by Dan Simmons
I thought he had something there. But then again, I remembered, the Poimen were gods... of a sort.
The ship had been lowered to some appropriate depth, although shafts of sunlight still filtered down through the clear blue waters. It was as if we were in a blue and gold cathedral. Hundreds of the Poimen, who weren’t men at all despite that part of their name (or the name Abraxas had given them), swam and shuttled around us, some being pulled by their jet-sled craft, some using other means of propulsion, some inside larger craft and looking out through transparent hulls. The depths were also filled with larger submersibles of varied design, some moving in obvious lanes but others shimmering like gigantic schools of metal fish. Far below us, the waters grew darker and larger things, living things I thought, moved with leviathan slowness.
Kemp gave the assignments. I hoped for Edmund, of course, all of us younger actors did, if we couldn’t get Edgar, but received the part of Albany’s servant. At least I got to kill and die onstage. (I confess I’ve never understood that servant’s motivation.) Heminges was to be Edmund, the bastard in every sense. I think I might have cast him as Edgar; Heminges is crazy enough out of character to play Tom O’Bedlam half the time. But Alleyn got Edgar. Pope was the Duke of Cornwall, evil Regan’s stupid husband—I could see Pope squinting dubiously at Aglaé (he’d never had such a young Regan). Gough got the good role of the Earl of Kent.
There was a tradition in Shakespeare’s day for Lear’s Fool, a sort of holy fool, to be played by the same actor who plays Cordelia—the Fool is never onstage when Cordelia is and he disappears completely when her major scenes begin—but this wasn’t going to work with tonight’s casting.
I would have given my left testicle to play the Fool, but Burbank got it.
Adam got the Old Man—what else?—and Philp was the courtly, brave, and courting Duke of Burgundy. Coeke was to be Curan, Gloucester’s retainer, and Hywo Gloucester.
The lesser roles, gentlemen, servants, soldiers, attendants, and messengers, were quickly parceled out. We knew all the parts—or were supposed to.
Pyk came up and tried to get Kemp’s attention, but our Fearless Leader was too busy making costume choices and discussing staging—Christ, we hated theater-in-the-round and prayed to Abraxas that this place would not be like Mezel-Goull.
“What is it, Pig?” I whispered.
“The Muse,” he whispered wetly in my ear.
“What about her?”
“You’d better come see, Wilbr.”
I followed him down through the engine room, through the double hatches, down the ladder to the tiny room holding the Muse’s sphere and mummy. I admit that I was a little nervous being in there just with Pig after watching the Muse’s gyrations and eyes opening an hour or so earlier.
Her eyes were still opened, but no longer empty. They were complete and blue and looking at me. No mummy now. The naked young woman floating in the blue fluid was more beautiful and younger than Aglaé. Her restored red hair floated around her like a fiery nimbus.
She did not quite smile at me but her gaze registered my presence.
I said to Pig, “Jesus Christ and Abraxas’s rooster’s balls. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
And we did. But what I’d actually thought of in those seconds I stared into the resurrected Muse’s eyes was an old catechism line from Saint Jung: “The dream is like a woman. It will have the last word as it had the first.”
* * * *
Saying it was an extraordinary performance of King Lear would not be praise enough. It was beyond extraordinary. It would have won the laurel wreath at any gathering of the Bard Troupes on Stratford and at any time in the last twelve hundred years or more. The legendary Barbassesserra could not have created a better Lear that night than Kemp did.
His very exhaustion lent more credence to the king’s age, despair, and madness. And I have to admit that Condella was tragically radiant and perfectly, absurdly stubborn as Cordelia. After a few minutes, I forgot her age—so I had to assume the Poimen never noticed.
The Poimen.
They allowed us to extend and light our own stage from the Muse. The ship had recovered sufficiently to handle the stage and basic lighting, although the cabiri were not functional. We were able to use our dressing rooms and regular arras and stage exits. But we did not need a tent where we performed.
Our ship and stage were on a sort of shell within a bubble. I have no idea what energies kept the bubble intact, our air recycled, or the pressures of the alien ocean from rushing in. But the bubble was invisible and it did not distort vision in or out as glass or plastic would. We did not float around or bob; the stage felt as firm beneath us as it had the night before at Mezel-Goull, but this was obviously an illusion since some moments into the performance we realized that our stage and ship and bubble were rotating three hundred and sixty degrees, even turning as they rotated. At times we were completely upside down—the surface of the ocean invisible beneath our feet and stage and stern of the Muse—but somehow the stage was always down. Our inner ear did not register the changes and gravity did not vary. (In fact, the gravity itself was suspicious, since it felt one-Earth average on such a gigantic planet.) But the turning and rotation were very slow, so if one did not look out beyond the proscenium for any length of time, there was no vertigo involved. When I did look, it took my breath away.
The water—if it was water—was incredibly clear. I could see scores of the huge blue and green crystal towers, each lighted from within, each with a central twin shaft filled with rising and falling liquids and passengers, each rising into sunlight and atmosphere above—where countless more of the Poimen floated and flitted—and then into space above that, each also extending down to the purple depths miles beneath us.
The Poimen floated around us by the thousands or by the tens of thousands. Without staring I couldn’t tell, and one can’t stare at the audience during a performance, even when the fear of vertigo isn’t a factor. I could see that they were not all the same. Shafts of sunlight columning down from the rough seas above illuminated a bewildering variety of Poimen sizes, shapes, and iridescent colors. Some of the creatures were as large as Archon spacecraft; others as small as the koi in funeral ponds on Earth. All showed the same sort of flat face, black eyes, throbbing gills, and tiny arms, at least relative to their body size, and delicate hands as our first visitor in the sphere that had come through the Muse’s hull.
Kemp and Burbank had gone on about how they hated performing in theater-in-the-round as at Mezel-Goull, but here we were in a theater of three dimensions, with audience above, to the side, and partially beneath us, thousands of pairs of eyes focused on us from all directions, and all of them moving in our constantly rotating field of
vision. A lesser troupe would have had trouble going on. We weren’t a lesser troupe.
Did the Poimen understand us? Did they get the slightest hint of what our “mimesis episode” was about? Could these sea-space creatures understand the foggiest outline of the themes and depths of Shakespeare’s tale of age and loss and ultimate devastation, much less follow the beautiful and archaic song of our language?
I had no idea. I’m sure Kemp and Burbank and Condella and the others carrying the burden of the performance had no idea. We carried on.
Burbank once told me that his father—who had led the Earth’s Men longer than any other person and who was almost certainly the finest actor ever to come out of our troupe—had said to him that King Lear precluded and baffled all commentary because the experience of it was beyond theater, beyond even the literature and art and music we had when humans had literature and art and music. King Lear and Hamlet, the older Burbank had told his son, went even beyond the false but beautiful holy scriptures humans used to have before the Archons and their superiors showed us the truth.The Torah, the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Rig-Veda, the Agama, the Mahavastu, the Adi Granth, the Sutta Pitaka, the Dasab-humisvara, the Mahabharata, and the Bible, to
name only a few, were false but beautiful, and important for evolving human hearts and minds, said the elder Burbank, but all receded before the unfathomable truths of Hamlet and King Lear. And where Hamlet explored the infinite bounds of consciousness, Lear delved the absolute depths of mortality, hoPeléssness, communication failed, trust betrayed, and the threads of chaos which weave our fates.
I think those are some of the words and phrases Burbank told me his father used. One does get in the habit of memorizing very quickly when traveling with actors.
They’d only been words to me until this night—pleasant theatrical hyperbole (which is redundant, Philp would argue, since all theater, however nuanced, is mimetic hyperbole of life)—but this day, this night, this performance of King Lear made me understand what Burbank’s father had been trying to say.
When Kemp, as Lear gone mad and wearing his crown of weeds and flowers, said to Hywo as the blinded Gloucester
If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester.
Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;
Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee. Mark.
and then Kemp slowly took off his crown not of thorns but of faded flowers and tangled dry grasses and Hywo/Gloucester wept
Alack, alack, the day!.
only to have mad Kemp/Lear pat his back and console him with absolute hopelessness—
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
I wept.
I’m glad I was offstage and behind the arras, away from those thousands of staring fish-eyes, because I wept like the child I don’t remember actually being.
By the time Lear carried his dead daughter onstage and pronounced those five heaviest words in the history of the theater—“Never, never, never, never, never.”—I could no longer stand. I had to sit down to sob.
And then the play was over.
There was no applause, no noise, no movement, no visible reaction at all from the schools and congregations and aggregations and flocks of Poimen in the blue beyond our bubble.
Kemp and the others bowed. We all took our curtain call.
The Poimen moved away in the sea currents and submersibles.
We stood there, exhausted, looking into the wings at the players who hadn’t played but who seemed equally exhausted, and then, almost in unison, we looked at the dragoman where he sat listlessly in the wings, elbows on his knees, eyes unblinking and seemingly unfocused.
“Well?” demanded Kemp, his voice almost gone and as old-sounding as the dying Lear’s. “Did they like it? Did they hear it?”
“Why do you ask me?” said the dragoman in his flat squeak.
“Weren’t they in touch with you?” bellowed Burbank.
“How do I know?” said the dragoman. “Were they in touch with you?”
Kemp advanced on the spindly dragoman as though he were going to pummel him, but just then our bubble went dim as surely as if someone had put a towel over a bird’s cage.
The dragoman jerked to his feet, not to meet Kemp’s charge—he was not even looking at Kemp—and said in a different tone, “You have one hour and eleven minutes to rest.
And then you and your ship shall be transported elsewhere.”
Our view out the bubble had disappeared with the light. There was no sense of whether we were being moved or not, but we knew from the motion during the performance that something was dampening our sense of inertia in this cage. We went back into the Muse.
* * * *
None of us slept during those seventy-one minutes. Some collapsed on their bunks or just stood in showers letting the hot water run over them—all of the Muse’s systems were functioning now—but about half the troupe met in the larger of the two common rooms on the upper deck.
“What’s going on?” demanded Pig.
I thought our youngest apprentice had summed up the essential question pretty well with those three words.
“They’re testing us,” said Aglaé. She’d been a brilliant Regan.
“Testing us?” demanded Kemp. He and Burbank and Condella and the senior members of the troupe were glaring at her.
“What else could it be?” asked my weary and oh-so-lovely Aglaé. “No one’s ever heard of a traveling troupe being forced to perform before the Archons before, much less before these... Poimen... if they are actually Poimen. We’re being tested.”
“For what?” asked Heminges. “And why us? And what happens if we fail?” He should have been as exhausted as Kemp or Burbank or Condella—he’d had important roles in all three of the performances we’d done in the last forty-eight hours—but fatigue just made his face look more handsomely gaunt and alert and Iago-cunning.
No one had an answer, not even Aglaé. But I began to think that she was right—we were being put to the test—but I could think of no reason, after all these centuries, that a traveling troupe, or the human race for that matter, should be tested. Hadn’t we been tested and found wanting those first years when the Archon, on the order of their masters we were made to understand, ended our freedom and cultures and politics and sense of history and dreams of ever going to the stars on our own? What more could they take from us if we failed their goddamned tests?
It made me want to weep, but I’d already blubbered like a baby enough during that extraordinary, never-to-be-repeated performance of King Lear, so I went up to the topside observation room to talk to Tooley for a few minutes, and then, when the
birdcage towel was lifted and the Muse informed us that we were in the Pleroma again in the wake of the Poimen ship, I climbed down through all the decks to the tiny room where the newly resurrected Muse floated in her clear blue nutrient.
* * * *
I felt like a voyeur.
In my previous eleven years aboard the Muse, I’d rarely come down here to her tiny compartment. There was no real reason to—the Muse spoke to us through the ship, was the ship, and we were no closer to her down here near the mummified husk she’d left behind so many centuries ago than anywhere else on the ship: less close here really, since she seemed alive elsewhere. But more than that, I was scared to come here as a boy. Philp and I used to dare each other to go down in the dark place to see the dead lady I rarely came down here as a man.
But now I had, and I felt like a voyeur.
What had been a brown, wrinkled, eyeless mummy was now a beautiful young woman, perhaps Aglaé’s age, perhaps even younger, but—I had to admit—even more beautiful.
Her red hair was so dark it looked almost black in the blue fluid. Her open eyes—I did not see her blink but at times her eyes were suddenly closed for long periods—were blue. Her skin was almost pure white, lighter than anyone else’s aboard. Her nipples were pink. Her lips were a darker pink. The perfect V of her pubic hair was red and curly and dense.
I looked away, thought about going back up to my bunk.
“It’s all right,” said a soft voice behind me. “She does not mind if you look.”
I just about jumped straight up through the hatch eight feet above me.
The dragoman stood there. His fibroneural filaments hung limp on his pale shoulders.
There were still black streaks and stains near the corners of his eyes and mouth.
“You’re in touch with her?” I whispered.
“No, she’s in touch with me.”
“What is she saying?”
“Nothing.”
“What happened to her?”
The dragoman said nothing. He seemed to be looking at an empty space between me and the blue sphere.
“Who restored her?” I asked, my voice echoing now in the tiny metal room. “The Poimen?”
“No.”
“The Archons?” It did not seem possible.
“No.”
“What does she want?”
The dragoman turned his lipless face to
ward me. “She tells you that the two of you should come here when it is your turn. Before you act.”
“Two of us?” I repeated stupidly. “Which two? Act on what? Why does the Muse want me to come here?”
At that moment the ship shook and I felt the familiar ending of the buzz and tingle one feels when transiting the Pleroma, a sort of vibration of the bones and rising of the short hairs on the arm, and then came the slight but perceptible downward shift-shock I’d felt so many times when we transitioned back to the Kenoma of empty forms. Our universe.
“Jesus Christ Abraxas!” came Kemp’s voice crashing over the intercom. “Everyone come up to the main common room. Now!”
* * * *
Tooley, Pig, Kemp, and the others had run viewstrips from deck to ceiling around the large common room, and then added more strips across the ceilings. The Muse’s external imagers provided and integrated the views. It was as if this deck of the ship were open to space.
