Celestial Matters Read online

  Miltiades took the scroll and rerolled it. “The Middlers have been arming their commandos with these weapons and sending them to assassinate our governors, our scientists, and our generals. In the last three months we have lost the governors of eight North Atlantean city-states; also the crown prince of the Olmeks; General Tydeus, commander of the armies invading Tibet; and six of our top scientists. If this continues we will be leaderless, and the Middle Kingdom will be able to conquer us easily.

  “Kroisos and I concluded that only a quick, decisive large-scale strike on our part can break the back of their strategy. Project Sunthief is our best hope to do that. If you destroy ’AngXou then they, not we, will be leaderless, and our army, aided by Man-maker’s pseudomen, will finally be able to end the war.”

  There was fire in his eyes. “But we must act soon, before we lose too many irreplaceable people. Kroisos laid down those dice to remind me that the time has come when we must take great risks if we wish to survive.”

  “Then Forethought?” I said.

  “Reassures Kroisos that he is doing the right thing,” Miltiades said. “But in truth, it is you we are relying on.”

  I raised my hand to my heart and gave him the Spartan salute.

  * * *

  We flew back to Chandra’s Tear on the same moon sled with the same navigator and the same guards, but a weightier silence. We traveled mostly in darkness, catching up to night over the mid-Atlantic, then flying over the black expanse of Atlantea. We reached my ship and the return of sunlight high over the Western Ocean. A thousand miles below us lay the island territories indisputably held by the Middle Kingdom; ahead lay Asia and the homelands of the enemy.

  Looking at the sunrise from a thousand miles above the half of the world we did not control, breathing in the clarifying upper air, I ruminated on the events on Delos. The Archons had placed their trust in me, and it was my duty sworn before Athena and Zeus to carry out that trust. But Ramonojon had also placed his trust in me, and it was equally my sworn duty to aid him. I hoped that I would not have to choose between them.

  We flew in from above and began to descend toward Chandra’s Tear; I leaned over the side of the sled to watch the small drop of pearl resolve itself into the gleaming silver of my ship. I expected to see that the usual bustle of shipboard activity; I did not expect to see units of guards marching all across the ship, walking to fore and aft, port and starboard, some going into caves, some emerging. It looked as if every single one of Aeson’s soldiers was on patrol.

  On my instructions the pilot landed the sled near the navigation tower, where more than a dozen soldiers were patrolling the tip end of the ship. Aeson, Yellow Hare, and I unstrapped and stepped from one piece of the moon to another. The sled vanished into sky, while Aeson called over the guards and demanded to know where Anaxamander was.

  “On the hill, sir.” The man’s eyes drooped as if he had not slept during the two days we had been away.

  We quick-marched aft, passing several more patrols. They saluted us vigorously, and I detected more than one grateful gaze directed toward Aeson. We reached the command courtyard and found the security chief standing in the shade of Alexander’s statue, reading through a sheaf of papers.

  “Report!” Aeson ordered.

  Anaxamander snapped to attention and saluted. “Full security lockdown has been implemented, Commander. Quadruple guard contingents deployed at all times. All spare men are on random patrols.”

  So great was his confidence in his bold, dramatic procedures that he did not see that they would only result in exhausted soldiers and decreased efficiency for the crew.

  Aeson took a deep breath, and I could feel his annoyance at Anaxamander’s overzealousness radiating outward like heat from a fire.

  “Tell the men to stand down,” Aeson said. “Reduce the guard to double status, cut down the random patrols to once every four hours.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Anything else to report?”

  “Yes, sir,” Anaxamander said. “The prisoner Ramonojon’s quarters have been sealed, but I have not searched them yet. I assumed you would want to attend to that yourself.”

  Aeson stroked his thin beard. “Quite correct, Security Chief. I will do so now.” He turned to me. “Aias, what do you—”

  “I’m coming with you,” I said.

  Aeson led me over to the statue of Aristotle and spoke to me in low tones, so Anaxamander would not overhear. Over my head the model of the universe in the hero’s hand continued its inexorable turning, marking out the passage of time. “Aias, you have too much to do to waste your time on this. We need to be ready to depart within the next week if we have any hope of meeting the schedule.”

  “Aeson of Sparta,” I said in the formal voice of commander speaking to commander, “do not try to tell me my duty. If Ramonojon is guilty then all the work he has done on this ship will need to be reviewed by the other dynamicists and the ship altered to undo whatever damage he has done. If he is not, I want him freed immediately to finish his work.”

  “Aias of Athens, do you not trust me to do my duty in conducting this search?” he asked, returning challenge for challenge.

  “I trust you, Aeson,” I said, softening my tone to one of friendship. “But you don’t know Ramonojon as well as I do, nor are you necessarily knowledgeable enough about science to interpret what you find there.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then gripped my elbow. “I will be grateful for your assistance in this search,” he said. “But remember, this is primarily a military, not a scientific, matter.”

  “Agreed,” I said, gripping his elbow in return.

  So it was that all four of us—myself, Aeson, Anaxamander, and Yellow Hare—walked down the port side of the hill, toward the circle of brass domes that held the senior staff quarters, through the curtain of Ramonojon’s antechamber, and down into the cave where my friend and subordinate lived.

  I had not been in Ramonojon’s home since before our vacation, and was stunned by the changes he had made since our return. Instead of the rich tapestries depicting scenes from the Ma’abarata, the walls were covered with plain linen night blankets. Instead of the thick gold carpet embroidered with complex interleavings of black, red, and blue that seemed to hint of some subtle, unknown structure, there was a brown mat woven of undyed papyrus reeds. Even the soft swan’s down pillows on which we had often reclined were absent; in their place was a simple cot.

  But most startling by their absence were the four dozen statues of major Hindu gods with which Ramonojon had divinely populated his cave.

  Lined up along the fore wall, where there had once been an altar to Shiva, were three large but unadorned oaken chests. On the aft wall, where formerly a series of statues depicting Vishnu as god and each of his avatar forms had stood, was an unpainted pine writing table.

  Aeson and Anaxamander opened the chests and began to root through them systematically. They pulled out clothing, scrolls, ink pots, quill pens, brushes, all the usual paraphernalia of the scholar. Meanwhile, Captain Yellow Hare methodically ran her hands along the drapes, feeling for anything hidden.

  I watched them for a while, trying to get a sense for what had happened to this room. This was not the home of the Ramonojon I had known. That man had had an eye for beauty and a deep love for the art of his homeland. He had reverently collected and publicly displayed many statues of the Hindu gods. Why had he rid himself of them? And how had he disposed of them without anybody noticing?

  “Security Chief?” I said, pulling Anaxamander away from rummaging through a pile of yellow tunics.

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “Were your men watching Ramonojon after he returned from vacation?”

  His face twisted slightly into a wry smile as if he had always known Ramonojon was a spy and was just waiting for the rest of us to catch up with him. “Off and on.”

  “Was he ever seen tossing anything over the side of the ship?”

  Anaxamande
r took a thick scroll out from a case tied to his belt. He unrolled it, and read it all the way through to himself before answering. “It’s possible, Commander. Chief Dynamicist Ramonojon was reported to have spent several nights staring over the port side during the time when you were confined to the hospital. But my men did not approach closely, nor did they keep constant watch over him.”

  “Thank you.” I could hardly imagine Ramonojon doing something as blasphemous as throwing his gods down from the ship to Earth, but that was the only explanation I could think of.

  Anaxamander returned to the clothes. With nothing better to do, I opened the drawers of the desk and started skimming through Ramonojon’s scrolls, sorting the scientific from the personal.

  “I have found it,” Yellow Hare said. We all turned to look. From behind one of the drapes she pulled out a small wooden box with silver and gold needles sticking out of one end. It certainly looked like the personal Xi lance that had been used against me, but who could tell with Middler technology?

  “There is our proof,” Anaxamander said, writing it down on his surveillance scroll with the succinct pleasure of a job well done.

  “Do not be swift in judgment,” I snapped. “Ramonojon’s been under arrest for two days. Anyone could have planted that in here.”

  “Security was perfect,” Anaxamander said coldly.

  “Keep searching!” Aeson growled. The two officers followed their commander’s order instantly.

  I returned to the scrolls, unrolling each one in turn, reading a little and then returning it to the desk; I stopped when I found Ramonojon’s copy of the Ramayana. I had borrowed the epic many times and knew the feel of this particular scroll. It was heavier than the last time I had held it.

  I unrolled the scroll carefully, idly skimming the familiar, block-printed Sanskrit words. A few feet into the document, I came upon another piece of paper rolled up inside the scroll. A broken lead seal with two fish biting each other’s tails adorned one end of the paper.

  This scroll was also in Sanskrit, but had not been printed; it was in Ramonojon’s handwriting, the painstaking pen strokes he used when he wanted to copy something exactly. I read the first few lines and blanched at the contents.

  The changes to Ramonojon’s room and his questions about ethics finally made sense to me. This scroll proved he was not the spy, but it was also solid evidence that he had committed a different offense the League would not forgive.

  I almost opened my mouth to declare what I had found. I wonder now what would have happened had I done so. Would I now not be submitting myself for judgment if I had spoken then? I cannot say. I do know that I made my decision without any god’s prompting. Perhaps it was spun into the thread of my fate, but I prefer to take the blame myself. For at that moment when duty to state and duty to friend came into opposition, I chose to balance both of them, to remember both my oaths and do all within my power to keep them.

  I rolled the scroll up and slipped it into my robes. Thank ’Ermes, patron of thieves, that the others were still too busy searching to notice what I had done. I looked at the three soldiers methodically tearing Ramonojon’s room apart, wondering if any of them could help me with this. I knew Anaxamander was too ambitious. I thought Yellow Hare too Spartan. My eyes lingered on Aeson; he was my friend, but he too placed duty to the state above all else. I concluded, erroneously as it turned out, that I would have to handle the matter alone.

  They finished the search soon thereafter.

  “We have all the evidence we need,” Anaxamander said, holding up the Taoist weapon as if it were a torch shedding light on my friend’s guilt. “We must send Ramonojon to Sparta for trial.”

  Aeson was about to assent to this when I interrupted.

  “Commander Aeson,” I said formally. “As your co-commander I demand to speak to my subordinate in private in order to learn the truth.”

  Aeson looked at me with pity. I glared back. I could feel Athena place the mantle of her presence on my back, and Aeson’s expression changed to an introspective frown.

  “Do you really believe Ramonojon to be innocent?” he asked.

  “I do,” I said. “And you cannot refuse my demand.”

  He nodded.

  “But I can,” Yellow Hare said. “It is against my orders to leave you alone with a potential spy.”

  “Captain Yellow Hare…,” I said, but my voice faded. There was no denying the implacable tone of her voice, and no contravening her orders from the Archons. “Very well,” I said at last. “But you will be in attendance only as my bodyguard.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then it does not matter to you whether or not you understand the language we are speaking.” I expected her to object to this subterfuge, but she surprised me.

  “Not at all, Commander,” she said. “I will be there solely to protect your life.”

  The brig on Chandra’s Tear consisted of five small caves under the hill, connected to the surface by a long tunnel only wide enough for one man to walk through. There was a locked steel door on each cave and another at the tunnel exit. Two guards were stationed up top and two more patrolled the hallway outside the cells. Until we picked up the Middler doctor, the brig had only been used to punish minor infractions by the soldiers, so I had never had occasion to go down into the oppressive, narrow cavern.

  Yellow Hare accompanied me into Ramonojon’s cell, a bare cave ten feet on a side. The floors and walls had leather straps to tie down prisoners when the ship was moving, but there were no night blankets to mute the ship’s silver light. I hoped Ramonojon had managed to sleep through the glare.

  We found him sitting cross-legged on the floor. His eyes were shut and his hands lay on his knees, palms curled upward.

  “Ramonojon.”

  His eyes snapped open.

  “It’s time we talked.”

  “Yes, Aias, I suppose it is.”

  I turned to Yellow Hare. “Do you speak Hindi?”

  She nodded.

  “Pharsi? Etruscan? Egyptian? Phoenician? ’Ebreu?” I ran through the dozen languages Ramonojon and I shared in common, finally finding out that she did not speak Assyrian. That was a relief; otherwise I’d have to talk to Ramonojon in the ’Unan dialect of the Middle Kingdom. I did not think Captain Yellow Hare would be pleased to hear me speaking to a spy in the enemy’s tongue.

  “I found the Diamond Sutra among your scrolls,” I said to Ramonojon. “I can understand why you did not want to tell me you’d become a Buddhist.”

  “The League does not like us,” he said with quiet understatement. “You should turn me in. Otherwise they’ll execute you, too, for harboring Buddhist sympathies.”

  I felt a flush of pride that no part of me intended to turn my friend over to the Spartans for practicing the only religion proscribed in the League. One century ago Buddhism had grown so popular in India that it spread pacifism across the eastern edge of the League and the western edge of the Middle Kingdom. Both the League and the Kingdom had cracked down, executing thousands of Buddhist teachers and monks. Possession of the Diamond Sutra or any other Buddhist tract merited execution in the eyes of Sparta.

  But despite their illegality, the fact is that the Buddhists opposed the war. None of them would spy for the Middlers, and none of them could be a party to assassination. That was how I knew Ramonojon to be innocent of the charges against him; but he could hardly use that as a defense. The only result would be in his execution for one crime instead of the other.

  “Why did you convert?” I asked.

  “That is hard to explain,” he said. “I never told you how troubled I had become about my work over the last few years. All the ships I’ve carved, all the deaths they’ve caused. I told myself it was my dharma to do this work. But for the last three years, working on Sunthief, I’ve been haunted by the vision of ’AngXou burning, and then over this vacation…”

  He paused, uncrossed his legs, and bowed his head between them. “Let me start again. Do you kno
w about Xan Buddhism?”

  “No,” I said. Xan was not a sect I had ever heard of.

  “It was founded about five hundred years ago by Buddhists and Taoists in the border states between India and the Middle Kingdom.”

  “Taoists? What does Buddhism have to do with Middler science?”

  “Mountain Taoists,” he said. “They’re philosophers, not scientists. The Middle Kingdom has as much use for them as the League does for Platonists. When I was home on vacation, I met a childhood friend whom I had not seen for years; I didn’t know at the time that he had been in Tibet learning the eightfold path. I told him about my work and my worries, and he introduced me to a Xan teacher. Instead of beginning with Buddhism, he began with the Tao. He made me see the folly of Sunthief by showing me that we were breaking the balance of yin and yang.”

  “I’ve seen those words in captured Taoist science texts. What do they mean?”

  “Yin and yang are seemingly opposed … forces is the best word for them, though that’s far from accurate. The important thing is that their opposition is an illusion. In fact they work together. When they are in balance, the Tao, that is, the way, is followed. When the Tao is not followed, destruction comes for everyone. Sunthief is part of that destruction.”

  I did not understand anything he had said, but it was clearly important to him. One thing troubled me, though. “If you felt that you couldn’t work on Sunthief anymore, why did you come back?”

  “My junior dynamicists could carry on the work without me. My hope in returning was to convince you to abandon Sunthief. It was the only way to undo the damage I had already done, the only way to stop you from killing those people. But you returned with assassins after you, a Spartan as your constant bodyguard, and a spirit of suspicion. How could I then speak to you about stopping the work without being thought of as a Middle Kingdom spy?”

  “So you changed your tactics,” I said. “You tried to slow down the work by convincing me that Mihradarius’s net design was flawed?”

  A glint of fire returned to his dulled eyes. “It is flawed. If you use that net, you’ll wreck this ship.”