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.

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.