The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “And the sky, so blue,” whispered the girl, whose name I’d forgotten again. “It must be so lovely.”

  “Yes,” I said and stifled a yawn. My earliest memories were the red sky-scars of descending and ascending Archon funeral barges, carrying millions more of freeze-dried human corpses to their resting places and then ascending again with the empty sarcophagi, the massive, ugly ship flames clawing across the gray-clouded sky to the backdrop thunder of their booming pulse drives. The only clear areas on Earth were the spaceports where the funeral barges landed and took off, around the clock, while huge service cabiri unloaded the transport sarcophagi, tumbled the brittle corpses into bins, and then reloaded the containers.

  The girl started caressing me again. I gently disengaged her hand and began pulling on my clothes.

  “Tomorrow’s . . . today’s . . . Sabbath,” I whispered. “I’ll see you in church.”

  I actually was religious—I was raised that way—and I did see Larli in church later that morning, but only across the crowded heads of the congregation. I was sure that more doles and arbeiters than usual attended services that day just to see the outworlders. As always, the rough stone pews were filled with the usual bands of brown wool homespun work uniforms, slightly less rough gray cotton administrator tunics, and the small cluster of colorful silks and cottons and wools that we dozen or so regularly churchgoing Earth’s Men chose to wear to Mass.

  The church itself was no cathedral. The locals had cleaned out one of the stone barns erected by the Archon mechs, put rough glass in the windows, converted the hayloft to a choir loft—my loins stirred when I saw the loft and that’s when I searched the crowd for Larli—and put some crude stone and canvas images of Gnostic saints and Abraxas him/herself at stations along the wall and behind the altar rail. The icons and paintings were rough but I could make out Saint Valentinius. Saint Sophia, Saint Thomas, Saint Emerson, Saint Blake, Saint Hesse, Saint Caprocates with his wife Alexandra hovering behind and above him, Saint Menander, Saint Basilides, and Simon Magus. That last prophet of the church was always depicted as flying, and in the painting along the north wall, the painted expression of Simon Magus looked as surprised at his sudden flying ability as the poorly rendered faces of the peasants below him.

  Abraxas, of course, held center stage, roughly where a huge cross and Jesus might have hung behind the altar long ago during the brief Christian era. The large sculpture carried the traditional whip and shield—showing the conjoined opposites of attack and defense—and had the usual head of a rooster, body of a man, and legs of heavy, coiled snakes. Behind the sculpture on a black, circular stone backdrop were gold stars with varying number of rays as well as the eight-fold symbol of the ogdoad, representing the transcending of the seven planets.

  The two perfecti at the front of the church—one male, one female, as prescribed by the Abraxic requirement of joining of opposites, one in all white with a black collar band, the other wearing the reverse—performed the opening rituals with the usual provincial blend of ineptitude and enthusiasm.

  The male perfectus gave the sermon. It was the third sermon from Saint Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead and I could have recited it from memory, and with far more feeling than the white-robed perfectus could deliver on his best day. Compared to memorizing and delivering the simplest line from Shakespeare, Jung’s rhetoric was baby’s work.

  The dead approaches like mist out of the swamps and they shouted: “Speak to us further about the highest god!”

  —Abraxas is the god whom it is difficult to know. His power is the very greatest because man does not perceive it at all. Man sees the summum bonum, supreme good, of the sun, and also the infinum malum, endless evil, of the devil, but Abraxas, he does not see, for he is undefinable life itself, which is the mother of good and evil alike.

  Life appears smaller and weaker than the summum bonum, wherefore it is hard to think that Abraxas should supersede in his power the sun, which is the radiant fountain of all life forces.

  Abraxas is the sun and also the eternally gaping abyss of emptiness, of the diminisher and dissembler, the devil.

  The power of Abraxas is twofold. You cannot see it, because in your eyes the opposition of this power seems to cancel it out.

  That which is spoken by God-the-Sun is life.

  That which is spoken by the Devil is death.

  Abraxas, however, speaks the venerable and also accursed word, which is life and death at once.

  Abraxas generates truth and falsehood, good and evil, light and darkness with the same word and in the same deed. Therefore Abraxas is truly the terrible one.

  He is magnificent even as the lion at the very moment when he strikes his prey down. His beauty is like the beauty of a spring morn.

  Indeed, he is himself the greater Pan, and also the lesser. He is Priapos.

  He is the monster of the underworld, the octopus with a thousand tentacles, he is the twistings of winged serpents and of madness.

  He is the hermaphrodite of the lowest beginning.

  He is the lord of toads and frogs, who live in water and come out unto the land, and who sing together at high noon and at midnight.

  He is fullness, uniting itself with emptiness.

  He is the sacred wedding;

  He is love and the murder of love;

  He is the holy one and his betrayer.

  He is the brightest light of day and the deepest night of madness.

  To see him means blindness;

  To know him is sickness;

  To worship him is death;

  To fear him is wisdom;

  Not to resist him means liberation.

  God lives behind the—

  The perfectus suddenly fell silent. The priest’s gaze was riveted on the rear door of the church and one by one the congregation swiveled their necks to see what or who had interrupted the service.

  I’d never seen a dragoman alone and I’d never seen one close up like this. Both new experiences were unsettling.

  He—I use the pronoun loosely since dragomen had no sex—was about my height but he had much larger eyes, much larger ears, no lips to speak of, no teeth visible, no real chin, a long tapered nose, and a queerly shaped head, his forehead sloped back along a cranium that seemed to have been malformed rearward until it blended with the long synaptic filaments that trailed on the floor behind now with a faint metallic rustling. His fingers were far too long, as if they had at least one extra joint and perhaps more, and disturbingly spatulate. His feet were flat and too broad—he had no toes and I could hear puckery suckerish sounds as he strode across the broad paving stones of the barn-church. His legs were too long, jointed oddly, and gave the false impression of being almost boneless. He was hairless and naked, of course, and as he passed my pew I saw how his skin glistened wetly, coarsely, like molded wax. He had no nipples. I could see how a waxy fold of loose skin folded down from his lower abdomen to cover whatever orifices he had for urination and excretion; it is common knowledge that dragomen have no real genitals and thus are more neuter than hermaphroditic.

  He stopped at Kemp’s pew and, bending oddly from the waist, leaned toward the leader of our troupe. The dragoman’s voice was as high and flat as a young child’s without any of a child’s charm. “The Heresiarch bids you to perform tonight at the Archon keep. Have your people dressed and prepared for transport at the moment the winds drop on the hour of the third mine shift.”

  He may have said something else, but if so the words were lost in the explosion of surprised murmuring and shifting in the church.

  “This is our chance,” whispered Heminges as the men crowded into one of the Muse’s two makeup and costuming rooms that afternoon.

  “Chance?” said Gough. Kemp and Condella had decided that we were doing the Scottish Play, over Burbank’s protests and Alleyn’s and Aglaé’s indifference.

  “To strike,” said Heminges. He was costuming himself for the role of Duncan.

  Gough rolled his eyes.


  “What are you talking about?” I asked. I was already terrified at the thought of performing before the Archons; I didn’t need Heminges’s revolution fantasies and conspiracies that night.

  “I’ve never heard of a troupe being invited to perform before Archons before . . . in their keep,” whispered Heminges.

  “You never heard of it before, because it’s never happened before,” said Old Adam. He was to be Banquo tonight. His favorite role was as Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Adam had been to more Bard Rendezvous on Stratford and performed in more competitions there than any of us, even Kemp and Burbank. He knew more lore than anyone else in the Earth’s Men.

  “Then it is perfect,” hissed Heminges as he applied his bald wig.

  “Perfect for what, for Christ’s sake? We can’t do anything up there . . . but put on the show, I mean. If we did . . . if we did . . .”

  “The pain synthesizers,” rumbled Coeke. “For the rest of our lives and then some.”

  Heminges showed his thin, tight Iago smile. “When we take the Muse to the keep, we set thrust to full burn, then take off before—”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, Heminges,” said Burbank, who’d come closer without us noticing. “We’re not taking the ship up there. The dragoman told Kemp that we were to be fully dressed and have all our props ready by . . . less than an hour from now . . . and a gravity sledge is going to take us the six miles to the castle. Do you really think the Archons would let us get a weapon . . . or anything that could be used as a weapon . . . anywhere near the keep?”

  Heminges said nothing.

  “I don’t want to hear another word of your silly revolution fantasies,” snapped Burbank, his voice as mad-strong as Hamlet’s speaking to Gertrude. “If you play this particular brand of sick make-believe again—one more word—I swear by Abraxas that we’ll leave you behind on this godforsaken rock.”

  It looked as if two thirds of the arbeiters and doles not at work in the mines showed up to watch us leave on the gravity sledge. It was easy to understand why they were curious. In all the centuries they and their ancestors had been on this rock, the only thing that left from the human city to be taken to the keep were dead bodies to be hauled to the Archon spaceport to await transshipment to Earth.

  There was a funeral barge up there now. We’d followed it through the Pleroma to this world and had planned to follow it out in three days to the next planet on our tour.

  From the look on the silent arbeiters’ faces as we floated past the city and up the road carved into rock toward the highlands, they didn’t expect us to return from the keep alive. Perhaps we didn’t either. But the excitement was real. It had been the unanimous opinion of Kemp, Condella, Burbank, Pope, Old Adam, and the other senior members of the troupe that no traveling Shakespearean group had ever been invited to perform before the Archon before. We had no idea what to expect.

  The dragoman who’d come to the church—if it was the same one, they all looked alike to me—was in the control cab of the sledge with various Archon cabiri and we were on the open freight pallet behind, where the human coffins were usually carried, so there was no chance for further conversation with the dragoman. The cabiri that the Archons had designed for the Muse and other old human spacecraft I’d seen—Shakespearean troupe, perfecti, and physiocrat—were more huge metal-spider than organic, but I noticed more patches of flesh and real hands and even a mouth, more lipped and human-looking than the dragoman’s, on the cabiri in the sledge cab. The flesh, lips, teeth, fingers, and the rest looked as if they had come from a human-being parts bin. This was disturbing.

  It was also disturbing to be in full costume and makeup so long before the performance. We carried along any changes in costume we’d need and a few props—chairs, a table, daggers, and the like—but no backdrops or scenery. And we assumed we’d have none of the computer-controlled lighting or microphone pickups that were always part of our performances at the Muse tents.

  The sledge slid two meters above the rock road as it rose toward the keep of Mezel-Goull.

  We’d never seen the spaceport or a funeral barge from up close before and we all stared as the sledge reached the cliff ledge and silently floated past the perfectly flat landing area. The barge was as grim as its purpose and huge, a three-siloed gray-black smooth-hulled mass that floated five meters above the scorch-blackened rock. Ramps led down to temperature-controlled storage sheds. More of the disturbing flesh-and-metal cabiri were loading human-sized sarcophagi up dark ramps. The interior of the barge glowed dim red. The ship was large enough to carry tens and tens of thousands of sarcophagi.

  There were three other Archon ships at the keep’s spaceport. We’d seen such ships before, passing them during our transit from Kenoma to Pleroma or the reverse, but those were always video images, fast glimpses, and fuzzy, distant holos. The close-up reality of the three gray, grim, massive, heavily gunned and blistered and turreted, shaped and shielded vessels reminded all of us that the Archons were a fierce breed. After all these centuries we had no idea who or what their enemies were in the dark light-years beyond the Tell—we knew only that they were subservient to the Poimen, Demiurgos, and mythical Abraxi—but these ships were built to fight. They were, all of us were thinking in silence, destroyers of worlds.

  The keep loomed larger than we had imagined. From the Muse, during our previous visits to the arbeiter town below, we’d guessed the height of the Archon castle to be about a thousand feet, its width about two-thirds that as its shape conformed to the narrow precipice a mile here above the black sulfur sea, but as we approached we realized that it must be more than two hundred stories tall. The gray-black stone was not stone but metal. Everywhere along its walls were blisters and bulges, much like on their warships, but here long rivulets and streaks of rust ran down. The streaks were the color of dried blood.

  Some of the window slits far above glowed a dull orange.

  “I need to take a piss,” said our apprentice Pig. He started to climb down from the slowly moving sledge.

  “Stay on,” snapped Kemp.

  “But . . .” began Pig.

  “I need to go as well,” said Kyder, costumed well as one of the three weird sisters in the first scene. “I doubt if they’ll have lavatories in this Archon heap.”

  “Stay on the goddamned sledge,” shouted Kemp. “If you get left behind, we won’t be able to put on the show.”

  As if the dragoman or cabiri in the cab had heard him, the sledge began spinning and climbing higher then, swirling in the air to fifty feet of altitude, then a hundred, then three hundred. Everyone grabbed everyone, backed away from the open edge of the freight bed, and dropped to at least one knee.

  The sledge swung out over the edge of the cliff. Acid breakers crashed onto fang-sharp boulders five thousand feet below us.

  “Oh, fuck me!” cried the Pig. I could see the wet stain spreading down his brown tights and I also felt the sudden urge to urinate.

  Six hundred feet up on the wall of stained metal-rock, high on the western side of the keep that hung out over the cliff’s edge a mile above the sea, there came a great grinding and a trapezoid of light fifty or sixty feet high began to shape itself.

  The sledge floated forward and we entered the keep.

  The Scottish Play was difficult to do well under the best of conditions, and I would not say that the Archon keep of Mezel-Goull provided the best of conditions.

  Our stage was a circular shelf about sixty feet across at the bottom of a giant well at the center of the keep. Or perhaps “well” isn’t the proper word here, even though the lightning-roiled sky was visible through the round opening far above, since the rock-steel cliffs on all sides of our circle opened wider the higher they went. I estimated the walls here to be about three hundred feet high. All along the rough circle of stone were small cave openings, and outside these openings, on irregular slabs and ledges, sat the Archons—certainly more than a thousand of them. Perhaps two or three thousand.

  Hang
ing by their filament hair around this almost gladiatorial space were dragomen—I guessed fifty, but there could have been more—attached to the crouching Archons’ sensory nerve bundles only by their filaments. Each dragoman’s synaptic fibers connected to at least twenty or thirty Archons, who looked more insectoid than ever here in their native habitat, crouched and multilegged on their rock shelves, some holding their red nerve bundle packets away from their bodies with a pair of hands, looking much like an ancient holo I once saw on Earth of a bearded Jesus Christ (or perhaps it was Mohammed; one of the ancient gods at least) holding forth his red heart as if only recently ripped from his chest.

  The only bright light was on our solid circle of yellow stone or metal. All the rest of the rising cavernous space was lighted by the dimmest of red glows from the cavern openings. Lightning continued to ripple and tear above us, but something muffled all sound from beyond the keep.

  Our performance was perhaps the best we’d ever given.

  Kemp and Condella played the Thane and his Queen, of course, with Burbank outdoing himself as the drunken Porter. Watching Condella as Lady Ma . . . as the Queen . . . reminded me of why she was one of the most incredible touring actresses in the Tell.

  For years I had played Macduff’s son but more recently had been upgraded to Lennox, one of the Scottish thanes, so I got to be onstage between the three witches’ scenes during the second scene where King Duncan, Malcolm, and the rest of us spy “the bloody man,” and I confess that my first line—“What a haste looks through his eyes! So should he look that seems to speak things strange”—came out as more powerful squeak than bold pronouncement.

  This unique setting for our performance did not seem to distract the others. Kemp was extraordinary. Condella transcended herself, although—as she once told me bitterly—“The Queen in this damned Scottish Play is just too good a role, Master Wilbr. Every time she’s onstage everyone else, even the Thane, is thrown into shadow. Shakespeare had to keep her offstage, the same as he had to kill Mercutio early in Romeo and Juliet or let him take over the play, like a callower Hamlet wandering loose.” And it was true, I noticed back then, that Lady Ma . . . the Queen . . . exits in act 3, scene 4, and isn’t seen again until she returns, already lost to madness, at the start of act 5.