She sailed into the sky without annunciation, around the winter solstice. She had been assembled in space, like a pontoon bridge, from a series of tiny satellites, carrying light-emitting polymers and mirrors, and when she was ready, she was unfurled over forty or so kilometres, twinkling and glittering. She went into a non-geostationary orbit, riding calmly round the earth seven and a half times in twenty-four hours, and could be clearly seen with the naked eye to be a reclining woman, full-breasted, narrow-waisted, with a cloud of shimmering hair and shapely legs in diaphanous harem pants, ending in sequinned stiletto-heeled shoes. She appeared to be as large as a jumbo jet on its descent. She lay along the sky, reclining, flying, floating. One arm was curled so that her hand rested on her swelling hip. The other was thrust out in front of her, bearing a huge mirror which reflected the light of the sun so intensely that it created a simulacrum of daylight in the cities she travelled over. It streamed with white rays like the Columbia Motion Pictures totem. The polymers were made with great cunning to create waves and ripples of coloured light, green, violet, lemon yellow, pale red, over her body; indeed she wriggled her hips and jounced the diamondlike facetted light in her navel.
Although there had been no publicity before her appearance, an orchestrated stream of information appeared in all the media immediately after it. Her name, it was revealed, was Lucy Furnix, which was also the name of a singer who was associated with Brad Macmamman, the tycoon, one of the few people powerful and rich enough to assemble a skywoman without fear of international complaints about light pollution, or advertising controls. Touching stories appeared about how the couple had sat together on a Caribbean island, quoting Juliet’s desire to take Romeo and “cut him out in little stars,” and Brad had had the idea of making his own Lucy immortal in the sky with diamonds. Her light, it was also said, was environmentally useful, as it would increase crop productivity in cold and dark wastes on the earth. And she was socially useful, as she lit up all dark alleys and sordid corners, thus reducing the risk of muggings and rapes. Astronomers had no need to complain about interference with starlight; they had radio telescopes based in deep space, which were perfectly adequate.
A spate of very cheap telescopes—some only plastic tubes with lenses—appeared on the market, patented as Lucy-tubes. With the aid of these watchers could see her finer points as she swept across their skies. She was a miracle of ingenuity—through the tubes she could be seen to have a pouting mouth, partly open to show sparkling teeth, with a plump upper lip. Her eyes were huge, with sapphire blue irises and thick fringes of yellow lashes. Her nose was pert and her cheekbones pronounced. She had mauve nail varnish. She wore multicoloured beads in multiple rows above her softly heaving breasts, and a braided sash above the harem pants. She wore also a diagonal sash, like a bandolier, or the guerdon of Miss World, crossing between the uptilted nipples, patterned with the logo of Brad Macmamman’s product, which was a round eye completely surrounded by spiky lashes. Brad Macmamman, in a discreet single interview, referred to her as “The Lady with the Lamp” and said he was a romantic at heart, which was quite likely true. She was popularly known as the Usherette. Graffiti appeared : “See Lucy’s boobs, with Lucy-tubes.”
People gathered on hilltops, and in parks, and at the tops of buildings, at first, to watch her rise above the horizon and sail to the zenith. Thin outbreaks of scattered clapping greeted her arrival in Sydney, Bogotá, and Helsinki. A kind of indulgent and cheery smile—at first—was the normal response to her frequent returns. Children had Lucy-watching parties, and cultural studies pundits talked about a new age of feminine values.
But after a time her rapidly reiterated appearances began to be greeted with indifference, and then with irritation, and then with increasing distaste and loathing. She was too big, too bright, too artificial. She seemed somehow to interpose her mundane curves between human beings and space, closing the earth off from the sky. Various illnesses, dementias, and aberrations began to be ascribed to her baleful influence, from milk souring to muggings. “Lucy-craziness” became a serious defence in cases of affray and motorway madness. In prosperous countries in the direct path of her spangling glare she caused odd tremors in the housing markets, as people tried to move to where darkness was more or less intact. Brad Macmamman and the singer were quiet on their Caribbean island, which was not in her orbit. Governments, and even the United Nations, began to discuss the dismantling or shooting down of the steadily smiling object, but this was found to be impossibly expensive or dangerous, and Macmamman said he neither could nor would remove her. So she sailed on and on.
Graffiti began to appear. “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?”
It was, ironically, children with Lucy-tubes who noticed the first signs of the new perturbations in the heavens. Swarms of small gold and silver lights were seen travelling across the sky, like self-propelled shooting stars, before and after Lucy’s dismally regular appearances. These lights darted and wheeled, like shoals of silvery fishes, or swarms of golden bees. For a time this was all they did, small and delicate and erratically mobile, increasing in number. Astronomers, and the public, began to train larger telescopes on them, and the swarms were seen to be made up of winged creatures in many shapes and sizes. Some were bird-winged—the stubby wings of finches, the powerful wings of albatrosses, the fine wings of swallows, the filigree wings of birds of paradise, the wheeling wings of vultures. Some were insect-winged—dragonflies, damselflies, butterflies, and moths, from skippers to moon moths, from swallowtails to morphos. There were lacewings and beetle cases, jewelled flies and darting wasps. There were fish-forms also, pipefish and medusas, seahorses made of light and writhing eels, nautilus and leaping salmon. They could be seen to expand and diminish, and after a time they could also be seen to metamorphose into other forms, all composed of pure light, it seemed, fingered vines which were snakes, plummeting birds which were flowers. They were most active at Lucy’s rising and setting and after a time began to cluster round her, surrounding her in a bright cloud of shimmering forms, dancing and twirling on her limbs and garments. After a time they were seen to be nipping and sipping at her, pulling at her with claws made of fire, sucking away her substance with bee mouths and fish lips, gathering and swarming into the darkness with fragments which they spat out, or tossed away.
Hundreds of humans gathered on hills and at windows with Lucy-tubes to watch the events in the heavens. Lucy began to look nibbled and bedraggled but still sailed on smiling; she was solid and the light-creatures were ephemeral. Then, after a time light began to gather and form in the night sky into larger forms, though those with good telescopes could see that these larger forms were somehow made up of congregations of the smaller ones, like cells or atomies. Over several weeks a large Scorpion assembled itself—its claws and its rearing tail were composed of what looked like swarms of celestial fire ants, who bristled and spun in their own tiny orbits within its form as it advanced, slowly, slowly, across the plains of heaven. When it reached Lucy Furnix it stretched out its formidable, brilliant pincers and sheared away her painted toes. Then it turned and crawled away into outer space, bearing the baubles.
The legs of the Archer’s horse-half formed first, gleaming hooves oscillating and prancing. Then the cannon bones, the knees, the hocks, and the gleaming flanks streaming with light made up of millions of racing and leaping elemental beasts, fawns and cheetahs, weasels and wolves. The human head swirled with a crest, or mane, of silver curling locks, which obscured the face, but not the muscular arms, containing twining tree trunks and gripping roots, and brandishing the bow which spanned a great arc of the visible sky. All this was very slow, added piecemeal with an inexorable heavenly patience, and the creatures on earth watched with an analogous patience, which seemed to be required of them—no panic, no rushing to hide, no prophecies of doom. Just a grave and complete attention at the end of optic tubes and from heights and viewing points. When the Archer had come into being he raised the great bow and loosed a sudden two-day-long stream of darting white arrows, using Lucy Furnix’s beads, and the logos on her sash, for a mercilessly accurate target practice. One by one the beads went out and fell away. Her sash floated loose, blinked and went dull and then null. The people set up a mild cheer. The Archer tossed his mane and cantered away with rippling muscles of light.
The Goat bounded up from below the horizon, all in one piece, tossing its silver head and its silver toes, butting at space with wicked curved slender horns. It had a majestic silver beard and gold eyes with dark barred pupils. It curvetted and danced and pranced, advancing on Lucy Furnix, jumping back, in teasing syncopated rhythms, for months and then suddenly put down its bright head, charged, and carried away her legs on its horntips in a rush into the depths. Its tail flicked on its elegant rump and the female calves above its head were brandished and taken into blackness.
The humans speculated mildly about how the other creatures would manifest themselves. It was better, and stranger, than a firework display, but had the same quality of ephemeral brilliance and unreality. They were deeply distressed if cloudy weather interrupted their vision of any night’s work, which went on whether or not they were looking. The Water-carrier was largely put together in cloudy weather, a figure like a standing waterfall, shimmering with moving light that was at once veil, cloud, and fountain—like the Archer it was faceless. It stood behind and above Lucy Furnix and fell on her in a cascade of shimmering ripples which dissolved into darkness and carried away the harem pants, the exiguous brassiere, and her well-coiffeured waves. Out of the final expanding ripples of the Aquarian pool rose a whole shoal of silver and golden fishes, finned and scaly, with round bright eyes and every conceivable shape of body—undulating rays, bony pike, seahorses, dolphins with beaks, sea-wolves and basking sharks. This sea of forms shone dappling and struggling, with bright slivers of glitter and moony runnels of shadow, round the lower half of the skywoman, nudging her bottom, eating away her buttocks and sex, such as it was. When they flashed away into their profound depths, vanishing to a network of points, Lucy Furnix was decidedly the worse for wear.
The curly fleece of the Ram floated together in tight spirals of creamy light, and massed itself into a muscular rectangle which then grew four stocky, golden legs, fine bronze cloven hooves, a magnificent pendulous sex, and a bright, weighty head which evolved curling, spiralling horns, ribbed and sharp at the tips. It advanced with a steady, dignified walk, slowly increased its pace to a trot, and then to a gallop. When it reached Lucy it lowered the shining bulk of its head, and with a purposeful hooked pair of tossing movements, bore off her tapered hands, with their painted nails, leaving her light somehow unconnected to the stump of her arm, but still in orbit. The light Jovial Bull, on the other hand, trotted purposefully into view, over the horizon. Its horns were lyre-shaped; there were garlands of starflowers around its neck; its eyes under broad brows were lustrous and gleaming. Its substance was also, under scrutiny, flower-flesh, petal-forms, florets, grasses intertwined like rushing waves. It ran lightly up to the depleted usherette, lowered its brow, and transfixed the mirror of her now dull lamp between its horns. Then it bore it away, at a canter, over the hill of the brightening world edge, into oblivion.
The Twins, who Western watchers expected to see as cherubic infants, took their initial form as complicated repeating diagrams of points and parallel lines which slowly became sword belts and plumed helmets of no known design. The burnish on the swords arrived very lengthily, sparkle by sparkle, whilst intricate devices grew and wreathed and were replaced on the crests of the helmets and the pommels. The two figures were far apart, and the stumps and smiling face of Lucy Furnix lay sacrificially between them, equidistant as they embellished themselves from streams of starlight. They made themselves flowing cloaks, with rippling folds, and intricate hooked spurs, glittering and cruel. Then they made themselves ghostly bodies—also faceless like the Water-carrier and the Archer, their shadowy features lost in swirls of dust and foam of feathers like the Milky Way. They strode at Lucy, in rhythm, in step, from each side, and raised the swords synchronically and sliced off her arms, leaving her trunk and hairless head to progress, with no diminution of her anodyne smile, around and again around.
The heavens darkened and became a shore, a scalloped line of delicately frilled water eternally breaking on a gleaming expanse of pale, bright, grains of sand. The expanse of space that was not shining grew deep indigo, patterned with the rocking motion of crested waves breaking and rolling in. The Crab advanced out of the water onto the sand, sideways with a ripple of synchronised, feathery legs, heaving its monstrous claws, raised and snapping. It was neither gold nor silver but darker blue than midnight, so dark that it gave the optical illusion of being a pit, a crustacean-shaped keyhole into the abyss. The starry water broke over its blue-black carapace. It came forward slowly, very slowly, trailing lines of bright waterlight on the grainy glitter. It was not made up of any other small forms or substances, but of absence and emptiness, with the most beautiful outline, and spherical, quivering burning eyes on stalks above its fluttering mouth. Behind it was a trail of vacancy. When it reached the dimmed truncated remnants of Lucy, it reared back, reached out with both claws simultaneously, the greater and the lesser, and surgically removed her jutting breasts. The watchers could almost feel the tearing in their own bodies. Then, its trophies raised high, it danced slowly sideways back to the rim of the ocean and submerged itself, always slowly, slowly, creating ripples and whirls in the surface. Lucy’s boobs bobbed for a moment on a sea of brightness and sunk without trace. The sea swirled and shone on.
Over the next few months there were rains of shooting stars and whizzings of comets, ruddy and dark gold. The sky was a turmoil of movement, amongst which the remnants of Lucy tumbled and shuddered. After a time the comets and stars began to coalesce like giant Catherine wheels into a curling pelt and a lashing tail that brushed the horizon. A mane made up of hissing and swirling circles of fire came next, and last four legs made out of continually rushing fire-arrows and a great cat head with teeth of star-ice, blue-silver, in a mouth opening on a gullet like a tunnel into the pit.
The crescent claws were curved and sharp and icy as the teeth. The great beast’s loins were narrow and his chest immense and magnificently draped with a fire-pelt of fiery wheels in turmoil. He arrived in bounds, crouching and lashing his tail, leaping and stretching, yawning and stepping delicately, taking his time. He was couchant for a time, staring at Lucy with great, motionless golden eyes, in which a dark pupil grew and grew. When all his eye was a black stare he pounced—a muscular arc that took up all the illusory curve of the arch of the heavens, and tore away her head from her body, which he tossed from claw to claw like a celestial kitten toying with its prey. Then he lifted the head in the great mouth—looking briefly, to the astonished earthlings, like a phantasmagoric sphinx—and loped away over a space that had become an infinite desert that seemed to tremble under his pads.
Now Lucy Furnix was nothing but an hourglass-shaped torso, with a cupped navel in which her diamond glittered, vulgar and forlorn. Now the angels began to dance in the heavens, flocks of them, swarms of them, like amoeba and water-fleas in pondwater (all sizes are relative) in every shape and size and colour. They were tiny enough to dance on pinheads in hundreds, they were vast enough that flocks of tiny ones could be seen to be busy inside a little fingernail, or seated along the life line in an outspread palm which took up the whole sky-span. For months and months, in unimaginable depths, human beings watched the skydance, circles of prancing cherubim, choirs of sailing seraphim, shoals of darting rainbow-bright thrones, dominations, and Powers. Human beings began to wait with a kind of glorious sick longing for the night and the next vision; they went through daylight like dreamers, and it seemed, the mild light of their one star, like a ghost-whisper of possible brilliance. Finally they all began to coalesce, and out of the whole host one angel, tall, terrible, and beautiful, began slowly to take on shape and sharpness, a great Creature with a tall spear in one hand, and a swirl of brilliant feathers and flowers in the other. The Angel’s face could not be seen, though its great beauty could—it was too bright, too full of constant changes of expression, too lucid to look at. Humans found themselves contemplating details for what seemed like eternities—the cloak which was covered with eyes like a peacock’s tail, and with little tongues of burning flames, the bright locks fanned by a breeze from the depths of infinity.
The Angel gestured with its spear, and there was a velvet emptiness which slowly became a great field of flowers, like an infinite tapestry on cloth of gold and silver, which had its own valleys and mountains all spread with cups and stars and flutes and bells of brightness, blue and rose and orange and aquamarine, emerald and periwinkle, crocus and windflower, lily-white and tiger-spotted, carnations, pinks, and daisies of every kind, tulips in butter and flame, snapdragons and honeysuckle and many more and all changing. And after a time this cloth of meadows was seen to be only the outer garment of a figure who sat veiled on a starry rock, with a dark blue robe inside the floral one, and a shimmering veil of light over a face too bright to look at, even through the exquisite transparent layers of the milky star-foam that covered it. There was a suspicion of a crown on her head, a plain circle of moonstones on a silver thread, which caught a fiery light from the Angel and blushed briefly rosy. She held a sheaf of lovely grasses and ears of corn, oats and barley, trembling and golden. She held also a pair of scales, solid, burnished, and bright. She waited, still and calm, with everything round her in motion, visionary wings and grasses and creatures, and the orderly rushing of inanimate space.
Then the Angel lifted its spear and brandished it, and saluted the Virgin, and turned its flaming point downwards, and pierced the diamond of the skywoman and offered it to the seated Lady, who held out her scales. And for a moment the diamond shone dimly in one pan, as stardust poured into the other like snuff, like poppyseed. The weightless stardust took its pan down and down, and the one with Lucy Furnix’s diamond shot up and catapulted its tiny light out into the field of flowers where it blinked and was lost forever. And the flowers shone, and the Lady smiled, and the angelic hosts wheeled and danced.
And then they were gone, and it was dark.
And the dazed human beings, in orderly and decorous silence, all over the world, dimmed and put out their artificial lights, and sat in darkness. And into their night came their epiphany. They saw, as they had some of them not seen in their lifetimes, the lovely lights visible from our small planet, the Milky Way, the galaxies, the constellations, the travelling planets and moons, the winking lights and the steady lights, the bluish and the red, the gold and the bright white. They sat in silence and were amazed, briefly and forever.