Celestial Matters Read online

  I should never have accepted the excessive gifts of consideration the crew laid before me. In order to keep me safe from further assassination attempts, everybody—my crew, my bodyguard, my co-commander, even the slaves—rearranged the working procedures of my ship so that I never had to be anywhere except my home cave or my office.

  Reports from all quarters of the ship were brought to my office desk, carrying with them the calm reassurance that everything was going smoothly. Meals were brought by the slaves so I never had to go to the commissary. Any questions I had were relayed by Yellow Hare to messenger slaves, who would find whomever I wanted to query, get an answer, and bring it back to me. All I had to do was sit at my desk, go over requisition forms, perform calculations, and let Captain Yellow Hare do whatever was necessary for my safety.

  Truth to tell, I found it easy to convince myself that I was doing my duty. After all, it was not as if my days were spent in idleness. I had to solve a considerable number of logistical and supply problems caused by our reduced schedule of dockings. Maps of half the world with shipping lanes carefully marked were strewn across my desk in order that I might determine the best routes for consignments of supplies to take in order to meet us. At one point I actually ordered a machine-milled half-pound icosahedron of fire-bronze that the net-spinning device required to be sent by courier from the factory in Korinthos all the way to the southern tip of Africa; there it joined a shipment of gold we needed to make replacement parts for the impellers; then that joint requisition was transported to South Atlantea, where the obsidian lenses for our sun goggles were being ground. Three packages that we could have picked up ourselves on three simple stops were consolidated at great expense and confusion just for my safety.

  And that was simple compared to the needs of the spontaneous-generation farmers. Papers were constantly crossing my desk about their need to stockpile more materials if they were going to keep making food animals for us. I don’t know how many requests I routed for bat dung or crushed violets or who knows what obscure effluvia they needed to create cows, pigs, and chickens.

  And I had my own scientific work to do. Ramonojon was building the ship, Kleon was installing the impellers, Mihradarius was working on the net, but the sun fragment itself was my responsibility. Celestial fire is a unique substance, existing in the body of the sun. It burns a million times hotter than terrestrial fire, it destroys and consumes matter like its earthly counterpart, but unlike normal flame it is eternal, indestructible, as are all things of the heavens. In sum, it is a fire that does not dissipate after it burns—the perfect weapon against terrestrial foes.

  The nature of celestial fire is such that once a fragment of it was pulled away from ’Elios, the piece would form a sphere and hold together just as the body of the sun does. The natural motion of celestial fire, like all celestial matters, is circular, orbiting the earth at a set speed. The sun net would harness that circular movement, turning the sun fragment into a tiny planet orbiting Chandra’s Tear. All well and good, and theoretically simple to control. But there was a gap of experience in our theories. We really only knew how celestial fire behaved in the region of ’Elios. I had to calculate how it would behave in the denser air of the lower spheres, in the water-laden atmosphere just above the earth, and in the solid body of Gaea herself. I had, of course, done most of this work during the previous three years, but theories can always be refined, and answers made more exact, particularly when the lives of my crew and the utility of Sunthief as a weapon depended on it.

  But, despite all I was doing, my work was not the center of my life during those three weeks; security was, and Yellow Hare was the heart of that security. Every morning, I would wake up in my home cave, pull the cords that rolled up the night blankets, and see her, sitting cross-legged on the floor, awake, clean, oiled, and armored. I knew that she slept on the carpeting because she told me that she did, but she always waited until I was asleep before taking her own rest, and I knew she would waken before me and silently prepare herself for the day’s work. Once I was awake she would send for slaves to wash me, dress me, and bring my breakfast, which she always made a slave taste before permitting me to dine. Then she would dismiss the slaves and make sure we were alone before preceding me out onto the surface of the ship.

  During the walk to my office, she would carry her evac thrower drawn in her left hand and her sword in her right. She would permit no one to approach except Aeson or a soldier she personally trusted. When we would reach the courtyard at the top of the hill, she would leave me in Aeson’s care while she prowled through my office like a sniffing jaguar.

  Only when she was satisfied as to its safety would she let me into my own office. She would see me to my desk, then take up guard position next to the doorway, still as a statue. She remained like that until someone came to the door. Then she would take one step back and put one hand on the hilt of her sword and the other on the evac thrower slung across her back.

  She always heard my visitors before I did. No matter how noisy the ship was, with the whine of the impellers, the rush of the wind, the clear bell-like clanging from the reshaping work, she was still able to hear people clear across the courtyard. She could also distinguish who they were by the sound of their footsteps. If she knew who the person was she would tell me before he arrived. But if she did not know, she would ask me to get up from my desk and stand behind her as she crouched beside the door, ready to spring if need be.

  But though I became comfortable, grateful actually, for the care Yellow Hare showed for me during those three weeks, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with the silence that lay between us. I resolved to find something to talk to her about, anything that would bridge the gap between us. But I had always had trouble finding common ground with Spartans. Aeson and I had become friends only after I found out that though he had been filled from birth with battles, strategies, and the marching of armies, still in a corner of his heart he harbored a romantic desire to journey to the outer planets. Anything I told him about the heavens affected him like wine, and his unschooled adoration of the wondrous spheres had many times during the course of Sunthief’s development reminded me of the glories of Ouranian existence, which my training had reduced to mere calculations.

  But Captain Yellow Hare had no such romanticisms. She soaked up all the details of the ship’s layout, learned the names, descriptions, and duties of every member of the crew, interrogated Clovix, our chief slave, about his underlings, and so on, until she knew Chandra’s Tear as well as Aeson and I did. But nothing any of us was doing mattered to her except as it threatened or aided the performance of her duty.

  Near the end of the third week, there came a night when I tried to bridge the gap between us. I had been working late in my office, clearing away the last of the requisition forms. Clovix had brought us dinner: lab-grown venison roasted with olive oil, oregano, and basil. We also had two loaves of fresh-baked barley bread. For drink we had a large bowl of Babylonian wine and water to mix it with. Yellow Hare drank the water straight; Atlanteans have no tolerance for wine. And they smoke tobakou instead of Indian hemp. For all my years in Atlantea, I could never understand why. Tobakou does nothing for me. Hemp at least is relaxing.

  I reclined on my couch and took a large bite of venison and bread, wiping a trickle of oil off my cheek with my sleeve. Yellow Hare sat cross-legged on the floor in the exact center of the room. It amused me that in seeking the most militarily useful position she had achieved perfect mathematical harmony with all the objects in my office. The desk was to her right; if an attack came she could roll under it and fire from cover. I reclined on the couch in front of her, and she could leap up in an instant and throw her body between me and any assailants. The wooden door was behind her, barred with a grate of iron she had ordered installed; she could spin to face it before anyone could break through. The walls, lined with cubbyholes, were to her left and right. If disarmed she could pull out heavy ivory scroll cases and lay them about her. The m
oon rock floor gave enough light for her to fight with, so the fixed fire-torches in the sconces along the rear wall could be picked up and used as weapons with impunity.

  Perfectly placed, with no need to look around, she fixed her eyes firmly on me. Even when she was eating, her gaze never left me. She seemed to have an unerring ability to find her food without looking at it. She took rapid, small bites of bread and swallowed them instantly, like a bird pecking at a plate of seeds.

  I poured wine into a small flat bowl, mixed in some water, and took a long swallow before trying to engage her in conversation.

  “Which of the Xeroki city-states are you from?” I asked.

  She stood up, walked over to my cubbyholes, and pulled out a map. I didn’t know that she even knew what was there; my shelves were not labeled. She unrolled it and pointed to a small town on a river two-thirds of the way down the east coast of North Atlantea.

  “I spent a lot of time in Atlantea as a child,” I said, gamely trying to keep the conversation going.

  “Hmm,” she grunted.

  “My father was Military Governor of Eto’ua for several years.”

  “Hmm.”

  I stopped speaking ’Ellenic and switched to Xeroki. “I’m very familiar with your homeland.”

  “Sparta is my homeland,” she said.

  “And the Xeroki?”

  “Made me capable of being Spartan.”

  I nodded and fell silent. Not a long conversation, but enough to give me some understanding of her. Most of those who attended the Spartan military college retained a closeness to their native land. But some sucked inside them the communal living, dining, suffering, and training and became members of a different people. They became warriors not of their homelands, of the Delian League, or even of the city of Sparta, but of Nike, Ares, and Athena, the gods of war.

  It is said that when Alexander entered the military college as a young boy, one of the first normative Spartans to be educated there, he carried his father Philip’s dreams of learning the ways of the Delian League so that it and the third of Persia it controlled could be placed under Makedonian rule. King Philip had been surprised, to say the least, when the Delian army came instead to conquer his land, and stunned at the face of young Captain Alexander, who led the charge into his own palace.

  * * *

  The morning after my talk with Yellow Hare, I found out what had been happening on the rest of the ship while I had been protected from it. Two junior scientists tried to barge unannounced into my office shouting an impressive array of multilingual blasphemies at each other.

  The twenty-five-year-old dressed in the red tunic and skirt of a Skythian was a young celestial navigator named Pandos. He was a normally pleasant-voiced young man with a reputation as a gregarious socializer. One would not have thought that about him given the way he was screaming insults in his native language and gesticulating menacingly with a rod of fire-gold. Yellow Hare grabbed his arm and twisted the two-foot-long, four-inch-thick club out of his hand. He kept swearing at the other man. My bodyguard laid the rod on my desk. I took a quick look at it. The top was rounded into a hemisphere with machine precision, but the bottom was ragged like a broken tree branch. The air grew clear and thin around it, distorting our voices into obnoxious squeaks.

  Pandos bellowed like an angry mouse. “This oaf broke off one of the tertiary impellers.”

  I looked at his companion, a morose, well-muscled Egyptian dressed in nothing but a loincloth and a leather tool belt. I did not remember his name, but I knew he was one of the heavy-equipment operators who worked under Ramonojon. He was equally frenetic and angrily waved a sander in the air. The rough stone block noisily dripped water on my floor. “These twittering birdbrains won’t even wait for us to finish beveling the prow before they install their impellers. We won’t be held responsible if they turn Chandra’s Tear into a lumbering hulk.”

  I held up a hand to silence them.

  “Now, tell me what is happening,” I said sternly. “One at a time.” I pointed at the Egyptian. “You first.”

  Their accounts were decidedly laden with partisan anger, but I managed to piece together what was happening. Ramonojon’s dynamic reshaping was taking longer than expected, and Kleon was impatient to get the Ares system emplaced, so their underlings were getting into fights over who should be working where.

  And while this had been going on, all the reports that had crossed my desk had spoken of amicable progress.

  The rage of Ares boiled up in my heart. “Return to your duties. I’ll see to this matter myself.”

  I slipped a woolen cloak over my shoulders to keep the wind off and, followed by Captain Yellow Hare, stalked outside.

  The sky at five hundred miles up was perfectly clear, and ’Elios blessed us with streams of his clean gold light. We walked down the hill and across the starboard side of the ship. I was impatient to reach the navigation tower, but Yellow Hare insisted on maintaining proper security procedures. We walked for a cautious half an hour and with each slow step my anger at being deceived festered and grew in my heart. Aeson’s soldiers saluted as we passed their barracks, as did the gunners manning the starboard evac cannon battery, but none of them approached us. I don’t know if it was Yellow Hare’s orders or the fact that my countenance must have made me look like one of the Furies.

  We were just passing the amphitheater when Athena tapped me on the shoulder. She reminded me that if I wanted answers, I would have to be calm, firm but calm. I stepped through the actors’ entrance in the rear of the open-to-the-sky auditorium. Tiers of solid moonstone seats were set in a half-circle around a stage carved from terrestrial granite. It had been a long time since the crew had put on any amateur dramatics. Aeson and I planned to remedy that situation once we began the long journey to the sun, but if things were not settled between Kleon and Ramonojon that trip would never begin.

  I walked around the low platform where the chorus would stand and climbed onto the stage to face my audience of one.

  “Fool! to think that I would brook with blood to stain me from my throat.” I quoted the Orestes of Euripides, hoping to expend my wrath in oratory.

  “That is no way to contain your anger,” Yellow Hare said from the center bottom seat.

  “Then how?” I asked, surprised but pleased at her solicitude.

  “Keep hold of it in your heart,” she said, and I could almost see ’Ermes and Athena sitting on her shoulders, lending her eloquence and wisdom. “Let it give force to your words like the strength of your arm, but do not let it guide your words. At the Spartan college they say anger is fire; contain it with wisdom and it will give you strength forever; let it out and it will blow away, leaving only ashes.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Fire is something I understand.”

  We left the theater and climbed over the small rise bowward of it. The sight that greeted my eyes from the top of that hillock fed the fire in my heart like a forest of dry wood. Across the sharp prow of my ship, dynamicists and celestial navigation engineering crews swarmed like two tribes of warring ants.

  Water-spraying bevelers came perilously close to fire-belching road graders. Cranes with heavy loads of stone and metal wavered perilously over the crowd. The forward cannon battery was being pulled back on float carts by teams of slaves under the direction of some dynamicists. Scant yards away, engineers lowered the Ares impellers over the bow on other cranes whose lines threatened to tangle with their rival machines.

  “Stop!” I shouted.

  There was too much noise for most of them to hear me, but the ones in the rear did, and they relayed the order from man to man until there was silence across the fore part of my ship.

  “Work crew leaders come up here.”

  Kleon’s and Ramonojon’s senior deputies stepped up to the hill. They were about to open their mouths and complain but I raised my fist for silence. “I don’t want to hear any explanations. I’ll talk to your seniors about that. Clear everything carefully out of
the way. Don’t interrupt, I don’t care how far behind schedule that will put you. I want this area to be safe before any more work is done.”

  “Yes, Commander,” they said in uncomfortable unison.

  “You will then work in alternate six-hour shifts, dynamicists first. Is that clear?”

  “But, commander—”

  “I asked if that was clear.”

  “Yes, sir,” they said, and returned to their crews.

  Yellow Hare and I went to the navigation tower while the cowed workers disentangled themselves. Yellow Hare spoke briefly to the guards stationed at the base of the moonstone spire, then preceded me through the thin blue curtain at the entrance and up the spiral stairs to Kleon’s control room.

  My chief navigator was hunched in front of a writing desk, strumming his lyre with one hand and drawing lines with charcoal on papyrus with the other. The panel that actually controlled the ship was being manned by one of Kleon’s junior navigators, a young Theban woman named ’Ekuba, who was staring out through the square quartz window in front of the controls.

  “Kleon!” I said, pulling slowly on the fire in my heart like Yellow Hare drawing on her pipe. “We need to talk.”

  His hands jumped, raising a harsh discord from his lyre. “I nearly had it. I could have cut three days off our travel time, and now I’ve lost the chords.”

  Then he looked up and saw who had interrupted him. “Aias? What are you doing out of your office?”

  I ignored his question and pointed at the window. “Have you looked out there recently?”

  Kleon leaned over to brush charcoal from the paper. The black dust fell slowly to the floor, then skittered trails across the hard stone as the ship’s circular motion forced the powder into unnatural perambulations.