Celestial Matters Read online

  After that rapid journey across half the world it seemed ridiculous to sit for an hour on a bobbing sled waiting for our turn to dock, but wait we did. Finally, we were waved forward. Our pilot flew the moon sled into one of the alcoves lining the thick limestone walls at the rear of the covered harbor. Slaves chained the sled to the ground, and guards checked our papers carefully. They politely but firmly required Aeson and Yellow Hare to surrender their weapons, then permitted us to disembark.

  I stepped off the moon sled and stretched three hours of aches out of my muscles. I took a deep breath and regretted it immediately; the water-laden air of the island saturated my lungs and dulled my mind just when I most needed to be thinking clearly.

  “May I escort you in, Commander?” the messenger asked politely.

  I nodded and she led us to the centerpoint of the crescent, where stood the twenty-foot-high iron double doors that formed the last barrier between the Archons and the world.

  The door wardens, two beefy slaves dressed only in loincloths, opened the gateway, and the messenger guided us briskly into the tunnel that connected the harbor to the main island. The passage was wide enough for six men to walk abreast, but the low ceiling and the guards stationed every seven feet made the way seem cramped and oppressive, or perhaps that was the heaviness of the air in my lungs or my worries about the upcoming meeting or about Ramonojon. I cannot truthfully account for the feeling of being pressed down on, but feel it I did.

  The two guards at the far door checked our credentials again, then ushered us through the thick bronze portals onto the island of Delos. We emerged into a paradise of architecture and greenery, lit by hundreds of fixed-fire globes on pylons of spun glass. The dome overhead had been painted with scenes of Olympos, showing the war between the gods and the Titans and the eventual triumph of the gods. Elsewhere, I knew, there were scenes of Zeus holding court, of the Elysian fields, of the Trojan War, and of the foundings of most of the ancient cities of the ’Ellenes. Yellow Hare gasped momentarily at the splendor around her; it warmed my heart to know that my stoic bodyguard was not immune to the beauty of Delos.

  “I must return to my duties,” the messenger said. “You are expected in the Purple Courtyard; it lies about half a mile down this path.”

  She pointed the way and then disappeared over a grassy hillock.

  We wandered slowly across the marble-paved walkway, past blue-domed temples and hanging gardens of rose and hyacinth. We crossed large open courtyards filled with scroll shelves and writing tables, surrounded by vineyards rich with plump grapes. Along the way we came across many statues of past Archons that stared down at us with carved expressions of stern benevolence. Every man who had ever been an Archon of the League was displayed in painted marble somewhere on the island. Those Archons who had been made heroes after their deaths had taller statues painted blue or black to distinguish them from their flesh-toned mortal colleagues.

  The only things disrupting this tranquil scene were the bureaucrats and military clerics running hither and yon, fulfilling the Archons’ orders and trying desperately to look important so they wouldn’t be demoted and sent back to Athens or Sparta, or, Zeus protect them, to the provinces.

  The first time I came to Delos I was shocked by the number of people inhabiting the island. Most citizens of the Delian League believed their Archons lived apart from the rough-and-tumble of League politics so they could devote themselves to making those broad decisions necessary to preserving the people’s welfare. That was the reason the Archons had originally been placed on this small island that had once held the League’s treasury, rather than being housed in Athens with the bureaucracy or billeted in Sparta with the general staff. But over the centuries the governance of the League had grown so complex and the speed of travel so fast that it had become both necessary and easy for certain small but crucial problems to be handed over from the lesser functionaries in Athens and Sparta to the two executives on Delos. As a result the Archons had amassed a staff that continued to grow year by year.

  A nervous bureaucrat wearing the green robe of a lower functionary intercepted us in our wanderings.

  “Welcome to Delos, Commander Aias, Commander Aeson, Captain Yellow Hare,” he said. “If you will come this way, the others are already assembled.”

  “What others?” I asked.

  “The other commanders of the Prometheus Projects,” he said, and he led us down a long, narcissus-lined path to an open courtyard surrounded by a purple colonnade. Eight walnut wood couches, richly decorated with Tyrian purple cushions, were arrayed in a semicircle. Four of the seats were occupied by men, and two young, athletic-looking soldiers stood behind them, eyeing our approach with the proper caution of guards. It seemed that only Aeson had dared ask for a Spartan officer to serve as bodyguard. Several tripods had been set out with platters of finger food. Our guide waved us over and disappeared back the way we had come.

  I knew three of the seated men. Aegistus of Myteline, one of the most self-deluded scholars the Akademe had ever produced, and Philates, one of the most credulous officers ever to leave Sparta; they were respectively scientific and military commander of Project Forethought. The two of them reclined and whispered to each other. No doubt Aegistus was reassuring Philates that their spurious project was progressing brilliantly.

  Across from them, wearing the traditional armor of an Egyptian general, sat Ptah-Ka-Xu, the fifty-year-old veteran who commanded the military side of Project Manmaker. He looked up at us and nodded a greeting, then returned to glaring at Aegistus and Philates with contempt.

  Next to Ptah-Ka-Xu, almost hiding in his shadow, was the man I did not know, a nervous-faced Aethiopian, no more than thirty years old. He was dressed in scholar’s robes, and his hair was combed in the Athenian style, but his furtive glances from side to side made it clear that he was unused to the courtyards of power.

  Aegistus looked up and waved us over as if he had just become aware of our presence. “Have you heard the wonderful news?” he asked.

  Aeson and I exchanged glances. For different reasons, neither of us was fond of Aegistus. I did not like the dignity his field, the blasphemous pseudoscience of mantikology, was afforded in the Akademe; Aeson, like any sensible Spartan, objected to anyone who claimed to be able to create omens that would determine when to carry out a military action. If anyone needs any further proof that something has gone horribly wrong in the history of science, he need look no further than that man’s hubristic belief that humans could constrain the gods and compel them to speak the future on command.

  “What news?” I asked, turning away from him to peruse a platter of foodstuffs. I selected a strip of mutton wrapped in phyllo crust, chewed it lightly, and swallowed.

  Aegistus waited until I had finished eating and had turned back to face him. No doubt he wanted to see the expression on my face. “Our part of Prometheus is a success,” he said like a parent boasting of a child’s achievements. “Our most capable seer has determined the precise day and hour when you should leave for the sun.”

  The light pastry in my stomach turned into a clay brick. The reason for our summons was now clear; we were being sent off far too early because of Kroisos’s obsession with Project Forethought. I started to sputter my usual objections but Ptah-Ka-Xu interrupted me, standing up between me and my “colleague.”

  “Aias, Aeson, may I present Kunati, the new scientific commander of Project Manmaker.”

  I turned away from Aegistus and nodded to the Aethiopian. He nodded back, clearly grateful for any sign of friendliness amid the bickering. “Congratulations,” I said. “I am sorry your promotion came under these sad circumstances.”

  “Thank you.” He twisted his hands around the scroll he was carrying. “I hope I’ll be able to complete the project.”

  “You will, young man, you will!” a stentorian voice thundered through the courtyard like the laughter of Zeus. Kroisos and Miltiades strode into the courtyard, setting a furious pace for men in thei
r seventies. Their coterie of scroll-bearing, anxious bureaucrats could barely keep up with them.

  Kroisos walked through the arched gateway between the columns and we all stepped forward to greet him. He favored each scholar with a firm arm-clasp, a flash of a smile, and a wordless expression of confidence. By force of personality alone he filled me with renewed faith that despite all difficulties Sunthief would succeed, but then I looked at Aegistus and doubt reentered my mind.

  Miltiades followed his more boisterous comrade. The old soldier wore full armor and an expression of iron sternness unmatched by any Spartan except Yellow Hare. Unlike Kroisos’s flowing gray locks, the military Archon’s hair was still the black of his youth. The only sign of age about him was his face, lined and broken like an ancient cliff blessed by Poseidon the Earthshaker.

  The Archon of Sparta waved us back to our seats. Slaves brought brightly painted drinking bowls decorated with figures of the three Fates spinning the short golden lives of heroes and filled them with diluted Samothracian wine, very watery but wonderfully mellow in flavor. Yellow Hare left me to join the other two guards, who seemed astonished to have a Spartan captain as a comrade. Miltiades nodded to her and smiled paternally, an expression his face was clearly unaccustomed to. She smiled in return, and though the expression was directed at the old man, I drew confidence from it.

  The two Archons sat down. Miltiades took a bowl of wine. Kroisos buried his nose in a scroll and waved away the slave who brought him drink.

  A minute later, the Archon of Athens looked up and rerolled the scroll with the carelessness of long practice. “This will be the final briefing for the Prometheus Projects.”

  From a fold in his robes, he pulled out three long strips of papyrus, and handed one to me, one to Aegistus, and one to Kunati. “These are your final operation schedules. They are to be committed to memory now and then returned to me. No written record of this schedule is to be made. All orders to your subordinates will be oral.”

  I studied the sheet of block printing, carefully memorizing dates and times. Halfway down, I stopped and reread a line three times before looking up. “Archon, my ship cannot reach the sun and return in only four months.”

  Kroisos’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward like a snake eyeing a bird. “Your navigator said he could do it, if I gave him the Ares impellers.”

  My stomach knotted. Kleon would never lie about something like that. It would violate his Pythagorean oaths. But he might not have made allowance for the comfort of the crew during such a flight, and he would certainly be willing to take risks with our lives if it meant cutting down the travel time.

  “Archon,” I said, “my navigator has not yet finished calculating his flight path and I have not had time to review it. I cannot at this moment guarantee with my oath what our travel time will be.”

  Kunati chirped a nervous “Excuse me,” which immediately drew Kroisos’s hawklike gaze toward him.

  “Archon,” the trembling young man said, “Project Manmaker is … technically a success. We have spontaneously generated fully grown pseudomen in the lab, but our prototype warrior has not been perfected. And I don’t know if we’ll be able to perfect them, and assemble five hundred thousand generation packets, and plant them on the Middle Kingdom border in the two months this schedule gives us. Sir, I only recently took over the project, and—”

  Kroisos brushed that aside with an airy wave. His beak darted around. “Aegistus, explain the situation to them.”

  The mantikologist pulled a folded piece of papyrus from his sleeve. He opened it, revealing a three-foot square covered with strange, handwritten symbols, including an inaccurate chart of the planets. “According to our Delphic resonators, the time for the attack must be four months from tomorrow. We have tested this hypothesis with six different prognostication methods and all of them produced the same date.”

  Kroisos smiled and nodded like a puppy. As if that settled the matter.

  O ye gods, when the time comes to judge Kroisos, recall the bravery of his youth, remember his ascent to the moon, pay heed to his work in dynamics and Ouranology that led to the creation of fleets of celestial ships and the exploration of the spheres. Pay great attention to his efforts in leading the League through trying times, but forgive him his folly. All of the greatest heroes have suffered blindness in one way or another. Forgive Kroisos because he thought the future could be seen by science without the intervention of the gods.

  “Sir,” I said to him, hoping that practicalities could dissuade him where I knew theology would fail. “We do not have the materials to make the sun net. For that matter, we don’t even have supplies to feed ourselves for that long a trip.”

  “Already attended. Food and spon-gen supplies await you on the moon. I’ve also arranged for the celestial matter you need to be refined on ’Ermes and Aphrodite. You can pick them up on the way out and build the net as you go.”

  I looked to Aeson for help. He had steepled his hands and was staring up at the dome. The picture overhead showed Zeus pulling Orion up from the earth and placing him among the constellations on the sphere of fixed stars. I could feel the longing in Aeson, the desire deep in his heart to travel out through the spheres. But he was too great a Spartan to put his command at risk to fulfill that dream. He looked momentarily at Kroisos, then turned away and stared directly at Miltiades in that practical Spartan way that had many times cut down a rarefied Athenian debate.

  “Sir,” he said, “I cannot permit Chandra’s Tear to leave Earth yet. We have serious security problems. It is even possible that one of the senior scientific personnel is a traitor.”

  Miltiades frowned, thrusting out his jutting chin. He turned to Kroisos. “Security takes precedence over the timetable.”

  “You can’t do that!” Aegistus cried.

  The cold gray eyes of the Delian League’s military commander in chief turned on him. “Can’t?”

  Aegistus lowered his head and his voice, wilting into himself like a flower. “We’d have to wait nine years for another day this auspicious.”

  “Then we will attack on an inauspicious day,” the Archon said coldly. “If you had spent your time studying the battles of the past, instead of the entrails of goats, you’d know that as many battles were won when the omens were bad as when they were good. The favor of the gods is not as easy to divine as you believe, and no man has succeeded in stealing the knowledge of the future from them.”

  Aegistus shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger, and shared a glance of Athenian confidence with Kroisos before turning back to Miltiades. “Archon, those ancient prognostications were crude, unscientific predictions. Project Forethought is the scientific study of the future. It is a thousand times more accurate than the ramblings of those bay-sniffing madwomen.”

  I held my tongue and wondered when Apollo would avenge himself on this atheist for blaspheming his oracle.

  “It is my decision that they wait,” the Archon of Sparta said.

  “And mine that they depart,” said the Archon of Athens.

  Miltiades and Kroisos stared at each other for a full minute. The inevitable had happened, as it had to Aeson and myself and to every other pair of leaders in the League. The two Archons were taking opposite views, and one of them would have to give way.

  At last Kroisos reached into his robes and pulled out a scroll sealed with the iron peacock of Sparta. Then he slipped a hand into a small fur pouch tied to his belt and removed two cubical dice carved from bone. He laid them down on Miltiades’ couch. The Spartan Archon stared at them for several seconds. Finally he swept them up in his huge hand and placed them inside his armor.

  Then he stood up and looked at the six of us. “You will try your best to follow the timetable, but leeway will be given. Kunati, the military will plant the manmaker packages ten days’ march closer to the border. Aias, Aeson, you have an extra ten days in which to travel to the sun and return. I hope that will be enough to permit you to solve your security pro
blems.”

  It wasn’t much but I thanked him for it.

  “This briefing is ended,” Kroisos said. He walked off, followed by the swarm of bureaucrats. The commanders of Manmaker and Forethought left, accompanied by their bodyguards, but Miltiades signaled for Aeson and me to stay. He also waved Yellow Hare over.

  Miltiades gripped Aeson’s arm in a gesture of farewell. “I regret that was all the time I could give you.”

  Aeson withdrew his arm and saluted formally. He held his hand over his heart and stared Miltiades in the eyes. By tradition, any graduate of the Spartan war college could ask any other his reasons for a military decision so that the wisdom of experienced commanders would be passed down to their juniors.

  “Sir, why could you not give us the time to make sure of Sunthief’s security? Surely it had nothing to do with Aegistus’s foolishness.”

  Miltiades broke the seal on the scroll that Kroisos had given him and handed it to Aeson. My co-commander read it and reread it with deliberation. “I was not aware that the war was going this badly.”

  The Archon nodded. “The Middlers have made a recent breakthrough in miniaturization.” He turned to me. “The weapon used on you by that assassin seems to be a man-portable Xi lance, apparently capable of disrupting the balance of bodily humours in the same way that a large Xi lance disrupts the flow of air or water.”

  I drew this piece of information into my heart and tried to make sense of it. How could the tides or air currents have anything to do with the humours? I tried to fit it in with all the other incomprehensible pieces of Middler science I had read over the years, but I could not put them together into a coherent whole. I sighed out my frustration and the spirit of the Akademe sighed with me.