The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Aglaé, the most beautiful young actress on this world or any other world, the most beautiful actress in the Tell or beyond, played one of the three Weird Sisters and her makeup was almost, not quite, good enough to hide her beauty behind warts, wrinkles, a fake nose, and a wispy beard.

  As I exited . . . which meant just to walk outside the circle of light onto the dark part of the round slab of floor . . . Aglaé came on and cried, “‘Where hast thou been, sister?’”

  Anne, as the second witch, answered, “‘Killing swine.’”

  Standing in the offstage darkness, I peered up at the ungainly slabs and ledges and cavemouths. Did these alien things know what witches were? What swine were? Presumably the latter since they had chosen pigs as one of the few forms of livestock to bring along with their human slaves.

  The third witch cried as if blind, “‘Sister, where thou?’”

  Aglaé responded, voice husky and ancient, “‘A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap. And munched and munched and munched. “Give me,” quoth I. “Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries. Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger. But in a sieve I’ll thither sail, and, like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.’”

  Dear Abraxas above, I thought, my heart pounding wildly, these Archons will not understand a word or thought of this. What help can the soulless dragomen be? They see and hear and maybe translate the words, but how can you translate Shakespeare to alien minds?

  And hard on the heels of that thought came a more terrible certainty: this is some sort of trial; the Archons are deciding whether to let us live or not.

  We played on. Sans props, sans scenery, sans curtain, sans human audience.

  When one act ended, we would all pause outside the circle of light for a few seconds and then begin the next. Kemp later told me that this was more or less the way Shakespeare and his people had done it in their day; that acts and scenes, as separate entities, were a later invention.

  One of Kemp’s earliest lines, to the witches, was “The Thane of Cawdor lives. Why do you dress me in borrowed clothes.”

  Dear God, I loved such phrases. “The Thane of Cawdor.” It evoked human ages and vital human barbarity long lost to all of us. But what could it possibly mean to the hooded, earless, handless, eyeless, faceless Archons on their bug ledges above?

  By the time Kemp choked out these anguished lines, I was sure that we’d already signed our own death warrants through our very incomprehensibility to this chitinous audience:

  If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

  It were done quickly. If th’ assassination

  Could trammel up the consequence and catch

  With his surcease success, that but this blow

  Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

  But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

  We’d jump the life to come . . .

  When suddenly, from the dark ledges above there came a susurration as of many insect breaths blowing over violin-bow forelimbs, followed by a growing chrr . . . chrrr . . . chrrrr . . . chrrrrr.

  Kemp as the Thane did not miss a beat, but offstage in the dark I leaned on Tooley, one of the soldiers, as I stared up into the dark, straining almost painfully to see. Coeke leaned over and whispered fiercely, “I didn’t know the Archons had wings, did you?”

  There was more chrrrring during the next hour, the loudest—it drowned out the ensuing dialogue and made even our most unperturbable players pause a second—came, for no reason we will ever understand, after Burbank as the Porter gave his “equivocation” speech:

  Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery. It makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; makes him stand to and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him.

  The chrrrring went on and on for almost three minutes. The drone-hum of wings was so loud I expected to look up to see the Archons flitting about this hive-tunnel space like so many hornets.

  Why? What could they possibly know of drunkenness or desire, lechery or impotence? Much less the effect alcohol has on men before, during, or after the sex act?

  I looked at Aglaé, still in her witch makeup and costume. As if reading my mind, she shook her head.

  In no time, in an eternity, it was over.

  Malcolm—Gough—the new King of Scotland, had his final words while Macduff stood there holding a fair likeness of Kemp’s head by the hair. It reminded me of the dangling dragomen above.

  “‘That calls upon us, by the grace of grace,’” boomed Gough-Malcolm, “‘we will perform in measure, time, and place. So thanks to all at once, and to each one, whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone.’”

  Those onstage bowed.

  The dead rose and bowed.

  Those of us in the darkened wings came into the circle of light and bowed.

  Nothing.

  No applause. Not a cough. Not even a chrrring of wings. Silence.

  After a moment of this excruciating nothing, the light in and on our circle went out. We could see that the ledges and slabs above were empty. Even the hanging dragomen were gone.

  A trapezoid opened in a solid wall behind us. The gravity sledge floated in.

  Kemp, still in makeup, refused to board—or allow us to board—until the dragoman standing by the cab gave us some indication of what the Archons had thought.

  The dragoman—I thought it was the same one that had come to the church that morning, but was not sure—said, “You are no longer the Earth’s Men.”

  Kemp opened his mouth but decided not to speak.

  “From this moment forward, you are the Heresiarch’s Men,” said the dragoman.

  We rendezvoused in orbit with the Archon warship exactly as instructed. This was to be the first time we ever penetrated the Pleroma following anything but a funeral barge. As far as we knew, it was the first time that any human ship—player troupe, perfecti, or physiocrat—had ever entered the Abyss behind anything but a funeral barge.

  It was also the first time that anyone other than a member of the troupe had traveled with us in the Muse.

  I still thought the dragoman was the same one who’d come to the church and driven us to the keep, but I’d seen enough of them in the cone of Mezel-Goull to know they actually all looked alike.

  Once we were safely in the Pleroma, surrounded by that objective golden glow, the dragoman had an odd request. He wanted to see the Muse. Herself.

  Kemp and Condella and Burbank and a few of the co-owners had to confer about that. We had never let an outsider see the true Muse. Except for when we were children trying to frighten each other, we seldom went down there ourselves.

  In the end, they relented. What choice did they have? Kemp did ask the dragoman—“Are you still in touch with the Archon? Even though your . . . ah . . . hair . . . isn’t connected? Even here in the Abyss?”

  The lipless large-eyed man-thing stared in a way that I almost could have interpreted as amusement. “We are always united in the flame of Abraxas,” he/it said.

  It was from the Fourth Sermon to the Dead.

  Good and evil are united in the flame.

  Good and evil are united in the growth of the tree.

  Life and love oppose each other in their own divinity.

  What the hell. They decided to let the dragoman visit the Muse.

  For some reason, Kemp beckoned me to join the four of them showing the dragoman the way.

  The body of the Muse slept through eternity in a small compartment past the sleeping level where our bunks lay empty, below the circular common room where a few of the others looked up at us with unanswered questions in their eyes as we passed, beneath the throbbing engine room where Tooley used to let me look in through the thick
blue glass at the star-flame of our fusion ship’s heart when I was a boy, down a ladder and through two hatches into a space barely large enough for the five of us humans and the dragoman to stand in a circle around the fluid-filled sphere in the center.

  She floated there in the thick, blue liquid. Long dead but not dead. Her body mummified. Her eyes long since turned to cobwebs. Her breasts now flattened to wrinkled mummy’s dugs. Her sex lost. Her once-red hair mostly gone, the wispy remnants floating like a baby chick’s fuzz. Her lips stretched back to reveal all her skull-teeth. Her arms were folded in front of her as she floated, looking as fleshless and fragile as broken bird’s wings, her thumbs folded in flat against her fluid-shriveled palms.

  “Who was she?” asked the dragoman.

  “No one knows,” said Condella. “Some say she was named Sophia.”

  “She wouldn’t answer if you asked her through the ship?” the dragoman asked.

  “She wouldn’t understand the question,” said Kemp.

  “I could ask her directly,” said the dragoman. The thought of that made my skin go cold.

  The Muse spoke then, her voice coming from the walls. I don’t know if any of the others jumped, but I did. “We have exited the Abyss and returned to the Kenoma. This system is not numbered. These worlds are unnamed. We are no longer in the Archon warship’s pleromic wake. Another craft has taken control and ordered me to follow it until further notice. All imaging surfaces are now active.”

  “Another craft?” I said, looking from Kemp to Burbank to the dragoman.

  The dragoman was clutching his head so fiercely that his ten spatulate fingers compressed white. “They’re gone,” he gasped.

  “Who’s gone?” asked Kemp.

  “The Archons. For the first time . . . in my . . . existence. There is . . . no . . . contact.” The dragoman fell to the deck and wrapped his long arms around his legs as he curled into a tight and rocking fetal position.

  “Whose ship is it then?” asked Condella.

  Black fluid ran from the dragoman’s eyes and open mouth as he gasped. “The Poimen.”

  In the globe of blue liquid, the mummy of the Muse writhed, extended her withered arms, and opened her empty eyes.

  We gathered in the common room. Tooley and Pig laid the unconscious dragoman on an old acceleration couch; we could not tell if he was still alive. Black fluid continued to seep from his mouth, ears, eyes, and unseen orifices under his genital flap and none of the rest of us wished to touch him.

  Tooley wiped his hands and hurried to unroll viewstrips along the curved outer bulkhead. Within minutes it felt as if we were on a high platform open to three-dimensional space in all directions.

  Kemp came down from above. “The Muse is not answering questions or responding to navigation requests,” he said. “We’re not even under power. As far as we can tell, there’s no pleromic wake, but we’re still under the influence of that ship pulling us toward the gas giant.”

  The Muse not answering questions or responding to orders? We all stared at one another with terror in our eyes. This had never happened. It couldn’t happen. If the Muse failed, malfunctioned, died, we were all dead. I remembered the flailing and stretching and silent gape-mouthed screams of her mummy in the blue sphere below and wondered if somehow we had all killed her by following the Archon warship through the Pleroma.

  I realized that the fusion thum and slight additional weight of in-system thrust was absent for the first time ever in our nonpleromic travels. The only thing keeping us from floating around the room was the sternward pressure of the internal tension fields. At least that meant that some power was still being generated.

  Watching the scene through the huge viewstrip windows did nothing to quell our terror.

  We were hurtling toward a gas-giant world with a velocity the Muse would never have allowed or been able to obtain. Ahead of us was a bluish-gray ship, size impossible to determine without references or radar that the Muse would not or could not bring online even after repeated requests. The blue-gray ship seemed solid yet was impossibly malleable, shifting shapes constantly: now an aerodynamic dart, almost winged; now a blue spheroid; now a muscular mass of curves and bubbles that made the missing Archon warship look as crudely made as an iron boomerang.

  Then all of us ceased looking at the ship towing us and stared slack-jawed at the approaching world.

  Worlds, I should say, because the green and blue and white gas giant—there was no doubt it was a Jovian-sized world—was accompanied by a dozen or more hurtling moons and a ring.

  I’d seen hundreds of gas giants in my travels from Pleroma to the Archon worlds of the Tell, Jupiter and Saturn being only the first and those only briefly glimpsed, but never had I seen a world like this. None of us had.

  Instead of the red, orange, yellow, and turqoise methane stripes common to most such giants, this world alternated bands of blue and white. Massive cloud-storms that must have been as large as Jupiter’s Red Spot swirled in cyclonic splendor, but these were white storms—Earth-like hurricanes—and they traveled along blue bands that suggested oceans of water thousands of miles below.

  This alone would have made us gawk—an Earth-like gas-giant world of such beauty—not to mention the dozen, no fifteen at least, no, now seventeen moons we could see hurtling above the multihued equatorial rings that girdled the big planet some tens of thousands of miles above its shimmering atmosphere, but it was the signs of civilization that kept our mouths open and our eyes wide.

  To say the world was obviously inhabited would have been the understatement of all time.

  The gas giant was about two-thirds illuminated by its yellow sun, but the dark slice beyond the curve of terminator was as brilliantly lighted as the glaring blue and white daytime side. Straight and winding strings of lights by the millions showed linear communities or highways or flyways or coastlines or spaceports or . . . we did not know what. Constellations of lights, by the billions it seemed, showed cities or, because the constellations were moving, perhaps just the denizens themselves, radiant as gods.

  Buildings . . . towers . . . crystalline structures rose out of the clouds and then out of the atmosphere itself; not one or a few, but hundreds of them. They moved with the revolution of the planet. Several rose not only through the atmosphere but up through the orbital rings around the giant world . . . rings which we now could see were made up of artificial moonlets or structures by the million. The myriad of sparkling orbital objects looked as if they were going to crash into the tallest crystal towers with the speed of meteors, of comets, but at the last minute the streams of particles—each object hundreds of times larger than the Muse, we realized—parted like a river current around a rock.

  The space between the big planet and the moons was filled not only with the countless objects that made up the equatorial rings, and with the fluid-filled cords to the moons, but with more millions of rising and descending flecks catching sunlight and throwing off their own flames. Spacecraft, we presumed, rising and descending from the world.

  “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 25–25–261B, 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.