Celestial Matters Page 12
“Plato’s final dialogue, published posthumously.” She still looked interested, which surprised me. “I assume you have not read Plato,” I said.
She shook her head; hardly surprising—few Akademics ever read him, let alone Spartans.
I felt a sudden wave of tiredness, so I walked over and lay down on my couch, staring up at the steel beams that reinforced my office’s granite ceiling. “The Apology is a fictional trial, in which Sokrates is charged with being hopelessly old-fashioned and unable to appreciate modern philosophy; his accusers are those Plato called the ‘younger generation of philosophers,’ in other words, scientists.
“The trial as presented could hardly be called a model of justice; the jury plugs their ears or pounds the floor whenever Sokrates speaks. His questions are left unanswered, the judge refuses to let him call witnesses, and when the guilty verdict and sentence of death or exile is delivered, they blindfold the statue of Dike.
“At the end Sokrates drinks hemlock, preferring to die rather than live in the world the scientists are making. But there’s no truth in it. Sokrates died of old age, respected throughout Athens. The whole work is just an embittered polemic, Plato showing his anger at Aristotle and the scientists for taking control of the Akademe and surpassing him in fame.”
She nodded slowly. “And Sokrates’ last words?”
I smiled and ate a fig. “His real last words were, ‘I owe a chicken to Asklepios.’ Apparently, he’d forgotten a sacrifice to the god of healing. In the Apology he said, ‘I cannot live in a world where philosophers have forgotten how to doubt.’”
She cocked an eyebrow. “A strange thing to say.”
“Sokrates believed doubt was vital to philosophy. Plato believed that Aristotle’s confidence in science was a betrayal of this ideal. Plato never understood that the scientific method is fundamentally based on doubt.”
“Thank you,” she said. “That was very useful.”
I took a sip of wine. “I wish I knew why Ramonojon mentioned it.”
“It was a warning,” Captain Yellow Hare said.
“If he’s a spy, why would he warn me?”
“Even spies have friends,” she said, and she looked out through the doorway to make sure he was gone.
I wish I could say that I had heard Ramonojon’s words and understood what he was trying to tell me, but I did not. All I could see was the work of Sunthief and the simple understanding of my duty. For my ignorance and my hubris I ask no pardon, for I do not deserve one.
* * *
Mihradarius’s demonstration was held a few days later. Kleon flew us to a point over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and by judicious manipulation of the lift and ballast balls kept us stationary above the ocean. Both the sun and moon were on the other side of the earth, but the outer planets and the fixed stars looked down in judgment upon our works.
My Persian subordinate had organized a huge dinner party in the commissary before he showed off his net. Pigs and sheep were roasted. Chickens were baked in herb wrappings. Fresh fruits and fried vegetables filled dozens of serving bowls. There was a table laden with cheeses from all over the League accompanied by dozens of loaves of barley, wheat, and maize bread. To keep our heads clear the slaves served only fresh fruit juices and very dilute wines.
Mihradarius presented himself in his scholar’s robes and even combed his hair in the Athenian style. He went through the crowd of junior scientists, thanking them for their assistance and praising them for guaranteeing the success of our venture. I would never have had the hubris to celebrate before a test, but Mihradarius had never lacked for confidence.
Kleon walked up and down the tables accompanied by a muscular female slave who was carrying a large silver tray. When he saw a bread or vegetable or fruit he liked, Kleon would grab it and put it on the platter. After a quarter hour of this, the tray was laden with enough food for three men. Satisfied, my chief navigator left for his tower to feast in private and prepare for his part of the test.
Ramonojon ate and drank nothing, keeping himself aloof in order to watch Mihradarius’s performance.
I ate very little, trying to settle my stomach with bread and sheep’s milk cheese. It was concern about the outcome of the test, and the decisions I would have to make if it failed, that suppressed my appetite.
After we had dined, Mihradarius directed us sternward over the gaming field, through the hill country above the laboratories to the groove that held the net trolley. It had been two years since Ramonojon’s dynamicists had carved the trench in the body of Chandra’s Tear. They had cut it with water and polished it with fire and air until it was as smooth as celestial matter that had been touched by the hands of man could be. Then they laid aluminum tracks in the moonstone gully and affixed the copper trolley to them by its air-silver wheels. And there it had sat, waiting with celestial patience for us mere humans to use it.
Mihradarius directed us to the starboard edge of the groove, where the ten-foot-long, spherical trolley lay waiting. Glimmering green strands of Aphroditean matter trailed away from the wheeled ball to the box that held the model net. The box in turn was connected by a thick tube to a specially designed evac cannon; the net itself had been threaded through the firing tube and packed into the belly of the gun, waiting to be shot out.
Just off Chandra’s Tear’s starboard side one of Kleon’s junior navigators sat on a moon sled, a ten-foot-across disk of gleaming Selenean matter; its round edge was studded with the fire-gold knobs of retracted impellers, which could be extended one by one by pulling on guide wires. Mounted on the sled behind the pilot’s seat was a six-foot cubic fire box that held the simulated sun fragment.
Mihradarius walked over to the evac cannon and waved us to silence. “Commander Aias, Commander Aeson, and you, my colleagues. Let me say at the outset that I did not plan on doing this test. Some of you know why it was necessary; the rest do not need to know. But though I was initially reluctant, over the last three weeks I have become enthusiastic. You are about to witness the actual usage of the device we have all been working for. This will be a foretaste of what we will accomplish when we reach the sun and steal the true fire of ’Elios.”
He looked over at me. “May I proceed, Commander?”
My voice carried clearly through the crisp night air. “Proceed, Senior Ouranologist.”
Mihradarius picked up a torch and waved it toward the moon sled. The navigator raised his hand in an acknowledging salute and pulled on a handful of his control wires. Six impellers came out from the starboard edge of the disk. The air on that side rarefied, brightening the silver glow of the sled. There was a momentary pause, and then the moon sled flew away from us, skipping over the rarefied air like a silver coin across a choppy lake.
We watched it as it receded from us, bouncing through the sky; it did not stop until it had flown two miles from the ship.
One minute later, a red-and-gold orb of flame emerged from atop the disk, flying skyward in a graceful arc, and expanding as it rose. The fireball momentarily washed the sled’s silver light into the darkness of a new moon. The burning globe passed away from the moon sled and over us. Mihradarius waited until the now hundred-yard-wide ball was half a mile above the stern of Chandra’s Tear, granting us a taste of daylight. Then he pulled the lever that fired the cannon. The sun net whooshed out spinning two parallel lines of gleaming filament into the sky.
The strands of brown, green, and silver celestial matter spiraled upward through space until they flanked the blob of simulated sun fire. Then they twisted together, braiding themselves around the sphere. The orb continued to fly, but its motion was now chained in an orbit around Chandra’s Tear. The trolley jerked to port, pulled along its track by the false fireball.
The pseudo sun fragment circled once, twice, thrice around us taking a minute for each orbit. I held my breath, waiting for the keening scream of injury to rise up from my ship, but there was nary a murmur, and not even the slightest tremble in our flight.
Applause rang out from the scientists and soldiers; libations were poured to Athena and Aristotle. I myself picked up a bowl of wine and carried it to Mihradarius. “Well done, Senior Ouranologist,” I said, giving him wine to drink with my own hands. “You may proceed with sun net Delta.”
“Thank you, Commander,” he said, and drained the bowl.
I walked over to Ramonojon and raised an eyebrow. “Well?” I said.
“It’s Maia,” he murmured. “It’s all illusion.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean what you have just seen is impossible.”
He turned from me and plunged into the crowd.
The sun net was reeled in after an hour; the celestial matter was extracted from the fireball and the terrestrial fire dispersed into the sky. The dangerous work was done, and the party became even more festive, with the slaves now handing around bowls of undiluted wine.
Four hours of celebration later we were leisurely chasing nighttime across North Atlantea. Aeson, Yellow Hare, and I had drifted away from the crowd and were camping on the sternward slope of the hill. Aeson and I were sitting and drinking. Yellow Hare stood guard, smoking her long pipe.
Not a word passed between us until a spot of silver appeared in the sky, flying toward us from the north. “Get down!” my bodyguard yelled, and I ducked behind her.
Yellow Hare and Aeson drew their throwers and waited. They relaxed a few minutes later, when the spot resolved itself into a moon sled. It descended, skimming twenty feet above the surface of my ship, flying directly toward the hill. As it approached I saw that the gleaming disk was manned not only by a celestial navigator but by a dozen soldiers as well. Crowded flying conditions to say the least.
The moon sled landed a few feet from us. The curtain of guards parted, and the navigator stepped off and came toward us carrying a scroll sealed in a bronze tube. She was dressed in a dark red, open-shouldered tunic with iron disks on her shoulders, the uniform of the Archons’ personal messengers.
She saluted Aeson and myself, and handed me the scroll. I broke the double seal carefully, unrolled it, and moved it close to my eyes so I could read Kroisos’s flowing handwriting in the ship’s moonlight.
“What is it?” Aeson asked.
I read the message twice, then spoke hesitantly, hoping I was hallucinating. “You and I are ordered to accompany this messenger to Delos immediately. The Archons wish to personally give us our final briefing before we leave for the sun.”
“We’re not ready to leave yet,” Aeson said.
“I know. I just hope we can convince Kroisos and Miltiades of that.”
“We had better call the senior staff together and tell them we’re leav—”
Yellow Hare was suddenly running down the hill. “Stop!” she shouted ahead of her, and, “Guard Commander Aias!” she yelled back at the soldiers.
Aeson and I exchanged quick glances and pursued her, followed closely by the guards.
Yellow Hare ran straight for the net launcher. When we caught up with her, she was holding Ramonojon up in the air by scruff of his neck.
“Put him down!” I shouted.
She shook her head and pointed to a small pile of broken wood on the ground beside the cannon. “He was trying to throw this over the side.”
I knelt down and sifted the cherry wood splinters carefully with my fingers. My fingers touched metal and I pulled up two wood chips with straight gold needles sticking out of them and two others with twisted silver needles.
I looked up at Aeson. “This appears to be the remains of a Taoist weapon.”
Aeson growled. “Senior Dynamicist Ramonojon, you are under arrest. Captain Yellow Hare, place him in the brig in the cell next to the Middler doctor. We’ll settle this when Aias and I return from Delos.”
Ramonojon went limp in Yellow Hare’s grip, and his face became a gloomy blank.
“It’s not true, is it? You can’t be a spy,” I said in his native tongue.
He looked at me with his sad brown eyes glowing in the washed-out silver light, but said nothing.
“I swear by the waters of the Styx that I will believe you,” I said.
“No, Aias,” he said. “I’m not a spy, but I can’t prove it.”
“Then I will,” I said.
ζ
With the sole exception of riding a camel bareback over broken ground during a sandstorm, moon sleds are the least comfortable way man has ever found to travel. The spin of the lunar motion coupled with the interminable skip-skipping over waves of rarefied air battered our backsides and bruised our legs. Every cloud and every air current we hopped over added another injury to my body and drew forth from my lips another blessing on the designers of Chandra’s Tear who had made it large enough to ignore such indignities.
The crowding on the sled added to the discomfort, for even though we were strapped into seated positions, we were so tightly packed that every pitch and roll of the sled knocked me sideways into Aeson, Yellow Hare, or one of the Archons’ soldiers.
The only justification for moon sleds is their speed. Their small size and large impeller array makes them fly faster than anything terrestrial or any larger celestial ship. It took us a mere three hours to cross half of North Atlantea and traverse the entire Atlantic Ocean, three hours in which we passed from midnight to a cloud-reddened dawn. So it was that when we reached Europe, it was out of a clear morning sky that we dove down toward the military port at the Pillars of ’Erakles.
Below us a fleet was streaming westward through the gateway that connected the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Seven warships of the same class as the Lysander, escorted by thirty-five smaller picket ships, passed slowly under the massed guns of the overlooking rock. Salutes were fired from the hundred-gun cannonade of ’Erakles, shooting flaming spheres into the air to honor the ships as they left for the wars.
Our navigator angled the moon sled and we descended, flying toward the array of six multitined sky docks that rose up from the Pillars like a half dozen of Poseidon’s favorite tridents. When we reached a height of two miles, three armed sleds flew up from one of the docks to greet us. They surrounded us and escorted us down to the ground level of the port. Fifty-foot-across shelves had been cut into the sides of the Pillars, making the ancient stones look like South Atlantean step-pyramids. The escort sleds shepherded us toward one of these ledges, where we landed. A squadron of slaves rushed out and chained the moon sled down with steel chains moored deep in the ground.
“Will we be here long?” I asked the navigator, hoping to stretch my aching legs.
“No, Commander,” she said. “As soon as we have been cleared by the port general, we’ll be departing. Normally, we would not even have to stop here, but for reasons I do not know, security in the Mediterranean was recently tightened.”
Yellow Hare, Aeson, and I kept silent. If the Archons had chosen not to inform their own messengers about the battle kite that had breached the center of the League, we were not going to do so.
Our sled’s pilot showed her messenger’s staff to an officer of the port, and we were given a flight path to follow while we were in the Mediterranean. We were warned that deviation from the path would result in our being fired on by any naval vessel or celestial ship that spied us.
We took off and ascended to ten miles, then skimmed along the coast of North Africa, catching fleeting glimpses of squat Carthage. Then we sailed over Sicily and suffered a short delay while the celestial ship Horn of Hathor sailed into the sky dock of Syrakuse.
Following our flight path we stopped at Sparta to join the daily caravan of a dozen messenger sleds that carr
ied orders and information back and forth between Delos and the military heart of the League.
O, Sparta, city of the Lakedaimonoi, of Aeson and Yellow Hare, of my father and my paternal ancestors going back to before recorded history, Oh city most beloved of ’Era, city of Lykurgus the lawgiver, what shall I say of you? That you of all the cities of the League shun adornment, that your homes are plain stone, your gates are solid doors of steel, and even your temples are unpainted marble. Only to the statues of the gods do you give anything of beauty, and to them you give all. How shall I describe your strength and untempered power, how can I, who was not accepted inside your bosom, tell anyone of your spirit?
Let it suffice, I pray, to declare that as we flew over your walls toward the bristling column of your sky dock, Aeson and Yellow Hare became filled with you, and grew larger with the presence of the gods, so that we who companioned them seemed to be men of the age of stone next to men of the age of gold; that the force of their purity overwhelmed my thoughts, taking from me, for the first time since I had set foot in Athens, the doubting spirit taught in the Akademe.
I can only account it a mercy that we did not stay long; for if we had, I do not know what would have been left of my spirit.
But it took only a brief check of our credentials at the sky dock and we were directed to a line of twelve floating moon sleds waiting to depart for Delos. Thankfully, we were the last sled expected, so the convoy left only a few minutes after we joined it.
Only ten minutes from Sparta, a glint appeared on the horizon and quickly grew into the silver-laced steel dome that covered the whole of the tiny island of Delos. Swivel-mounted cannons tracked our approach until we flew down to water level and floated under the bronze canopy that projected out like a bird’s bill from the southern end of the island, a quarter mile of brazen shield, covering the water, protecting the harbor from air attack.
We flew under this aegis and made for the crescent-shaped dock of Delos, where a hundred soldiers waited to defend the Archons. Twenty of them patrolled along the shoreline in squads of five; the other eighty sat inside armored boxes, pointing short-barreled, wide-mouthed cannons out over the water. The caravan of moon sleds halted under the canopy and waited to be invited to land by the soldiers.