Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

But before Aglaé spoke that first line—she hesitated, her eyes on mine, the God and dragoman forgotten by both of us—I began to undress her. She rushed to undress me.

But the lovemaking was not rushed. I have no need to describe it here and you have no need to hear details, but trust me that there was nothing rushed, nothing self-conscious, no sense of doom or finality, no awareness of other eyes on us—neither divine nor dragomanic—and we made love as joyously and slowly and then as impetuously and wildly as Romeo and Juliet would have at their age and in their depths of first-love rapture.

I did love her. Juliet. Aglaé. My love. My life.

We half-dressed afterward, she delivered her “Wilt thou be gone?” line, we laughed and debated whether it was the lark or the nightingale—the former meant death to me from Juliet’s family, but I laughed out, “‘Let me be ta’en, let me be put to death. I am content, so thou wilt have it so.’”

That wakens her to the morn and danger. She all but shoves me out with protests and final kisses and more final hugs and kisses.

I’d forgotten Abraxas. Forgotten the floating dragoman with the unblinking eyes. I’d forgotten everything but my performance and the truth beneath it—which was my body still vibrating like a struck bell because of my lovemaking with Aglaé and the knowledge that should the human race or universe itself end tomorrow, it was all worth it for these moments.

It was in our final tomb scene together that I realized that we were probably going to die then and there.

Our lovemaking had been spontaneous but real.

Our love was new but real.

The lines we were delivering had never been delivered like this by living actors in all the history of time or theater. Our energies were absolute. Our emotions all real.

I was sure that when I pantomimed drinking the poison in Juliet’s tomb, I would feel the cold spread of the true apothecary’s poison actually move through my veins like death-ice. And then, a moment later, when Aglaé pantomimed my dagger entering her breast, real blood would flow into the Pleroma and she would die.

“‘Here’s to my love,’” I whispered anyway, holding up the imaginary bottle and drinking it all down. “‘O true apothecary. Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.’”

The kiss was brief. I was dying after all. I fell, floating slowly away from where she floated horizontally in the golden glow.

I did not die. Nor did Aglaé’s make-believe dagger pierce an all-too-real and beating heart. The show went on. I summarized Friar Lawrence’s lines, the Page’s, the Watchmen’s, then Aglaé reported Capulet’s wife’s and Montague’s sorrow in snippets of dialogue, and then I delivered Balthasar’s and the Prince’s important lines.

Aglaé floated dead again while I boomed out in a prince’s royal voice.

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,

The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;

Some shall be pardoned, and some punished:

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Aglaé floated upright next to me and took my hand. We bowed together in Abraxas’s direction.

The God who was also the Devil, the apotheosis of Night and Day combined, did not move. His rooster eyes did not blink. His arms on the throne were still. His serpent legs with their serpent heads and fangs and serpent eyes did not stir or slither.

Aglaé and I looked to the dragoman.

Time did not move in this timeless place, but I could feel Aglaé’s heartbeats and my own. We lived.

“Well?” I said to the dragoman at last.

“Return to your ship,” he said.

“Not yet,” I said. Aglaé and I kicked forward together, floating closer to the throne and the God Above Gods seated on it. We could clearly see the lion teeth in the huge rooster beak as we came closer.

We stopped in front of Him. “Do you have anything to say to us?” I asked.

“Speak now,” said Aglaé to the thing on the throne, “or forever hold your peace.”

Abraxas did not stir or blink.

I raised my fist and brought it down hard on the God’s head. The chanticleer coxcomb and skull cracked and fell away when I struck again.

Aglaé’s small fists pounded His chest. It also cracked and then opened, showing hollowness inside.

The Unlikely Likely One, the All-Powerful in the Realms of Reality and Unreality, was as hollow and fragile as a plaster statue.

We turned to look at the dragoman.

“It’s always been you,” said Aglaé.

“Of course,” said the naked form. “Let’s get back into the Muse before you catch your death of cold out here.”

The Muse sealed the airlocks, pumped the Pleroma out, released real air into the ship from storage tanks, and the twenty-one other members of our troupe began gasping and gagging and coughing and retching. All had survived.

“There have been alterations,” came the Muse’s voice through the intercoms. “I can transit the Pleroma on my own now. To anywhere in the Tell or beyond. Where would you have us go?”

Without really thinking or waiting for Kemp or Burbank or Condella or the others—even my beloved Aglaé—to respond, I said, “25-25-261B.”

This transit took less than thirty minutes.

As much as we all wanted to crawl to our bunks and sleep for a month, most of us showered and dressed in our clean ship tunics and gathered in the common room, where Kemp and other older ones—still thinking they commanded the ship or their destinies—demanded to know what had happened in the Pleroma. I let Aglaé tell them.

“What was Abraxas’s verdict then?” asked Heminges. “On whether the human race continues or ends?” Aglaé had left out the part where we had found our God to be brittle, dead, false, and hollow.

“Perhaps we’ll see on 25-25-261B,” I said just as the Muse announced that we had exited the Pleroma and were approaching the planet.

The Muse roared down through cloud and sky on her thundering three-mile-long pillar of fire. It was daytime and the hot winds were howling in from the high desert above the arbeiters’ and doles’ plateau.

We suited up in hot condition suits and filter masks and went out anyway.

What we’d seen from orbit was true: the arbeiter barracks were empty, the dole hovels and offices deserted, the mushroom mine works abandoned and silent except for the howling of the wind.

Everyone was gone.

We returned to the ship and I ordered it to rise and hover near the Archon keep.

The stone-steel walls were there, but only a shell now. It looked as if a great fire had consumed every part of the interior. Embers still glowed.

“Where is everyone?” I asked the dragoman.

He showed spatulate fingers in an openhanded gesture even while he gave his small-shouldered shrug. “Perhaps the Archons have gone home—”

“I don’t mean the goddamned Archons,” I interrupted. “I mean the people. The human beings. The slaves. The people.”

If he had shrugged again, or smiled, I would have killed him then—be he dragoman or divinity or both—but he only said, “Perhaps you failed your tests and your people are no more. Gone from the galaxy, with your troupe soon to follow.”

“No,” I said. It was not a protest, merely a statement of certainty.

“Then perhaps some… force… has removed them from all worlds in the Tell where they were in bondage and sent them home to Earth,” he said.

I shook my head. “There’s not room enough on Earth, even without the oceans, even if the goddamned tombs were to be torn down, for the billions upon billions of us from the Tell,” I said.