Celestial Matters Page 3

  “You are right, Captain,” I said. “My apologies. I have served too long in positions of safety. I will defer to your judgment.”

  She nodded curtly, then shifted her attention to the ship’s armament, scrutinizing the evac cannons set in drum-shaped swivel mounts every five feet along the port and starboard rails. They looked like twin rows of phalloi at a Dionysiac festival. One by one the tops of the long cannons described circles in the air as the gunners greased and tested the aiming gears. My bodyguard nodded curt approval and returned her unreadable gaze to me.

  I began to wonder if this assignment was some sort of punishment for her. The idea gave me a perverse sense of relief since it reduced the likelihood that I was in real danger. But two facts glared down this comforting hypothesis: First, Spartan officers who made mistakes were either forgiven or executed depending on the seriousness of the crime.

  Second, and more compelling: that battle kite had attacked a ship carrying merchants, wool, and purple dye. The only thing on it of any great value to the Delian League was an important scientist. But I was by no means the most important target in the heart of the League. Unless the Middle Kingdom had found out about Sunthief.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the boatswain shouting, “Brace for speed!”

  I reflexively grabbed and held on to the support rail that ran the length of the deck and braced my feet against the corrugated flooring.

  He shouted, “Deploy impellers!” and a line of golden wedges sprouted on the prow’s fluted waterline. A fiery gleam washed under the canopy, limning ’Era’s statue with a divine light. The aura of Zeus’s bride flowed backward, suffusing Yellow Hare’s armor with a fiery brightness. She stood so still and looked so majestic in the light that I thought, forgive the impiety, that there were two statues of goddesses in front of me.

  My eyes grew accustomed to the glow and the moment of inspiration passed. I took a deep sniff of the rarified water that wafted like a bracing mist from the impellers. The fire-impregnated metal thinned the ocean, so the ship could sail swiftly without being slowed by the sluggishly heavy waters.

  As the ship sped toward Athens on a carpet of unresisting ocean, I gripped the railing hard to brace myself against the back-push. But Captain Yellow Hare’s only precaution against the sudden speed was to lean slightly forward and tense her legs. And that little action stopped her from sliding across the deck or tumbling over the side. Immobile as the earth, she let the cosmos shift around her, heaving Spartan defiance in the face of physics.

  The ocean spray leaped into the sky in front of us, rushing onto the deck. It stung my face a little, but my cuts had mostly healed and I relished the sharp touch of speeding droplets. I closed my eyes and inhaled the tangy melange of salt and rarified air; then I cleared my head with a deep breath and started to sort through the strange things that had happened since I left Tyre.

  Two facts appeared instantly in my thoughts: Ramonojon and Kleon. Had they also been assigned bodyguards? They were in my estimation more valuable to the League than I was. Kleon was universally regarded as the ablest celestial navigator ever to graduate from the school on Crete. And Ramonojon, despite not being an Akademe graduate, was the most skilled dynamicist from India to Atlantea. If the Middle Kingdom wanted to set the Delian League’s celestial ship design work back five years, they only had to kill him.

  And Ramonojon was vacationing in India, so near the Middle Kingdom border. If they could get a kite to me here … O Athena, I prayed, bearer of the Aigis, keep my friend safe.

  I turned to Captain Yellow Hare and shouted over the noise of the waves breaking against the ship, “Have guards been assigned to Kleon and Ramonojon?”

  “I do not know,” she said. “My orders were rushed to me from Delos without explanation.”

  Athena struck me with a sudden revelation. Whatever had prompted Captain Yellow Hare’s presence had to have happened within the last few hours. The Athenian bureaucracy knew my entire itinerary; they would have been able to reach me with a message or with bodyguards at any time in the last month. What could have happened in a few hours to bring about this response?

  The boatswain called, “Retract impellers,” snapping me from my reverie.

  Lysander slowed as we neared port. My heart lifted; If there was any place in the world where I could find answers it was in Athens, the city of knowledge.

  I stared with wide welcoming eyes at the chaotic jumble of buildings that comprised my adopted city. Towers twenty stories high, built within the last century, made the city appear to be a forest of bronze and steel, and at their bases like newly grown mushrooms around ancient trees were clusters of one-story stone oikoi built millennia ago by the founders of Athens. Most of the citizens wandered through that jumbled thicket of stone, metal, and time unsure of where or when they were.

  My gaze wandered upward, beyond the tall metal trees to the spire that dwarfed them all: the sky dock of Athens, the one building at the harbor that stood aloof from the ceaseless clanking of daily life. The tapering steel cylinder towered a mile above the clifflike buildings of the harbor. The uppermost quarter mile of the sky dock was covered with flares and lamps to illuminate the way for approaching ships. Once the vessels were over Athens, those same bright beacons guided the celestial ships in to dock at the top of the tower; the vessels came bearing news and raw materials from the inner spheres, then left again laden with commands from the earth to the heavens.

  As Lysander joined the throng of ocean ships entering port, a four-hundred-foot-long gleaming silver arrow, its sides studded with cannonades, detached itself from atop the sky dock, rose into the air, and flew off westward, a warship dispatched to Atlantea to clear the skies of battle kites. No doubt there were on that ship green soldiers being granted their first glimpse of Athens from the air and being amazed at the orderliness that lay hidden in the chaos of buildings below them.

  It had been a quarter of a century since I had first been blessed with that vision of unity arising from discord like Aphrodite from the roiling ocean. At that time I was still a student at the Akademe, and my Ouranology class was being taken to the moon so that we pupils, our heads stuffed with theory, might have our first practical experience of the celestial. We traveled on one of the school’s celestial ships, a decommissioned early military model without any of the conveniences a modern craft like Chandra’s Tear enjoyed.

  Most of my fellow students had stared up at the heavens, eager for their first close-up view of the spheres, but I looked down over the railing on the ship’s rim at the place we were leaving behind and made sense of the city of the goddess of wisdom.

  The narrow twisty streets and the brightly painted buildings, both old and new, were clumped around three hubs of activity: the harbor, the Acropolis, and the Akademe. The city was a pendant comprised of three huge gems surrounded by clusters of smaller stones. I wondered then whether in her idle moments Athena sometimes opened her jewelry box and studied this most beautiful of her ornaments, knowing that none of the other gods had its equal among their jewels.

  I had wanted to continue staring over the silvery edge at that cluster of gems, but my teacher pulled me back and strapped me down on a couch as we set off on the ten-thousand-mile journey to the moon.

  I shook away my remembrances as the Lysander steered slowly into the harbor of Athens. The piers were, as always, jammed with packet ships from all corners of the Delian League. Egyptian barges rubbed gunwales with Persian triremes, Indian frigates, Atlantean longships, and so many others. And everywhere there were Spartan warships, sending up signal flares to welcome a brother combatant home.

  I had heard many captains complain about using ships of the line as messengers between Sparta and Athens. They bitterly resented being stationed in the Mediterranean when they could have been off battling the Middle Kingdom’s navies in the Pacific Islands or off the coast of Atlantea. Lysander’s captain would have a story of combat that would give his comrades in dull duty hope for battle
, though I doubted anyone else would be happy to hear it.

  Lonely but confident in this crowd of bullying athletes was a single Phoenician merchant ship, much like the one we had left behind. A clumsy gang of hulking Norse slaves was hoisting a pile of tan bales from her hold: papyrus, the lifeblood of the city’s bureaucrats.

  The paper was trundled on float carts into the bureaucracy’s office buildings, which clustered around the harbor like man-made cliffs, anthills filled with thousands of workers sucking in and spewing out the paperwork that kept the League alive. A web of evac tubes connected the cliffs to one another. The port was alive with hums and clanks as message capsules rushed through the tubes from one building to the next.

  Lysander drew parallel to a long stone pier, and ropes were tossed from her deck and tied to the mooring anchors. Then the warship rolled out its gangway, which met the dock with an audible clang. Harbor slaves started to come aboard but Captain Yellow Hare ordered them back.

  “No one is to come within thirty feet of the gangway,” she said. Soldiers, sailors, and slaves moved quickly away. The orders of a Spartan were not lightly ignored. Only when there was room enough around the plank for her to keep track of every person nearby did she permit me to debark.

  So it was that with aching muscles, scratched skin, itchy robe, and a bewildered mind, I set foot for the last time in the city of Athens.

  β

  “Commander Aias?” A thin-lipped man of indeterminate middle age stepped from the dockside crowd into the space Yellow Hare had cleared. As he approached, he reached his right hand into a fold of his plain brown robe, but before he could remove whatever was concealed there Captain Yellow Hare had leaped on him, pulled him several yards from me, and pressed the edge of her sword against his throat.

  “Commander Aias,” he croaked. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “I told everyone to stay back,” my bodyguard said. “Why did you disobey?”

  “I thought you meant the slaves and sailors,” the man said, peering nervously at the cleanly honed sword blade. “I was sent to request Commander Aias’s presence.”

  “Where is he wanted?” she asked.

  The man raised his left hand slowly and pointed up at one of the whitewashed stone buildings that housed the bureaucracy. “There’s some paperwork waiting for him.”

  A laugh rose up unbidden in my throat and burst out at the absurd banality. “Please let him go, Captain,” I said. “I recognize him; he is a clerk from the budgetary bureaucracy.”

  Yellow Hare sheathed her sword and released the bureaucrat. He straightened up, trying to regain some of his dignity before the crowd of smirking onlookers who, no doubt, were enjoying the rare sight of a humiliated clerk. He tried again to approach me, but Captain Yellow Hare placed herself between us, forming with her wiry body a barrier more imposing than any wall of stone or steel.

  “Commander,” he said, “I really must protest your officer’s actions. I will lodge a formal complaint with the Archons.”

  “There is no need for that,” I said. “I apologize for my bodyguard’s zealousness, but she was just doing her duty.” I was not overly concerned about the effect the protests of a clerk would have on me, but I did not, at the time, know whether Yellow Hare’s record would be immune to such a complaint.

  “And I was doing my duty,” he said, puffing himself up, to the amusement of the now larger crowd of harbor slaves who had gathered to watch the fracas. “Now will you come with me and do your duty?”

  “Of course,” I said; I bowed my head slightly as if accepting the clerk’s reprimand. There seemed no point in continuing a dispute with a man whose view of the world was confined to bureaucratic procedure and an inflated sense of his own dignity.

  “Then come this way please,” the man said. I followed him across the cement dock; Captain Yellow Hare kept between us while sweeping a corridor through the mingling crowd of slaves and sailors. As we passed, whispered rumors rose around and behind us. Clerks, Athenian scholars, and Spartan captains were everyday sights to the denizens of the harbor, but my bodyguard’s demands for security while we walked were unknown in the supposedly safe heart of the League.

  The clerk led us through the bustling dockyard, where priority cargo ships were being repaired and refitted with new engines, keels, and impellers by crews of slaves overseen by dynamicists, past the green-and-white granite warehouses stuffed with the produce of half the world, and into the steamy interior of a bureaucratic anthill.

  We climbed seven flights of stairs, and of the three of us only I was short of breath when we stopped. The clerk pointed me into one of the innumerable cramped offices honeycombing the blocky edifice. “Wait in here, sir.”

  “No,” Captain Yellow Hare said. “A larger room.”

  “But Captain,” the clerk started to protest. She silenced his objections with a single look.

  “Very well. Please wait one moment.” He stepped into the tiny chamber, pulled a pile of papyrus scrolls from atop the pine-wood table that filled half the room, then led us down the hall to a larger office. “Will this suffice for your needs, Captain?”

  Captain Yellow Hare appraised the room with a sweep of her eyes. The granite walls were lined from floor to ceiling with wooden scroll shelves. There were half a dozen writing tables Uttered with scraps of papyrus; each table also had two snap-down scroll readers, endlessly unrolling and rerolling papers that no one was reading. The open ends of evac tubes stuck out of every wall, waiting hungrily to suck message capsules into neighboring buildings. The only seating was provided by six unupholstered pine benches. The room reeked of that pseudo-Spartan scrimping beloved of those who affect rather than practice austerity.

  “It will do,” my bodyguard said.

  “If you will excuse me, Commander, Captain,” the clerk said nodding to each of us in turn. “I will find Senior Clerk Phrynis.”

  He dropped the pile of scrolls on one of the tables and disappeared into the hall, while I went in and sat down on one of the uncomfortable benches. As I leaned back against the hard wall, I could feel the strain from my efforts during the attack.

  “Is there a problem, Commander?” my bodyguard asked.

  “A month of leisure followed by five minutes of battle,” I said. “I should not have indulged myself so much during my vacation.”

  Captain Yellow Hare nodded but said nothing more. She stationed herself beside the uncurtained doorway and again became perfectly still.

  After a few minutes, a pinch-faced Corinthian official wandered in and sat down in front of the imposing heap of rolled papyrus.

  “Good day, Commander,” he said. “I am Senior Clerk Phrynis. Thank you for making time for this meeting.”

  “It was no problem,” I lied. “I assume you want an accounting of my expenses for the last month.”

  “No, Commander.” He pulled a thick scroll off the top and unrolled it.

  “This is a list of all the cost overruns and staffing requests you have made since the inception of Project Sunthief, three years ago. We decided to take advantage of your presence in Athens to go over them with you.”

  I should have known that they would do something like this. I quashed a momentary desire to fight their pettiness with a petty display of temper. Instead, I nodded magnanimously and said, “Very well, Phrynis, but please be quick about it.”

  “As quick as I can,” he said as he studied the scroll with a leisurely eye. I should have guessed that some form of petty revenge would be taken for my having outmaneuvered the bureaucracy. It may seem strange that after having been attacked I would sit still for a two-hour interrogation about the petty details of my work, but those two hours comforted me like the waters of Lethe; they let me forget, for a while, the true madness of that day.

  So, secure in that womb of stone and triviality, I listened and I answered. “Why did you ask for five tons of aluminum, Commander Aias? Couldn’t you have made the tracks from silver?”

  “Aluminum
requires less water to maintain its atomic integrity. There is no water in the celestial realms.”

  “Why did you request Aerologist Ptolemy’s analyses of solar wind, Commander Aias? Wouldn’t a lesser-known scholar have done?”

  “The success of Sunthief depends on my navigator being able to keep control of the ship only two miles from ’Elios. We needed to know exactly how strong the winds are that close to the sun.”

  “Why have you reconfigured the dynamics of your ship four times, Commander Aias? Surely Dynamicist Ramonojon could have done it correctly the first time and saved the League considerable expense?”

  “Are you questioning Dynamicist Ramonojon’s competence or decisions?”

  The man hesitated. “No, Commander,” he said finally.

  And on and on. He wrote down every word I said, filed it, and moved on without comment.

  When this labor of paperwork and pointless argument finally ended, the Corinthian rolled up the scroll of answers, sealed it into a capsule, and pushed it into an evac tube. “Thank you for your assistance, Commander Aias.”

  I nodded to him and walked stiffly out of the granite-and-papyrus confines of the bureaucratic world onto the streets of Athens. The sun was halfway down the western sky, casting the long shadows of the anthills into those ancient avenues, only a few hours until nightfall. I wanted to be home before darkness came.

  Captain Yellow Hare pointed toward a tube-capsule station. The sign over the entrance said: To the Akademe. I walked down the long tunnel and boarded an empty capsule, eager to return to the sanity of the scientific world.

  * * *

  Nine-foot-high statues of Athena and Aristotle stood on the left and right flanks of the Akademe’s ivory gate. I made obeisance to both, bowing first to the gilded bronze goddess who looked down beneficently with her owl eyes, then to the blue marble hero who stared up at the heavens searching for the divine knowledge Pallas already possessed. Captain Yellow Hare ignored Aristotle, but she saluted Athena like a soldier reporting to a superior officer. Athena seemed to nod her approval to the captain.