The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Lu gazed at me from his ruddy, honest face. He did indeed know everyone. A Navy lifer, and with all the amiability and human contacts that I lacked. And he trusted me. I could feel that unaccustomed warmth, like a small and steady fire.

  “I think I can do that, sir.”

  He did. I spoke first to Dalo, then to Forrest Jamili. He sent a packet of encrypted information. I went back to my data, working feverishly. Then I made a second encrypted call to Dalo. She said simply, “Yes. Susan says yes, of course she can. They all can.”

  “Dalo, find out when the next ship docks with the Sheherazade. If it’s today, book passage on it, no matter where it’s going. If there’s no ship today, then buy a seat on a supply shuttle and—”

  “Those cost a fortune!”

  “I don’t care. Just—”

  “Jon, the supply shuttles are all private contractors and they charge civilians a— It would wipe out everything we’ve saved and—why? What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t explain now.” I heard boots marching along the corridor to the vault. “Just do it! Trust me, Dalo! I’ll find you when I can!”

  “Captain,” an MP said severely, “come with me.” His weapon was drawn, and behind him stood a detail of grim-faced soldiers. Lu stepped forward, but I shot him a glance that said, Say nothing! This is mine alone!

  Good soldier that he was, he understood, and he obeyed. It was, after all, the first time I had ever given him a direct—if wordless—order, the first time I had assumed the role of commander.

  My mother should have been proud.

  Her office resembled my quarters, rather than the vaults: a trapezoidal, low-ceilinged room with alien art etched on all the stone walls. The room held the minimum of furniture. General Anson stood alone behind her desk, a plain military-issue camp item, appropriate to a leader who was one with the ranks, don’t you know. She did not invite me to sit down. The MPs left—reluctantly, it seemed to me—but, then, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she could break me bare-knuckled if necessary.

  She said, “You made two encrypted commlink calls and one encrypted ansible message from this facility, all without proper authorization. Why?”

  I had to strike before she got to me, before I went under. I blurted, “I know why you blocked my access to the meteor-deflection data.”

  She said nothing, just went on gazing at me from those eyes that could chill glaciers.

  “There was no deflection of that meteor. The meteor wasn’t on our tracking system because Humans haven’t spent much time in this sector until now. You caught a lucky break, and whatever deflection records exist now, you added after the fact. Your so-called victory was a sham.” I watched her face carefully, hoping for . . . what? Confirmation? Outraged denial that I could somehow believe? I saw neither. And, of course, I was flying blind. Captain Susan Finch had told Dalo only that yes, of course officers had access to the deflection records; they were a brilliant teaching tool for tactical strategy. I was the only one who’d been barred from them, and the general must have had a reason for that. She always had a reason for everything.

  Still she said nothing. Hoping that I would utter even more libelous statements against a commanding officer? Would commit even more treason? I could feel my breathing accelerate, my heart start to pound.

  I said, “The Teli must have known the meteor’s trajectory; they’ve colonized 149-Delta a long time. They let it hit their base. And I know why. The answer is in the art.”

  Still no change of expression. She was stone. But she was listening.

  “The answer is in the art—ours and theirs. I ansibled Forrest Jamili last night—no, look first at these diagrams—no, first—”

  I was making a mess of it as the seizure moved closer. Not now not now not in front of her . . .

  Somehow I held myself together, although I had to wrench my gaze away from her to do it. I pulled the holo cube from my pocket, activated it, and projected it on the stone wall. The Teli etchings shimmered, ghostly, behind the laser colors of my data.

  “This is a phase-space diagram of Ebenfeldt equations using input about the frequency of Teli art creation. We have tests now, you know, that can date any art within weeks of its creation by pinpointing when the raw materials were altered. A phase-state diagram is how we model bifurcated behaviors grouped around two attractors. What that means is that the Teli created their art in bursts, with long fallow periods between bursts when . . . no, wait, General, this is relevant to the war!”

  My voice had risen to a shriek. I couldn’t help it. Contempt rose off her like heat. But she stopped her move toward the door.

  “This second phase-space diagram is Teli attack behavior. Look . . . it inverts the first diagrams! They attack viciously for a while, and during that time virtually no Teli creates art at all . . . Then when some tipping point is reached, they stop attacking or else attack only ineffectively, like the last raid here. They’re . . . waiting. And if the tipping point—this mathematical value—isn’t reached fast enough, they sabotage their own bases, like letting the meteor hit 149-Delta. They did it in the battle outside 16-Beta and in the Q-Sector massacre . . . you were there! When the mathematical value is reached—when enough of them have died—they create art like crazy but don’t wage war. Not until the art reaches some other hypothetical mathematical value that I think is this second attractor. Then they stop creating art and go back to war.”

  “You’re saying that periodically their soldiers just curl up and let us kill them?” she spat at me. “The Teli are damned fierce fighters, Captain—I know that even if the likes of you never will. They don’t just whimper and lie down on the floor.”

  Kai lanu kai lanu . . .

  “It’s a . . . a religious phenomenon, Forrest Jamili thinks. I mean, he thinks their art is a form of religious atonement—all of their art. That’s its societal function, although the whole thing may be biologically programmed as well, like the deaths of lemmings to control population. The Teli can take only so much dying, or maybe even only so much killing, and then they have to stop and . . . and restore what they see as some sort of spiritual balance. And they loot our art because they think we must do the same thing. Don’t you see—they were collecting our art to try to analyze when we will stop attacking and go fallow! They assume we must be the same as them, just—”

  “No warriors stop fighting for a bunch of weakling artists!”

  “—as you assume they must be the same as us.”

  We stared at each other.

  I said, “As you have always assumed that everyone should be the same as you. Mother.”

  “You’re doing this to try to discredit me, aren’t you,” she said evenly. “Anyone can connect any dots in any statistics to prove whatever they wish. Everybody knows that. You want to discredit my victory because such a victory will never come to you. Not to the sniveling, backstabbing coward who’s been a disappointment his entire life. Even your wife is worth ten of you—at least she doesn’t crumple under pressure.”

  She moved closer, closer to me than I could ever remember her being, and every one of her words hammered on the inside of my head, my eyes, my chest.

  “You got yourself assigned here purposely to embarrass me, and now you want to go further and ruin me. It’s not going to happen, soldier, do you hear me? I’m not going to be made a laughingstock by you again, the way I was in every officer’s club during your whole miserable adolescence and—”

  I didn’t hear the rest. I went under, seizing and screaming.

  It is two days later. I lie in the medical bay of the Sheherazade, still in orbit around 149-Delta. My room is locked, but I am not in restraints. Crazy, under arrest, but not violent. Or perhaps the General is simply hoping I’ll kill myself and save everyone more embarrassment.

  Downside, in Vault D, Lu is finishing crating the rest of the looted Human art, all of which is supposed to be returned to its rightful owners. The Space Navy serving its galactic citizens. Maybe the ar
t will actually be shipped out in time.

  My holo cube was taken from me. I imagine that all my data has been wiped from the base’s and ship’s deebees as well, or maybe just classified as severely restricted. In that case, no one who is cleared to look at it, which would include only top line officers, is going to open files titled “Teli Art Creation.” Generals have better things to do.

  But Forrest Jamili has copies of my data and my speculations.

  Phase-state diagrams bring order out of chaos. Some order, anyway. This is, interestingly, the same thing that art does. It is why, looking at one of Dalo’s mutomati works, I can be moved to tears. By the grace, the balance, the redemption from chaos of the harsh raw materials of life.

  Dalo is gone. She left on the supply ship when I told her to. My keepers permitted a check of the ship’s manifest to determine that. Dalo is safe.

  I will probably die in the coming Teli attack, along with most of the Humans both on the Sheherazade and on 149-Delta. The Teli fallow period for this area of space is coming to an end. For the last several months, there have been few attacks by Teli ships, and those few badly executed. Months of frenetic creation of art, including all those etchings on the stone walls of the Citadel. Did I tell General Anson how brand-new all those handmade etchings are? I can’t remember. She didn’t give me time to tell her much.

  Although it wouldn’t have made any difference. She believes that war and art are totally separate activities—one important and one trivial—whose lifelines never converge. The general too will probably die in the coming attack. She may or may not have time to realize that I was right.

  But that doesn’t really matter anymore either. And strangely, I’m not at all afraid. I have no signs of going under, no breathing difficulties, no shaking, no panic. And only one real regret: that Dalo and I did not get to gaze together at the Sistine Chapel on Terra. But no one gets everything. I have had a great deal: Dalo, art, even some possible future use to humanity if Forrest does the right thing with my data. Many people never get so much.

  The ship’s alarms begin to sound, clanging loud even in the medical bay.

  The Teli are back, resuming their war.

  MUSE OF FIRE

  DAN SIMMONS

  A writer of considerable power, range, and ambition, an eclectic talent not willing to be restricted to any one genre, Dan Simmons sold his first story to The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982. By the end of that decade, he had become one of the most popular and bestselling authors in both the horror and the science fiction genres, winning, for instance, both the Hugo Award for his epic science fiction novel Hyperion and the Bram Stoker Award for his huge horror novel Carrion Comfort in the same year, 1990. He has continued to split his output since between science fiction (The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man) and horror (Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night) . . . although a few of his novels are downright unclassifiable (Phases of Gravity, for instance, which is a straight literary novel although it was published as part of a science fiction line), and some (like Children of the Night) could be legitimately considered to be either science fiction or horror, depending on how you squint at them. Similarly, his first collection, Prayers to Broken Stones, contains a mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and “mainstream” stories, as does his most recent collection, Lovedeath. Some of his most recent books confirm his reputation for unpredictability, including The Crook Factory, a spy thriller set in World War II and starring Ernest Hemingway; Darwin’s Blade, a “statistical thriller” halfway between mystery and horror; Hardcase, a hard-boiled detective novel; and A Winter Haunting, a ghost story. Coming up is a new novel, The Terror. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Simmons now lives with his family in Colorado.

  Simmons has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the New Space Opera with his glittering, baroque Hyperion novels, and his two most recent novels, Ilium and Olympus, which use the Trojan War as the backdrop for an ambitious space opera duology. In the complex and multifaceted novella that follows, he takes us on a journey of unparalleled scope and scale, in company with a hapless group of actors who find themselves burdened with the responsibility of putting on the single most important theatrical performance in human history . . .

  I sometimes think that none of the rest of the things would have happened if we hadn’t performed the Scottish Play that night at Mezel-Goull. Nothing good ever comes from putting on the Scottish Play—if we remember any history at all, we know that—and much bad often does.

  But I doubt if there have ever been ramifications like this before.

  The Muse of Fire followed the Archon funeral barge out of the Pleroma into the Kenoma, slipped out of its pleromic wake like a newborn emerging from a caul, and made its own weak-fusion way to our next stop on the tour, a world known only as 25–25–261B. I’d been there before. By this time, I’d been with the Earth’s Men long enough to have visited all of the four hundred or so worlds we were allowed to tour regularly. They say that there are over ten thousand worlds in the Tell—ten thousand we humans have been scattered to, I mean—but I’ll never know if that’s true. We’ll never know.

  I always love the way the Muse roars down through cloud and sky on her thundering three-mile-long pillar of fire, especially at night, and the descent to the arbeiter community on the coastal plateau below the Archon keep of Mezel-Goull was no disappointment.

  We landed on the inner edge of the great stone shelf separating the human villages from the acid-tossed sea cliffs. One glance at the Muse’s log had reminded me that 25–25–261B had only three variations in its day and weather: twilight-bright dimness and scalding spray blown in by winds from the crashing black ocean of sulfuric acid for fourteen hours each day; twilight-bright dimness and sandstorms blown to the barely habitable coasts by hot winds from the interior of the continent for another fourteen hours each day; and full darkness when no winds blew for the final fourteen hours. The air was breathable here—all of our tour worlds had that in common, of course, since we only travel to planets where the Archons keep arbeiter and dole slaves—but even in the middle of their twenty-one hours of daytime on this bleak rock, the sky brightened to only a dim, brooding grayness because of the constant layers of clouds, and no one ventured out unprotected during the hours when the scalding spray blew in from the black, sulfuric sea.

  The Muse touched down during the hours the hot simoom winds blew. No one came out from the huddled stone city to meet us. The thousands of arbeiters were either sleeping in their barracks between shifts or working in the mines, dropping down to darkness in rusty buckets and then following veins miles deeper underground to harvest a gray fungus that the Archons considered a delicacy. The few hundred local doles in their somewhat higher huddle of stone hovels were doing whatever doles do: recording, accounting, measuring, file-keeping, waiting for instructions from their masters via the dragomen.

  We stayed inside the ship while the hot winds roared, but the Muse’s cabiri scrambled out through maintenance hatches like so many flesh-and-metal spiders, opened storage panels, rigged worklights, strung long cables from the hull, pounded k-chrome stakes into solid rock, unfolded steel-mesh canvas, and had the main performance tent up and rigidified within thirty minutes. The first show was not scheduled to begin for another six hours, but it took a while for the cabiri to arrange the lighting and stage and set up the many rows of seats. The old Globe Theater in London during the Bard’s time, according to troupe lore, would seat three thousand, but our little tent-theater comfortably seated about eight hundred human beings. We expected far fewer than that during each of our four scheduled performances on 25–25–261B.

  On many worlds we have permission to land at a variety of arbeiter huddles, but this world had only this single major human population center. The town has no name, of course. We humans gave up naming things long ago, abandoning that habit along with our culture, politics, arts, history, hope, and sense of self. No one in the troupe or among the arbeiters and doles here ha
d a clue as to who had named the Archon keep Mezel-Goull, which apparently meant “Devil’s Rest,” but the name seemed appropriate. It sounded appropriate, even if the words actually had no meaning.

  The hulking mass of Archon steel and black stone dominated an overhanging cliff about six miles north of this plateau upon which the humans were housed. Through binoculars, I could see the tall slits of tower windows glowing yellow while pale white searchlights stabbed out from the keep and up to the highlands, then probed down over the human escarpment and across the Muse, then swept out to the sulfur sea. None of us from the troupe had ever been to the keep, of course—why would humans, other than dragomen (whom most of us do not consider human), have any business with Archons? They own us, they control our lives, they dictate our actions and fates, but they have no interest in us and we usually return the favor.

  There were twenty-three of us in this Shakespearean troupe called the Earth’s Men. Not all of us were men, of course, although we knew through stage history that in the Bard’s day even the women’s roles were acted by males.

  My name is Wilbr. I was twenty SEY old that day we landed on 25–25–261B and had been chosen for the troupe when I was nine and turned out to be good enough at memorizing my lines and hitting my marks to be on stage for most productions, but by age twenty I knew in my heart that I would never be a great actor. Probably not even a good one. But my hope remained to play Hamlet someday, somehow, somewhere. Even if only once.

  There were a couple of others about my age in the Earth’s Men; Philp was one of them and a good friend. There were several young women in the troupe, including Aglaé, the best and most attractive Juliet and Rosalind I’ve ever seen: she was a year older than me and my choice for girlfriend, lover, and wife, but she never noticed me; Tooley was our age, but he primarily did basic maintenance engineering on the Muse, although he could hold a spear in a crowd scene if pressed to.