Finally my youth and terror-augmented strength—combined with a lucky knee applied briskly to his codpieced balls—turned the tide and I forced Heminges against the bulkhead again and then up, up, the spade handle under his chin, until his toes left the deck. He hung there close to helpless. One final concerted press forward and I’d crush his Adam’s apple with the handle, or just choke the fucking fool to death.

Instead of smashing his larynx, I panted, “What are you doing?”

His eyes, already wide, grew as round as the dragoman’s but much madder. “I…break…the globe…” he panted, breathing whiskey fumes all over me, “and the fusion reactor goes critical. We… blow… those alien… cock-suckers… to hell.”

“Bullshit,” I said, dropping him so his feet hit the deck but not relenting the pressure of the spade handle against his throat. If I slammed it up under his chin, it would snap his neck. “Nothing can make the reactor explode. Tooley told me so.”

He tried to shake his head but it only resulted in the spade handle rubbing more skin from his already reddened neck. “She… told me… it would,” he gasped. His staring eyes were looking over my shoulder.

I released the pressure and turned to look at the Muse, the spade now hefted loosely in my hands. “How did she tell you?” I asked Heminges without turning to look at him. He was no threat. He’d slid down the bulkhead and was sprawled on the deck, panting and wheezing.

“Through dreams,” he managed at last. “She gets… into… my dreams. If the reactor goes critical, we can blow a hole in this Demiurgos sphere and all the air will rush out and…”

He stopped. He must have realized then how insane that idea sounded. As if the Demiurgos’s home—the ultimate Creation of the Creators—could be so easily damaged.

I did not speak to him then, but looked directly into the Muse’s blue eyes when I spoke. “Did you really tell him that? Did you really get into his dreams and tell him he could do this? If you can turn this ship… yourself… into a hydrogen bomb, you sure don’t need this aging Iago to help you do it. What the fuck are you up to, woman?”

The Muse smiled sadly at me but no voice came from the speaker grills on the wall.

I turned back to Heminges, stood over him, and handed him the spade. “Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes are almost finished with their scene,” I said. “Gough will be going on with his pickaxe without you. He’d just fucking love to take your part and deliver your lines. He’s always thought he’d make a better First Clown than you. I doubt if the goddamned Demiurgos will notice that there’s an assistant gravedigger missing.”

It was as if I’d run thousands of amps of current directly into Heminges’s ass. He leaped up, steadied himself on the spade, shot an angry look at the Muse, and clambered up the steps and out. Actors, I thought, are nothing if not predictable.

My hands empty now, I spent another long moment staring at the naked woman in the blue sphere. I said nothing. This time she did speak through the intercom, her words echoing in the otherwise empty ship.

“That had to be done, Wilbr, or he would have found a real way to damage the ship in his vain attempt at revolution. This way, I would have been the only one injured.”

I still stared and said nothing. Injured? The Muse had been dead for centuries, the solid illusion of her naked young body here notwithstanding.

“Do bring her down here, just the two of you and the dragoman, as soon as we enter the Pleroma,” said the Muse. Her lips did not move, of course, her mouth did not open, but it was her voice.

I did not say, “Yes.” I did not say, “Bring who?” I said nothing.

After a moment I turned my back, scrambled up the ladder, and went out into the sunlight to watch the end of the play.

I’m sorry that I used the word “brilliant” and perhaps even “unprecedented” when I described our performance of King Lear earlier… and perhaps I even used words like that to describe our performance of the Scottish Play in front of the Archon, or maybe (although I doubt it) our staging of Much Ado About Nothing for the arbeiters and doles the day before… because now I have no adequate words to describe the truly brilliant performance our people achieved with this Hamlet. I’d missed a few minutes, to be sure, wrestling with Heminges and the spade down in the storm cellar of the Muse, but I’d not missed so much that I didn’t realize how truly extraordinary this show had been. Whoever the long-dead critic had been, if he’d been real at all, who said that Hamlet should be read rather than seen to be fully appreciated… well, he hadn’t seen this performance.

Our people were half dead with exhaustion and tension by the last line, but somehow that added to the verisimilitude and unique quality of the performance. It was as if we had lived these hours—eternities—with the Prince of Denmark and his wit. Even those who hadn’t acted or who had simply been onstage as placeholders—the soldiers, attendants, guards, messengers, sailors, followers of Laertes and so forth—seemed as totally wrung out as Alleyn, Aglaé, Kemp, and the other principals.

Heminges, I should mention, was goddamned wonderful. He’s the only character in the play—a play in which even the most inconsequential character speaks more artfully than any man or woman now alive—who is a worthy interlocutor to Hamlet. If language is a game—and when is it not with Shakespeare? — then the gravedigger was the only player who should have been allowed on the court with the fiendishly witty Hamlet. ‘“Tis a quick lie, sir, ‘twill away again from me to you,” the gravedigger says once, taking one of Hamlet’s serves and smashing it back across the net. (We know about tennis through Henry V.)

Even before they are fully engaged in their battle of wits, Hamlet says of the gravedigger to Horatio, “How absolute the knave is. We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us.” Burbank taught me that this is a sailor’s card, a shipman’s card, that Hamlet is referring to—one on which all thirty-two compass points are clearly marked.

But Hamlet is a play in which no clear compass points have ever been marked to guide either the actors or the audiences. It ends, as Hamlet himself does, with far more brilliant questions asked than answered. When Hywo as Fortinbras, his voice husky with exhaustion and emotion, speaks the last words of the play over our rough stage strewn with corpses.

Take up the bodes. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

And all the living exited by march, carrying Hamlet’s body with them; we did not provide the sound effects of the cannon shooting as we usually did.

There was only silence: a silence broken only by the gentle afternoon breezes blowing across the mesa and the slight creakings and stirring of the Demiurgos’s triple legs and metal girdles and many tentacles. Their great yellow eyes did not blink. It was as if they were waiting for an encore.

Our dead sat up onstage. We actors, including Alleyn who was almost staggering from exhaustion and Aglaé, who was as pale as the real drowned Ophelia, came back onstage, joined hands, and bowed.

The Demiurgos made no sound or new movement.

“Well,” said Kemp at last, still wearing the dead Claudius’s crown as he faced the silent dragoman. “Did we pass? Does the human race continue? What’s our grade?”

“You are to return to your ship and seal it,” said the dragoman.

“Fuck that!” cried Kemp. He was shouting now at the looming ship-sized shells of the Demiurgos, I noticed, not at the round-eyed dragoman. “Give us your answer. Give us your verdict. We’ve done our bleeding best for every race of you alien pricks. Tell us now!’