Celestial Matters Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Part I

  α

  β

  γ

  δ

  ∈

  ζ

  η

  θ

  Part II

  ι

  κ

  λ

  μ

  ν

  ξ

  o

  π

  ρ

  σ

  Praise

  Copyright

  To my wife, Alessandra

  I

  α

  I supplicate myself before Apollo of the poets and before the Muses. I ask them to fill me, a weak-voiced scientist, with their gifts so that I may in their honor adorn the tale I must tell with beauty, yet in it say nothing but the truth.

  But forgive me, O gods, it is not right that I honor Apollo with my voice and dishonor his father Zeus, god of guests, with my anonymity. Therefore, I tell you that my name is Aias; that I was born in the city of Tyre in the 935th year since the founding of the Delian League; that my antecedents are honorable, since my mother was a child of a great Phoenician merchant house and my father a Spartan general who in his youth commanded armies and in his maturity served as military governor of many city-states within the League.

  As for my personal honors, I graduated at the age of twenty from the Athenian Akademe and in the twenty-three years since then I served the League as a scholar in the fields of Pyrology and Ouranology. Most recently I held the post of Scientific commander of the celestial ship Chandra’s Tear, and on that vessel I oversaw the researching, creation, and operation of Project Sunthief. It is because of my actions in that capacity that I am now called and do freely submit myself and my story to the gods for judgment.

  Once again I bow before Phoibos and the Nine who follow him, and offer prayers for their assistance. With their help and your indulgence, therefore, permit me to begin my tale during the last peaceful period in my life, that final stretch of pleasant time the Fates gave me before they snarled the thread of my existence.

  For three years I had been in command of Chandra’s Tear, during which time I and my subordinates had by the labor of our minds and the experiments of our hands brought Project Sunthief from a theoretical possibility to an incipient reality. At the end of those three years, we were actually capable of spinning celestial matter mined from the inner planets into a sun net. We believed and hoped that we would be able to use such a net to capture a portion of ’Elios’s celestial fire.

  But the exact specifications of the sun net still required a great deal of patient calculation and experimentation that could only be performed by Mihradarius, my chief Ouranologist. No other progress could be made until he finished that part of the project. When I put the matter to him Mihradarius passed a few minutes in silent contemplation, then confidently declared that he would be able to complete the work in a month.

  So, much to our surprise, I and my other two primary subordinates, Kleon, chief Celestial Navigator of Chandra’s Tear, and Ramonojon, the Chief Dynamicist, found ourselves with nothing to do for thirty days. We each decided to take advantage of this unexpected gift of time to take leave from the ship.

  Of the thousand days that had passed since my crew had first assembled on Chandra’s Tear not one of us had spent more than ten on the earth. I do not know how the others felt, but I had come to dream of once again walking across Gaea’s stationary ground, and laying my motion-wracked body on her peaceful grassy surface, and enjoying the stillness of that static globe that lay at the center of the endlessly moving cosmos.

  I sent messages down to Earth requesting permission from the Athenian bureaucracy, the Spartan military high command, and the Archons on Delos for a month’s vacation for the three of us. Both of the Archons approved without comment. The Spartans had no objection since Chandra’s Tear would still be guided by its Military Commander, my friend and partner, Aeson. They knew, as I did, that the firm hand of that wise officer would ensure that the project proceeded smoothly and securely. But the bureaucrats in Athens were another matter. They had no problem with Kleon and Ramonojon taking time off, but to their pedantic minds a ship’s commander belonged on his ship.

  For four days message capsules flew back and forth between Chandra’s Tear and Athens conveying my arguments and their counterarguments. They finally gave in when I threatened to lodge protests with the Archons and the provost of the Akademe. I hinted at dire consequences to careers, and implied a level of influence with those in power that I was not sure I had. My bluff worked, but out of spite the bureaucrats insisted I find some way to pay for my absence. I grudgingly offered to make a lecture tour of some of the city-states around the Mediterranean to offset the minute costs of my month’s rest.

  That matter settled, Kleon, Ramonojon, and I cleared our desks of paperwork and prepared to depart. We arranged to disembark from the ship at the sky dock on Crete and come aboard again one month later from the port in Athens. I considered having a formal ceremony of departure, during which I would explicitly hand over scientific command of Chandra’s Tear to Mihradarius, who was my second-in-command. But on reflection I decided that a formal ceremony of leave-taking with the requisite prayers, sacrifice, and taking of omens would make the crew too conscious of my absence and worry them unduly. However, neither did I want to simply vanish from my own ship like a thief in the night, so, the night before I was to go back down to Earth, I had a celebratory feast laid on in the ship’s commissary.

  The slave cooks did a marvelous job of preparing the meal, which centered around a whole roasted lamb marinated liberally in olive oil and oregano, served with barley bread fresh from the ship’s ovens; there were also fresh vegetables from all across the world and little honey cakes dotted with dates. To add to the celebration, Mihradarius himself brought out some jars of Persian wine that had aged for many years in his family estates near Persepolis. He broke the seal on a dark red vintage and let the heady smell waft deliciously from the clay clask; then he poured and mixed the wine with water and toasted me with fulsome congratulations for having brought Sunthief this close to final success.

  The whole scene is engraved in my heart with perfect clarity; I remember Mihradarius’s aristocratic, upright stance, his flowing Athenian scholar’s robes, and the sight of his right hand as he raised up the plate of wine. The last rays of sunlight glinted off the deep crimson liquid while the silvery glow that came up from the ship’s deck set off the black figure painting of Mithras on the underside of the drinking vessel.

  “To Aias of Athens,” Mihradarius said, his voice carrying clearly though the crisp air of five hundred miles up. “Commander, may you well enjoy your rest after long labors.”

  I bowed my head in thanks and the two hundred crewmen of Chandra’s Tear, both my own scientific staff and Aeson’s soldiers, raised their plates of wine and drank to my triumph from which their own triumphs would flow.

  As the sun set, I raised my plate and drank to my crew in the mingled silver light of moon and stars and ship. That dark purple draft of Dionysos flowed down
my throat and elated me with thoughts of my soon-to-be-completed achievement. All around me my crew were drinking and laughing, praising me and delighting in their own efforts. O gods, how easy it is for man to fall into hubris. O Prometheus, maker of man, why did you bless us with so little of your divine forethought?

  Basking in the warmth of wine and praise, I took a plate of lamb and wandered for a while through the party, graciously accepting the congratulations of all about me and complimenting each crewman in turn upon his work. In one corner of the commissary, seated on two adjacent couches, I came upon Mihradarius and Ramonojon in animated discussion. They formed a strange contrast, the tall, intense young Persian genius, keen and clear with his ideas, and the old Indian man cautiously rounding off the sharp corners of concepts, smoothing the way for Mihradarius’s notions to be put into actual practice. In the three years we had worked together they had fallen into a secure practice of continual wrangling from which had emerged the designs for the sun net and the mechanism that would secure it to the ship

  “Commander,” Mihradarius said as I walked up to them.

  “Aias,” Ramonojon said, greeting me as friend to friend instead of subordinate to leader.

  “Ramonojon, you have no work for the next month,” I said. “Why are you sitting here arguing with Mihradarius?”

  “There was a matter of the net specifications,” he said.

  “I did not ask what you were arguing about,” I said. “But why were you arguing?”

  Ramonojon bit his thumbnail in contemplation. He sat for a few moments thinking intensely. “Habit,” he said at last. “Just habit.”

  Ramonojon lowered his head in mock shame and ate a little of the lamb on his plate. Mihradarius and I laughed lightly at Ramonojon’s self-mockery.

  “Do not worry about the sun net, Chief Dynamicist,” Mihradarius said to Ramonojon. “I shall keep all your concerns in mind while you are gone.”

  “Thank you, Senior Ouranologist,” Ramonojon said. He smiled for a moment, but then it seemed as if a heaviness settled briefly on his shoulders before being dispelled by a shake of his head. “But only I can keep all my concerns in mind.”

  I wondered what was troubling him, and was about to ask, but at that point Kleon darted out of the crowd and flitted over to us. He was carrying a small plate of olives and sweet wheat cakes, one of which he was in the process of devouring. True to his Pythagorean vows, my Chief Celestial Navigator never ate meat, but that had never stopped him from relishing his food.

  “Mihradarius,” Kleon said, wiping the last few crumbs of cake from his thin, scraggly beard. “I hope you will keep my ship safe while I am down on Earth.”

  The navigator’s musical voice held an air of joking amusement, but underneath that tone lay a clear note of real concern. It was hard for Kleon to leave the ship he had been piloting for three years; he knew his second navigator to be a competent pilot but not divinely gifted as Kleon had become through years of Pythagorean mathematical contemplation.

  Mihradarius nodded patiently to Kleon. “Tell me what you think I should do,” he said.

  Kleon and Mihradarius settled down to a discussion of the ship’s routine, including flight schedules, maintenance work that needed to be done, and so on. Mihradarius was remarkably indulgent of Kleon; usually my second-in-command had little or no patience for such things. I noted it in my mind as further evidence that Mihradarius would one day be an excellent scientific commander.

  While Kleon and Mihradarius were going over the rotation schedule for the junior navigators, Ramonojon stood up quietly and faded into the crowd, not wanting to be drawn into such a lackluster conversation.

  For similar reasons I also slipped off, ducking through the throng of scientists and soldiers sharing idle talk and grandiose hopes, and made my way to the aft end of the commissary, where the slave cooks waited with more food and wine.

  My co-commander Aeson was seated on a couch next to the serving table. Between small bites of plain bread he swept his glance over the crowd, studying his soldiers and officers with an appraising eye. His Spartan spirit kept the men from indulging in excess, and made them remember that they were the crew of a celestial ship of the Delian League.

  While I could inspire my scientists with the vision of Sunthief, it was Aeson who kept the whole crew, civilian and soldier alike, aware of the military importance of our work. Watching him, I became keenly aware of the central tenet of Delian rulership: two leaders for every command. There was a pang in my heart, an instant of worry about my absence. Would the ship run as smoothly with one full commander and one second-in-command? But that brief touch of wise caution was swept out of me by the spirit of surety that reigned over my ship.

  Aeson nodded to me and handed me a plate of wine. “Enjoy your rest, Aias,” he said. “I will keep watch over our command.”

  I drank the wine to the last drop, put down the plate, and gripped Aeson’s elbow as friend to friend. “I have no doubt of that,” I said.

  Aeson returned the gesture, his scarred, strong warrior’s hand giving my arm a gentle clutch of reassurance. The two of us together raised a toast to our crew and to Sunthief and then with the hurrahs of my men still ringing in my ears, I retired to pack my traveling satchel and sleep off the heady wine of confidence.

  The next morning Chandra’s Tear docked above Crete to take on supplies. Kleon, Ramonojon, and I bade farewell to our comrades and underlings, then disembarked to enjoy once again the pleasures that only Earth could provide. Kleon remained in Crete at the celestial navigators guild to obtain some new impellers for our ship and to catch up on the latest advances in mathematics with his fellow Pythagoreans. Ramonojon and I shared a light breakfast of bread and olives at a small restaurant on the coast; then he boarded a fast ocean ship bound for his home in India. Alone and at peace, I reacquainted my body with the sensations of immobility before setting out to refamiliarize my mind with the luxurious life to be found around the central sea of the Delian League.

  My first stop was Memphis in Egypt; there I walked along the banks of the Nile, watched slaves harvest papyrus reeds to be pressed into scrolls, and saw the steamships ferrying gold and exotic foods from the heart of Africa into the Mediterranean basin. I paid due homage to Thoth-’Ermes at the temple in Memphis and gave a ten-year-old lecture on the properties of light-gathering materials to the schoolmasters and junior scholars of that city.

  From there I passed on to ’Ierusalem and enjoyed a lively debate with the Pyrology staff at the rabbinical college on the exact motive properties of different forms of fire. We argued for seven hours without a pause and only stopped because night was about to fall and the ’Ebreu holy day of rest began that evening. The next day I and a few other visitors wandered the nearly deserted streets of the city while the inhabitants stayed in their homes praying with their families or went to their temple to worship their god.

  The next day I traveled by underground evac tube to the port of Gaza and boarded a Spartan warship traveling to Rome in order to pick up soldiers needed for the war in North Atlantea. The Forum in Rome buzzed with the latest battle news; merchants and aristocrats argued cogently about what strategies the Spartan high command would use to capture the plains of that continent and what means the army of the Middle Kingdom would use to try and stop our armies. Of all the peoples in the Delian League the Romans come closest to the Spartans in their fascination with war.

  As I was leaving the Forum, I was accosted by an old veteran who had when a much younger man served under my father’s command. I bought the retired soldier a bowl of wine and listened respectfully as he told me of the campaigns of his youth and the battles he had fought to take the river Mississipp.

  He was particularly vehement about how easy today’s soldiers had it, since he had been in the army before the invention of celestial ships. In those days the enemy ruled the skies with their battle kites and our troops had only the artillery to defend themselves with. Before I left, he asked me how my
father was. I smiled and shrugged, not wanting to tell this loyal old man that my father and I had not spoken in over two decades.

  Not surprisingly, my lecture to the Roman college was poorly attended as I refused to speak about weapons research. The Spartans would have had my head if I had actually given out any details about an important military project like Sunthief. The night before I left I attended the New Orphic mysteries in the catacombs beneath the Pantheon, then I paid my respects to Zeus of the Capital and sailed away.

  From Rome I went to Syrakuse, where I offered the traditional sacrifice of the blood from a black-wooled sheep to the hero-scientist Archimedes, one of the first great weapon makers. Few ask for his intercession, but I needed all the divine assistance I could muster for the completion of my work. In the bustling port of Syrakuse I took ship to the Pillars of ’Erakles; from there I traveled on land in the sweltering steel box of a military fire chariot eastward across the north coast of Africa. The soldiers driving the steam-powered wagon asked me if I had ever been in anything this hot. I, who was planning to capture a fragment of the sun itself, had no choice but to laugh all the way to Carthage.

  The citizens of that part of the world are very traditional people. Of all the cities on the Mediterranean, Carthage is the only one to have no modern conveniences. Their tallest buildings are three stories high, there is no sky dock, no evac tubes for intracity transport, no weather-filtering grids of air-silver above their houses. They even refuse to grow animals in spontaneous generation farms.

  Some people, no doubt, derive contentment from that primitive existence, but I had come back to Earth to enjoy myself. After giving a very abbreviated lecture and taking as few questions as possible, I fled on the first ship I could find bound for Tyre, the city of my birth.

  I reached Tyre four days before my vacation was due to end. The moment I stepped off the boat, I was mobbed by two dozen of my maternal relatives. Young cousins pulled at the blue fringe on my scholar’s robe and asked me all sorts of questions about life on a celestial ship. Uncles offered me advice on how to keep my subordinates in line, and my aunts presented me with the names of several eligible women I might wish to marry; after all, I was forty-three and not getting any younger.