Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

“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. 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.