Radiance

[long pause] We’ll call her something else. Hell, I named her once, I can do it again. Something bombastic, something mythic, something Venusian. All the names have to come back to Venus in the end. I remember what you said when we were writing Rocketship Banshee—we went up to that cabin on the Sea of Fertility and trotted out our old dance, writing movies instead of fucking. Two rooms, two typewriters, the blue cassia forests, moon-daisies by the door. We swam naked in the bitter silver sea and you floated on your back under the Earthlight with water running off your colloidal blue breasts and said: Names aren’t loners, they’re connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny. You wouldn’t just let me name our hero John and his demon bride Molly.

MAKO: This is different.

UNCK: We’ll call her Ares. I gave her a boy’s name the first time around, so why not this time? It’s perfect. Ares went and shagged Venus when he should have stuck to what he was good at, which was fighting with anyone who’d put up half a fist. Good, right? Yeah. Yeah.

MAKO: Let her have her name, Percy. Let everyone have her own name. She’d hate you for changing it. You know that.

UNCK: [Clears his throat several times. His voice quavers.] I don’t want to. I don’t want to write it at the top of every page. I don’t want to have to say it. Every day. All day. I don’t want to have to call some nobody actress by my daughter’s name.

MAKO: Too bad. It’s my script, too. I’m not your secretary. Her name is Severin. You don’t get to turn her into one of our demon brides.

[Sounds of typewriter keys and cigarettes extinguishing, lighting, smoke exhaling.]

UNCK: Fine. Fine. You win. Severin bloody Unck forever and ever amen.

Back to it. Once we’ve got the world created—Sky, Earth, clamshell—we move on to more important business. The Plot at Hand. We switch scenes entirely. I want to go full noir: neon fritzing signs reflected in rainy streets on Luna. Unless it shouldn’t be Luna. Could do somewhere more interesting. They get vicious storms on Uranus. Wrath of God-type stuff. We shot something in Te Deum once, didn’t we? What was it? Thief of Light? The Oberon Assassin? Christ, I can never remember. We’ve made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant. But TD is a spectacular city, really. All those coloured towers—bioluminescent, you know—thick as a fat man’s fingers, stubbing up pink and purple and hot green to the stars. Cheap as hell, too. Pubs everywhere like mushrooms in the morning. Good gravity, at least in the winter.

MAKO: If you insist on shooting on location, at a minimum we’ll need permits for Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter. We’re fine for principal photography on Luna, obviously. Venus?

UNCK: Oh, Vince, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. Isn’t there somewhere on the Moon we can dress for Venus? We have enough seas. I’ll hose down half the globe if it means I don’t have to go to Venus. Or we could try Earth. Glum old Earth. Moscow, maybe. Or Chicago. Could try Australia, but the red tape is absolutely frightful. Melbourne, perhaps. I can’t stand Sydney. We almost did Hope Has No Master down there, remember? Looks quite a bit like the older parts of Mars. Then again, Mars actually gave us a better deal, when you figure in the tax incentives. Guan Yu is a fabulous town. You can see Mons Olympus from every balcony.

MAKO: But ultimately, we want a city. Deep in a city. Noir has to have a city. And a detective. I presume we’re talking about Anchises.

UNCK: I know, I know. Who else could it be? If we don’t produce him pretty quickly, everyone’ll just be waiting for his entrance. We’re telling a story everyone already knows. We gotta outrace their memory.

MAKO: I think he’s living back on Venus, now. Shouldn’t be too hard to find him, if we want the man himself.