Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

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 toward 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.

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.