Celestial Matters

by Garfinkle, Richard

  “I understand,” I said. “But still, to give up dual command, the thing that has sustained the League through nine long centuries.”

  “Aias, if by some strange spinning of the Fates the two of us found ourselves in the heart of the Middle Kingdom, surrounded by their armies and with no clear chance to survive, would you not feel as I do now?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Would you not, if prompted by a divinity, pass over to me your authority, believing that I had the only hope of finding a way for us to escape?”

  “Yes, Aeson, I would,” I said, bowing my head. “Please leave me and give me time to think.”

  “Yes, Commander,” he said. He walked down the hill, past the guards, and entered into some heated argument with Mihradarius which I could not overhear.

  I walked to the edge of the hill where the ship had split in two and stared over the ragged edge with its myriad of irregular facets all gleaming a cold silver. Three hundred thousand miles straight down lay the earth, a longer journey than even Orpheus had taken back from ’Ades, and I lacked the power of his voice to charm the universe. All I had was my mind and the impetus given me by Father Zeus.

  I stared down that great fall and waited for that raw interior motion to turn into a coherent idea. But the only thought that came to me was the one ’Elios had burned into my mind when he pointed out my hubris. Your duty is to the Good.

  “But what is the Good, here?” I said, calling down through the heavens to the sun god.

  “To survive,” Yellow Hare said from behind me. “And to bring back to the League that which will aid our cause upon the earth.”

  I turned around. Yellow Hare stood on top of the hill, the highest point in existence presently occupied by man. The glow of Ares had washed her steel armor into bronze, but the war god’s mantle did not lie across her shoulders. The divinity that set her golden eyes to glowing was Sparta’s patron, ’Era, queen of heaven.

  “And what could we bring back to the League from this debacle?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” Yellow Hare said while ’Era kept divine silence. “Aeson gave you his authority because only you can answer that question.”

  I walked up the hill and joined Yellow Hare at the heights of humanity. “And have the Fates given me the power to answer it?” I said.

  “They have,” ’Era said through her, “and you shall.”

  Thunder filled my heart; I leaned forward and kissed Yellow Hare gently on the lips. Breath joined with breath and god with god. There was a moment when Zeus and ’Era spoke to one another through our mingled Pneuma. Then the gods were gone and only Yellow Hare and I remained. I stepped back from the embrace and looked into her golden eyes.

  “You do me honor,” I said.

  “As do you to me,” she replied.

  We stood for a time in silent communion, exchanging wordless thoughts in light and breath; then we turned and walked in unison back down the hill.

  All the survivors of the vessel were assembled at the base of the slope looking upward; even Mihradarius, Miiama, and Phan sat among the others. They had all been waiting for us, or rather for me, to come down with my judgment.

  I looked over at Mihradarius. “Despite your actions, we will live and return to Earth,” I said. Then I turned to Miiama. “I am not ordering your executions now, for two reasons. First, it would put my soldiers’ lives at risk, and second, when we return to Earth, you will be taken prisoner and your actions dealt with in accord with the customs of war prisoners. Understand, however, that while you are on my ship you will be watched constantly. Any attempt to interfere with what we are doing and you will be killed before you succeed in any act of sabotage. You will live only so long as you keep still.”

  “I am not concerned,” Mihradarius said. “There is no way to bring this wreckage back to Earth.”

  “And how do you know that?” I said.

  “Because I cannot think of any such way,” he replied. “And your mind was never a match for mine.”

  “It is true,” I said, “that you are more blessed by the scientific Muses than I am. But there are other, greater sources of inspiration.”

  Mihradarius shook his head as if shrugging off the insults of a madman.

  Miiama had eyes only for Yellow Hare and Aeson; it was clear that he regarded me as no obstacle to his work. Only the Spartans were dangerous to him. Death lay on his shoulders, both ours and his, but Death did not come out of him, for on our side War opposed it. The spirits stared at each other through human eyes, then gradually subsided. Miiama would not kill unless he could kill us all, and neither Yellow Hare nor Aeson would attack without my orders.

  I turned to look at Phan. He stared up into my eyes impassively. No words passed between us, but he slowly bowed his head.

  “Very well,” I said. “Now as to how we shall survive. To begin with, our resources are: half of Chandra’s Tear, two hundred pounds of fire-gold, the net, and the sun fragment.”

  Ramonojon looked up. “The fragment is a problem, not a resource.”

  I shook my head, suddenly realizing what I had been saying. Athena and Ourania blessed me with the light of inspiration. “No, Ramonojon, the sun fragment is the only thing we have that is fast enough to bring us back to Earth. If we can guide it, it could pull us home like a horse pulls a chariot. The question is how we can control it.”

  Phan stared at me quizzically. “I do not understand your problem,” he said. “Why would it be difficult to guide the fireball down to the earth?”

  “Celestial matter moves in circles; that is its nature. How could we constrain it to a linear motion?”

  He scratched his beard and nodded slowly. “The Xi flows that guide the planets are circular. Is that what you mean?”

  “Perhaps,” I said, focusing my clarified mind on the strange concepts of Taoist science. “Since I do not understand the meaning of the word Xi, I cannot answer your question. Regardless, we have to find a way to force the sun fragment to draw us down to Earth.”

  “No,” Phan said. “All you have to do is strengthen the proper Xi flow and the fireball will follow it as a matter of course.”

  Athena struck me with sudden realization. “Are you saying that we can use your technology to return to Earth?”

  “Say nothing!” Miiama said in a voice cold enough to shatter steel.

  “Be quiet,” Yellow Hare said to the Nipponian; she and Aeson drew their swords and signaled for the guards to do the same.

  The soldiers waited for my command. I was sorely tempted to order Miiama’s death then and there, but though I was certain Yellow Hare and Aeson could kill the Nipponian, I was equally certain that one or both of them would die in the process. I also knew looking at Miiama that he would not act until he was sure both Phan and I would die in his attack. He would not die uselessly, and I would not throw away the lives needed to kill him. In my heart grew the strange realization that the best thing I could do to further my purposes was nothing.

  And with that realization, I remembered the incomprehensible references in Taoist texts to action through inaction.

  I turned back to Phan, thinking I would have to encourage him to continue, but much to my surprise, the old man answered my question without any further prompting. “In theory it could be done. In practice … I do not know. Battle kites are easy to fly. This piece of the moon, I do not know.”

  “How do the kites fly?” I asked.

  Phan shut his eyes and massaged his temples. He seemed to be struggling for the right ’Ellenic words. “We have mapped the Xi flows of the atmosphere. Our kites use Xi enhancers to strengthen the flows so the natural motions of the universe can support the heaviness of the kites. Once that is done our kites travel along the strengthened flows as easily as birds through the air.”

  “Are there Xi flows here in the outer spheres?” I asked.

  Phan gave out a strangely musical laugh that reminded me momentarily of Kleon. “Xi is the movement of exi
stence; it flows everywhere.”

  He pulled the rice paper scroll he had been drawing on previously from a pocket and unrolled it. On it were eight small circles arranged in a line. Each circle had a single Middler character inscribed in it. The first had the character for Earth, the second for the moon, and so on out to Khronos. I realized immediately that it was a map of the heavens, but instead of the planets being embedded in the celestial spheres, as we would draw them, they were surrounded by carefully inked wavy lines that resembled the ocean currents on a terrestrial pilot’s map.

  “This is how you represent the universe?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Phan said. He pointed to sets of wavy lines that connected each planet to the one directly above it. “There are major Xi flows between each pair of adjacent planets, including this one.” Here he pointed to Ares. I noticed that the war god’s world was surrounded by a confusing multitude of eddies and crosscurrents.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “The tides that make this planet’s orbit so eccentric.”

  “You mean those are the epicyclic crystal spheres?”

  “There seems to be some connection between the flows and the matter,” he said. “Our heaven theorists have never understood the spheres or why the Architect of Heaven rooted the planets in them. According to our theories, if the spheres were gone the planets would still orbit in the same way as they do now. Of course, we cannot prove that.

  “But here are the long flows,” he said, returning to his map and pointing out two sets of parallel lines extending from Ares, one of which led outward toward Zeus, the other inward toward ’Elios.

  I stared at it squint-eyed, trying to think like a sailor. “So,” I said at last, “if we could reach this inward flow, you could guide us down it to the Sun, then from the Sun to Aphrodite, and so on down to Earth?”

  He shook his head. “If this ship were a battle kite I could do so, but the flows that control celestial objects are more complicated; our science cannot truly predict how this piece of moon rock will fly. That is why the first expedition to the Moon crashed trying to return to Earth.”

  Yellow Hare cocked an eyebrow. “What is he talking about? Kroisos and Miltiades landed safely.”

  “Two Middlers reached the moon before Kroisos and Miltiades,” I said, “but they did not make it back alive. Their kite crashed in Gaul. Some pieces of Selenean matter were found in a box that survived the crash, and those samples prompted the League’s first expedition to the moon.”

  “Why have I never heard of this?” she said.

  “The Archons of that time restricted that information to Ouranologists,” Aeson said. “Later the knowledge was given to all commanders of celestial ships as well. Had I not been placed in command of Chandra’s Tear, I would never have heard of it either.”

  “I see,” she said. But I saw a hint of troubled thought cloud her sunlike eyes.

  “The moon pieces were responsible for the crash,” Phan said. “The circular movement of the samples pulled the kite out of the Xi flow between Earth and the Moon.”

  His hands described an elegant crash landing.

  “So you cannot guide us down,” I said, preparing to abandon this line of inquiry and search for others.

  “I cannot keep celestial matter aligned with the inward flows for long periods of time,” Phan said.

  “How long?” I asked, a possibility forming in my mind.

  “No more than twenty minutes,” he said.

  “And we would be flying at the natural speed of the Sun for that period?” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Aias, what are you thinking?” Ramonojon said.

  But I did not answer him. My mind had become filled with a storm of calculations.

  “I think we can do it,” I said at last.

  I picked up a quill and quickly sketched my idea on a sheet of virgin papyrus. “We can use the fire-gold we have to make small impellers that we can use as reins to guide the sun fragment toward the Xi flow. Phan, you can then fly the ship down the flow until the fragment’s natural motion orbits it away from the current. We then do nothing at all, while the fragment pulls us in a vast circular path around Earth and eventually back to the flow, where we repeat the process.”

  “What?” Aeson said.

  “It’s simple,” I said. “We will enter the flow, descend, orbit, enter, descend, and so step by step we will reach Earth.”

  “But, Aias,” Yellow Hare said, “the last time the fragment pulled the ship, we did not fly in a circular orbit. There was no regularity at all.”

  I looked at her for a moment and smiled. “That,” I said, “is because Phan was disrupting the normal motion. Were you not?”

  The old Middler bowed his head. “Yes,” he said. “I strengthened the eddies around the Sun and let them drag the fragment wildly.”

  “Now you will help us tame it?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Might I have the paper and pen, Commander Aias?”

  Phan took the sheet and the quill and began draw a picture of the ship next to my calculations. “If we could build functional wings for this piece of moon rock, and if I can build a large enough Xi enhancer, it might work.”

  I looked over at Ramonojon. “Chief Dynamicist?” I said.

  “What kind of wings do you need?” he asked Phan.

  The three of us sat down to calculate. Ramonojon sketched a redesign of Chandra’s Tear with cloth wings added while Phan and I discussed the two different guidance systems we would be using, where they would have to be placed, and what material we would need to make them.

  We sent Clovix to the storage cave to find steel rods and as many bolts of cloth as we had, in order to make the wings. We also needed silver and gold to make the Xi devices, and we needed to make guide wires for the sun fragment. Staring at the design, I wished Kleon were alive. I knew a little about celestial navigation, but Daidalos himself would have been hard put to fly this hybrid bird we were building.

  Three hours later, we knew the thing could be done. I folded the sheet of papyrus and looked up at Aeson, who had stood guard over us while we worked.

  “Now we can mourn our dead,” I said to him.

  We held the ceremony on the playing fields. The ’Erms were gone but we offered wine to ’Ermes Psychopompos, asking him to guide the souls of our ship’s ghosts down the long ways to the courts of ’Ades. We had no black-wooled sheep to give blood to the dead, but we did have a small stock of silver coins, most of which Clovix donated from his hoard; these we gave so that the dead might pay the fare to Kharon the ferryman and so cross over the river Styx. We had no one to sing the songs of mourning but we swore to remember the dead and bring their names and fates back to their families. And we had too few people for funeral games, but we promised to deliver the roll of honor to Olympia and entreat the overseers to include our crew among those praised at the next games.

  When the ceremony ended, I made silent conference with Kleon’s ghost, saying that I would fly this vessel in his name. I knew that no sacrifice of blood or wine would do more honor to that greatest of celestial navigators.

  * * *

  Over the next few days we worked to make reality from my vision. We had no cranes, so Aeson and the guards had to assemble the wing struts by hand. A steel framework was laid over the middle of the port and starboard edges of the ship, secured by bronze spikes to the corpse of Chandra’s Tear. The guards had to crawl out over the side to join one steel rod to the next with the silver rivets Phan insisted were necessary for proper Xi control. Meanwhile Clovix and Ramonojon sewed the wings themselves out of every scrap of cloth we could scrounge from the ship’s night blankets, from bolts of linen used for making clothes, from the thick cotton used to pad the insides of armor—every piece of fabric on the ship except the clothes we were wearing was stitched into those patchwork wings.

  Ramonojon secured the trolley in place by roughening the groove, breaking the wheels, and wedging
all the marble we had into the channel itself. It took him a week, but he was finally satisfied that when the fragment moved it would pull the ship after it without dislodging the trolley and returning to orbit the ship.

  Meanwhile, I formed our precious reserves of fire-gold into small nodules. These I attached to four long, silver guide wires I planned to use as reins for our horse of the sun. When I had finished them Aeson himself, clad in protective clothing, crawled along the sun net and around the epicycle that tethered it to Ares in order to interleave the wires with the twisted strands of celestial thread.

  The skeleton of a huge bird gradually grew up from the remains of Chandra’s Tear. The truncated fore end had become the bird’s tail, and the port and starboard sides became shoulders. The net was the neck, and the sun fragment itself was the head.

  Throughout this time, Yellow Hare watched Miiama and Mihradarius, making sure that they did nothing. As we progressed she reported to me that the Persian was becoming sullen and seemed to be spending most of his time in nervous prayer to his gods. But the Nipponian was studying everything we were doing with great care.

  “Aias,” Yellow Hare said. “He is going to attempt sabotage soon. Give the order for his execution.”

  “Can you guarantee your survival in a fight with him?” I said. “Even with Aeson’s help, can you promise me that with both of you still recovering from injuries that you can kill him without either of you dying?”

  “No,” she said. “I cannot swear to that.”

  “Then I will not give the order,” I replied. For fear of being overheard I did not tell her that I thought the matter would be taken care of without any of us being put at risk. For I had been watching Phan carefully over the past few days; in the old Taoist’s eyes I had seen the dawning realization that the ship we were building might actually work to fly us home. I had taken Phan’s measure; I had seen the desire for life grow in him until it was ready to burst out. And I had seen Phan cast his gaze at Miiama and realize that the Nipponian was the only thing that stood in the way of survival. But Phan could not act swiftly; as long as he believed other possibilities lay open to him, he would not act against Miiama. But if my assessments were accurate, he would soon come to realize that all other choices were gone.