Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

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.