Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

“Then perhaps the oceans are being refilled and the…goddamned tombs… torn down as we speak,” said the dragoman. “And perhaps your kind has been returned also to more Earthlike worlds—beyond the Tell, perhaps even among the Spheres, where they can resume their stumble toward their destiny.”

“What in the hell is this… thing… babbling about?” demanded Kemp.

“This thing is more God than Abraxas or the Poimen or the Archons were or will ever be,” I said tiredly.

Kemp and the others could only stare with their mouths open. I think all of our mouths were open. We were all learning to breathe air again.

“It was never really a test of us, was it?” I asked the dragoman.

“Only in the sense that every one of your performances is always a test,” he said.

“But you were testing them,” I said. “The Archons. The Poimen. The Demiurgos. Even Abraxas, if there is such a thing.”

“Yes,” said the dragoman. “There is no Abraxas, but there are the Abraxi. They are the Pleroma. Think of them as a sort of primal cosmic zooplankton. They are not very intelligent and make piss-poor gods.”

“Did all these species pass?” I asked.

“Not all of them.” The dragoman walked past us and looked at the Archon keep a mile below us. “Do you want that to remain?” he asked.

“No,” I said. While the others were trying to understand what we were talking about, I said to the Muse, “Full fusion thrust, please. Melt that place to slag.”

The Muse did what I asked. We felt the internal fields press around us as the ship leaped back into space.

“Were you really dead?” I asked the dragoman. “Did the Poimen really resurrect you from the dead?”

“I was. They thought they did. I have allowed others to believe the same in other places and at other times. Illusions are important for children, especially illusions about oneself or one’s place in the universe.”

“Do they know who you are? What you are?”

“No,” said the dragoman. He showed his thin, lipless smile again. “Do you?”

Before I could speak—and I do not know to this day what I was about to say—the dragoman said to us all, “You will encounter hundreds of other races of sentient and tool-using, if not always intelligent, beings if you cross the Pleroma to places beyond the Tell. None of them are gods. You will have to war with some if you want to survive. Some may have to die out. Some will want to destroy you. Some you may wish to destroy or conquer. You will have to look inside yourselves and to your poetry when those choices are faced.”

Aglaé said, “So there are no gods out there?”

“None out there,” said the dragoman. “Perhaps one or more in here.” He disappeared and we all leaped back as the air rushing into the space where he had been made a small thunderclap.

The Muse’s sudden voice from the walls made us all jump again.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

“Which of the Bard’s plays is that from?” asked Burbank, his voice hoarse with exhaustion and disbelief that there were lines he did not know.

“It’s not Shakespeare,” replied the Muse in her new, young voice so filled with dark energy. “It’s by a man named Wystan Hugh Auden. You people need to learn some new poets.”

“Perhaps you’ll have time to teach us,” I said. “Where are we now, please?” The viewstrips showed only stars, darkness, and arcane coordinates.

“We’re approaching pleromic transit-phase velocity,” said the Muse. “What is your desired destination?”

Only Aglaé spoke, but she spoke for all of us.

“Home.”