Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

Heminges, I should mention, was goddamned wonderful. He’s the only character in the play—a play in which even the most inconsequential character speaks more artfully than any man or woman now alive—who is a worthy interlocutor to Hamlet. If language is a game—and when is it not with Shakespeare? — then the gravedigger was the only player who should have been allowed on the court with the fiendishly witty Hamlet. ‘“Tis a quick lie, sir, ‘twill away again from me to you,” the gravedigger says once, taking one of Hamlet’s serves and smashing it back across the net. (We know about tennis through Henry V.)

Even before they are fully engaged in their battle of wits, Hamlet says of the gravedigger to Horatio, “How absolute the knave is. We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us.” Burbank taught me that this is a sailor’s card, a shipman’s card, that Hamlet is referring to—one on which all thirty-two compass points are clearly marked.

But Hamlet is a play in which no clear compass points have ever been marked to guide either the actors or the audiences. It ends, as Hamlet himself does, with far more brilliant questions asked than answered. When Hywo as Fortinbras, his voice husky with exhaustion and emotion, speaks the last words of the play over our rough stage strewn with corpses.

Take up the bodes. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

And all the living exited by march, carrying Hamlet’s body with them; we did not provide the sound effects of the cannon shooting as we usually did.

There was only silence: a silence broken only by the gentle afternoon breezes blowing across the mesa and the slight creakings and stirring of the Demiurgos’s triple legs and metal girdles and many tentacles. Their great yellow eyes did not blink. It was as if they were waiting for an encore.

Our dead sat up onstage. We actors, including Alleyn who was almost staggering from exhaustion and Aglaé, who was as pale as the real drowned Ophelia, came back onstage, joined hands, and bowed.

The Demiurgos made no sound or new movement.

“Well,” said Kemp at last, still wearing the dead Claudius’s crown as he faced the silent dragoman. “Did we pass? Does the human race continue? What’s our grade?”

“You are to return to your ship and seal it,” said the dragoman.

“Fuck that!” cried Kemp. He was shouting now at the looming ship-sized shells of the Demiurgos, I noticed, not at the round-eyed dragoman. “Give us your answer. Give us your verdict. We’ve done our bleeding best for every race of you alien pricks. Tell us now!’

“You are to return to your ship and seal it,” repeated the dragoman.

“Arrrrrhh!” screamed Kemp and threw his crown at the tentacled maw of the nearest Demiurge. It did not quite make contact.

We all went into the ship. The hatches were sealed. The viewstrips showed the Demiurgos ambling away to the north in their long three-legged strides in the short minute before the mesa rock and grass beneath the ship glowed white, then yellow, then turned into a long metallic funnel, and the ship fell—or was flung—violently down and down and then out. The internal fields all kicked on and we were frozen in place as the Muse compensated for the deadly acceleration gravities assailing us. Evidently they were within the thirty-one g’s she could handle. A moment later we abruptly transited to the gold nothingness of the Pleroma—the Demiurgos had not even bothered flinging us out through their tenth, eleventh, and twelfth spheres before making the transit leap—and Kemp said, “I’ll interpret our being allowed to leave as a passing grade.”

“Allowed to leave?” said Heminges. “They fucking well booted us out.”

Burbank said, “I’m going to get some sleep,” and everyone cheered raggedly and we began to head for our bunks. Some were so exhausted that they fell on couches or the deck and were instantly asleep.

I sought out Aglaé before she disappeared up to her bunk cubbie.

“Do you trust me?” I asked when I’d asked her to follow me down to the Muse’s level and she’d grudgingly complied. It felt strange to be alone with Aglaé in the dim blue light with the naked female form floating just a few feet away.

“Do you trust me?” I asked again when she did not reply immediately.

“Wilbr, what do you want? I’m tired. Very tired.” She had every right to be, I realized. Aglaé had held important parts in all four plays we’d presented in the last three endless, continuous, sleepless days and nights of strangeness. “If you brought me down here for…” she began with a warning in her voice.

We were interrupted by the dragoman coming down the ladder after dogging the overhead hatch behind him. I’d not told him to come.

I turned to the Muse in her sphere. The tiny cracks where the spade had dented the surface had not spread. My guess was that the metaglass would have survived a thousand spade attacks. “We’re here,” I said to the naked form.

“In immeasurable distance there glimmers a solitary star on the highest point of heaven,” said the dragoman in the Muse’s voice, accurate down to her new youthful energy. “This is the only God of this lonely star. This is his world, his Pleroma, his divinity.”

I knew the words so well I could have recited them myself. Any of us could have. This was from Saint Jung’s Seventh Sermon to the Dead.

“There is nothing that can separate man from his own God, if man can only turn his gaze away from the fiery spectacle of Abraxas,” continued the Muse’s voice through the dragoman’s mouth. I understood that she was communicating with us this way so the rest of the ship would not hear. But why? Why this sermon?

Aglaé looked at me with growing concern in her eyes. She didn’t like this sermon coming from the ship’s soul, and neither did I. I shook my head to show her my own confusion.

“Man here,” said the Muse. This was the penultimate verse of the Seventh Sermon, word for word. “God there. Weakness and insignificance here, eternal creative power there. Here is but darkness and damp cold. There all is sunshine.”

“Muse,” began Aglaé, “why have you—”

“Upon hearing this, the dead fell silent,” continued the Muse as if Aglaé had not spoken, “and they rose up like smoke rises over the fire of the shepherd, who guards his flock by night.”

“Amen,” Aglaé and I said in unison, out of habit.

“Anagramma,” said the Muse, her voice lower, completing the Seventh Sermon with its sacred and secret codicil. “Nahtriheccunde. Gahinneverahtunin. Zehgessurklach. Zunnus.”

Alarm klaxons began blaring throughout the ship. More alarms rang and bleated and thumped. The Muse’s voice—her old voice, probably a recorded voice, her voice in rare alarm even as her face behind the metaglass stayed serene, her eyes watchful—shouted out, “Warning! Warning! The airlocks are opening! The airlocks are opening! We are in Pleroma and all hatches and airlocks are opening! Warning!”

At that moment the dragoman’s neurofiber filaments slipped through my skin and flesh and pierced the nerves at the base of my skull. I saw filaments wrapping around Aglaé’s lovely neck and doing the same. More filaments shot forward from the dragoman’s head, made contact with the metaglass, and then passed through. The Muse extended her body so that the filaments pierced her small, white breasts.

“Warning! Airlocks opening. All hatches opening. We are in the Pleroma. Warning! Air pressure dropping. Don protective gear. Warning! All airlocks are…” came the recorded voice at full volume from all speakers, but the words grew tinier and tinnier and then disappeared completely as the last air roared and hissed and flowed out of the ship through all of its open airlocks and hatches and doors, while the golden vacuum of the Pleroma flowed in to fill each compartment and all of our straining lungs with its nothingness.