Muse of Fire

by Dan Simmons

  There was no Poimen ship ahead of us. We had been flung out of the Pleroma into this system like a stone from a catapult such as the ones we’d seen arbeiters on 30-08-16B9

  use to move boulders miles up the mountains to build the Archon’s keep.

  We were hurtling toward a series of concentric translucent spheres surrounding a blinding blue-white star.

  Each sphere was larger than the last, of course, but shafts of brilliant sunlight passed through each sphere to the next and then through the last one out to us. The Muse put up deep radar and other readings showing that there were more than a dozen spheres, each one mottled with dark continents and painted with blue seas.

  “Eyes of Abraxas!” breathed Heminges. “This is not possible.”

  “It’s not possible in a thousand ways,” said Tooley. “According to Muse’s data there, we’re one hundred and forty-four AU out from this star. There shouldn’t be this much light reaching us... or this first, last, sphere. Unless each sphere were somehow refracting and refocusing the light... or magnifying it... or adding to it...”

  We all stared at Tooley. Usually he spoke only to explain how he was unplugging toilets or greasing gears or some such. This was by far the longest speech any of us had ever heard from him.

  I remembered that an AU was an astronomical unit, the distance Earth was from its sun.

  Most of the Archon worlds we visited lurked at around one AU from their suns…

  144 AU out?

  “There are a dozen spheres around this sun,” came the Muse’s strangely young voice.

  “There are two separate but intersecting spheres at one AU, one at two AU, then others at three AU, five AU, eight AU, thirteen AU, twenty-one AU, thirty-four AU, fifty-five AU, eighty-nine AU, and this outer one at one hundred forty-four AU from the star.”

  “Fibonacci sequence,” muttered Tooley.

  “Precisely,” said the Muse. “But it seems oddly inelegant. A series of orbiting Apollonian circles would have put more spheres of varying diameter within a closer radius to this star without the need for—”

  “Muse!” interrupted Kemp. “We’re approaching this outer sphere pretty damned

  quickly. Shouldn’t you be firing the engines to slow us?”

  “It would not help,” said the Muse. “Our velocity upon leaving the Pleroma was a significant fraction of C, the speed of light. We have never entered any system from any pleromic wake at anything near this velocity. I do not even understand how we can maintain our integrity at this speed since the collision of isolated hydrogen particles alone should—”

  “You mean you can’t slow us?” interrupted Condella.

  “Oh, yes, I can,” said the Muse. “At my full thrust of four hundred gravities, it would take me a little over eight months to bring our velocity down. But we will impact the outer sphere in four minutes and fifteen seconds. Also, the ship’s internal fields protect passengers... you... only up to thirty-one gravities. You would be, as the old saying goes, raspberry jam.”

  “Can you miss the outer sphere?” asked Aglaé. “Steer around it?”

  The Muse only laughed. I had never heard her laugh before and I’m sure that not even the oldest members of the troupe had either.

  No one said anything for a while.

  Finally, Burbank ordered, “Show clock. Analog. Countdown.”

  A holographic clock appeared above a viewstrip, showing three minutes and twenty-two seconds until impact. The sweep hand continued moving backward toward zero.

  Burbank wheeled on the dragoman who had been silent, great lidless eyes downcast, standing away from the rest of us who were almost forming a circle while staring at the clock and viewstrips. “Do you have any goddamned ideas?” barked Burbank. His tone sounded accusatorial, as if the dragoman had brought us to this end.

  It turns out that someone with no lips can still smile. “Pray?” he said softly.

  * * * *

  What would you do with three minutes left to live? I didn’t pray. I didn’t do anything else either, other than to look at Aglaé for a minute with more regret than I thought it possible for a person to hold. I was sorry that she and I would never make love. More than that, I was sorry that I’d never told her I loved her.

  “One minute,” said the Muse.

  I suddenly wondered if this was the time the Muse had mentioned, through the

  dragoman, when I should bring Aglaé to the blue sphere with me when—how had she put it?—we should come there when it was our turn, before we act.

  No, it didn’t seem that this was what the Muse had meant. And it looked as if “our turn,”

  whatever that might have been, would now never come.

  The outer sphere filled all viewstrips. We could clearly see the dark undersides of continents and make out the actual turning of the sphere itself. To give us some sense of scale, the Muse superimposed an outline of the large continent on 25-25-261B against one of the smaller continents now on the top viewstrip. It was a tiny dot on the huge landmass.

  Jaws dropped open but still no one spoke.

  “Ten seconds to impact,” the Muse said calmly. Our speed became apparent as we hurtled at the airless wall ahead of us—a wall that now seemed flat because it extended so far in each direction.

  We struck.

  We did not strike, actually, but passed through the seemingly solid underside, passed through a mile or two of ocean in a blink of an eye, passed through five or eight miles of blue-sky atmosphere above that, and then we were in space again, hurtling toward the next sphere—the eleventh celestial sphere according to the Muse’s earlier description, one a mere eighty-nine AU out from this impossible blue-white sun.

  “We shed twenty-five percent of our velocity,” the Muse reported.

  “We couldn’t…that’s not…how could we…” stammered Tooley. “I mean—Abraxas’s

  teeth!—even if the sphere floor were porous, impact with the ocean and atmosphere would have been... I mean... slowing twenty-five percent from...”

  “Yes,” agreed the Muse, “what we just experienced was not possible. We could not have survived. Such a deceleration could not have occurred. That much kinetic energy could not have been dissipated without much violence. Nine minutes until impact with the next sphere.”

  Thus we passed through the eleventh sphere at eighty-nine AU, and then the tenth at fifty-five AU—although the Muse informed us that it should be taking us many weeks to be covering these distances, even at our velocity still some double-digit percentage of light itself, and she suggested that time itself was out of joint in and around the ship, but we did not care about that—and then we approached the ninth sphere rotating at thirty-four AU from the blue-white star.

  The Muse of Fire bored through an ocean just as the first three times— with Tooley

  muttering “hypercavitation” to himself as if the word meant anything—but this time we did not tear through the atmosphere and into space again.

  The Muse rose slowly, reached the top of her arc, hung there a minute like a balloon hovering several thousand feet above a great, almost-but-not-quite flat expanse of green fields and forests and brown mountains, and then began to fall.

  The Muse fired her engine almost gently. We passed over a coastline and then over wide plains toward a range of mountains.

  “We are to land on that mesa,” said the dragoman.

  “Who’s ordering us to land there?” demanded Kemp. “The Poimen?”

  The dragoman smiled again and shook his head.

  * * * *

  The Archons were the petty rulers according to our Gnostic faith, the Poimen the shepherds (although the gospels never told us what or who they were shepherds of), the Demiurgos were the architects, the fashioners, the true (but flawed and failed) creators of our world and universe, and Abraxas was God of All Opposites, Satan and Savior, Love and Hatred, and all other truths combined.

  Now, as we all stood outside our ship in the sweet, rich air of this ninth-sph
ere world, the Demiurgos approached from the direction that might have been north.

  None of us had ever set foot on a world as beautiful as this. From our high mesa we could see hundreds if not thousands of square miles of green grasslands, rolling fields golden as if from wheat, thousands of acres of distant tidy orchards, more thousands of acres of apparently wild forest stretching off to the green foothills of a long mountain range, snow on the mountain peaks, a wide blue sky interrupted here and there by bands of clouds with some of the cumulonimbus rising ten miles into the blue sky, rain visibly falling in brushstroke dark bands far to our right, and more, a hint of our just-traversed coastline and ocean far, far to what we decided was the west, and from every direction the sweet scent of grass, growing things, fresh air, rain, blossoms, and life.

  “Is this Heaven?” Condella asked the dragoman.

  “Why do you ask me?” was the naked dragoman’s reply. He added a shrug.

  That was when three Demiurgos approached from the north.

  We’d already seen living things during our minutes alone on the mesa top—huge white birds in the distance, four-legged grazers that might have been Earth antelope or deer or wildebeest running in small herds many miles below on the great green sea of grass surrounding the mesa, large gray shadows in the faraway forests—elephants?

  rhinoceroses? dinosaurs? giraffes? any of Earth’s long-extinct large wild things?

  We hadn’t brought binoculars out and couldn’t tell without going back into the Muse to use her optics and now we didn’t care as the Demiurgos approached.

  We never doubted that these three were from the race of our Creators, even though no image of our Demiurge or his species appeared in our gospels or church windows.

  They were six or seven hundred feet tall—above our height of three or four hundred feet above the lowlands here on the flat-topped mesa even though the bottoms of their legs were on the grasslands. They did not seem too massive for all their height because two thirds of each of them was in the form of three long, multiply articulated legs, each glowing a sort of metallic red and banded with black and dark blue markings, the three legs meeting in an almost artificial-looking metal-studded triangular disk of a torso—

  like a huge milking stool with living legs, was Tooley’s later description.

  It was the last hundred feet or so of Demiurgos that rose above the three legs and triangular torso that caught our attention.

  Imagine a twenty-story-tall chambered nautilus rising from that metallic torso—not something like a chambered nautilus, but an actual shell—three shells here, each with its characteristic bright stripes—and from the lower opening of each spiraled shell, the living Demiurgos itself.

  At the center of each shell was the circular umbilicus. Forward of that, over the massive opening, was a huge hood the color of dried blood. Beneath that hood on each side were the huge, perfectly round yellow eyes. Each black pupil at the center of each eye was large enough to have swallowed me.

  And the word “swallow” did come to mind as the three Demiurgos tripoded their way closer until they hung over us; the great opening at the front of each shell was a mass of tentacles, tentacle sheaths, orangish-red spotted tonguelike material, horned funnels, and sphinctured apertures that might have been multiple mouths. Each huge yellow eye had its own long, fleshy ocular tentacle with a red-yellow node on its eye-end looking like some gigantic infested sty.

  These were our Creators. Or at least one of them had been some twelve to twenty billion

  years ago. For Creators, I thought, they were very fleshy and organic created things themselves, for all the beauty of their huge spiraled nautilus shells.

  We’d all stepped back closer to the open airlocks and ports of the Muse, but none of us ran inside to hide. Not yet. I was painfully aware that the Dermiurgos closest to me could whip down one of those sticky tongue-tentacles and have me in its bony funneled orifice in a second.

  “You will perform a play now,” said the dragoman. “The best one you know. Perform it well.”

  Kemp tore his gaze away from the gigantic tripods looming over us and said to the dragoman, “You’re in touch with them? They’re speaking to you?”

  The dragoman did not respond.

  “Why won’t they speak to us?’ cried Burbank. “Tell them that we want to talk to them, not perform another play.”

  “You will perform the best play you know now,” said the dragoman, his voice flat in that way it got when he was channeling these other beings. “You will perform it to the best of your ability.”

  “Is this a test?” asked Aglaé. “At least ask them if this is a test.”

  “Yes,” said the dragoman.

  “Yes it’s a test?” demanded Kemp.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” said Burbank.

  The dragoman’s large eyes were almost closed. The Demiurgos’s huge yellow eyes above us never blinked but their ocular tentacles moved in a way that seemed hungry to me.

  “What happens if we fail?” asked Aglaé.

  “Your species will be extinguished,” said the dragoman.

  There was a roar of confused noise from all of us at that. The Demiurgos leaned farther over the mesa, their mouths and tentacles and eyes coming closer, and I picked up the strong brackish scent of the ocean—salt and reeking mud tidal flats and dead fish in the sun. I had a strong urge to run up the ramp into the Muse and hide in my bunk.

  “That’s just not. .. fucking. .. fair,” Kemp said at last, speaking for all of us.

  The dragoman smiled and I admit that I wouldn’t have minded beating him to death at that moment. He spoke slowly, clearly: “Your species was excused upon first encounter

  because of Shakespeare. Only because of Shakespeare. His words and the meaning behind his words could not be fully comprehended, even unto the level of the Demiurge who created you. In your world, then, man was Abraxas—you gave birth to and

  devoured your own worlds and words, embracing eternal weakness even while you blazed with absolute creative power. You sought to build a bridge over death itself. All higher powers beneath the Absence that is Abraxas—the lowly Archons, the preoccupied Poimen, the race of Demiurgos themselves—voted that immediate extinction had to be your species’ fate. But because of this one dead mind, this Shakespeare, there was a stay of execution on this sentence not to exceed one thousand and nine of your years. That time is up.”

  We stood silent in the sunlight. There was the sound in my ears of a single, huge, pounding heart, like the surf of a rising sea; I did not know if the pounding beat came from the Demiurgos whose shadow fell over me or from me.

  “You will perform the best play that you know,” repeated the dragoman. “And you will perform it to the best of your ability.”

  We looked at each other again. Finally Kemp said, “Hamlet.”

  * * * *

  The show went on. It took us half an hour to get into costumes, review roles—although we all knew our roles for Hamlet without asking—and slap on makeup, although the idea of the Demiurgos noticing our makeup was absurd. Then again, those huge, unblinking yellow eyes did not seem to miss anything, even though they stared through their own waving mass of tentacles when looking forward.

  I was Rosenkrantz when we performed Hamlet and I enjoyed the part. Philp was

  Guildenstern. Old Adam had once told us that on Earth, pre-Contact, there had been a

  derivative play—not by Shakespeare supposedly—which featured Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, those two lying but playful betrayers. I would have loved seeing it, if it ever did exist. Hell, I would have loved starring in it.

  The other parts fell the way you would expect now that you know our troupe—Alleyn as Hamlet, Old Adam as Hamlet’s father’s ghost (a role our lore says the Bard himself sometimes played), Aglaé as Ophelia, Kemp as Claudius, Burbank as Polonius, Goeke as Horatio, Condella as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, Hywo as Fortinbras. .. and so on.

  About the only profound
talent in our troupe not fully used in Hamlet was Heminges, who carried Othello-with his powerful Iago, cast as the gravedigger. Now the

  gravedigger—the official name in our “Persons of the Play” list is “First Clown,” the

  “Second Clown” being the gravedigger’s companion played today by Gough—is one of the great roles in all of Shakespeare, but it is relatively brief. Too brief for Heminges’s ego. But he made none of his usual protests this time as we rushed to dress and finish our makeup. He even smiled, as if performing for the Demiurgos to decide whether our species would be annihilated or not was what he had always looked forward to.

  * * * *

  None of us had slept for... I’d lost track of the hours, but seventy-two hours at least and I guessed many more (transiting the Pleroma strangely affects either one’s sense of time or time itself). .. and we’d performed four daunting plays: Much Ado About Nothing for the doles and arbeiters and late-coming Archons, Macbeth... shit, I mean “the Scottish Play”... for the Archons, then King Lear for the Poimen, and now Hamlet, a play that is almost impossible to produce and act in well enough to do it justice at the best of times.