Radiance

But I can’t. I have to go back. I have people to look after.

BERGAMOT

You were vaporised at the point of contact. You cannot go back, only forward. Back and forward are nonsense words, anyway. But you can still look after your people, if you want to.

You do not understand what a callowhale is. You have never seen like we see. In some places, we look like a camera. Like an eye shared between three women. Like a story about seeing and being seen.

[The screen shows a parade of images, of scenes, each lapping at the next like a wave. ERASMO in a small room with an espresso, agony and anger and exhaustion on his face. MARY PELLAM sleeping next to a green creature with lion paws. MARY as a child in Oxford. PENELOPE leaving a basket on the doorstep of a grand house. PERCY and VINCE, arguing over a script, swimming naked in a lake on the Moon. PERCY and FREDDY arguing; Freddy running off with PERCY’s gun, shooting THADDEUS IRIGARAY, weeping. MAUD LOCKSLEY and ALGERNON B washing blood off a floor. ERASMO and ANCHISES eating biscuits on Mars, laughing. ERASMO and CRISTABEL jogging together in the morning. MARIANA sleeping in a morphine haze. MARIANA singing to the dragon SANCHO PANZA in the broiling sun. SEVERIN, very little, trying to work out who is telling the story to whom. Many more flash by, millions more. Wars that come sooner in one universe come later in another, but come all the same. There are great rockets instead of airplanes; battles stretched by transit windows and orbits until they fray to pieces, leaving fleets abandoned in the night; more and more; human bodies sailing further out, past the solar system, filling with milk and starlight until fiddleheads open out of their navels, blossoming with flowers; great-grandchildren playing with CLARA without understanding what she could ever have been, more; until SEVERIN is crying; until she puts her hands over her face.]

BERGAMOT

Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.

[SEVERIN looks up. She laughs.]

BERGAMOT

Why are you laughing?

SEVERIN

I just…I really wish you could’ve met my dad. I wish I could tell him it really was an ice dragon, after all. [She wipes her eyes.]

All right, mister. Put me in the picture.

Acknowledgments

Radiance began very simply, with the desire to write about having grown up as the daughter of a filmmaker. Though my father ultimately went into advertising, his passion colored my childhood profoundly. But somehow, it grew tentacles along the way, and has been growing (and growing and growing) for seven years. In that time, even the smallest of creatures racks up a lot of debts.

My heartfelt thanks to: Dmitri, who asked for a story set on a Venusian waterworld, Neil Clarke for publishing the short story that knew it wanted to grow up big and strong from the first line, to my agent, Howard Morhaim, and my editor, Liz Gorinsky, for feeding it its spinach, Winter and Fire Tashlin for the hours spent in my living room forking nineteenth-century history off into strange and unruly paths, and Kat Howard for being a new set of eyes. I bow in the direction of all the classic science fiction writers who envisioned the worlds of our solar system as they were not but might be, but particularly Roger Zelazny.

This book owes more to Heath Miller than it is polite to admit in company. For his constant readings and rereadings, listening to me say the whole thing was terrible over and over, theatrical consults and structural advice (I hear Mom’s really great with structure), for his midnight meatball sandwiches and infinite supply of index cards, he has my eternal gratitude. I love you right in the face.

And finally, thanks, Dad, for the movie of my life.

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE’s adult novels, including The Orphan’s Tales, Palimpsest, and Deathless, have been finalists for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards and won the James Tiptree Jr., Mythopoeic, Lambda Literary, and Locus Awards. Her YA phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a New York Times bestseller and won the Andre Norton Award. Valente lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and a cat.