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.”
“Then how in the hell can they get anything out of the play?” snapped Heminges.
I thought he had something there. But then again, I remembered, the Poimen were gods . . . of a sort.
The ship had been lowered to some appropriate depth, although shafts of sunlight still filtered down through the clear blue waters. It was as if we were in a blue and gold cathedral. Hundreds of the Poimen, who weren’t men at all despite that part of their name (or the name Abraxas had given them), swam and shuttled around us, some being pulled by their jet-sled craft, some using other means of propulsion, some inside larger craft and looking out through transparent hulls. The depths were also filled with larger submersibles of varied design, some moving in obvious lanes but others shimmering like gigantic schools of metal fish. Far below us, the waters grew darker and larger things, living things I thought, moved with leviathan slowness.
Kemp gave the assignments. I hoped for Edmund, of course, all of us younger actors did, if we couldn’t get Edgar, but received the part of Albany’s servant. At least I got to kill and die onstage. (I confess I’ve never understood that servant’s motivation.)
Heminges was to be Edmund, the bastard in every sense. I think I might have cast him as Edgar; Heminges is crazy enough out of character to play Tom o’Bedlam half the time. But Alleyn got Edgar. Pope was the Duke of Cornwall, evil Regan’s stupid husband—I could see Pope squinting dubiously at Aglaé (he’d never had such a young Regan). Gough got the good role of the Earl of Kent.
There was a tradition in Shakespeare’s day for Lear’s Fool, a sort of holy fool, to be played by the same actor who plays Cordelia—the Fool is never onstage when Cordelia is and he disappears completely when her major scenes begin—but this wasn’t going to work with tonight’s casting.
I would have given my left testicle to play the Fool, but Burbank got it.
Adam got the Old Man—what else?—and Philp was the courtly, brave, and courting Duke of Burgundy. Coeke was to be Curan, Gloucester’s retainer, and Hywo Gloucester.
The lesser roles, gentlemen, servants, soldiers, attendants, and messengers, were quickly parceled out. We knew all the parts—or were supposed to.
Pyk came up and tried to get Kemp’s attention, but our Fearless Leader was too busy making costume choices and discussing staging—Christ, we hated theater-in-the-round and prayed to Abraxas that this place would not be like Mezel-Goull.
“What is it, Pig?” I whispered.
“The Muse,” he whispered wetly in my ear.
“What about her?”
“You’d better come see, Wilbr.”
I followed him down through the engine room, through the double hatches, down the ladder to the tiny room holding the Muse’s sphere and mummy. I admit that I was a little nervous being in there just with Pig after watching the Muse’s gyrations and eyes opening an hour or so earlier.
Her eyes were still opened, but no longer empty. They were complete and blue and looking at me. No mummy now. The naked young woman floating in the blue fluid was more beautiful and younger than Aglaé. Her restored red hair floated around her like a fiery nimbus.<
br />
She did not quite smile at me but her gaze registered my presence.
I said to Pig, “Jesus Christ and Abraxas’s rooster’s balls. Let’s get the hell out of here.” And we did. But what I’d actually thought of in those seconds I stared into the resurrected Muse’s eyes was an old catechism line from Saint Jung: “The dream is like a woman. It will have the last word as it had the first.”
Saying it was an extraordinary performance of King Lear would not be praise enough. It was beyond extraordinary. It would have won the laurel wreath at any gathering of the Bard Troupes on Stratford 111 at any time in the last twelve hundred years or more. The legendary Barbassesserra could not have created a better Lear that night than Kemp did. His very exhaustion lent more credence to the king’s age, despair, and madness. And I have to admit that Condella was tragically radiant and perfectly, absurdly stubborn as Cordelia. After a few minutes, I forgot her age—so I had to assume the Poimen never noticed.
The Poimen.
They allowed us to extend and light our own stage from the Muse. The ship had recovered sufficiently to handle the stage and basic lighting, although the cabiri were not functional. We were able to use our dressing rooms and regular arras and stage exits. But we did not need a tent where we performed.
Our ship and stage were on a sort of shell within a bubble. I have no idea what energies kept the bubble intact, our air recycled, or the pressures of the alien ocean from rushing in. But the bubble was invisible and it did not distort vision in or out as glass or plastic would. We did not float around or bob; the stage felt as firm beneath us as it had the night before at Mezel-Goull, but this was obviously an illusion since some moments into the performance we realized that our stage and ship and bubble were rotating three hunded and sixty degrees, even turning as they rotated. At times we were completely upside down—the surface of the ocean invisible beneath our feet and stage and stern of the Muse—but somehow the stage was always down. Our inner ear did not register the changes and gravity did not vary. (In fact, the gravity itself was suspicious, since it felt one-Earth average on such a gigantic planet.) But the turning and rotation were very slow, so if one did not look out beyond the proscenium for any length of time, there was no vertigo involved. When I did look, it took my breath away.
The water—if it was water—was incredibly clear. I could see scores of the huge blue and green crystal towers, each lighted from within, each with a central twin shaft filled with rising and falling liquids and passengers, each rising into sunlight and atmosphere above—where countless more of the Poimen floated and flitted—and then into space above that, each also extending down to the purple depths miles beneath us.
The Poimen floated around us by the thousands or by the tens of thousands. Without staring I couldn’t tell, and one can’t stare at the audience during a performance, even when the fear of vertigo isn’t a factor. I could see that they were not all the same. Shafts of sunlight columning down from the rough seas above illuminated a bewildering variety of Poimen sizes, shapes, and iridescent colors. Some of the creatures were as large as Archon spacecraft; others as small as the koi in funeral ponds on Earth. All showed the same sort of flat face, black eyes, throbbing gills, and tiny arms, at least relative to their body size, and delicate hands as our first visitor in the sphere that had come through the Muse’s hull.
Kemp and Burbank had gone on about how they hated performing in theater-in-the-round as at Mezel-Goull, but here we were in a theater of three dimensions, with audience above, to the side, and partially beneath us, thousands of pairs of eyes focused on us from all directions, and all of them moving in our constantly rotating field of vision. A lesser troupe would have had trouble going on. We weren’t a lesser troupe.
Did the Poimen understand us? Did they get the slightest hint of what our “mimesis episode” was about? Could these sea-space creatures understand the foggiest outline of the themes and depths of Shakespeare’s tale of age and loss and ultimate devastation, much less follow the beautiful and archaic song of our language?
I had no idea. I’m sure Kemp and Burbank and Condella and the others carrying the burden of the performance had no idea. We carried on.
Burbank once told me that his father—who had led the Earth’s Men longer than any other person and who was almost certainly the finest actor ever to come out of our troupe—had said to him that King Lear precluded and baffled all commentary because the experience of it was beyond theater, beyond even the literature and art and music we had when humans had literature and art and music. King Lear and Hamlet, the older Burbank had told his son, went even beyond the false but beautiful holy scriptures humans used to have before the Archons and their superiors showed us the truth. The Torah, the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Rig-Veda, the Agama, the Mahavastu, the Adi Granth, the Sutta Pitaka, the Dasabhumisvara, the Mahabharata, and the Bible, to name only a few, were false but beautiful, and important for evolving human hearts and minds, said the elder Burbank, but all receded before the unfathomable truths of Hamlet and King Lear. And where Hamlet explored the infinite bounds of consciousness, Lear delved the absolute depths of mortality, hopelessness, communication failed, trust betrayed, and the threads of chaos which weave our fates.
I think those are some of the words and phrases Burbank told me his father used. One does get in the habit of memorizing very quickly when traveling with actors.
They’d only been words to me until this night—pleasant theatrical hyperbole (which is redundant, Philp would argue, since all theater, however nuanced, is mimetic hyperbole of life)—but this day, this night, this performance of King Lear made me understand what Burbank’s father had been trying to say.
When Kemp, as Lear gone mad and wearing his crown of weeds and flowers, said to Hywo as the blinded Gloucester
If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester.
Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;
Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee. Mark.
and then Kemp slowly took off his crown not of thorns but of faded flowers and tangled dry grasses and Hywo/Gloucester wept
Alack, alack, the day!
only to have mad Kemp/Lear pat his back and console him with absolute hopelessness—
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
I wept.
I’m glad I was offstage and behind the arras, away from those thousands of staring fish-eyes, because I wept like the child I don’t remember actually being.
By the time Lear carried his dead daughter onstage and pronounced those five heaviest words in the history of the theater—“Never, never, never, never, never.”—I could no longer stand. I had to sit down to sob.
And then the play was over.
There was no applause, no noise, no movement, no visible reaction at all from the schools and congregations and aggregations and flocks of Poimen in the blue beyond our bubble.
Kemp and the others bowed. We all took our curtain call.
The Poimen moved away in the sea currents and submersibles.
We stood there, exhausted, looking into the wings at the players who hadn’t played but who seemed equally exhausted, and then, almost in unison, we looked at the dragoman where he sat listlessly in the wings, elbows on his knees, eyes unblinking and seemingly unfocused.
“Well?” demanded Kemp, his voice almost gone and as old-sounding as the dying Lear’s. “Did they like it? Did they hear it?”
“Why do you ask me?” said the dragoman in his flat squeak.
“Weren’t they in touch with you?” bellowed Burbank.
“How do I know?” said the dragoman. “Were they in touch with you?”
Kemp advanced on the spindly dragoman as though he were going to pummel him, but just then our bubble went dim as surely as if someone had put a towel o
ver a bird’s cage.
The dragoman jerked to his feet, not to meet Kemp’s charge—he was not even looking at Kemp—and said in a different tone, “You have one hour and eleven minutes to rest. And then you and your ship shall be transported elsewhere.”
Our view out the bubble had disappeared with the light. There was no sense of whether we were being moved or not, but we knew from the motion during the performance that something was dampening our sense of inertia in this cage. We went back into the Muse.
None of us slept during those seventy-one minutes. Some collapsed on their bunks or just stood in showers letting the hot water run over them—all of the Muse’s systems were functioning now—but about half the troupe met in the larger of the two common rooms on the upper deck.
“What’s going on?” demanded Pig.
I thought our youngest apprentice had summed up the essential question pretty well with those three words.
“They’re testing us,” said Aglaé. She’d been a brilliant Regan.
“Testing us?” demanded Kemp. He and Burbank and Condella and the senior members of the troupe were glaring at her.
“What else could it be?” asked my weary and oh-so-lovely Aglaé. “No one’s ever heard of a traveling troupe being forced to perform before the Archons before, much less before these . . . Poimen . . . if they are actually Poimen. We’re being tested.”
“For what?” asked Heminges. “And why us? And what happens if we fail?” He should have been as exhausted as Kemp or Burbank or Condella—he’d had important roles in all three of the performances we’d done in the last forty-eight hours—but fatigue just made his face look more handsomely gaunt and alert and Iago-cunning.
No one had an answer, not even Aglaé. But I began to think that she was right—we were being put to the test—but I could think of no reason, after all these centuries, that a traveling troupe, or the human race for that matter, should be tested. Hadn’t we been tested and found wanting those first years when the Archon, on the order of their masters we were made to understand, ended our freedom and cultures and politics and sense of history and dreams of ever going to the stars on our own? What more could they take from us if we failed their goddamned tests?
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