Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire

“Dear Abraxas,” whispered Burbank. “How tall are those structures?”

We could see the towers’ shadows now, thrown across entire continents below them, across seas of clouds. The base of each tower was invisible beneath the white and blue—perhaps the fluid-filled towers passed through the entire giant world like so many crystalline stakes driven through the planet’s heart—but their summits and upper floors rose deep into the vacuum of cislunar space.

“Hundreds of miles high, at least,” said Heminges who knew a few technical things. “Thousands, I think.”

“That’s impossible,” said Condella.

The towing ship slowed and we slowed with it as we entered the cislunar system.

“Look at this,” said Tooley, who had pushed some of the viewstrips to their maximum magnification.

From farther out we’d seen the writhing strands rising from the world toward the many moons, but now we could see that not only were they continuous—connected all the way from the giant planet to the many hurtling moons, some of which must have been the size of Earth or 25-25-26 IB, but the cords, each anchored somewhere on the big planet, were transparent and hollow.

“Those must each be three or four hundred miles in diameter,” whispered Gough.

“Impossible,” said Kemp.

Coeke nodded and rubbed stubble on his massive jaw. “It is impossible, but look…” He stabbed a blunt, black finger into the holo of the viewstrip. “There’s something moving inside each connecting thread.”

“Are those things bridges?” asked Alleyn in hushed tones.

“More like umbilicals, I think,” said Hywo. “Conduits. They’re filled with liquid. Things are… swimming… moving both directions in that fluid.”

“Not possible,” Kemp said.

“We’re closing on that tallest tower pretty fast,” said Philp.

He was right. Kemp, Tooley, and Burbank, our three most common interlocutors with the Muse, began calling to her with some alarm in their voices—if we needed to fire engines to brake, she needed to do it now —but the Muse did not answer.

“Oh, Abraxas, embracer of all opposites, terror of the sun, heart of the sun, help us,” prayed Old Adam.

A blue sphere about twelve feet across floated through the hull. We clambered and leaped to get out of its way.

At first, in my fear and confusion, I thought it was the blue-fluid-filled globe below that held the mummy of the Muse, but this was larger and something else. The blue was a different color and the sphere glowed from within. There was a living being in the water or fluid; the creature was golden, vaguely amphibian, and about eight feet long. I could see a face of sorts, eyes of sorts, a slash of a mouth or feeding orifice, large gills, gold and green scales, and two vestigial arms, like those of a malformed fetus, with lovely small hands.

Suddenly the still corpse of the dragoman spoke. “We are sorry we injured this member of your species. He is no longer living. We shall resurrect him to make amends.”

None of us spoke until Aglaé managed, “Are you the Poimen?”

“We did not mean to damage this unit while we were taking your ship from the possession of the petty rulers,” said the dead dragoman, a black fluid as viscous as ink still running from the corners of his mouth and eyes as he lay there on the couch.

I remembered my catechism, Father teaching me in the glass room through the endless rainy afternoons on Earth. Centuries ago, after our first contact with the Archons and the end of our species’ rule of self, Abraxas had revealed four levels of our masters, four stages of our own eternal evolution should our physical bodies be returned to Earth and our psyche and pneuma be pure enough to ascend the four circles.

The Archons were the petty rulers. The Poimen, whom no humans in our lifetimes had ever glimpsed, were the shepherds. The Demiurgos were the half-makers. (It was they who had created our faulty, failed Earth and universe.) The Abraxi were the shattered vessels of Abraxas, the ultimate God of Opposites.

The dragoman sat up on his couch, set his splayed feet on the deck, and wiped ink from his lipless mouth. His synaptic filaments hung down like wet vines. His black-rimmed eyes stared at us with no obvious signs of alarm. “What happened while I was dead?”

Before we could answer, he spoke again, but his voice had that somehow flatter, infinitely more vacant tone it had held a moment before when the Poimen amphibian in the blue globe had spoken through him.

“We will be docking within moments. You will choose one of your mimesis episodes for performance in one hour and eleven minutes. An appropriate place will be made ready for you. There will be those there to receive your images and sounds… an audience.”

“One hour and eleven minutes!” shouted Kemp. None of us had slept for at least thirty-six hours. We’d already performed Much Ado About Nothing and the most successful performance of The Tragedy of Macbe… the Scottish Play… that we had ever seen, much less participated in.

“One hour and eleven minutes?” he cried again.

But the Poimen and its sphere were gone, floated back through the hull and out of sight.

The Poimen ship placed the Muse of Fire gently in a niche near the top of the crystal tower—we passed through some sort of tough but permeable membrane that held the liquid inside, not to mention its inhabitants, safe and separate from the cold of space—and then other gold and green and reddish and blue-gilled forms piloting small machines, open and delicate jet sledges which they guided with their tiny hands, took us down the thousand miles or two of flooded crystal column at an impossible speed.

“Supercavitation,” muttered Tooley.

“What?” snapped Kemp.

“Nothing.”

Our one engineer seemed sullen since the Muse quit speaking to him.

We spent most of the hour and ten minutes during the descent—the water-scooter Poimen pulled and pushed us through clouds and what seemed like blue and turqoise seas—arguing about what to perform.

“Romeo and Juliet,” argued Alleyn and Aglaé. Of course they would argue for that play. It was theirs. Kemp and Condella and Adam and even Heminges were old farts and demoted to secondary and tertiary roles in that play.

Kemp vetoed the idea. “This may be the most important performance we ever do,” said the troupe leader. “We have to put on the best —the best of the Bard, the best of ourselves.”

“You said that yesterday,” Alleyn said dryly. “For the Archons.”

“Well, it was true then,” said Kemp. He was so exhausted that his voice was raw. “It’s truer now.”

“What then?” asked Burbank. “Hamlet? Lear?”

“Lear,” decided Kemp.

What a surprise! I thought bitterly. Kemp decides on the play tailored to Kemp on our most important performance ever. The universe ages, Earth loses its oceans, the human race is subjugated and turned into cultureless futureless slaves, but actors still count lines.

“Will I be Cordelia?” asked Aglaé.

Of course she would. She’d been Cordelia in the past twenty performances, with Condella as the infinitely rancid older Goneril.

“No, I will be Cordelia,” announced Condella in tones that brooked no opposition. “You will be Regan. Becca can be Goneril.”

“But,” began Aglaé, obviously crushed, “how can you play…” She stopped. How can an actress tell another actress that she’s decades too old for a part, even when it would be obvious to the most groundling groundling?

Kemp said, “These are aliens. We’ve never seen these… Poimen… and they’ve never seen us. They can’t tell our ages. They almost certainly can’t tell our genders. I’m not sure they can tell our species.”