Celestial Matters (16 page)

She saluted Aeson and myself, and handed me the scroll. I broke the double seal carefully, unrolled it, and moved it close to my eyes so I could read Kroisos’s flowing handwriting in the ship’s moonlight.

“What is it?” Aeson asked.

I read the message twice, then spoke hesitantly, hoping I was hallucinating. “You and I are ordered to accompany this messenger to Delos immediately. The Archons wish to personally give us our final briefing before we leave for the sun.”

“We’re not ready to leave yet,” Aeson said.

“I know. I just hope we can convince Kroisos and Miltiades of that.”

“We had better call the senior staff together and tell them we’re leav—”

Yellow Hare was suddenly running down the hill. “Stop!” she shouted ahead of her, and, “Guard Commander Aias!” she yelled back at the soldiers.

Aeson and I exchanged quick glances and pursued her, followed closely by the guards.

Yellow Hare ran straight for the net launcher. When we caught up with her, she was holding Ramonojon up in the air by scruff of his neck.

“Put him down!” I shouted.

She shook her head and pointed to a small pile of broken wood on the ground beside the cannon. “He was trying to throw this over the side.”

I knelt down and sifted the cherry wood splinters carefully with my fingers. My fingers touched metal and I pulled up two wood chips with straight gold needles sticking out of them and two others with twisted silver needles.

I looked up at Aeson. “This appears to be the remains of a Taoist weapon.”

Aeson growled. “Senior Dynamicist Ramonojon, you are under arrest. Captain Yellow Hare, place him in the brig in the cell next to the Middler doctor. We’ll settle this when Aias and I return from Delos.”

Ramonojon went limp in Yellow Hare’s grip, and his face became a gloomy blank.

“It’s not true, is it? You can’t be a spy,” I said in his native tongue.

He looked at me with his sad brown eyes glowing in the washed-out silver light, but said nothing.

“I swear by the waters of the Styx that I will believe you,” I said.

“No, Aias,” he said. “I’m not a spy, but I can’t prove it.”

“Then I will,” I said.

ζ

With the sole exception of riding a camel bareback over broken ground during a sandstorm, moon sleds are the least comfortable way man has ever found to travel. The spin of the lunar motion coupled with the interminable skip-skipping over waves of rarefied air battered our backsides and bruised our legs. Every cloud and every air current we hopped over added another injury to my body and drew forth from my lips another blessing on the designers of
Chandra’s Tear
who had made it large enough to ignore such indignities.

The crowding on the sled added to the discomfort, for even though we were strapped into seated positions, we were so tightly packed that every pitch and roll of the sled knocked me sideways into Aeson, Yellow Hare, or one of the Archons’ soldiers.

The only justification for moon sleds is their speed. Their small size and large impeller array makes them fly faster than anything terrestrial or any larger celestial ship. It took us a mere three hours to cross half of North Atlantea and traverse the entire Atlantic Ocean, three hours in which we passed from midnight to a cloud-reddened dawn. So it was that when we reached Europe, it was out of a clear morning sky that we dove down toward the military port at the Pillars of ’Erakles.

Below us a fleet was streaming westward through the gateway that connected the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Seven warships of the same class as the
Lysander,
escorted by thirty-five smaller picket ships, passed slowly under the massed guns of the overlooking rock. Salutes were fired from the hundred-gun cannonade of ’Erakles, shooting flaming spheres into the air to honor the ships as they left for the wars.

Our navigator angled the moon sled and we descended, flying toward the array of six multitined sky docks that rose up from the Pillars like a half dozen of Poseidon’s favorite tridents. When we reached a height of two miles, three armed sleds flew up from one of the docks to greet us. They surrounded us and escorted us down to the ground level of the port. Fifty-foot-across shelves had been cut into the sides of the Pillars, making the ancient stones look like South Atlantean step-pyramids. The escort sleds shepherded us toward one of these ledges, where we landed. A squadron of slaves rushed out and chained the moon sled down with steel chains moored deep in the ground.

“Will we be here long?” I asked the navigator, hoping to stretch my aching legs.

“No, Commander,” she said. “As soon as we have been cleared by the port general, we’ll be departing. Normally, we would not even have to stop here, but for reasons I do not know, security in the Mediterranean was recently tightened.”

Yellow Hare, Aeson, and I kept silent. If the Archons had chosen not to inform their own messengers about the battle kite that had breached the center of the League, we were not going to do so.

Our sled’s pilot showed her messenger’s staff to an officer of the port, and we were given a flight path to follow while we were in the Mediterranean. We were warned that deviation from the path would result in our being fired on by any naval vessel or celestial ship that spied us.

We took off and ascended to ten miles, then skimmed along the coast of North Africa, catching fleeting glimpses of squat Carthage. Then we sailed over Sicily and suffered a short delay while the celestial ship
Horn of Hathor
sailed into the sky dock of Syrakuse.

Following our flight path we stopped at Sparta to join the daily caravan of a dozen messenger sleds that carried orders and information back and forth between Delos and the military heart of the League.

O, Sparta, city of the Lakedaimonoi, of Aeson and Yellow Hare, of my father and my paternal ancestors going back to before recorded history, Oh city most beloved of ’Era, city of Lykurgus the lawgiver, what shall I say of you? That you of all the cities of the League shun adornment, that your homes are plain stone, your gates are solid doors of steel, and even your temples are unpainted marble. Only to the statues of the gods do you give anything of beauty, and to them you give all. How shall I describe your strength and untempered power, how can I, who was not accepted inside your bosom, tell anyone of your spirit?

Let it suffice, I pray, to declare that as we flew over your walls toward the bristling column of your sky dock, Aeson and Yellow Hare became filled with you, and grew larger with the presence of the gods, so that we who companioned them seemed to be men of the age of stone next to men of the age of gold; that the force of their purity overwhelmed my thoughts, taking from me, for the first time since I had set foot in Athens, the doubting spirit taught in the Akademe.

I can only account it a mercy that we did not stay long; for if we had, I do not know what would have been left of my spirit.

But it took only a brief check of our credentials at the sky dock and we were directed to a line of twelve floating moon sleds waiting to depart for Delos. Thankfully, we were the last sled expected, so the convoy left only a few minutes after we joined it.

Only ten minutes from Sparta, a glint appeared on the horizon and quickly grew into the silver-laced steel dome that covered the whole of the tiny island of Delos. Swivel-mounted cannons tracked our approach until we flew down to water level and floated under the bronze canopy that projected out like a bird’s bill from the southern end of the island, a quarter mile of brazen shield, covering the water, protecting the harbor from air attack.

We flew under this aegis and made for the crescent-shaped dock of Delos, where a hundred soldiers waited to defend the Archons. Twenty of them patrolled along the shoreline in squads of five; the other eighty sat inside armored boxes, pointing short-barreled, wide-mouthed cannons out over the water. The caravan of moon sleds halted under the canopy and waited to be invited to land by the soldiers.

After that rapid journey across half the world it seemed ridiculous to sit for an hour on a bobbing sled waiting for our turn to dock, but wait we did. Finally, we were waved forward. Our pilot flew the moon sled into one of the alcoves lining the thick limestone walls at the rear of the covered harbor. Slaves chained the sled to the ground, and guards checked our papers carefully. They politely but firmly required Aeson and Yellow Hare to surrender their weapons, then permitted us to disembark.

I stepped off the moon sled and stretched three hours of aches out of my muscles. I took a deep breath and regretted it immediately; the water-laden air of the island saturated my lungs and dulled my mind just when I most needed to be thinking clearly.

“May I escort you in, Commander?” the messenger asked politely.

I nodded and she led us to the centerpoint of the crescent, where stood the twenty-foot-high iron double doors that formed the last barrier between the Archons and the world.

The door wardens, two beefy slaves dressed only in loincloths, opened the gateway, and the messenger guided us briskly into the tunnel that connected the harbor to the main island. The passage was wide enough for six men to walk abreast, but the low ceiling and the guards stationed every seven feet made the way seem cramped and oppressive, or perhaps that was the heaviness of the air in my lungs or my worries about the upcoming meeting or about Ramonojon. I cannot truthfully account for the feeling of being pressed down on, but feel it I did.

The two guards at the far door checked our credentials again, then ushered us through the thick bronze portals onto the island of Delos. We emerged into a paradise of architecture and greenery, lit by hundreds of fixed-fire globes on pylons of spun glass. The dome overhead had been painted with scenes of Olympos, showing the war between the gods and the Titans and the eventual triumph of the gods. Elsewhere, I knew, there were scenes of Zeus holding court, of the Elysian fields, of the Trojan War, and of the foundings of most of the ancient cities of the ’Ellenes. Yellow Hare gasped momentarily at the splendor around her; it warmed my heart to know that my stoic bodyguard was not immune to the beauty of Delos.

“I must return to my duties,” the messenger said. “You are expected in the Purple Courtyard; it lies about half a mile down this path.”

She pointed the way and then disappeared over a grassy hillock.

We wandered slowly across the marble-paved walkway, past blue-domed temples and hanging gardens of rose and hyacinth. We crossed large open courtyards filled with scroll shelves and writing tables, surrounded by vineyards rich with plump grapes. Along the way we came across many statues of past Archons that stared down at us with carved expressions of stern benevolence. Every man who had ever been an Archon of the League was displayed in painted marble somewhere on the island. Those Archons who had been made heroes after their deaths had taller statues painted blue or black to distinguish them from their flesh-toned mortal colleagues.

The only things disrupting this tranquil scene were the bureaucrats and military clerics running hither and yon, fulfilling the Archons’ orders and trying desperately to look important so they wouldn’t be demoted and sent back to Athens or Sparta, or, Zeus protect them, to the provinces.

The first time I came to Delos I was shocked by the number of people inhabiting the island. Most citizens of the Delian League believed their Archons lived apart from the rough-and-tumble of League politics so they could devote themselves to making those broad decisions necessary to preserving the people’s welfare. That was the reason the Archons had originally been placed on this small island that had once held the League’s treasury, rather than being housed in Athens with the bureaucracy or billeted in Sparta with the general staff. But over the centuries the governance of the League had grown so complex and the speed of travel so fast that it had become both necessary and easy for certain small but crucial problems to be handed over from the lesser functionaries in Athens and Sparta to the two executives on Delos. As a result the Archons had amassed a staff that continued to grow year by year.

A nervous bureaucrat wearing the green robe of a lower functionary intercepted us in our wanderings.

“Welcome to Delos, Commander Aias, Commander Aeson, Captain Yellow Hare,” he said. “If you will come this way, the others are already assembled.”

“What others?” I asked.

“The other commanders of the Prometheus Projects,” he said, and he led us down a long, narcissus-lined path to an open courtyard surrounded by a purple colonnade. Eight walnut wood couches, richly decorated with Tyrian purple cushions, were arrayed in a semicircle. Four of the seats were occupied by men, and two young, athletic-looking soldiers stood behind them, eyeing our approach with the proper caution of guards. It seemed that only Aeson had dared ask for a Spartan officer to serve as bodyguard. Several tripods had been set out with platters of finger food. Our guide waved us over and disappeared back the way we had come.

I knew three of the seated men. Aegistus of Myteline, one of the most self-deluded scholars the Akademe had ever produced, and Philates, one of the most credulous officers ever to leave Sparta; they were respectively scientific and military commander of Project Forethought. The two of them reclined and whispered to each other. No doubt Aegistus was reassuring Philates that their spurious project was progressing brilliantly.

Across from them, wearing the traditional armor of an Egyptian general, sat Ptah-Ka-Xu, the fifty-year-old veteran who commanded the military side of Project Manmaker. He looked up at us and nodded a greeting, then returned to glaring at Aegistus and Philates with contempt.

Next to Ptah-Ka-Xu, almost hiding in his shadow, was the man I did not know, a nervous-faced Aethiopian, no more than thirty years old. He was dressed in scholar’s robes, and his hair was combed in the Athenian style, but his furtive glances from side to side made it clear that he was unused to the courtyards of power.

Aegistus looked up and waved us over as if he had just become aware of our presence. “Have you heard the wonderful news?” he asked.