Songs of the Dying Earth

“That’s odd,” said Derwe Corme as she rolled out of her hammock and into Shrue’s. The cheap clasps and thin webbing strings on Shrue’s hammock groaned and stretched but held as Derwe sat up and straddled him. “I never knew I was afraid of heights until today.”

On Sixthday Night of the second week, Shiolko and his sons opened the beautiful Grand Ballroom — its crystal floor took up almost a third of the hull bottom — and the passengers and sons staged a Mid-Voyage Festival, even though no one had the slightest idea if the voyage was at its midpoint or not. By midnight, Shrue cared no more than the others about such niggling fine points.

Even after two weeks, Shrue was surprised at his fellow passengers’ festive skills. Shiolko’s sons, it turned out, each played an instrument — and played it well. The side-windows were open in the Grand Ballroom and out into the interocean night went the complex bell-chimes of tiancoes, the string music of violins, serpis, and sphere-fiddles, the clear notes from flutes, claxophone, harp, and trumpet, and the bass of tamdrums and woebeons. Captain Shiolko, it turned out, was as much a master of the three-tiered piano as he was of his ship, and thus the dancing began.

Reverend Cepres and his two wives — Wilva and Cophrane — had not been seen out of their cabin since the voyage commenced, but they appeared in brilliant blue silks this night and showed the interested celebrants how to dance the wild and uninhibited Devian Tarantula. The Brothers Vromarak put aside their mourning for the night and led everyone in a hopping, leaping tango-conga line that concluded with two-thirds of the dancers collapsing in a wriggling, laughing heap. Then Arch-Docent Hu—the same tall, silent, solemn form with whom Shrue had played chess every evening on the foredeck — who had left his dark docent robes behind in his booklined stateroom, appeared barechested in gold slippers and silver pantaloons to dance a wild solo Quostry to the pounding piano and tamdrums. The dance was so gravity-defying and amazing to watch that the sixty-some passengers and crew applauded to the beat until Hu concluded by literally leaping to the ceiling, tapdancing there for an impossible three minutes, and then lowering himself like a spider to the crystal dancefloor below and bowing.

Little Maus Meriwolt wheeled out an instrument that he’d cobbled together. The thing appeared to be a mixture of organ, calliope, and fog horn, and Meriwolt — dressed now in his fanciest yellow shirt, white gloves, and red shorts — tapdanced in oversized wooden clogs as he sang in his falsetto and pulled ropes to activate the various horns, pipes, and steam sirens. The effect was so comical that the round of applause Meriwolt received rivaled Arch-Docent Hu’s reception.

But perhaps the most amazing part of the long night to Shrue was the transformation of Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme and her six Myrmazons.

Shrue had never seen Derwe Coreme or her fighters out of their formfitting dragonscale armor, but this night they appeared in thin, floating, incredibly erotic gowns of shimmeringly translucent silk of soft red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Everyone in the ballroom gasped when the Myrmazons floated in like a rainbow. And — like the bands of color in a rainbow — the intensity and hues shifted and changed from one to another as the women moved and as one moved in relation to them. Derwe Coreme, who had entered in a red dress, had her thin gauze’s color shift to violet as Shrue approached to ask her to dance. Each of the young women’s gowns shifted color as they moved and as their bodies moved beneath the fabric, but the full rainbow was always present with all seven of its colors.

“Astounding,” whispered Shrue much, much later as he held Derwe Coreme close as they danced. The orchestra, apparently exhausted from its own exertions during the wild dances, was playing a slow waltz half as old as time. The ball was almost over. There was a pre-dawn grayness to the light outside the crystal windows. Shrue could feel Derwe Coreme’s breasts against him as they slowly moved together across the crystal hull-floor. “Your gown — all your gowns — are astounding,” he said again.

“What? This old thing?” said Derwe Coreme, tossing aside a floating ribbon of the nearly transparent and seemingly gravity-free fabric — it was now green. “Just something the girls and I picked up after sacking the city of Moy.” She was obviously amused — and perhaps pleased — by Shrue’s amazement. “Why, diabolist? Does this sort of garb on a warrior not fit into your magician’s philosophy?”

Shrue recited softly—

“Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given