Muse of Fire Read online

  * * * *

  The audience, mostly arbeiters in their brown rawool and a few score doles in their cotton gray, laughed hard and applauded and cheered frequently.

  Alleyn and Aglaé were wonderful in their act 1 banter and we’d just gotten into act 2

  with Benedick asking me to sing a “divine air”—I don’t believe I mentioned that they had me play Balthasar primarily because I was the best singer in the troupe now that Davin had died and left us—and I’d just begun the song when everything changed forever.

  Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

  Men were deceivers ever,

  One foot in sea, and one on shore,

  To one thing constant never.

  Then sigh not so, but let them go,

  And be you blithe and bonny,

  Converting all your sounds of woe

  Into Hey, nonny nonny.

  In the middle of my song, into the tent floated a forty-foot-long heavy iron-gray gravity

  sledge carrying at least eight carapace-hooded, chitinous, four-armed, ten-foot-tall Archons, each sitting deep in its own iron-gray metal throne. Hanging from the sledge by their synaptic fiberneural filaments, which ran down to their hairless, distended skulls like slim, translucent copper hair, were four naked dragomen. Their oversized, lidless eyes focused on the stage and their cartilage-free ears rotating the better to pick up—and relay to their Archon masters—my singing.

  Arbeiters and doles created a racket scrambling out of their seats to get out from under the massive, flat-bottomed gravity sledge. Archons landed their vehicles when and where they pleased and more than a few humans from 25-25-261B certainly had been crushed before this night.

  But the sledge did not land. It rose to a point just below the tent roof about forty feet from the stage and hovered there. The doles and arbeiters who’d fled found places to sit in the aisles out from under the sledge’s shadow and the dangling bare feet of the dragomen and returned their attention to the stage, their faces pale but attentive.

  I’m a professional. I did not miss a beat or drop a note. But I know my voice quavered as I sang the next stanza.

  Sing no more ditties, sing no more,

  Of dumps so dull and heavy.

  The fraud of men was ever so,

  Since summer first was leavy.

  Then sigh not so, but let them go,

  And be you blithe and bonny,

  Converting all your sounds of woe

  Into Hey, nonny nonny.

  Gough, playing Don Pedro, did not miss a beat. “‘By my troth, a good song,’” he cried, his eyes never shifting to the sledge and Archons.

  “‘And an ill singer, my lord,’” was my response. For once I was telling the truth. My voice had cracked or quavered half a dozen times in those eight simple lines of singing.

  ‘“Ha, no, no, faith,’” bellowed Gough/Don Pedro, “‘thou sing’st well enough for a shift.’”

  My hands were shaking and I did sneak a glance at the motionless sledge and the slowly twisting dragomen hanging naked and slick-skinned and hairless and sexless beneath that sledge, the filaments from the four of their skulls running up to red sensory node bundles on the complicated chest carapaces of the eight Archons.

  Did the peasant arbeiters and equally peasant doles out there—any of them—have any idea that Gough’s use of the ancient word “shift” in his line meant something like “to make do”? Almost certainly not. Almost all of the beauty and subtlety of Shakespeare’s language was lost on them. (It had taken me years after the troupe adopted me to begin appreciating it.)

  Then what in the hell were the Archons perceiving as they heard these archaic words through the dangling dragomen’s ears, saw our colorful costumes and overbright makeup through the dragomen’s eyes?

  Alleyn caught my eye, forcing my attention back to the play, responded broadly to Don Pedro, and turned to the audience—ignoring the gravity sledge—and gave his chuckling

  Benedick’s reply.

  “‘An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him. And I pray God his bad voice bode no mischief. I had as life have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it.’”

  The night-raven, I knew and the arbeiters and doles almost certainly did not know—who in the name of the Gnostic God of All Opposites had any idea what the dragomen and Archons knew?—was the bird of ill omen.

  * * * *

  There is always a party after a performance. There was that night.

  Some worlds are so dolefully awful that we have to hold the party on the Muse, inviting the pretty girls and pretty boys aboard (there are no human dignitaries, mayors, burgomasters, commissars, or officials of importance in human life now, only the gray doles, and they don’t know how to party). On the more palatable worlds, and 25-25-261B qualified as such, we tried to move the party to a local pub or barn or similar public space. This rock had a pub in the oldest section of arbeiter town. (Those are the only two public institutions that have survived the end of all human politics and culture after our species’ hopeless enslavement—pubs and churches. We’d never partied in a church. At least not yet.)

  The drinking with the few adventurous arbeiters and storytelling and drinking and gambling and more storytelling and more drinking went on until the sulfur winds began to howl against the titanium shutters, and then the young ones among us began pairing off with the most attractive locals we could cull from the herd.

  Aglaé rarely stayed at these parties for long and never went off with locals, but Philp, Pig (our apprentice Pyk), red-haired Kyder, Coeke, Alleyn, Anne, Pope, Lana, the short Hywo, Gough. Tooley, and some of the rest of us each found someone eager to make the beast with two backs with a rare stranger to their world, and two by two, arbeiter and actor, like randy animals filing toward Noah’s Ark, we began slipping away from the ebbing party and heading for arbeiters’ hovels and barracks and outbuildings and barns.

  In my case it was a barn.

  We did it three times in the loft that night as the acid rains blew against the stone walls.

  (It would have been more times, but at age twenty, I’m not as young and resilient as I once was.) The barn held five animals (besides us)—a llama, a cow, a goat, and two chickens. None seemed bothered by our exertions or Larli’s loud cries.

  Larli was the arbeiter girl who’d invited me home to her barrack’s barn. She was fairly typical for a postperformance fling girl: very young but old enough for me not to feel too guilty, curly hair, pretty eyes, broad shoulders, more muscles than I’d ever have, and hands so callused and strong that several times when I cried out, it was in pain not ecstasy.

  She liked to talk and ask questions—also fairly typical for a postplay fling date—and I tried to stay awake and keep up my end of the conversation (since I was too tired to keep anything else up) as the wind and sulfur rain tore at the slate tiles above us.

  “You must see a lot of wonderful places,” she said, lying back on the blanket on the straw. “Lots of wonderful worlds.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I was deciding how to explain that I was going to return to the Muse to sleep. I always came home to the Muse to sleep after the postperformance. This night

  was already later than most.

  “Have you ever gone to Earth?” she asked. Her voice almost broke on the soft syllable of the last word. They always do.

  “I was born on Earth.”

  I could tell by her silent stare that she didn’t believe me.

  “A lot of players come from Earth,” I said. “I was nine when they chose me.”

  “There’s no one... alive... on Earth,” she whispered. I could hear the acid rain outside diminish and the hot winds begin to blow. It would not be long before the terminator crossed this plateau. And it was the Sabbath.

  I patted her pale but powerfully muscled leg. “There are thousands of living arbeiters on Earth... um. .. Larli.”

  “I thought only the dead lived there.”
She shook her blond curls, flustered. “You know what I mean.”

  I nodded in the dim glow of one shielded lantern hanging on a post below this loft.

  “There are a few thousand living humans on Earth,” I said quietly. “My family among them. I was born there. The cabiri tend the tombs and do the heavy work, but there is always some labor for the doles and arbeiters.”

  “What is it like, Wilbr? Earth, I mean? It must be very beautiful.”

  “It rains a lot,” I said. This was an understatement. Earth had not seen a blue sky in more than a thousand years.

  “But the oceans... the perfecti tell tales of the great blue seas. Oceans of water. They must be gorgeous.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking only of how I was going to disengage myself so I could get back to my bunk on the Muse. The oceans of Earth had been drained by the Demiurgos long ago. Everything there now was rock and tombs: metal sarcophagi, tens and hundreds of billions of them, stacked on rocky plains, coastal shelves, deep shadowed mountain ranges that had once been ocean depths. Earth had no ecology, no wild things, no domesticated plants or animals—not even the ubiquitous goats and cows and llamas and chickens and other pathetic livestock scattered among sad arbeiter communities like this around the Tell—and no real towns. The few thousand arbeiters and doles were scattered among the tombs.

  “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 infmum 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.