Muse of Fire

by Dan Simmons

  “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 estima
ted 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.

  Hanging 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.

  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 he 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 d
ragomen 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.