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.
These were our Creators. Or at least one of them had been some twelve to twenty billion years ago. For Creators, I thought, they were very fleshy and organic created things themselves, for all the beauty of their huge spiraled nautilus shells.
We’d all stepped back closer to the open airlocks and ports of the Muse, but none of us ran inside to hide. Not yet. I was painfully aware that the Dermiurgos closest to me could whip down one of those sticky tongue-tentacles and have me in its bony funneled orifice in a second.
“You will perform a play now,” said the dragoman. “The best one you know. Perform it well.”
Kemp tore his gaze away from the gigantic tripods looming over us and said to the dragoman, “You’re in touch with them? They’re speaking to you?”
The dragoman did not respond.
“Why won’t they speak to us?’ cried Burbank. “Tell them that we want to talk to them, not perform another play.”
“You will perform the best play you know now,” said the dragoman, his voice flat in that way it got when he was channeling these other beings. “You will perform it to the best of your ability.”
“Is this a test?” asked Aglaé. “At least ask them if this is a test.”
“Yes,” said the dragoman.
“Yes it’s a test?” demanded Kemp.
“Yes.”
“Why?” said Burbank.
The dragoman’s large eyes were almost closed. The Demiurgos’s huge yellow eyes above us never blinked but their ocular tentacles moved in a way that seemed hungry to me.
“What happens if we fail?” asked Aglaé.
“Your species will be extinguished,” said the dragoman.
There was a roar of confused noise from all of us at that. The Demiurgos leaned farther over the mesa, their mouths and tentacles and eyes coming closer, and I picked up the strong brackish scent of the ocean—salt and reeking mud tidal flats and dead fish in the sun. I had a strong urge to run up the ramp into the Muse and hide in my bunk.
“That’s just not… fucking… fair,” Kemp said at last, speaking for all of us.
The dragoman smiled and I admit that I wouldn’t have minded beating him to death at that moment. He spoke slowly, clearly: “Your species was excused upon first encounter because of Shakespeare. Only because of Shakespeare. His words and the meaning behind his words could not be fully comprehended, even unto the level of the Demiurge who created you. In your world, then, man was Abraxas—you gave birth to and devoured your own worlds and words, embracing eternal weakness even while you blazed with absolute creative power. You sought to build a bridge over death itself. All higher powers beneath the Absence that is Abraxas—the lowly Archons, the preoccupied Poimen, the race of Demiurgos themselves—voted that immediate extinction had to be your species’ fate. But because of this one dead mind, this Shakespeare, there was a stay of execution on this sentence not to exceed one thousand and nine of your years. That time is up.”
We stood silent in the sunlight. There was the sound in my ears of a single, huge, pounding heart, like the surf of a rising sea; I did not know if the pounding beat came from the Demiurgos whose shadow fell over me or from me.
“You will perform the best play that you know,” repeated the dragoman. “And you will perform it to the best of your ability.”
We looked at each other again. Finally Kemp said, “Hamlet.”
The show went on. It took us half an hour to get into costumes, review roles—although we all knew our roles for Hamlet without asking—and slap on makeup, although the idea of the Demiurgos noticing our makeup was absurd. Then again, those huge, unblinking yellow eyes did not seem to miss anything, even though they stared through their own waving mass of tentacles when looking forward.
I was Rosenkrantz when we performed Hamlet and I enjoyed the part. Philp was Guildenstern. Old Adam had once told us that on Earth, pre-Contact, there had been a derivative play—not by Shakespeare supposedly—which featured Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, those two lying but playful betrayers. I would have loved seeing it, if it ever did exist. Hell, I would have loved starring in it.