It turns out that someone with no lips can still smile. “Pray?” he said softly.
What would you do with three minutes left to live? I didn’t pray. I didn’t do anything else either, other than to look at Aglaé for a minute with more regret than I thought it possible for a person to hold. I was sorry that she and I would never make love. More than that, I was sorry that I’d never told her I loved her.
“One minute,” said the Muse.
I suddenly wondered if this was the time the Muse had mentioned, through the dragoman, when I should bring Aglaé to the blue sphere with me when—how had she put it? — we should come there when it was our turn, before we act.
No, it didn’t seem that this was what the Muse had meant. And it looked as if “our turn,” whatever that might have been, would now never come.
The outer sphere filled all viewstrips. We could clearly see the dark undersides of continents and make out the actual turning of the sphere itself. To give us some sense of scale, the Muse superimposed an outline of the large continent on 25-25-261B against one of the smaller continents now on the top viewstrip. It was a tiny dot on the huge landmass.
Jaws dropped open but still no one spoke.
“Ten seconds to impact,” the Muse said calmly. Our speed became apparent as we hurtled at the airless wall ahead of us—a wall that now seemed flat because it extended so far in each direction.
We struck.
We did not strike, actually, but passed through the seemingly solid underside, passed through a mile or two of ocean in a blink of an eye, passed through five or eight miles of blue-sky atmosphere above that, and then we were in space again, hurtling toward the next sphere—the eleventh celestial sphere according to the Muse’s earlier description, one a mere eighty-nine AU out from this impossible blue-white sun.
“We shed twenty-five percent of our velocity,” the Muse reported.
“We couldn’t…that’s not…how could we…” stammered Tooley. “I mean—Abraxas’s teeth! — even if the sphere floor were porous, impact with the ocean and atmosphere would have been… I mean… slowing twenty-five percent from…”
“Yes,” agreed the Muse, “what we just experienced was not possible. We could not have survived. Such a deceleration could not have occurred. That much kinetic energy could not have been dissipated without much violence. Nine minutes until impact with the next sphere.”
Thus we passed through the eleventh sphere at eighty-nine AU, and then the tenth at fifty-five AU—although the Muse informed us that it should be taking us many weeks to be covering these distances, even at our velocity still some double-digit percentage of light itself, and she suggested that time itself was out of joint in and around the ship, but we did not care about that—and then we approached the ninth sphere rotating at thirty-four AU from the blue-white star.
The Muse of Fire bored through an ocean just as the first three times— with Tooley muttering “hypercavitation” to himself as if the word meant anything—but this time we did not tear through the atmosphere and into space again.
The Muse rose slowly, reached the top of her arc, hung there a minute like a balloon hovering several thousand feet above a great, almost-but-not-quite flat expanse of green fields and forests and brown mountains, and then began to fall.
The Muse fired her engine almost gently. We passed over a coastline and then over wide plains toward a range of mountains.
“We are to land on that mesa,” said the dragoman.
“Who’s ordering us to land there?” demanded Kemp. “The Poimen?”
The dragoman smiled again and shook his head.
The Archons were the petty rulers according to our Gnostic faith, the Poimen the shepherds (although the gospels never told us what or who they were shepherds of), the Demiurgos were the architects, the fashioners, the true (but flawed and failed) creators of our world and universe, and Abraxas was God of All Opposites, Satan and Savior, Love and Hatred, and all other truths combined.
Now, as we all stood outside our ship in the sweet, rich air of this ninth-sphere world, the Demiurgos approached from the direction that might have been north.
None of us had ever set foot on a world as beautiful as this. From our high mesa we could see hundreds if not thousands of square miles of green grasslands, rolling fields golden as if from wheat, thousands of acres of distant tidy orchards, more thousands of acres of apparently wild forest stretching off to the green foothills of a long mountain range, snow on the mountain peaks, a wide blue sky interrupted here and there by bands of clouds with some of the cumulonimbus rising ten miles into the blue sky, rain visibly falling in brushstroke dark bands far to our right, and more, a hint of our just-traversed coastline and ocean far, far to what we decided was the west, and from every direction the sweet scent of grass, growing things, fresh air, rain, blossoms, and life.
“Is this Heaven?” Condella asked the dragoman.
“Why do you ask me?” was the naked dragoman’s reply. He added a shrug.
That was when three Demiurgos approached from the north.
We’d already seen living things during our minutes alone on the mesa top—huge white birds in the distance, four-legged grazers that might have been Earth antelope or deer or wildebeest running in small herds many miles below on the great green sea of grass surrounding the mesa, large gray shadows in the faraway forests—elephants? rhinoceroses? dinosaurs? giraffes? any of Earth’s long-extinct large wild things?
We hadn’t brought binoculars out and couldn’t tell without going back into the Muse to use her optics and now we didn’t care as the Demiurgos approached.
We never doubted that these three were from the race of our Creators, even though no image of our Demiurge or his species appeared in our gospels or church windows.
They were six or seven hundred feet tall—above our height of three or four hundred feet above the lowlands here on the flat-topped mesa even though the bottoms of their legs were on the grasslands. They did not seem too massive for all their height because two thirds of each of them was in the form of three long, multiply articulated legs, each glowing a sort of metallic red and banded with black and dark blue markings, the three legs meeting in an almost artificial-looking metal-studded triangular disk of a torso—like a huge milking stool with living legs, was Tooley’s later description.
It was the last hundred feet or so of Demiurgos that rose above the three legs and triangular torso that caught our attention.
Imagine a twenty-story-tall chambered nautilus rising from that metallic torso—not something like a chambered nautilus, but an actual shell—three shells here, each with its characteristic bright stripes—and from the lower opening of each spiraled shell, the living Demiurgos itself.
At the center of each shell was the circular umbilicus. Forward of that, over the massive opening, was a huge hood the color of dried blood. Beneath that hood on each side were the huge, perfectly round yellow eyes. Each black pupil at the center of each eye was large enough to have swallowed me.
And the word “swallow” did come to mind as the three Demiurgos tripoded their way closer until they hung over us; the great opening at the front of each shell was a mass of tentacles, tentacle sheaths, orangish-red spotted tonguelike material, horned funnels, and sphinctured apertures that might have been multiple mouths. Each huge yellow eye had its own long, fleshy ocular tentacle with a red-yellow node on its eye-end looking like some gigantic infested sty.