The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  We were interrupted by the dragoman coming down the ladder after dogging the overhead hatch behind him. I’d not told him to come.

  I turned to the Muse in her sphere. The tiny cracks where the spade had dented the surface had not spread. My guess was that the metaglass would have survived a thousand spade attacks. “We’re here,” I said to the naked form.

  “In immeasurable distance there glimmers a solitary star on the highest point of heaven,” said the dragoman in the Muse’s voice, accurate down to her new youthful energy. “This is the only God of this lonely star. This is his world, his Pleroma, his divinity.”

  I knew the words so well I could have recited them myself. Any of us could have. This was from Saint Jung’s Seventh Sermon to the Dead.

  “There is nothing that can separate man from his own God, if man can only turn his gaze away from the fiery spectacle of Abraxas,” continued the Muse’s voice through the dragoman’s mouth. I understood that she was communicating with us this way so the rest of the ship would not hear. But why? Why this sermon?

  Aglaé looked at me with growing concern in her eyes. She didn’t like this sermon coming from the ship’s soul, and neither did I. I shook my head to show her my own confusion.

  “Man here,” said the Muse. This was the penultimate verse of the Seventh Sermon, word for word. “God there. Weakness and insignificance here, eternal creative power there. Here is but darkness and damp cold. There all is sunshine.”

  “Muse,” began Aglaé, “why have you—”

  “Upon hearing this, the dead fell silent,” continued the Muse as if Aglaé had not spoken, “and they rose up like smoke rises over the fire of the shepherd, who guards his flock by night.”

  “Amen,” Aglaé and I said in unison, out of habit.

  “Anagramma,” said the Muse, her voice lower, completing the Seventh Sermon with its sacred and secret codicil. “Nahtriheccunde. Gahinneverahtunin. Zehgessurklach. Zunnus.”

  Alarm klaxons began blaring throughout the ship. More alarms rang and bleated and thumped. The Muse’s voice—her old voice, probably a recorded voice, her voice in rare alarm even as her face behind the metaglass stayed serene, her eyes watchful—shouted out, “Warning! Warning! The airlocks are opening! The airlocks are opening! We are in Pleroma and all hatches and airlocks are opening! Warning!”

  At that moment the dragoman’s neurofiber filaments slipped through my skin and flesh and pierced the nerves at the base of my skull. I saw filaments wrapping around Aglaé’s lovely neck and doing the same. More filaments shot forward from the dragoman’s head, made contact with the metaglass, and then passed through. The Muse extended her body so that the filaments pierced her small, white breasts.

  “Warning! Airlocks opening. All hatches opening. We are in the Pleroma. Warning! Air pressure dropping. Don protective gear. Warning! All airlocks are . . .” came the recorded voice at full volume from all speakers, but the words grew tinier and tinnier and then disappeared completely as the last air roared and hissed and flowed out of the ship through all of its open airlocks and hatches and doors, while the golden vacuum of the Pleroma flowed in to fill each compartment and all of our straining lungs with its nothingness.

  “Come out!” commanded the voice, but only Aglaé, the dragoman, and I could do so. The others might have been dead, their lungs and eyes and eardrums exploded. Or they could be frozen in the vacuum-thick Pleroma like ancient insects in amber. In either case, they could not move.

  Aglaé and I could do so and we did, laboriously climbing the ladder, floating and swimming through the golden medium to the airlock, then out into the Abyss. It seemed to take centuries. But no one was in a hurry. The dragoman followed, his long spatulate fingers and flattened feet pulling him and pushing him through the golden nothing with easy, broad, flick-away swimming motions.

  Abraxas was waiting outside. I was not surprised. I could feel that Aglaé was not surprised either, nor the Muse—who was watching us somehow, I felt, even though the external imagers no longer worked for those trapped inside.

  When I say that we went—or swam—outside into the Abyss, the Pleroma, it gives no real sense of the experience. The Abyss or Void or Pleroma was not absence; it was Fullness beyond all measure. It filled our mouths and lungs and eyes and cells. Moving in it was a matter of will, not locomotion. Once outside, there was no up, no down, no side to side. Aglaé and I willed and swam our way through the golden fullness to the long, gray curve of the outer hull of the ship—the only thing, other than Abraxas and us, that fouled the ineffable absoluteness of the Pleroma. We could use the hull as down if we stood on it; as a wall if we set our backs against it or near it; as a ceiling if we so chose. It gave us reference. Everything else, other than Abraxas waiting, was . . . ineffable.

  I had learned that word in my catechisms as a child, but I never understood ineffable until this minute. Even as my mind reeled with vertigo, it remembered the words of our Gnostic prophet Basilides as quoted by Hippolytus some thousands of years before Contact ended all context.

  For that which is really ineffable is not named Ineffable, but is superior to every name that is used . . .

  Naught was, neither matter, nor substance, nor voidness of substance, nor simplicity, nor impossibility of composition, nor inconceptibility, nor imperceptibility, neither man, nor angel, nor god; in fine, neither anything at all for which man has ever found a name, nor any operation which falls within the range either of perception or conception. Such, or rather far more removed from the power of man’s comprehension, was the state of nonbeing, when the Deity beyond being, without thinking, or felling, or determining, or choosing, or being compelled, or desiring, willed to create universality.

  This pretty well defined the Pleroma that Aglaé and I found ourselves floating in: a field that was at once boundless, impersonal, indefinable, and absolutely transcendental. This was the “Ain Soph Aur” of the Jewish Kabbalah and the Tibetan and Mongolian and Buddhist “Eternal Parent, wrapped in her Ever-Invisible Robes, asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.”

  And that pretty well described Abraxas as well.

  The Abraxas who waited for us here, the incarnation He chose to show us, held no surprises. This Abraxas was the Heavenly Chanticleer, straight from the paintings in Gnostic churches throughout the Tell: small as far as manifested Absolute Gods go—only about six feet tall, a little shorter than me—and matching our images down to his rooster’s head, curled serpent legs, and the whip he carried in one inhuman hand and the shield he carried in the other. The stars with their resplendent rays and the ogdoad symbol of the transcending seven planets were on his shield here rather than floating behind him, but the center of the large gold shield was taken up with a complicated design working the gold of the shield into the face of the sun. Abraxas’s eyes were not those of a rooster, but rather the predator orbs of a lion. His mouth was mostly beak, but the teeth and tongue were also those of a lion.

  All in all, a modest visible incarnation for the God of Totality, the Lord of Opposites, who not only stands outside of time but rules outside of all mere religions as the reality of the eternally available timeless moment.

  “You will perform a play,” said the dragoman.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “What else is new?”

  When I tell you “the dragoman said” or “I said,” the words are not correct since the medium of the Pleroma, which was not a medium at all, carried no sound. There was no air in my lungs or in Aglaé’s lungs. The Pleroma satisfied our brains’ and cells’ need for oxygen, but it was exactly as if we’d drowned in the Fullness. I know that the other twenty-one members of our troupe were writhing in terror in the ship, trying to move, trying to breathe air that was no longer there, no more concerned about performing a Shakespearean play than a fish out of water would have been about working out multiplication tables as it writhed and flopped on some hostile shore.

  But something the Muse or the dragoman—or both—had done to Aglaé and me a
llowed us to think, to move, and, by shaping the words with our mouths and minds even in the golden absence of actual air, to shape our thoughts to be heard as speech.

  “Will you perform?” asked the dragoman, presumably speaking for Abraxas who floated before us.

  I looked at Aglaé. She nodded, but this was redundant. After whatever we had experienced in the Muse’s room, this young woman and I were as in tune as two tuning forks struck to the same pitch and vibration.

  “We will do parts of Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “However much we can do as a troupe of two.”

  Now, neither Kemp nor Burbank nor any of the other elders of our troupe would have chosen Romeo and Juliet as one of Shakespeare’s pieces to perform when the future of our species—or even an important performance—was at stake. As appreciated as the old standard was by arbeiter and dole audiences around the Tell—and by the troupe itself, to tell the truth—it was earlier, easier Shakespeare: brilliant in its parts, but never the incomparable artistic achievement that was King Lear or Hamlet or Othello or The Tempest or even the Scottish Play.

  What were our choices? It would have made more sense to put on The Tempest before the God of the Sun and Darkness, dealing as it does with the ultimate magus, magic, enchanted islands, captured races turned into slaves, and the end of control, probably Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater if Kemp in his cups is to be believed—literally the drowning of Prospero’s Books.

  But I couldn’t have done Prospero on my best day. I’d never been understudy for Prospero and had had no regular role on the rare occasions when we produced it. And however we might abridge The Tempest, it would never make a workable two-person production for Aglaé and me.

  Of course, neither would Romeo and Juliet, but I regularly played Samson in the opening scenes—“No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir”—and I’d been understudy for Alleyn as Romeo on multiple occasions. And Aglaé was wonderful as Juliet.

  And so we started.

  We decided to use the hull as a sort of wall behind us, better to define the stage in our minds and to reach back to touch if the pleromic vertigo became too bad. Other than the absurd rooster-headed Abraxas—solitary King, Bond of Invisibility, Breaker of the Cycles of Bondage, and First Power—there wasn’t anything to look at or hold on to out there in the Pleroma except the dragoman and the hull. And Aglaé.

  I looked at her, nodded, and floated forward a few yards.

  Two households, both alike in dignity,

  In fair Verona (where we lay our scene),

  From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

  Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

  From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

  A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;

  Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

  Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

  Aglaé was watching me intently, wondering, I am sure, if I was going to do the entire Chorus’s part, but I wasn’t sure of the last part so I broke off there. Then I raised my arms and said conversationally in the direction of Abraxas, who was now seated on a gold throne that had not been there a second before, “Imagine, if you will, two young men, Samson and Gregory, of the house of Capulet, entering in swords and bucklers.”

  Then I did act out all the parts between Samson and Gregory—I knew these lines well enough—and after that, quickly explaining the situation to the dragoman and the Lord of Light and Darkness in easily improvised phrases, I acted out the entrance of Abraham and a serving man of the House of Montague. In other words, I got to deliver my “but I bite my thumb, sir” line after all.

  Aglaé had crossed her arms. I could read her thought. Will you be doing Juliet as well?

  Instead I improvised a clumsy little summary of Montague and Benvolio’s scene—I’d played Benvolio once before when Philp was ill—and then summarized the coming scene between Benvolio and Romeo, stepping into character when it came time for Romeo’s major lines and speeches—he was smitten and love-sodden already, you remember—but, we learn, with Fair Rosaline, not Juliet. Shakespeare, never all that interested in logic or verisimilitude, was asking us to believe that in that small town where the Montagues and the Capulets had been entwined with enmity for centuries like a climbing vine on an ancient trellis, Romeo had somehow not seen, or even heard of, Juliet yet.

  I stepped—or floated—back. Taking her cue perfectly, Aglaé moved forward facing Abraxas, summarized the scene with old Capulet, Paris, and the clown servingman Peter in just a few words, and then launched into the third scene where she played Capulet’s wife, the inimitable Nurse, and Juliet herself. Aglaé’s voice was never so beautiful as when she spoke for Juliet—a girl-woman only thirteen years old in Shakespeare’s mind. My Romeo was five years younger than I in real life . . . “real life” being the mind of the Bard.

  And so our play advanced.

  For the next scene, I summarized Benvolio’s parts but found that I could do most of Mercutio’s amazing lines perfectly from memory. “If love be rough with you, be rough with love: Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.” I’d seen Mercutio performed by the best men of our troupe and now I added my own little bits of business with closed fist and thrust forearm for the pricking lines, picking up Mercutio’s madness and Romeo’s naïve responses without hesitating a nanosecond between the wide shifts in tone and voice and posture and mannerism.

  All my life, I realized, I’d wanted to do the Queen Mab speech, and now I did, babbling on about the tiny fairies’ midwife, her wagon’s spokes made of spinners’ legs, the cover, the wings of grasshoppers, her whip of cricket bone . . . faster and faster, madder and madder, a tortured young man with eloquence rivaling Shakespeare’s but none of the solid, business side of the Bard; Mercutio, a man in love with his own words and willing to follow words where they led even as they led him to madness . . .

  “‘Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talk’st of nothing,’” I interrupted myself in my Romeo voice, alarmed now at my much more brilliant friend’s frenzy, shifting my body in space through three dimensions as if shaking the space where I’d stood as Mercutio an instant before.

  And so the play slid forward in that timeless spaceless space.

  I realized almost at once that Aglaé was better at improvising the summaries than I—and she could remember most of the other players’ lines and the Chorus’s long speeches word for word when she wanted to retrieve any of them—so I let her take the lead, only stepping in as Romeo or Mercutio or Tybalt for key lines, and then only a few. It was as if we were skipping across the surface of a pond, saving ourselves from falling in only through our speed and unwillingness to fall and drown.

  Then it was our first encounter, our first scene together as our real characters, all thoughts of Rosaline out of my teenaged mind now, my heart and soul and stirring prick focused forever more on the transcendent image of my Juliet—

  “O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”

  We asked the unmoving Abraxas to imagine the party, Tybalt’s anger, Capulet’s restraint of the young firebrand, the singing, the dancing, the men and women in bright colors and masks, and all the while young Romeo following, almost stalking, young Juliet. Our banter had the urgency of youth and love and lust and of the reality—shared by so few in all of time!—of truly having found the one person in the cosmos meant for you.

  “‘Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,’” whispered Juliet/ Aglaé. “‘Which mannerly devotion shows in this . . . ’”

  A second later I leaned close to her. “‘Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?’”

  “‘Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.’”

  “‘O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They . . . pray.’” And I sent my palm against hers and we both pressed hard. “‘Grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.’”

  When we did kiss a few seconds later, it was—for both of us, I
could feel—unlike any kiss or physical experience either of us had ever known. It lasted a very long time. I touched her thoughts as well as her lips. Her trust—never fully given before, I understood at that instant, chased by so many men, stolen by a few, betrayed by all others—opened warmly around me.

  She floated above me during the balcony scene. It was the first time I’d ever understood the depth and youthful shallowness and hope in those lines I’d heard too many times before.

  I was Mercutio and Benvolio and Romeo in coming scenes, even while Aglaé delivered selected lines from the Nurse and from Peter.

  She summarized Friar Lawrence’s part except for certain responses to her Juliet.

  Suddenly I found myself acting out Mercutio’s verbal taunts with Tybalt, Benvolio’s failed attempts to intervene, Romeo’s joyful interruption, the mock fight between Tybalt and Mercutio that led to Mercutio being slain under Romeo’s arm.

  To an observer—and in a real sense Abraxas was the only observer, since the dragoman’s eyes and ears were presumably just conduits to Him—it must have looked as if I were having an epileptic fit in freefall, babbling at myself, twisting, floating, lunging with invisible épées, moaning, dying. “They have made worms’ meat of me,” cries Mercutio.

  “O!” cries Romeo. “I am fortune’s fool.”

  In act 3, scene 5, Aglaé and I made love. We actually made love.

  We had not intended to do it, even as our thoughts flew between us like messenger doves during the intimacy of our almost perfect improv. I had not thought of doing it.

  But as the scene opens but before Juliet says “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day,” our stage directions say only that we are both aloft, with a ladder of cords, but Kemp had often staged it with Romeo and Juliet half-dressed on a couch standing in for their marriage bed. Offstage, of course, between scenes, had been Romeo and Juliet’s one night of bliss as man and wife—a very few hours of realized love before the lark pierced the fearful hollow of their ears and never, as fate would have it, to be followed by another night or moment of intimacy.