Celestial Matters Read online

  “It’s not my fault,” he said. “I’m following the schedule.”

  He picked up his lyre and pointed to a sheet of paper glued to the wall. It was in Ramonojon’s meticulous handwriting and gave specific times and dates when his dynamicists would be working on each part of the ship. From the state of work outside, it appeared that they were two weeks behind. This was the first time in three years that Ramonojon’s crews had been anything but punctual.

  Kleon picked up his lyre and strummed the Pythagorean chords of the seven spheres. “My people are doing their jobs. I’ve tried to talk to Ramonojon about his workers, but he just says he’ll look into it and then returns to whatever it is he’s experimenting on.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?”

  “I am sorry,” he mumbled. “I did not mean to offend you, Commander, but with the danger and your own work … We thought it would be better to work things out among ourselves, but Ramonojon hasn’t been doing his work.”

  “Ramonojon?”

  “Yes, Aias. He said he would keep his men to the schedule but he hasn’t been out here once to oversee them.”

  “Then you should have told me weeks ago.”

  “Yes, Aias.”

  “I’ll speak to Ramonojon right away,” I said, trying to keep my anger under control. “And as for you, the next time something like this happens I expect to see you in my office telling me about it.”

  “Yes, Commander,” he said.

  I stalked out of the tower and proceeded aft toward Ramonojon’s laboratory. The fury rose in me; all I could think about was that my friend who had always supported me was now ignoring his duty both to the project and to me.

  “Commander,” Yellow Hare said quietly. “Settle yourself before you speak to him. Contain your anger.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “You have dealt with the immediate emergency. You have the time to settle yourself and think through what you want to say.”

  We came around the starboard side of the central hill and saw the bright yellow colonnade of the commissary.

  “Food and wine to settle the balance of my humours,” I said.

  “Yes, Commander,” she replied.

  The commissary courtyard was nearly empty; only a tenth of the hundred eating couches were occupied. Most of the diners were junior scientific staff, but a few off-duty soldiers were present. These snapped to attention when Yellow Hare entered. I walked to the squat granite kitchen at the aft end and ordered a small loaf of bread and half a roast chicken from the chief cooking slave. Yellow Hare made the nervous old Norsewoman taste the food before letting me settle down to eat.

  I had just cut off the drumstick when one of my staff approached me, a Theban woman named Phaedra; she was a good Ouranologist, but her student years at the Akademe had made her too cautious in proposing her own ideas. “Excuse me, Commander. I know how busy you are, but something strange came up and I didn’t know if I should disturb you with it.”

  “Too many people have been trying to not disturb me, Phaedra.” I took a bite of the chicken, concentrating on the taste to control my anger. It was fresh and hot; the skin slipped down my throat just right, leaving a tang of Indian pepper on my tongue. “Tell me.”

  “Chief Dynamicist Ramonojon came to the file room last week and asked to see the archive report on the first ’Elios probe. I gave it to him. The next day, Security Chief Anaxamander reprimanded me. He said that report was restricted to the Ouranology staff.”

  “I’ll look into it,” I said. I finished the chicken and returned the bones to the kitchen so the spon-gen labs could use them in growing more birds. What would Ramonojon want with ten-year-old data on the sun? I wondered. And didn’t Anaxamander have more important things to do than checking on my files?

  Aft of the commissary we walked onto a square, open plain of gleaming moonstone that extended in for a quarter mile from the starboard edge of the ship. The area was flatter than the rest of Chandra’s Tear, but with rougher ground. It was the place where ceremonial games were held and funerals performed. We had had no deaths so far, but both Aeson and I knew that we could not rob the sun without some loss of life. The corners of the plain were each marked with a ’Erm, a small head of ’Ermes Psychopompos set on a three-foot-high marble pillar. None of the crew knew that when Sunthief had begun, Aeson and I had gone to these statues and offered sacrifices of wine and blood to the god of thieves and guide of the dead.

  Past the open enclosure at the ship’s widest point lay the lab caverns, where my subordinates did their work. The surface entrances to these caves were hemispherical mounds with curtained openings behind which lay straight stairways down into the ship. We entered Ramonojon’s lab through the starboardmost hillock.

  Yellow Hare and I walked down two dozen steps and entered the dynamicist’s moonlit underworld. The cave was a demicylinder, like an eastern Atlantean longhouse. Its long edge ran from fore to aft and we had entered from the lone door in its fore end. The center of the cave was empty, though the flat floor and high arched ceiling bore as much soot and scarring as the pyrology lab at the Akademe. Drawing tables, stores of pen and ink, and stacks of paper fined the port wall, but no one was in that side of the lab. The starboard wall was covered with stacks of thick steel cases, each containing a sample of some terrestrial or celestial material. Ramonojon sat at a workbench near the cases, hunched over something. Yellow Hare gave the room a good eyeing, then nodded for me to enter.

  Ramonojon looked up with a lined, haggard face. He coughed and rubbed his hands against his cheeks. “Aias, what are you doing here?”

  “Trying to keep my ship from falling apart. Your people and Kleon’s are practically at war.”

  He cocked his head. “What about?”

  “The resculpting.”

  “Oh, that’s my fault.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “I thought I could leave that work to my juniors. I suppose I had better take care of it.”

  The rage began to spread from my heart into my blood. I could feel black bile rising to color my thoughts. Then I grasped the anger and did as Yellow Hare had advised. I placed my fury in the timbre of my voice. “Senior Dynamicist Ramonojon,” I said, casting my words like the spear of Ares. “Why have you not been doing your duty?”

  But my anger did not strike him. He reacted to my rebuke as if it were a simple question.

  “Because of this,” he said, and waved us over to his table.

  On an oil-smudged cloth lay a scale model of Chandra’s Tear carved from Selenean matter. It was chained to the table by bands of iron to keep it from spinning off under its natural motion. The model was a foot-long teardrop, carved in so much detail that I could not only make out large features like the hill and the amphitheater, but small ones like the entrance to my cave. Dynamicists only made such models when they needed to study the unique motive characteristics of a particular object.

  Twenty small weights depended from the bottom, representing our ballast spheres, and ten small fire-gold balls, miniatures of our lift orbs, floated above it, secured to the model ship by steel rods. A groove had been cut in the aft end of the model where we’d planned to put the sun net. Also on the table was a four-inch-wide fire-containment box. Something inside it was making a steady thumping noise. A gossamer net about two inches long waved jerkily in the air, pulling in three different directions at three different rates. The net connected the model to whatever was in the box.

  “What’s this?”

  “This is a model of sun net design Delta. I constructed it according to Mihradarius’s specifications.”

  “I’m impressed. Mihradarius’s work is so abstruse I doubt any Ouranologist could duplicate it. I know I couldn’t. How did you do it?”

  Ramonojon said nothing. He opened the fire box and scooped out a little glowing ball with a pair of tongs.

  “This,” he said, “is a model of the sun fragment. It is a mixture of rarifie
d fire and ’Ermean and Selenean matter. I made it according to your formula for simulating the motive properties of celestial fire. I checked your figures against the ’Elios probe data.”

  I took a heat meter from the table and held it over the sphere. The water in the glass tube boiled in exactly the right amount of time. My formula was unstable since it used terrestrial fire and celestial solids to simulate celestial fire, but if kept in a fire box it would remain accurate for several days before the celestial matter drifted out of it.

  Ramonojon wrapped the ball in the net, unchained the model of Chandra’s Tear, and hooked the net to the model. The net started spinning around the ship, chained to a little wheel that rolled along the groove. The full-size net would be tied to a trolley, but on that scale, a wheel would suffice.

  Ramonojon walked to the center of the room, released the model into the air, then ran as fast as he could back to us. The little Chandra’s Tear flew straight forward for a few yards as the real ship normally did when its native circular motion was counterbalanced by the terrestrial pulls of the ballast spheres and lift orbs. As the ship cut through the air, the pseudo sun fragment orbited it in a perfect circle, once, twice, thrice.

  But as it orbited, the net that tethered it to the ship began to drag a little, its lines twisting through the flame. The fireball tried to make a fourth orbit, but it was fouled in the nets; it began to thrash and pull the ship like a whale hauling a fishing boat half its size. The model began to vibrate as the fragment darted this way and that. A crack developed in the groove. The bottom weights snapped off. There was a spray of silver moondust, a noise of breaking stone, and the fragment broke away, carrying the net and the back end of the Tear with it.

  The rest of the ship, no longer moored to a straight flight path, arced upward and shattered against the ceiling, shrieking the Pythagorean chord of Selene. I covered my ears to dampen the echoes of that pure scream.

  Moondust floated gently around the room, congealing gracefully into a circling ring of silver.

  “I have tested this three times already,” Ramonojon said, trying unsuccessfully to conceal his distress in a dispassionate monotone. “The first time, the model ship floated around the room, spiraling randomly; the second time it crashed into the floor; the third time the result was the same as this test. The conclusion is inescapable. Mihradarius is using the wrong net.”

  I nodded slowly, and asked for his calculations. Ramonojon showed me Mihradarius’s Ouranological formulas and what he had done with them to derive the dynamics for his model. Ramonojon knew nothing of Ouranology, but he was certainly capable of taking someone else’s calculations of impetus and discerning the dynamics of an object subjected to those forces.

  I went back to my cave and spent three hours going over my friend’s work. It was compelling, but not convincing. There were so many places where he could have been incorrectly interpreting Mihradarius’s theories that I was tempted to dismiss his fears out of hand. Also, he had been acting so strangely since our vacation. Perhaps something had happened to him.… But what if he was right?…

  I returned to the dynamics lab and found Ramonojon seated cross-legged on the floor. He looked up when we came in. “Well?”

  I sighed. “One of you is making a mistake,” I said. “But I don’t know which one.”

  “I do not envy you your position.” A half smile cracked his facade, then vanished, but not before I could smile in acknowledgment.

  “See to the restructuring,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mihradarius and find a solution to this dilemma.”

  Yellow Hare and I walked out of the dynamics lab and through the field of mounds toward the Ouranology labs.

  “I do not trust Senior Dynamicist Ramonojon,” Yellow Hare said.

  “Because he’s Indian, I suppose,” I said, annoyed at her seeming prejudice. “When will you Spartans forget the rebellions?”

  “That is not the reason,” she said.

  “What, then?”

  “Because you who are his friend are beginning to doubt him.”

  I rounded on her. “What concern is it of yours, Captain?”

  “It is my duty to guard you,” she said, touching her sword hilt. “From friends and enemies alike.”

  I held my temper. “And that gives you the power to discern my thoughts?”

  “No,” she said. “Athena bade me watch your face as you examined Ramonojon’s work. Your expression was not one of concentrated effort but of friendly concern mixed with bewilderment.”

  At that point we reached the entrance to Mihradarius’s laboratory, and the conversation ended for a time.

  My chief Ouranologist’s lab was in the center of the research warren. It was a cube six yards on a side buried deep down in the body of the ship. A much smaller working space than Ramonojon’s, but Mihradarius was a theoretician; there was no risk of colliding with exploding models in his underground den.

  With the safety of theory came the luxury of decoration; carved on Mihradarius’s walls were friezes of the two events beloved of most ’Ellenized Persians. The richly sculpted images depicted first Xerxes’ surrender of the western third of Persia to Athens and Sparta at the end of the Persian war. This took up only one of the three walls; the rest were occupied with Alexander’s conquest of the rest of Persia and his capture of the emperor Darius. The scene was carved in the moon rock and colored with bright, transparent paint that gave a supernatural glow to that great triumph.

  One of Mihradarius’s assistants met us as we came down and conducted us to him. My genius subordinate was poring over a page of stress and balance formulas for arrangements of ’Ermean and Aphroditean matter so complex it would have taken me days to check them for accuracy.

  He looked up as we approached. “Aias?” He looked over at Yellow Hare. “Is it safe for the commander to be wandering around?”

  “No,” she said. “But it is necessary.”

  “Ramonojon has some problems with your net design,” I said slowly.

  He narrowed his eyes into a glare. “What problems?”

  I described Ramonojon’s demonstration.

  Mihradarius scowled, and his eyes lost their focus as they always did when he was in the depths of thought. I waited.

  “The net design is perfect,” he said at last. “Ramonojon must have made a mistake.”

  “One of you has,” I said. “How do I judge between the most skilled dynamicist and the most brilliant Ouranologist in the League?”

  “You do have a problem,” he said stiffly.

  “I could go over your calculations with you.”

  “With respect, Commander, your knowledge of Ouranology is too specialized for such a review. You know too much about the celestial fire and too little about the celestial solids.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Mihradarius stroked his beard thoughtfully and stared at me. I could almost feel his mind working, racing through possible options, looking for one that would satisfy me. A moment later he clapped his hands and smiled broadly. “I have it. I will work out a demonstration of my own using Chandra’s Tear itself.”

  “You will not put my ship at risk!”

  “Not to worry, Commander,” he said, raising a hand to calm me. “I will build a net one-quarter the size of net Delta. If Ramonojon is right, a net on that scale would cause us some flight problems, but nothing Kleon could not handle. But if my calculations are correct, we will suffer no difficulties at all.”

  It sounded like a good idea at the time. After all, I rationalized, such an experiment would conclusively demonstrate the truth to my satisfaction and that of my subordinates.

  “How long will you need to set up such a demonstration?”

  He tapped his fingers together excitedly. “Three weeks, since I assume you want me to be careful.”

  “Very careful,” I said, and walked out of the cave.

  * * *

  Four days later, I had a few hours away from the rigors of command and th
e constant presence of Captain Yellow Hare when the monthly meeting of the new Orphic mysteries was held. I had been invited to join the exclusive mystery twenty years ago during my first fling with Fame, and it had been a comfort and an assurance during the lean times that followed. Of the three-hundred-some soldiers and scientists on Chandra’s Tear, there were only eight New Orphics, including myself, Aeson, and Kleon.

  Yellow Hare waited for me outside while the eight of us marched carrying torches down the black-painted tunnel carved into the side of the hill that led into the black-painted, naturalistically carved cave which the various mystery cults took turns using. In that artistically cut, pseudo earthly cavern, it did not take much imagination to believe that we were deep in Gaea’s umbral womb rather than flying five hundred miles above her.

  The mystery began with each member taking an assigned role in the story of Orpheus. This time I wore the mask of ’Ades. Phaedra played Persephone. Aeson had the unrewarding role of Kerberus, and Kleon wore the mantle of Orpheus. He was too nervous and excitable for the role, but he could play the lyre, which lent verisimilitude to his overly frenetic performance.

  The mystery play closely follows the myth of the divine musician. Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, dies, and the heroic musician goes down to ’Ades to rescue her. His music charms ’Ades, and the god of the dead promises to give Orpheus his wife if he follows a certain condition. In the mystery the condition laid on him and the ending of the myth are different from the normal telling of the tale. Initiation in the mystery requires that one swear never to reveal this version of the story. That I subsequently broke this oath should be taken into account in your judgment of me, but I will come to that event in due course.

  After the ceremony we put away the masks and robes and settled down in our torchlit privacy to drink and talk. In the cities of the League many important political deals are made at such meetings, but there were so few of us on Chandra’s Tear that we usually took the opportunity to relax in pleasant company.

  As the player of Orpheus, Kleon had the duty to pour and mix the wine, since no slaves were permitted in the mystery cave.