Radiance

That notion lasted longer than it should have. When my father took me to Mercury for principal photography on The Hermit of Trismegistus, I reasoned that Mars still held herself pure for me. When he bundled Maud Locksley to Mars for Atom Riders of Ma’adim, I knew that Saturn, at least, would cast her rings around me and hold me close. When I got to the outer planets for the first time, well, no one even looked out the windows to see ringrise anymore. Someone snapped off a picture of me standing in the observation car and crying like an idiot. I’ve still got it pasted on the inside of George’s case. I look at it sometimes, try to really look. To remember everything I hoped the solar system would be. Self-portrait with Saturn. The photographer sold a copy of that miserable snapshot to Limelight and I hated myself for forgetting that I have never been unwatched, unwitnessed, unrecorded in my whole life.

[CUT BACK to SEVERIN, sipping from a cider globe. She looks out the porthole and speaks in profile. Dollops of ice cascade past. They look like stars, more like stars than the stars themselves. The camera can barely pick up those dim stellar pinpricks washed out by the greater light of the ship and a million glassy cold shards.]

SEVERIN

This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes. Pilot, lighting designer, director of photography, production assistant, sound engineer, astronomer, local guide. You pay Mr Edison through gritted teeth and try to recover your finances by launch. You choose good kids, strong and a little gullible and intrepid as Argonauts. You check their references and they’re just as bright and perfect as stained glass. You get them all in a tin can together, set the clock for nine months transit on a favourable orbital window, and pour out the last real bourbon you’ll see for a year. Settle in for a long sail in the dark. And the first thing your kids do when the cameras are off and our big dumb blue mama is drifting away in the portholes is lean in close with eager puppy eyes and say: Come on, Severin, you can tell us now—who’s your mother, really?

But it doesn’t matter, that’s what the rags don’t get. And my crew does read the rags, sucks them down like sweets.

Let me tell you something terrifying, instead.

When I was seven, I saw Mary Pellam in The Seduction of Madame Mortimer—do you remember that series? Madame Mortimer, lady detective, having lost an eye on Uranus in The Saturnine Solution, finally meets her match in the dashing person of the master criminal Kilkenny, known to me as Igor Lasky, actor, Lothario at large, and frequent occupant of our liquor cabinet and back bedroom. Oh, how I loved those murder flicks! And Madame Mortimer best of all, with her bouncing blond curls and cruel laugh and hidden pistols and leaps of pristine logic. Madame always got her man. This was after Clotilde Charbonneau left us quite bereft and ran off with Clarence Feng, darling of the Red Westerns. Papa and I were both disconsolate. And I looked at my father and I pointed at the screen and I said: I want her for my new mother.

And he got her for me.

It took almost a year of gentle, insistent courting to seduce Madame Mortimer for my personal use. But Mary Pellam moved in by Christmas and had taught me to shoot like a bandit queen by Easter. The night after my father put a ring on her finger I sat up quite late, thinking very seriously about what had just occurred. I could ask for anything and receive it. Even people. Even a mother. I had a terrible power. I could easily become a monster like Kilkenny. Monstrous in my appetites, and each of them satisfied without end. I was reasonably certain I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I’d never seen a movie about someone with power who turned out nicely. If you have something, well, you’ve got to use it. I cried myself to sleep that night. I had been given a destiny, and that destiny was to be a villain, when all I wanted was to be Madame Mortimer.

Mary Pellam was a good mum. She taught me the Four Laws of Acting, which she had made up over gimlets at the Tithonus Savoy one afternoon so she could make a little scratch teaching between MM features.

[SEVERIN breaks into a glossy imitation of Mary Pellam’s crisp Oxford accent.]