It made me want to weep, but I’d already blubbered like a baby enough during that extraordinary, never-to-be-repeated performance of King Lear, so I went up to the topside observation room to talk to Tooley for a few minutes, and then, when the birdcage towel was lifted and the Muse informed us that we were in the Pleroma again in the wake of the Poimen ship, I climbed down through all the decks to the tiny room where the newly resurrected Muse floated in her clear blue nutrient.
I felt like a voyeur.
In my previous eleven years aboard the Muse, I’d rarely come down here to her tiny compartment. There was no real reason to—the Muse spoke to us through the ship, was the ship, and we were no closer to her down here near the mummified husk she’d left behind so many centuries ago than anywhere else on the ship: less close here really, since she seemed alive elsewhere. But more than that, I was scared to come here as a boy. Philp and I used to dare each other to go down in the dark place to see the dead lady I rarely came down here as a man.
But now I had, and I felt like a voyeur.
What had been a brown, wrinkled, eyeless mummy was now a beautiful young woman, perhaps Aglaé’s age, perhaps even younger, but—I had to admit—even more beautiful. Her red hair was so dark it looked almost black in the blue fluid. Her open eyes—I did not see her blink but at times her eyes were suddenly closed for long periods—were blue. Her skin was almost pure white, lighter than anyone else’s aboard. Her nipples were pink. Her lips were a darker pink. The perfect V of her pubic hair was red and curly and dense.
I looked away, thought about going back up to my bunk.
“It’s all right,” said a soft voice behind me. “She does not mind if you look.”
I just about jumped straight up through the hatch eight feet above me.
The dragoman stood there. His fibroneural filaments hung limp on his pale shoulders. There were still black streaks and stains near the corners of his eyes and mouth.
“You’re in touch with her?” I whispered.
“No, she’s in touch with me.”
“What is she saying?”
“Nothing.”
“What happened to her?”
The dragoman said nothing. He seemed to be looking at an empty space between me and the blue sphere.
“Who restored her?” I asked, my voice echoing now in the tiny metal room. “The Poimen?”
“No.”
“The Archons?” It did not seem possible.
“No.”
“What does she want?”
The dragoman turned his lipless face toward me. “She tells you that the two of you should come here when it is your turn. Before you act.”
“Two of us?” I repeated stupidly. “Which two? Act on what? Why does the Muse want me to come here?”
At that moment the ship shook and I felt the familiar ending of the buzz and tingle one feels when transiting the Pleroma, a sort of vibration of the bones and rising of the short hairs on the arm, and then came the slight but perceptible downward shift-shock I’d felt so many times when we transitioned back to the Kenoma of empty forms. Our universe.
“Jesus Christ Abraxas!” came Kemp’s voice crashing over the intercom. “Everyone come up to the main common room. Now!”
Tooley, Pig, Kemp, and the others had run viewstrips from deck to ceiling around the large common room, and then added more strips across the ceilings. The Muse’s external imagers provided and integrated the views. It was as if this deck of the ship were open to space.
There was no Poimen ship ahead of us. We had been flung out of the Pleroma into this system like a stone from a catapult such as the ones we’d seen arbeiters on 30-08-16B9 use to move boulders miles up the mountains to build the Archon’s keep.
We were hurtling toward a series of concentric translucent spheres surrounding a blinding blue-white star.
Each sphere was larger than the last, of course, but shafts of brilliant sunlight passed through each sphere to the next and then through the last one out to us. The Muse put up deep radar and other readings showing that there were more than a dozen spheres, each one mottled with dark continents and painted with blue seas.
“Eyes of Abraxas!” breathed Heminges. “This is not possible.”
“It’s not possible in a thousand ways,” said Tooley. “According to Muse’s data there, we’re one hundred and forty-four AU out from this star. There shouldn’t be this much light reaching us… or this first, last, sphere. Unless each sphere were somehow refracting and refocusing the light… or magnifying it… or adding to it…”
We all stared at Tooley. Usually he spoke only to explain how he was unplugging toilets or greasing gears or some such. This was by far the longest speech any of us had ever heard from him.
I remembered that an AU was an astronomical unit, the distance Earth was from its sun. Most of the Archon worlds we visited lurked at around one AU from their suns…
144 AU out?
“There are a dozen spheres around this sun,” came the Muse’s strangely young voice. “There are two separate but intersecting spheres at one AU, one at two AU, then others at three AU, five AU, eight AU, thirteen AU, twenty-one AU, thirty-four AU, fifty-five AU, eighty-nine AU, and this outer one at one hundred forty-four AU from the star.”
“Fibonacci sequence,” muttered Tooley.
“Precisely,” said the Muse. “But it seems oddly inelegant. A series of orbiting Apollonian circles would have put more spheres of varying diameter within a closer radius to this star without the need for—”
“Muse!” interrupted Kemp. “We’re approaching this outer sphere pretty damned quickly. Shouldn’t you be firing the engines to slow us?”
“It would not help,” said the Muse. “Our velocity upon leaving the Pleroma was a significant fraction of C, the speed of light. We have never entered any system from any pleromic wake at anything near this velocity. I do not even understand how we can maintain our integrity at this speed since the collision of isolated hydrogen particles alone should—”
“You mean you can’t slow us?” interrupted Condella.
“Oh, yes, I can,” said the Muse. “At my full thrust of four hundred gravities, it would take me a little over eight months to bring our velocity down. But we will impact the outer sphere in four minutes and fifteen seconds. Also, the ship’s internal fields protect passengers… you… only up to thirty-one gravities. You would be, as the old saying goes, raspberry jam.”
“Can you miss the outer sphere?” asked Aglaé. “Steer around it?”
The Muse only laughed. I had never heard her laugh before and I’m sure that not even the oldest members of the troupe had either.
No one said anything for a while.
Finally, Burbank ordered, “Show clock. Analog. Countdown.”
A holographic clock appeared above a viewstrip, showing three minutes and twenty-two seconds until impact. The sweep hand continued moving backward toward zero.
Burbank wheeled on the dragoman who had been silent, great lidless eyes downcast, standing away from the rest of us who were almost forming a circle while staring at the clock and viewstrips. “Do you have any goddamned ideas?” barked Burbank. His tone sounded accusatorial, as if the dragoman had brought us to this end.