Celestial Matters

by Garfinkle, Richard

  But where to go? A memory wafted through my mind, a delicious smell of flour and honey enticing me back to one of my favorite places in all of Athens.

  There was a bakery on a curving little side street half a mile from the Akademe, hidden from the crush of traffic. The baker was an old man whose family had been baking bread and selling it for twelve hundred years. The stone walls were impregnated with the sweet scent of barley bread, baked from a recipe unchanged for centuries. The only difference between that baker and his many-times-great-grandfather was that he used an oven of self-heating metal rather than one of brick and ash.

  I could think of no place I wanted to be more than in that shop, eating fresh bread drizzled with sweet olive oil and discussing the Athens of centuries past with that baker, in that piece of living history.

  I told Captain Yellow Hare that I wanted to walk the streets of the real Athens, not the city of self-important bureaucrats and self-deluding scientists, but Athena’s blessed city of real people living the same real lives their ancestors had led since the Mykenaeans had ruled the Peloponnese.

  “No, Commander,” Yellow Hare said with the finality of Zeus rendering judgment. “I cannot allow you to take any risks.”

  I heard noises in the corridors, slaves mopping the floors, polishing the statues. Soon the students would awake for their morning exercises, and then the scholars would rise to teach and argue. The Akademe was stirring, and I wanted to be gone before it blinked its sleepy eyes and saw me.

  Athena tapped me gently on the shoulder and told me the way out. Though my bodyguard denied me the heart of the city, she could not keep me from its soul. I turned to Captain Yellow Hare. “May we go to the Acropolis? I wish to make amends to Kleio.”

  “Of course,” she said, and in the gleam of her golden eyes I saw the hint of approval. “Even the Middlers would not attack a sanctuary of the gods.”

  I splashed cold water and rubbed warm oil over my body, changed into my sturdy traveling robes, and grabbed two apples and a piece of nut bread from the heavy-laden breakfast tray a slave brought in, and then Yellow Hare, Ramonojon, and I left the Akademe. I did not even glance backward at the halls and grove I was abandoning.

  * * *

  Captain Yellow Hare commandeered a tube capsule for us and prevented anyone else from using it. The men who guarded the tube stations grumbled about that, but no ordinary soldier would dispute the orders of a Spartan officer. The trip from the suburbs to the center of Athens passed quietly and uneventfully. I was wrapped up in my thoughts, contemplating how best to frame my prayers. Ramonojon leaned back on the bench and twisted the leather straps tightly around his hands. His eyes were shut and he seemed to be whispering to himself, though I could not hear the words he was saying. Captain Yellow Hare sat next to me, straight backed, alert eyed, one arm poised next to the hilt of her sword, the other touching the ammunition bag at the butt of her evac thrower. Like the lightning before a storm she brooded, waiting to strike at the first clash of thunder.

  We emerged from the terminus station into the long morning shadow near the western base of the Acropolis, and climbed the stairway carved into the side of that holy hill. There was already a throng of worshipers passing through the gaily colored gate of the propylaea. Citizens of Athens come to pay their respects and ask the gods for fortune, love, or glory rubbed shoulders with visitors from the provinces come to see the original statue of Athena Parthenos from which myriad copies had been made and placed in temples throughout the League.

  Once inside the holy enclosure, Captain Yellow Hare apparently felt we were safe enough to leave Ramonojon and me to our own devices for an hour while she went to the small temple of Athena Nike, just south of the gateway. I presumed she had gone to ask the victorious goddess for aid in her duties.

  Ramonojon and I went over the top of the hill, bypassing the red-and-blue-columned Parthenon itself; we walked over the flag-stoned path down the other side of the Acropolis into the Erektheon, where most of the gods were housed. We passed the statue of Athena, Protectress of the City, and descended the short staircase to the gallery of lesser gods on the lower level.

  I approached the niche that held the Muses hesitantly, head bowed, arms outstretched with a bowl of wine in my hands that I offered in libation to Kleio before I whispered to her. “Goddess who took me from despair and gave me life, who offered me words of truth to speak when my own voice was dumb. Forgive me that I did not speak your oracle to the Akademe. But they would not have heard me. I offer myself again to you and swear by Zeus in the heavens, Poseidon in the waters, and ’Ades below the earth to do all that I can in your service from this day forth.”

  I turned away from the smooth-hewn alcove and saw Ramonojon bowing perfunctorily to the gods with a startling look of indifference, almost distaste, on his face. I could not understand what had happened to him. He had always been a very religious man, enthusiastic in his prayers and sacrifices to the huge array of Hindu deities, nor had he ever been lax in offering obeisance to the ’Ellenic gods. I wanted to challenge his actions, but I could not bring myself to question his devotion in the presence of a goddess I had blasphemed and whose favor I was trying to regain.

  When I had poured a final libation to the Muse and was about to leave, Ramonojon held up a hand to stop me. He waved me away from the dozen or so other worshipers pouring their offerings out to the deities.

  In a dark corner, Ramonojon reached into his tunic, pulled out a scroll, and slipped it into the sleeve of my robes.

  The scroll was not papyrus, but had the soft fragility of rice paper, which meant it had to come from the Middle Kingdom. I unrolled the beginning of it and saw the complex ideographs that the Middlers use for writing. The title said: Records of the Historian by Ssu-ma X’ien.

  I nearly tore the paper in my excitement. Here was a document I had only heard rumors of. It was written by the greatest historian the Middle Kingdom had ever produced, and was said to detail Alexander’s attack on the Middlers and the political upheaval it caused in the Middle Kingdom.

  “I knew how much you’ve wanted to read it,” Ramonojon said, a thin smile cracking his demeanor.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, unsure if I was speaking to my friend or to the goddess of history, who perhaps had just given me a sign of her forgiveness.

  “How did you get this?” I asked Ramonojon.

  “I chanced upon it in India,” he said vaguely. And I knew he would not tell me any more.

  I hid the document carefully in the folds of my robes, not wanting my bodyguard to see me perusing a Middle Kingdom document. Spartans have a habitual distrust of those who show too much interest in the ways of the enemy.

  We met Captain Yellow Hare in the Parthenon and joined the crowd offering general prayers to the gilded statue of Athena. We wandered the temple complex watching the crowds, looking over the city from its second-highest structure, and so on until ’Elios had climbed to the highest point in his journey through the sky. Then we commandeered another tube capsule and took a quick trip under the city to meet Chandra’s Tear.

  Security at the sky dock was tighter than I had ever seen it. Four guards instead of the usual two were stationed at the thick steel gates that led into the complex of warehouses, bureaucratic office buildings, and slave quarters around the mile-high steel pillar. These guards looked over my identity scroll three times, feeling the seal for signs of forgery or tampering, making sure I matched the written description down to the last detail. Ramonojon was even more carefully scrutinized, and I was required to swear over water, earth, and fire that he was who his documents said he was. Captain Yellow Hare of course was passed without comment. There was no way to counterfeit that Spartan air she had, and no common soldier would question the integrity of a Spartan officer.

  We threaded our way through the crowd of slaves loading huge wooden crates onto large bronze float carts which hovered a few inches above the ground, clerks checking written manifests and directing the slaves t
o drive this load of lunar matter into that warehouse, pull out that crate full of newly manufactured evac throwers and prepare it for loading, watch where you’re going with that box of gold. Be careful you lackwitted northerners don’t you know that shipment of onyx is fragile? Careful you, oh I beg your pardon, Commander, Captain. The inner gates are this way.

  We passed through the security procedure again outside the basalt gates to the inner courtyard that surrounded the dock itself. As we waited to pass through this checkpoint, Chandra’s Tear hove into view, floating over the horizon from the east. My ship was a mile-long piece of the moon, carved by Ramonojon’s crews into a perfect silver teardrop. She floated majestically over the city, at first just a gleaming disk in the sky no larger than an obol. A dozen tiny black spots appeared on her underside, the water-filled ballast balls that controlled the ship’s descent. Chandra’s Tear grew larger as it came closer to the earth. The silvery light it shed grew brighter until it washed out the gold of the sun. A mile above the ground my ship connected with the top of the sky dock. There was a clang of steel and a pure, high-pitched tone like the ringing of a stone bell carved by a master; it was the pure harmonic of the moon, one of the seven notes of the music of the spheres.

  I looked up longingly and all I could think was that I would soon be home aboard her at last.

  We were let through the final gate into the central courtyard. Slaves and soldiers filled the compound. The soldiers were systematically checking the contents of crates before giving them to the slaves. The slaves in turn would pack the boxes into hemispheric cargo capsules, then push the capsules into the hollow up-tube of the sky dock. The huge steam engines next to the pillar would whine as they pulled the air out of the tube. Then the ground would throb as the pusher plate buried beneath the tube would spring out of the ground, shooting the capsules up through the thin air into Chandra’s Tear’s docking bay.

  In the compound we immediately spotted the one man dressed neither as a soldier nor as a slave. Kleon was a welcome sight in a short Cretan tunic, a bright blue skirt, and sandals so neatly tied they looked woven.

  He was running around the courtyard like a frightened chicken, pointing out one pile of huge boxes and demanding they be sent up next. I grinned at Ramonojon, and he responded with a half smile that he quickly suppressed.

  “Kleon, what is all this?” I shouted, so as to be heard above the hissing and banging of the steam engines.

  “Aias!” he shrieked in delight. “You’ll never believe what happened! I—” He spun around and shouted at a soldier routing through a long thin box. “Careful with that. You could buy half of Persia with what’s in there.” He turned back to me. “I got the Ares impellers. They’ll cut weeks off our travel time.”

  “You did what?” I shook my head, hoping the noise was playing tricks on my ears. The Ares impellers were the longest airrarifiers ever built; when assembled, there would be forty rods of solid fire-gold, each half a mile long. They had been created for a survey mission of the fifth planet, not for Chandra’s Tear. I cringed to think about how much of our budget Kleon had spent on these things, and how many favors Aeson and I now owed to commanders of other projects.

  “To the crows with you, Kleon! I sent you to Crete to replace some broken impellers, not steal the most expensive project ever to come out of the Akademe. And what did you say to make the celestial navigators give them to you?”

  Kleon smiled maniacally. His teeth shone out from his dark brown face, and his brown eyes sparkled in the silver light. “I showed them your authorization from Kroisos.”

  I clutched my head in disbelief. The Archon of Athens could have my head for this misuse of authority.

  Kleon patted my hand like a consoling aunt. “Don’t worry about it. The Ares designers sent a messenger to Delos before giving me the impellers. Kroisos personally authorized the transfer. The Celestial Navigator’s Guild is so angry at me for snatching this prize from them, they might even expel me.”

  I couldn’t believe he was happy about that. “Those impellers were designed for the Spear of Ares. Do you realize how much carving we’ll have to do on Chandra’s Tear so she’ll be able to fly right after they’re installed?”

  “That’s no problem.” He started humming happily and turned to Ramonojon. “It’ll be easy to reconfigure the dynamics, won’t it?”

  Ramonojon blinked as if he hadn’t been listening to the conversation. “Hmm. Yes, I suppose so.”

  Had all of my subordinates lost their minds? For two years Ramonojon had been carefully sculpting Chandra’s Tear so she’d be able to fly to ’Elios and back with and without the sun fragment. Now Kleon had undone all that work in one stroke, and Ramonojon acted as if it were a minor problem.

  “Come on,” Kleon said. “We’ll take the next capsule up. I can’t wait to start recalculating our flight path.”

  He ran to the nearest passenger capsule and climbed in.

  Ramonojon shrugged and followed Kleon into the fire-gold-studded steel hemisphere. I strode after them, shadowed by Captain Yellow Hare.

  We four strapped ourselves down on the capsule’s steel floor, heavily padded with a carpet of cotton under a layer of thick leather, and with enough pillows to keep an Indian rani comfortable. I felt a small bump under us; through one of the tiny square windows in the side of the capsule I saw slaves push a float cart under our conveyance and trundle us into the sky dock’s up tube.

  Through the clear quartz roof, I looked up through the mile of darkness dotted with little glowing nodules of fire-gold. A pillar of stars, all sharply visible in the rarified air through which we would travel like a tetra out of a cannon.

  The steam engines whined as they evacuated the tube, making the air as thin as humanly possible. We waited. Ramonojon breathed evenly. Kleon sang to himself, working out flight paths between the celestial spheres in the musical mathematics of Pythagoras. Captain Yellow Hare lay still as a corpse. I gripped the soft down pillows and counted backward from one hundred.

  At sixty-four, the pusher plate slammed into the base of the capsule and we shot skyward. The breath rushed from my lungs as we flew up past the artificial stars toward the real ones.

  A minute later there was a deafening clang as our hemispheric capsule hit the hemispheric dome at the top of the column. The leather straps dug into my chest and legs as my body tried to fly further up. After a moment’s midair hesitation, the capsule gave up the notion of ascent and fell, but just a few feet. The floor rang like a muffled gong, sending shivers through my bones as we hit the catching plate that my ship’s docking bay had automatically thrust between us and the mile-long drop down to Earth.

  I caught my breath and slowly unstrapped myself. My muscles felt as fragile as dry reeds. A door opened in the side of the tube, letting in a rush of air and light. Two of the ship’s slaves removed the capsule from the up tube and resealed the door so that the tube could be reevacuated for the next load of cargo.

  The capsule door was opened, and, led by Captain Yellow Hare, we walked out quickly onto the glowing silver landscape of my ship. The cold, clear air of a mile up caressed my skin, sucking the accumulated dew of the earth from my body. The ship’s surface pushed against my feet; I knew it was only the natural circular motion of lunar matter giving impetus to my terrestrial body’s native linearity, but it felt like an affectionate welcome.

  A man in black-painted bronze armor strode forward through the silver glare and snapped a brief salute at me. Anaxamander, security chief of Chandra’s Tear, looked the same as when I’d left a month before: tall, olive-skinned, muscular, the perfect model of a Spartan officer, except, to his obvious shame, he was not a Spartan, not one of those who had been taught at the greatest military school in the world. His dignified bearing and haughtily stoic face concealed his well-known anger at having risen as high as he would be permitted in the Delian League’s army.

  “Commander Aeson has ordered a staff meeting for one hour from now,” he said without a h
int of greeting.

  I nodded. So did Ramonojon. Kleon looked crestfallen. “I have to install the impellers.”

  “No time,” Anaxamander growled. “My men,” he said, and his voice rose with his pride at having others under his command. “My men will have to check the capsule’s crates before the equipment is unpacked.” He paused and looked down from his six feet of height to Kleon’s diminutive five. “It is a matter of security.”

  Anaxamander turned back to address me, but when he looked over my shoulder at Captain Yellow Hare his well-practiced arrogance faltered. The perfection of her Spartanness overwhelmed his carefully honed pose as the light of the sun would the gleam of a lamp.

  “Meeting in one hour,” he mumbled to her behind the stiffest salute I’d ever seen him give.

  Kleon saw an opportunity to argue with the security chief, but Ramonojon stopped him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. “There will be plenty of time for work. Commander Aeson has good reason to want to see us.”

  Ramonojon cast a glance at me, and I shook my head. Apart from his casually fearless style of piloting, Kleon was basically a high-strung, excitable person. I did not want to be the one to tell him about the attack.

  Kleon glowered at all of us, then fixed his attention on Anaxamander. “How long until the last of the supplies are loaded?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Then I’ll make sure we are under way before the meeting starts.”

  Kleon picked up his traveling bag and lyre case, nodded to all of us, then turned toward the bow of the ship and walked off with as much dignity as his grasshopperlike gait could lend him. I watched him walk-hop-walk across the open stretches of my ship’s surface as he crossed the quarter mile between the docking bay and the navigation tower, where he lived and worked. I lost sight of him when he disappeared around the blue marble amphitheater that lay just aft of that glowing tower of granite and moon rock where he lived.