Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

“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-sphere 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.