Radiance

You can’t grow grain on Uranus. Point of fact, grain is a hard call all over. Grain guzzles sun; accept no substitutes. Venus, Neptune, and parts of Uranus do rice. The road to heaven is paved with rice. Rice isn’t picky, doesn’t play favourites, will go home with anyone if they’ve got water and light in the fridge, though she mutates if you look at her funny. Uranian rice is electric blue with a black bran, the longest of long grain. Tannic tea-ish aftertaste that’ll pucker your face. Official name is Capilli Regis Filiae Sophiae. Princess Sophia’s Hair. With a name like that, you know there’s nothing but groundbound idiots in charge back home on Earth. They’d name their own shits after a princess if they could. We call it rice, for fuck’s sake. Saturn has rhea: carefully bred lavender corn. It’s not half bad. But then, anything Uranus can do, Saturn can do better. Bigger rings, more moons, deeper mines, food that’ll grow without a guy getting down on his knees to beg. Mars, being a bitch of many talents, can do you quinoa, amaranth, even a stunted barley in a good year, but no wheat. Mercury’s got fuck-all, and who’d bother trying on Jupiter? Probably half the moons get by on hybrids. Pluto, our nearest buddy, the mad wife in the attic of the solar system, has a night-blooming lily called infanta. (See? Even the Yanks love a princess.) Big, blowsy white flowers with a nutritional mug shot not unlike a coconut: fat, sugar, carbs, calcium. When the first ship landed, all they saw were the lilies, covering the whole planet. Turned toward the spittle-sun like radio antennae. Landed in a field of them like Santa Claus in the snow.

I’ve never eaten one. I’d like to, before I close out my accounts. I’ve heard they taste like honey and coffee and your mother’s own milk. But Plutonians don’t export. Not so much as a fart aimed down-system. The youngest kid never has to share their toys.

You think about food a lot when you don’t have any. The parts of your brain that used to think about getting ahead in the world, about doing wrong to those who need it, about art or fucking, they just get burnt out, ’til they can’t do anything but grind on the thought that if I lived on Saturn I could have corn.

Here you get loaves of midnight-green lichen scraped off the bottom of King George’s Sea, mashed up with callowmilk and Sophie’s Shits and morels. Cubed for your barest sustenance. Collect your weekly allowance at your local Depot. Oh, I know morels sound like the better quarter of that mess, but they’re not really morels, just what we call the powder-blue mushrooms that grow on the lee side of the luminescent towers. Come up by the million at sunrise; taste like your grandma’s worst perfume; rich in all-important vitamin D, vitamin C, and Queen Sugar; and ever so slightly hallucinogenic.

Fuck morels and fuck vitamin C, too. The bitch had bread. Real bread. With a crust and a soft middle. And it was hot. It had had carnal relations with an oven on the recent.

My stomach, recently vacated, made its preferences known. It wasn’t a fair fight and the American lady knew it. Come, dog. Heel. Good boys get treats. She reached back and pulled out a knob of something wrapped in wax paper. She didn’t say a thing—didn’t have to. Just peeled back the red wax wrapper corner by corner with her perfect purple nails. Slow like, so I could hear it coming away from the creamy lump of heaven within.

Butter.

“Get in the car,” the dame said, and it would knock your head back how fast I did what I was told.

Good dog. Sit up. Shake a paw.

Newsreel

PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL INCLUDED WITH ORIGINAL TRAILER REELS OF THE RADIANT CAR THY SPARROWS DREW; WITHDRAWN IN FINAL PRINTS

TITLE CARD

The Road to Heaven is Paved With Prithvi Brand Concentrated Callowmilk—You Can’t Leave Home Without It!

[Male voice-over, a rich, deep, and reassuring voice, but not authoritative—an after-dinner voice, merely sharing its knowledge among friends.]

VOICE-OVER

What can you do without Prithvi Brand Callowmilk? Nothing.

[Stock footage of Venus beaches, palms waving like vacation posters under a brilliant sun.]

Hand-harvested on the lush, scarlet shores of Venus, the most precious bounty of the universe arrives at every supper table courtesy of your friends at Prithvi Deep-Sea Holdings Incorporated.