Muse of Fire

by Dan Simmons

  One critic, it is said, back in the pre-Contact centuries, suggested that because of all the failed attempts to put on Hamlet, we’d do better just to quit trying to perform it and to allow everyone to read it.

  Well, the Demiurgos did not look as if they were waiting to be handed— tentacled?—

  copies of the script.

  Under the brilliant yellow light of the distant blue-white star, the play went on. Waiting behind the arras with Philp for our characters to enter at the beginning of act 2, scene 2

  —Hamlet’s fellow students and so-called friends confer and conspire with King Claudius and Queen Gertrude before going on to try to trick Hamlet into revealing what the royal couple wants to know—I kept looking up and around.

  This ninth sphere-world from the sun we were on was so large that we could not see the upward-curving horizons in any direction, merely a strange glowing haze that might have been the distance-distorted image of the inner wall rising up thousands of miles away from here. But I could see hints of the other eight spheres inward from us toward the sun. That was a sight I have no words for and perhaps Shakespeare would have failed here as well—the size, the crystalline clarity, the turnings within turnings, the shafts of sunlight and quick-caught glimpses of color that might have been continents and blue seas a solar system’s leap away—but it made me cry.

  I was doing a lot of crying on this trip. I’ll blame it on the lack of sleep.

  * * * *

  When we had thought our command performance for the Poimen was our last and

  ultimate test, Kemp and the others had chosen King Lear for a variety of reasons, but perhaps because Lear’s infinitudes and nihilisms are more manageable—by man or any species—than Hamlet’s ever-expanding paradoxes.

  I’ve seen the play a hundred times and performed in it, usually as Rosenkrantz, more than half that number of times, but it always knocks me on my ass.

  In all of Shakespeare’s other plays, the characters that are larger than the play being performed—Falstaff, Rosalind, Cleopatra, the night porter in the Scottish Play, Mercutio

  —are either killed off or contained before they escape the deliberately confined double-

  sphered space of the play and theater. Not so with Hamlet and Hamlet. The play is about theater, not revenge, and is both the ultimate experience of theater and the ultimate comment on theater, and the strangely expanding consciousness of Hamlet—who begins as a student character prince about twenty years old and, “within a few weeks in the time of the play, ages to a wise man in his fifties at least— makes no pretense of following any story line other than Hamlet’s wildly leaping thoughts.

  I strutted and fretted my enjoyable moments on the stage. The Muse’s cabiri bots still were not working (Tooley had found that all their organic parts were missing), so we extended the usual stage and acted on without lighting, which would have been redundant in the bright sunshine anyway—and tried to make our entrances and exits without looking up at the hovering shells and tentacle-mouths of the three Demiurgos.

  My last scene was one that had been sometimes omitted in our shorter performances of the play—act 4, scene 4, where we encounter Fortinbras’s army on our way to the sea to sail to England, where Guildenstern and I are supposed to deliver Hamlet up to his execution but, according to offstage events, Hamlet will steal King Claudius’s execution request and substitute Guildie’s and my names instead, so presumably this is my swan song, and my last words to Alleyn. .. Hamlet. .. are “Will’t please you go, my lord?” but Hamlet is pleased to stay and to give what I call his “even for an eggshell” soliloquy. It’s especially odd, and I thought so this day under the shadow of the slowly shifting Demiurgos, that Hamlet seems to be praising Fortinbras, who is little more than a quarrelsome killing machine.

  I see

  The imminent death of twenty thousand men

  That for a fantasy and trick of fame

  Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot

  Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,

  Which is not tomb enough and continent

  To hide the slain? O,from this time forth

  My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!

  In other words, Hamlet—the paragon of human consciousness and occasional

  conscience (although he showed little enough of that when he stabbed stupid-but-innocent Polonius through the arras curtain and announced to his mother that he was going to lug the guts to another room)—was praising bloody action in a thug’s nature rather than his own sublime awareness of morality and mortality.

  And then the thought hit me like a stab between the ribs—Where the fuck is Heminges?

  * * * *

  Still in Rosenkrantz costume, I ran up the ramp into the Muse and began throwing open hull hatches and sliding down ladders without my feet touching the steps.

  Heminges was right where I expected him to be, in the Muse’s tiny room, but I hadn’t expected the heavy spade—the one the gravedigger was to use in his upcoming

  encounter with Hamlet—in his hands. He’d obviously already taken half a dozen swings at the Muse’s blue globe—the meta-glass was chipped and a few hairline cracks already extended from the niche where the spadeblade had fallen—and he was winding up to take another overhand swing when I leaped at him.

  Heminges was fueled by a fanatic’s rage—I could see white froth at the corners of his open mouth—but I was heavier, stronger, and younger than the professional Iago. I grabbed the spade, we whirled, and I forced him back against the bulkhead, but not before I’d glimpsed the Muse... the physical Muse, whoever or whatever she was. ..

  floating in the red halo of her own hair, her newly young breasts almost touching the metaglass directly beneath the spade’s damage, her arms passively down by her naked

  hips, her palms forward, as if she were awaiting the next and final spade blow almost with anticipation.

  Heminges and I lurched around the small compartment with the comic clumsiness of two grown men fighting each other to the death. All four of our hands were gripping the long spade handle chin-high between us. Neither of us spoke; both of us grunted.

  Heminges’s breath smelled of the whiskey we synthesized and broke out only after a successful performance.

  Finally my youth and terror-augmented strength—combined with a lucky knee applied briskly to his codpieced balls—turned the tide and I forced Heminges against the bulkhead again and then up, up, the spade handle under his chin, until his toes left the deck. He hung there close to helpless. One final concerted press forward and I’d crush his Adam’s apple with the handle, or just choke the fucking fool to death.

  Instead of smashing his larynx, I panted, “What are you doing?”

  His eyes, already wide, grew as round as the dragoman’s but much madder. “I. . .break. .

  .the globe...” he panted, breathing whiskey fumes all over me, “and the fusion reactor goes critical. We. .. blow. .. those alien. .. cock-suckers ... to hell.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, dropping him so his feet hit the deck but not relenting the pressure of the spade handle against his throat. If I slammed it up under his chin, it would snap his neck. “Nothing can make the reactor explode. Tooley told me so.”

  He tried to shake his head but it only resulted in the spade handle rubbing more skin from his already reddened neck. “She. .. told me... it would,” he gasped. His staring eyes were looking over my shoulder.

  I released the pressure and turned to look at the Muse, the spade now hefted loosely in my hands. “How did she tell you?” I asked Heminges without turning to look at him. He was no threat. He’d slid down the bulkhead and was sprawled on the deck, panting and wheezing.

  “Through dreams,” he managed at last. “She gets... into... my dreams. If the reactor goes critical, we can blow a hole in this Demiurgos sphere and all the air will rush out and...”

  He stopped. He must have realized then how insane that idea sounded. As if the Demiurgos’s
home—the ultimate Creation of the Creators—could be so easily damaged.

  I did not speak to him then, but looked directly into the Muse’s blue eyes when I spoke.

  “Did you really tell him that? Did you really get into his dreams and tell him he could do this? If you can turn this ship... yourself. .. into a hydrogen bomb, you sure don’t need this aging Iago to help you do it. What the fuck are you up to, woman?”

  The Muse smiled sadly at me but no voice came from the speaker grills on the wall.

  I turned back to Heminges, stood over him, and handed him the spade. “Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes are almost finished with their scene,” I said. “Gough will be going on with his pickaxe without you. He’d just fucking love to take your part and deliver your lines. He’s always thought he’d make a better First Clown than you. I doubt if the goddamned Demiurgos will notice that there’s an assistant gravedigger missing.”

  It was as if I’d run thousands of amps of current directly into Heminges’s ass. He leaped up, steadied himself on the spade, shot an angry look at the Muse, and clambered up the steps and out. Actors, I thought, are nothing if not predictable.

  My hands empty now, I spent another long moment staring at the naked woman in the blue sphere. I said nothing. This time she did speak through the intercom, her words echoing in the otherwise empty ship.

  “That had to be done, Wilbr, or he would have found a real way to damage the ship in his vain attempt at revolution. This way, I would have been the only one injured.”

  I still stared and said nothing. Injured? The Muse had been dead for centuries, the solid illusion of her naked young body here notwithstanding.

  “Do bring her down here, just the two of you and the dragoman, as soon as we enter the Pleroma,” said the Muse. Her lips did not move, of course, her mouth did not open, but it was her voice.

  I did not say, “Yes.” I did not say, “Bring who?” I said nothing.

  After a moment I turned my back, scrambled up the ladder, and went out into the sunlight to watch the end of the play.

  * * * *

  I’m sorry that I used the word “brilliant” and perhaps even “unprecedented” when I described our performance of King Lear earlier... and perhaps I even used words like that to describe our performance of the Scottish Play in front of the Archon, or maybe (although I doubt it) our staging of Much Ado About Nothing for the arbeiters and doles the day before... because now I have no adequate words to describe the truly brilliant performance our people achieved with this Hamlet. I’d missed a few minutes, to be sure,

  wrestling with Heminges and the spade down in the storm cellar of the Muse, but I’d not missed so much that I didn’t realize how truly extraordinary this show had been.

  Whoever the long-dead critic had been, if he’d been real at all, who said that Hamlet should be read rather than seen to be fully appreciated... well, he hadn’t seen this performance.

  Our people were half dead with exhaustion and tension by the last line, but somehow that added to the verisimilitude and unique quality of the performance. It was as if we had lived these hours—eternities—with the Prince of Denmark and his wit. Even those who hadn’t acted or who had simply been onstage as placeholders—the soldiers, attendants, guards, messengers, sailors, followers of Laertes and so forth—seemed as totally wrung out as Alleyn, Aglaé, Kemp, and the other principals.

  Heminges, I should mention, was goddamned wonderful. He’s the only character in the play—a play in which even the most inconsequential character speaks more artfully than any man or woman now alive—who is a worthy interlocutor to Hamlet. If language is a game—and when is it not with Shakespeare?—then the gravedigger was the only player who should have been allowed on the court with the fiendishly witty Hamlet. ‘“Tis a quick lie, sir, ‘twill away again from me to you,” the gravedigger says once, taking one of Hamlet’s serves and smashing it back across the net. (We know about tennis through Henry V.)

  Even before they are fully engaged in their battle of wits, Hamlet says of the gravedigger to Horatio, “How absolute the knave is. We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us.” Burbank taught me that this is a sailor’s card, a shipman’s card, that Hamlet is referring to—one on which all thirty-two compass points are clearly marked.

  But Hamlet is a play in which no clear compass points have ever been marked to guide either the actors or the audiences. It ends, as Hamlet himself does, with far more brilliant questions asked than answered. When Hywo as Fortinbras, his voice husky with

  exhaustion and emotion, speaks the last words of the play over our rough stage strewn with corpses.

  Take up the bodes. Such a sight as this

  Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

  Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

  And all the living exited by march, carrying Hamlet’s body with them; we did not provide the sound effects of the cannon shooting as we usually did.

  There was only silence: a silence broken only by the gentle afternoon breezes blowing across the mesa and the slight creakings and stirring of the Demiurgos’s triple legs and metal girdles and many tentacles. Their great yellow eyes did not blink. It was as if they were waiting for an encore.

  Our dead sat up onstage. We actors, including Alleyn who was almost staggering from exhaustion and Aglaé, who was as pale as the real drowned Ophelia, came back onstage, joined hands, and bowed.

  The Demiurgos made no sound or new movement.

  “Well,” said Kemp at last, still wearing the dead Claudius’s crown as he faced the silent dragoman. “Did we pass? Does the human race continue? What’s our grade?”

  “You are to return to your ship and seal it,” said the dragoman.

  “Fuck that!” cried Kemp. He was shouting now at the looming ship-sized shells of the Demiurgos, I noticed, not at the round-eyed dragoman. “Give us your answer. Give us

  your verdict. We’ve done our bleeding best for every race of you alien pricks. Tell us now!’

  “You are to return to your ship and seal it,” repeated the dragoman.

  “Arrrrrhh!” screamed Kemp and threw his crown at the tentacled maw of the nearest Demiurge. It did not quite make contact.

  We all went into the ship. The hatches were sealed. The viewstrips showed the Demiurgos ambling away to the north in their long three-legged strides in the short minute before the mesa rock and grass beneath the ship glowed white, then yellow, then turned into a long metallic funnel, and the ship fell—or was flung—violently down and down and then out. The internal fields all kicked on and we were frozen in place as the Muse compensated for the deadly acceleration gravities assailing us. Evidently they were within the thirty-one g’s she could handle. A moment later we abruptly transited to the gold nothingness of the Pleroma—the Demiurgos had not even bothered flinging us out through their tenth, eleventh, and twelfth spheres before making the transit leap—

  and Kemp said, “I’ll interpret our being allowed to leave as a passing grade.”

  “Allowed to leave?” said Heminges. “They fucking well booted us out.”

  Burbank said, “I’m going to get some sleep,” and everyone cheered raggedly and we began to head for our bunks. Some were so exhausted that they fell on couches or the deck and were instantly asleep.

  I sought out Aglaé before she disappeared up to her bunk cubbie.

  “Do you trust me?” I asked when I’d asked her to follow me down to the Muse’s level

  and she’d grudgingly complied. It felt strange to be alone with Aglaé in the dim blue light with the naked female form floating just a few feet away.

  * * * *

  “Do you trust me?” I asked again when she did not reply immediately.

  “Wilbr, what do you want? I’m tired. Very tired.” She had every right to be, I realized.

  Aglaé had held important parts in all four plays we’d presented in the last three endless, continuous, sleepless days and nights of strangeness. “If you brought me down
here for...” she began with a warning in her voice.

  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.