Perhaps it was too late.
Zoe had climbed the wall, and found herself on the edge of the wide alabaster dome. She made her way around it, keeping low so that her shadow did not show through to those inside. Eventually she found a narrow opening in the alabaster, and levered herself in. Inside there was a narrow ledge, circling the inside of the dome, Zoe crouched down to keep herself hidden. When she looked below she saw Jamie strapped to a table, his shirt pulled open, and Hero selecting a knife to use on her friend.
She was about to scream out, when she heard a thin whistle. Hero must have heard it too, for he looked around, confused.
Zoe saw the Doctor first, directly below her, a Muse guarding him on either side.
‘What are you doing?’ Hero asked.
The Doctor had his recorder in his hand. He spoke quietly. ‘My friend here, I appreciate he will live for ever in the Muse, but I’d like to play a little tune for him, if I may? A Scottish tune?’ The Doctor nodded at Erato and Urania on either side of him. ‘My new friends understand the power of a funeral dirge in its place.’
Hero frowned. ‘The problem with these Muses is they have no idea how much I’ve done for them. Very well, but quietly, I need to concentrate.’
Hero picked up a thin knife and, as he did so, the Doctor looked up and winked at Zoe. Clinging to the edge of the dome opening with one hand, Zoe held the double pipe in the other, and despite her precarious position and never having played before, she felt certain she would be able to play sweetly, perfectly.
As she took a breath and Hero made his first nick in Jamie’s skin, the Doctor let out a belter of a blow into his own recorder. Zoe brought the double pipe to her lips and blew.
Nothing happened. There was no sound.
The Doctor played his own recorder again, and again Zoe tried with the double pipe. No sound.
Hero looked away from Jamie to see what was going on, and what he saw had him drop the knife and back away to the far wall, away from the Doctor and from Zoe above.
The Doctor turned to see what had so scared Hero and he too looked startled, but he looked up and said to Zoe, who couldn’t see what Hero and the Doctor could see, ‘Keep playing, keep playing!’
And so, teetering on the edge of the dome, Zoe continued to play a sound she could not hear, a tune that no human ears would ever hear. She played the tune that called the Muses – the real Muses – from their home, the planet Helicon, renamed Mount Helicon in the myths that humans had created to explain the astonishing power of the alien women they rewrote as ‘the Muses’.
Below Zoe, the mechanical Euterpe snapped to attention. Her body shifted and grew, seemed to take up much more space. As did Urania and all of the other Hero-made Muses. Then the misshapes emerged from the antechamber, and they too ranked themselves alongside their fellow Muses. They kept coming, half-made limbs, and talking heads, eyes rolling animatedly across the floor, mouths speaking, though no sound came from them. All of them were more alive than they had ever been, more alive than Hero could ever make them.
And then Euterpe reached up her arm, an arm that seemed to extend itself without elongating, to reach without changing shape, and she plucked the pipe from Zoe’s hand.
Zoe grabbed the dome opening with both hands now, and carefully, trembling, she crouched down, sitting on the lip of wall at the edge of the dome.
Now Euterpe played the pipes, her own pipes, the original aulos, the prototype recorder stolen from her eons ago, and eventually forgotten. It had been traded, transported, and finally arrived, its precious origins unknown, conserved on a dusty shelf in the depths of the Musaeum.
When Euterpe played, everyone could hear the music. It was more than beautiful and it took only moments for Hero to be weeping at his own foolishness, at the enormity of his presumption in thinking he might recreate a real Muse. The music was beautiful enough to rouse Jamie, who woke neither annoyed nor angry, but grateful to be lying there, to feel the music running through his body, in time with his still-beating heart.
Finally, when Euterpe’s music had called in the original Muse to each of the other Hero-made Muses, she played a long, pure, high note that shattered the alabaster dome, shards miraculously falling clear of Zoe.
It was Melpomene who took Hero to task.
‘I was once Muse of Singing, just singing, did you know that, Hero?’
Hero shook his head.
‘And when it was understood that the voice is the way to all feeling, and all too often to the feelings you humans run from, they made me Muse of Tragedy. Now I stand before you, you tragic figure, and I wonder, how should I inspire you now? Your arrogance has brought us back to this tedious Earth, where all you ever do is moan and complain and beg us to visit…’ She was warming to her theme now, prowling the room, the other Muses and pieces of Muses nodding and clapping, tapping half-made fingers and toes on the marble floor in applause and agreement with her. ‘Whining, “Oh Muse visit me”, “Oh Muse, I can’t create without you”, “Oh Muse, help me, help me, help me”…’
Melpomene paused and took a breath, her body and voice suddenly vast. ‘Do you not think we grow tired of HELPING?’ she demanded, looming over Hero. ‘And even more insulting,’ she added, back to her original size, ‘when you demand we attend you, we have to pretend to be men to get in.’
The Muses and the many mechanical half-pieces tutted and shook what heads they could as Melpomene closed her argument. ‘We, who are the essence of all that is inspiring in women, inspiring of men and of women, have to pretend to be men, because you demand we arrive. When the whole point of being a Muse – the whole point,’ she thundered, ‘is for YOU to wait for US.’
She looked at Jamie who was gazing at her in adoration, at Hero cowering before her, and at the Doctor, who was leaning against the wall, a quiet smile on his face.
She glared. ‘Do I amuse you, Doctor?’
‘No Melpomene, you enthuse me – as you always have.’
Zoe thought she saw a fleeting smile cross Euterpe’s lips at this, and she was certain Clio and Erato winked at each other, but Melpomene didn’t so much as blush.
‘As I should,’ she said, holding her hands out to the Doctor. ‘As I should.’