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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.
    SONNET 116

    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments; love is not love
    Which alters when it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove.
    O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
    That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
    It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
    Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
    Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
    Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
    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