Mahnmut couldn’t be killed in literal terms—although part organic, he “existed” rather than “lived,” and he was designed tough—but he definitely did not want to become part of a fountain or a frozen chunk of an abstract sculpture for the next thousand e-years. For a minute he forgot both the kraken and Sonnet 116 as he worked the numbers—the diapir’s ascent rate, his submersible’s forward progress through the slush, the fast-approaching cap ice—and then he downloaded his thoughts to the engine room and ballast tanks. If it worked right, he would exit the south side of the diapir half a klick before glob impact with the ice and accelerate straight ahead, doing an emergency surface blow just as the tidal wave from the diapir fountain was forced down the lead. He would then use that 100-klick-per-hour acceleration to keep him ahead of the fountain effect—essentially using his submersible like a surfboard for half the distance to Conamara Chaos Central. He’d have to make the final twenty klicks or so to the base on the surface after the tidal wave dissipated, but he had no choice. It should be one hell of an entrance.
Unless something had blocked the lead ahead. Or unless another submersible was coming out-lead from Central. That would be embarrassing for the few seconds before Mahnmut and The Dark Lady were destroyed.
At least the kraken would no longer be a factor. The critters refused to rise closer than five klicks to the surface cap.
Having entered all the commands and knowing that he’d done everything he could think of to survive and arrive at the base on time, Mahnmut went back to his sonnet analysis.
Mahnmut’s submersible—which he had long ago named The Dark Lady—cruised the last twenty kilometers to Conamara Chaos Central down a kilometer-wide lead, riding on the surface of the black sea beneath a black sky. A three-quarters Jupiter was rising, clouds bright and cloud bands roiling with muted colors, while a tiny Io skittered across the rising giant’s face not far above the icy horizon. On either side of the lead, striated ice cliffs rose several hundred meters, their sheer faces dull gray and blunted red against the black sky.
Mahnmut was excited as he brought Shakespeare’s sonnet up.
Over the decades he had come to hate this sonnet. It was the kind of things humans had recited at their weddings way back in the Lost Age. It was smarmy. It was schlocky. It wasn’t good Shakespeare.
But finding microrecords of critical writings by a woman named Helen Vendler—a critic who had lived and written in one of those centuries, the Nineteenth or Twentieth or Twenty-first (the record time-stamps were vague)—had given Mahnmut a key to translating this sonnet. What if Sonnet 116 was not, as it had been portrayed for so many centuries, a sticky affirmation, but a violent refutation?
Mahnmut went back through his notated “key words” for support. There they were from each line—“not, not, no, never, not, not, not” and then in line fourteen—“never, nor,” and “no”—echoing King Lear’s nihilistic “never, never, never, never, never.”
It was definitely a poem of refutation. But refutation of what?
Mahnmut knew that Sonnet 116 was part of “the Young Man” cycle, but he also knew that the phrase “the Young Man” was little more than a fig leaf added in later, more prudish years. The love poems were not sent to a man, but to “the youth”—certainly a boy, probably no older than thirteen. Mahnmut had read the criticism from the second half of the Twentieth Century and knew these “scholars” thought the sonnets to be literal—that is, real homosexual letters from the playwright Shakespeare—but Mahnmut also knew, from more scholarly work in previous eras and in the later part of the Lost Age, that such politically motivated literal thinking was childish.
Shakespeare had structured a drama in his sonnets, Mahnmut was certain of that. “The youth” and the later “Dark Lady” were characters in that drama. The sonnets had taken years to write and had not been produced in the heat of passion, but in the maturity of Shakespeare’s full powers. And what was he exploring in these sonnets? Love. And what were Shakespeare’s “real opinions” about love?
No one would ever know—Mahnmut was sure the Bard was too clever, too cynical, too stealthy ever to show his true feelings. But in play after play, Shakespeare had shown how strong feelings—including love—turned people into fools. Shakespeare, like Lear, loved his Fools. Romeo had been Fortune’s Fool, Hamlet Fate’s Fool, MacBeth Ambition’s Fool, Falstaff . . .well, Falstaff was no one’s Fool . . . but he became a fool for the love of Prince Hal and died of a broken heart when the young prince abandoned him.
Mahnmut knew that the “poet” in the sonnet cycles, sometimes referred to as “Will,” was not—despite the insistence of so many of the shallow scholars of the Twentieth Century—the historical Will Shakespeare, but was, rather, another dramatic construct created by the playwright/poet to explore all the facets of love. What if this “poet” was, like Shakespeare’s hapless Count Orsino, Love’s Fool? A man in love with love?
Mahnmut liked this approach. He knew that Shakespeare’s “marriage of two minds” between the older poet and the youth was not a homosexual liaison, but a true sacrament of sensibilities, a facet of love honored in days long preceding Shakespeare’s. On the surface, Sonnet 116 seemed to be a trite declaration of that love and its permanency, but if it truly was a refutation . . .
Mahnmut suddenly saw where it fit. Like so many great poets, Shakespeare began his poems before or after they began. But if this was a poem of refutation, what was it refuting? What had the youth said to the older, love-besotted poet that needed such vehement refutation?
Mahnmut extended fingers from his primary manipulator, took up his stylus, and scribbled on his t-slate—
Dear Will—Certainly we’d both like the marriage of true minds we have—since men cannot share the sacramental marriage of bodies—to be as real and permanent as real marriage. But it can’t be. People change, Will. Circumstances change. When the qualities of people or the people themselves go away, one’s love does as well. I loved you once, Will, I really did, but you’ve changed, you’ve altered, and so there has been a change in me and an alteration in our love.
Yours most sincerely,
The Youth
Mahnmut looked at his letter and laughed, but the laughter died as he realized how this changed all of Sonnet 116. Now, instead of a treacly affirmation of unchanging love, the sonnet became a violent refutation of the youth’s jilting, an argument against such self-serving abandonment. Now the sonnet would read—