Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

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.