. They just look like one picture. There are a million million frames, each one of them only a little different, and callowhales move through those frames like a cigarette burn in the corner of the image. Each frame is a world; a universe. Some of them are full of panthers. Some are full of dancing. Some are so sad I think you would never stop crying if you saw them, far sadder than this one, with its teeming Earth. You and Venus and your lover and your ship and the Moon and your father are only one frame, and there are ever so many more than twenty-four per second.

This frame has only one living world. It is where I died. Sometimes we are not very tidy when we die. Pieces of my body washed up in every possible reality. A scale here, a pneumatocyst there, a frond on a beach near a village called Adonis. I spasmed all the way through my death. When I got sick, I shook and shivered, and my shaking and shivering happened not to this Pluto, but to the one you know, to a town called Proserpine. When I died, I screamed in pain, and my screaming happened not to that cold Mars but to a town called Enyo. We have no manners when we are sick. I am ashamed.

SEVERIN

If you died, how are we speaking? Am I dead?

BERGAMOT

I would prefer you not to be dead.

SEVERIN

You and me both, buddy.

BERGAMOT

This octopus, sitting with you, is just a piece of my body washing up, like the others. It will dissolve, eventually, like the rest. I wish you could stay here forever with us under the sea.

SEVERIN