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

“Arrrrrhh!” screamed Kemp and threw his crown at the tentacled maw of the nearest Demiurge. It did not quite make contact.

We all went into the ship. The hatches were sealed. The viewstrips showed the Demiurgos ambling away to the north in their long three-legged strides in the short minute before the mesa rock and grass beneath the ship glowed white, then yellow, then turned into a long metallic funnel, and the ship fell—or was flung—violently down and down and then out. The internal fields all kicked on and we were frozen in place as the Muse compensated for the deadly acceleration gravities assailing us. Evidently they were within the thirty-one g’s she could handle. A moment later we abruptly transited to the gold nothingness of the Pleroma—the Demiurgos had not even bothered flinging us out through their tenth, eleventh, and twelfth spheres before making the transit leap—and Kemp said, “I’ll interpret our being allowed to leave as a passing grade.”

“Allowed to leave?” said Heminges. “They fucking well booted us out.”

Burbank said, “I’m going to get some sleep,” and everyone cheered raggedly and we began to head for our bunks. Some were so exhausted that they fell on couches or the deck and were instantly asleep.

I sought out Aglaé before she disappeared up to her bunk cubbie.

“Do you trust me?” I asked when I’d asked her to follow me down to the Muse’s level and she’d grudgingly complied. It felt strange to be alone with Aglaé in the dim blue light with the naked female form floating just a few feet away.

“Do you trust me?” I asked again when she did not reply immediately.

“Wilbr, what do you want? I’m tired. Very tired.” She had every right to be, I realized. Aglaé had held important parts in all four plays we’d presented in the last three endless, continuous, sleepless days and nights of strangeness. “If you brought me down here for…” she began with a warning in her voice.

We were interrupted by the dragoman coming down the ladder after dogging the overhead hatch behind him. I’d not told him to come.

I turned to the Muse in her sphere. The tiny cracks where the spade had dented the surface had not spread. My guess was that the metaglass would have survived a thousand spade attacks. “We’re here,” I said to the naked form.

“In immeasurable distance there glimmers a solitary star on the highest point of heaven,” said the dragoman in the Muse’s voice, accurate down to her new youthful energy. “This is the only God of this lonely star. This is his world, his Pleroma, his divinity.”

I knew the words so well I could have recited them myself. Any of us could have. This was from Saint Jung’s Seventh Sermon to the Dead.

“There is nothing that can separate man from his own God, if man can only turn his gaze away from the fiery spectacle of Abraxas,” continued the Muse’s voice through the dragoman’s mouth. I understood that she was communicating with us this way so the rest of the ship would not hear. But why? Why this sermon?

Aglaé looked at me with growing concern in her eyes. She didn’t like this sermon coming from the ship’s soul, and neither did I. I shook my head to show her my own confusion.

“Man here,” said the Muse. This was the penultimate verse of the Seventh Sermon, word for word. “God there. Weakness and insignificance here, eternal creative power there. Here is but darkness and damp cold. There all is sunshine.”

“Muse,” began Aglaé, “why have you—”

“Upon hearing this, the dead fell silent,” continued the Muse as if Aglaé had not spoken, “and they rose up like smoke rises over the fire of the shepherd, who guards his flock by night.”

“Amen,” Aglaé and I said in unison, out of habit.

“Anagramma,” said the Muse, her voice lower, completing the Seventh Sermon with its sacred and secret codicil. “Nahtriheccunde. Gahinneverahtunin. Zehgessurklach. Zunnus.”

Alarm klaxons began blaring throughout the ship. More alarms rang and bleated and thumped. The Muse’s voice—her old voice, probably a recorded voice, her voice in rare alarm even as her face behind the metaglass stayed serene, her eyes watchful—shouted out, “Warning! Warning! The airlocks are opening! The airlocks are opening! We are in Pleroma and all hatches and airlocks are opening! Warning!”

At that moment the dragoman’s neurofiber filaments slipped through my skin and flesh and pierced the nerves at the base of my skull. I saw filaments wrapping around Aglaé’s lovely neck and doing the same. More filaments shot forward from the dragoman’s head, made contact with the metaglass, and then passed through. The Muse extended her body so that the filaments pierced her small, white breasts.

“Warning! Airlocks opening. All hatches opening. We are in the Pleroma. Warning! Air pressure dropping. Don protective gear. Warning! All airlocks are…” came the recorded voice at full volume from all speakers, but the words grew tinier and tinnier and then disappeared completely as the last air roared and hissed and flowed out of the ship through all of its open airlocks and hatches and doors, while the golden vacuum of the Pleroma flowed in to fill each compartment and all of our straining lungs with its nothingness.

“Come out!” commanded the voice, but only Aglaé, the dragoman, and I could do so. The others might have been dead, their lungs and eyes and eardrums exploded. Or they could be frozen in the vacuum-thick Pleroma like ancient insects in amber. In either case, they could not move.

Aglaé and I could do so and we did, laboriously climbing the ladder, floating and swimming through the golden medium to the airlock, then out into the Abyss. It seemed to take centuries. But no one was in a hurry. The dragoman followed, his long spatulate fingers and flattened feet pulling him and pushing him through the golden nothing with easy, broad, flick-away swimming motions.

Abraxas was waiting outside. I was not surprised. I could feel that Aglaé was not surprised either, nor the Muse—who was watching us somehow, I felt, even though the external imagers no longer worked for those trapped inside.

When I say that we went—or swam—outside into the Abyss, the Pleroma, it gives no real sense of the experience. The Abyss or Void or Pleroma was not absence; it was Fullness beyond all measure. It filled our mouths and lungs and eyes and cells. Moving in it was a matter of will, not locomotion. Once outside, there was no up, no down, no side to side. Aglaé and I willed and swam our way through the golden fullness to the long, gray curve of the outer hull of the ship—the only thing, other than Abraxas and us, that fouled the ineffable absoluteness of the Pleroma. We could use the hull as down if we stood on it; as a wall if we set our backs against it or near it; as a ceiling if we so chose. It gave us reference. Everything else, other than Abraxas waiting, was… ineffable.

I had learned that word in my catechisms as a child, but I never understood ineffable until this minute. Even as my mind reeled with vertigo, it remembered the words of our Gnostic prophet Basilides as quoted by Hippolytus some thousands of years before Contact ended all context.

For that which is really ineffable is not named Ineffable, but is superior to every name that is used…

Naught was, neither matter, nor substance, nor voidness of substance, nor simplicity, nor impossibility of composition, nor inconceptibility, nor imperceptibility, neither man, nor angel, nor god; in fine, neither anything at all for which man has ever found a name, nor any operation which falls within the range either of perception or conception. Such, or rather far more removed from the power of man’s comprehension, was the state of nonbeing, when the Deity beyond being, without thinking, or felling, or determining, or choosing, or being compelled, or desiring, willed to create universality.