Celestial Matters (17 page)

Aeson and I exchanged glances. For different reasons, neither of us was fond of Aegistus. I did not like the dignity his field, the blasphemous pseudoscience of mantikology, was afforded in the Akademe; Aeson, like any sensible Spartan, objected to anyone who claimed to be able to create omens that would determine when to carry out a military action. If anyone needs any further proof that something has gone horribly wrong in the history of science, he need look no further than that man’s hubristic belief that humans could constrain the gods and compel them to speak the future on command.

“What news?” I asked, turning away from him to peruse a platter of foodstuffs. I selected a strip of mutton wrapped in phyllo crust, chewed it lightly, and swallowed.

Aegistus waited until I had finished eating and had turned back to face him. No doubt he wanted to see the expression on my face. “Our part of Prometheus is a success,” he said like a parent boasting of a child’s achievements. “Our most capable seer has determined the precise day and hour when you should leave for the sun.”

The light pastry in my stomach turned into a clay brick. The reason for our summons was now clear; we were being sent off far too early because of Kroisos’s obsession with Project Forethought. I started to sputter my usual objections but Ptah-Ka-Xu interrupted me, standing up between me and my “colleague.”

“Aias, Aeson, may I present Kunati, the new scientific commander of Project Manmaker.”

I turned away from Aegistus and nodded to the Aethiopian. He nodded back, clearly grateful for any sign of friendliness amid the bickering. “Congratulations,” I said. “I am sorry your promotion came under these sad circumstances.”

“Thank you.” He twisted his hands around the scroll he was carrying. “I hope I’ll be able to complete the project.”

“You will, young man, you will!” a stentorian voice thundered through the courtyard like the laughter of Zeus. Kroisos and Miltiades strode into the courtyard, setting a furious pace for men in their seventies. Their coterie of scroll-bearing, anxious bureaucrats could barely keep up with them.

Kroisos walked through the arched gateway between the columns and we all stepped forward to greet him. He favored each scholar with a firm arm-clasp, a flash of a smile, and a wordless expression of confidence. By force of personality alone he filled me with renewed faith that despite all difficulties Sunthief would succeed, but then I looked at Aegistus and doubt reentered my mind.

Miltiades followed his more boisterous comrade. The old soldier wore full armor and an expression of iron sternness unmatched by any Spartan except Yellow Hare. Unlike Kroisos’s flowing gray locks, the military Archon’s hair was still the black of his youth. The only sign of age about him was his face, lined and broken like an ancient cliff blessed by Poseidon the Earthshaker.

The Archon of Sparta waved us back to our seats. Slaves brought brightly painted drinking bowls decorated with figures of the three Fates spinning the short golden lives of heroes and filled them with diluted Samothracian wine, very watery but wonderfully mellow in flavor. Yellow Hare left me to join the other two guards, who seemed astonished to have a Spartan captain as a comrade. Miltiades nodded to her and smiled paternally, an expression his face was clearly unaccustomed to. She smiled in return, and though the expression was directed at the old man, I drew confidence from it.

The two Archons sat down. Miltiades took a bowl of wine. Kroisos buried his nose in a scroll and waved away the slave who brought him drink.

A minute later, the Archon of Athens looked up and rerolled the scroll with the carelessness of long practice. “This will be the final briefing for the Prometheus Projects.”

From a fold in his robes, he pulled out three long strips of papyrus, and handed one to me, one to Aegistus, and one to Kunati. “These are your final operation schedules. They are to be committed to memory now and then returned to me. No written record of this schedule is to be made. All orders to your subordinates will be oral.”

I studied the sheet of block printing, carefully memorizing dates and times. Halfway down, I stopped and reread a line three times before looking up. “Archon, my ship cannot reach the sun and return in only four months.”

Kroisos’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward like a snake eyeing a bird. “Your navigator said he could do it, if I gave him the Ares impellers.”

My stomach knotted. Kleon would never lie about something like that. It would violate his Pythagorean oaths. But he might not have made allowance for the comfort of the crew during such a flight, and he would certainly be willing to take risks with our lives if it meant cutting down the travel time.

“Archon,” I said, “my navigator has not yet finished calculating his flight path and I have not had time to review it. I cannot at this moment guarantee with my oath what our travel time will be.”

Kunati chirped a nervous “Excuse me,” which immediately drew Kroisos’s hawklike gaze toward him.

“Archon,” the trembling young man said, “Project Manmaker is … technically a success. We have spontaneously generated fully grown pseudomen in the lab, but our prototype warrior has not been perfected. And I don’t know if we’ll be able to perfect them, and assemble five hundred thousand generation packets, and plant them on the Middle Kingdom border in the two months this schedule gives us. Sir, I only recently took over the project, and—”

Kroisos brushed that aside with an airy wave. His beak darted around. “Aegistus, explain the situation to them.”

The mantikologist pulled a folded piece of papyrus from his sleeve. He opened it, revealing a three-foot square covered with strange, handwritten symbols, including an inaccurate chart of the planets. “According to our Delphic resonators, the time for the attack must be four months from tomorrow. We have tested this hypothesis with six different prognostication methods and all of them produced the same date.”

Kroisos smiled and nodded like a puppy. As if that settled the matter.

O ye gods, when the time comes to judge Kroisos, recall the bravery of his youth, remember his ascent to the moon, pay heed to his work in dynamics and Ouranology that led to the creation of fleets of celestial ships and the exploration of the spheres. Pay great attention to his efforts in leading the League through trying times, but forgive him his folly. All of the greatest heroes have suffered blindness in one way or another. Forgive Kroisos because he thought the future could be seen by science without the intervention of the gods.

“Sir,” I said to him, hoping that practicalities could dissuade him where I knew theology would fail. “We do not have the materials to make the sun net. For that matter, we don’t even have supplies to feed ourselves for that long a trip.”

“Already attended. Food and spon-gen supplies await you on the moon. I’ve also arranged for the celestial matter you need to be refined on ’Ermes and Aphrodite. You can pick them up on the way out and build the net as you go.”

I looked to Aeson for help. He had steepled his hands and was staring up at the dome. The picture overhead showed Zeus pulling Orion up from the earth and placing him among the constellations on the sphere of fixed stars. I could feel the longing in Aeson, the desire deep in his heart to travel out through the spheres. But he was too great a Spartan to put his command at risk to fulfill that dream. He looked momentarily at Kroisos, then turned away and stared directly at Miltiades in that practical Spartan way that had many times cut down a rarefied Athenian debate.

“Sir,” he said, “I cannot permit
Chandra’s Tear
to leave Earth yet. We have serious security problems. It is even possible that one of the senior scientific personnel is a traitor.”

Miltiades frowned, thrusting out his jutting chin. He turned to Kroisos. “Security takes precedence over the timetable.”

“You can’t do that!” Aegistus cried.

The cold gray eyes of the Delian League’s military commander in chief turned on him. “Can’t?”

Aegistus lowered his head and his voice, wilting into himself like a flower. “We’d have to wait nine years for another day this auspicious.”

“Then we will attack on an inauspicious day,” the Archon said coldly. “If you had spent your time studying the battles of the past, instead of the entrails of goats, you’d know that as many battles were won when the omens were bad as when they were good. The favor of the gods is not as easy to divine as you believe, and no man has succeeded in stealing the knowledge of the future from them.”

Aegistus shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger, and shared a glance of Athenian confidence with Kroisos before turning back to Miltiades. “Archon, those ancient prognostications were crude, unscientific predictions. Project Forethought is the scientific study of the future. It is a thousand times more accurate than the ramblings of those bay-sniffing madwomen.”

I held my tongue and wondered when Apollo would avenge himself on this atheist for blaspheming his oracle.

“It is my decision that they wait,” the Archon of Sparta said.

“And mine that they depart,” said the Archon of Athens.

Miltiades and Kroisos stared at each other for a full minute. The inevitable had happened, as it had to Aeson and myself and to every other pair of leaders in the League. The two Archons were taking opposite views, and one of them would have to give way.

At last Kroisos reached into his robes and pulled out a scroll sealed with the iron peacock of Sparta. Then he slipped a hand into a small fur pouch tied to his belt and removed two cubical dice carved from bone. He laid them down on Miltiades’ couch. The Spartan Archon stared at them for several seconds. Finally he swept them up in his huge hand and placed them inside his armor.

Then he stood up and looked at the six of us. “You will try your best to follow the timetable, but leeway will be given. Kunati, the military will plant the manmaker packages ten days’ march closer to the border. Aias, Aeson, you have an extra ten days in which to travel to the sun and return. I hope that will be enough to permit you to solve your security problems.”

It wasn’t much but I thanked him for it.

“This briefing is ended,” Kroisos said. He walked off, followed by the swarm of bureaucrats. The commanders of Manmaker and Forethought left, accompanied by their bodyguards, but Miltiades signaled for Aeson and me to stay. He also waved Yellow Hare over.

Miltiades gripped Aeson’s arm in a gesture of farewell. “I regret that was all the time I could give you.”

Aeson withdrew his arm and saluted formally. He held his hand over his heart and stared Miltiades in the eyes. By tradition, any graduate of the Spartan war college could ask any other his reasons for a military decision so that the wisdom of experienced commanders would be passed down to their juniors.

“Sir, why could you not give us the time to make sure of Sunthief’s security? Surely it had nothing to do with Aegistus’s foolishness.”

Miltiades broke the seal on the scroll that Kroisos had given him and handed it to Aeson. My co-commander read it and reread it with deliberation. “I was not aware that the war was going this badly.”

The Archon nodded. “The Middlers have made a recent breakthrough in miniaturization.” He turned to me. “The weapon used on you by that assassin seems to be a man-portable Xi lance, apparently capable of disrupting the balance of bodily humours in the same way that a large Xi lance disrupts the flow of air or water.”

I drew this piece of information into my heart and tried to make sense of it. How could the tides or air currents have anything to do with the humours? I tried to fit it in with all the other incomprehensible pieces of Middler science I had read over the years, but I could not put them together into a coherent whole. I sighed out my frustration and the spirit of the Akademe sighed with me.

Miltiades took the scroll and rerolled it. “The Middlers have been arming their commandos with these weapons and sending them to assassinate our governors, our scientists, and our generals. In the last three months we have lost the governors of eight North Atlantean city-states; also the crown prince of the Olmeks; General Tydeus, commander of the armies invading Tibet; and six of our top scientists. If this continues we will be leaderless, and the Middle Kingdom will be able to conquer us easily.

“Kroisos and I concluded that only a quick, decisive large-scale strike on our part can break the back of their strategy. Project Sunthief is our best hope to do that. If you destroy ’AngXou then they, not we, will be leaderless, and our army, aided by Man-maker’s pseudomen, will finally be able to end the war.”

There was fire in his eyes. “But we must act soon, before we lose too many irreplaceable people. Kroisos laid down those dice to remind me that the time has come when we must take great risks if we wish to survive.”

“Then Forethought?” I said.

“Reassures Kroisos that he is doing the right thing,” Miltiades said. “But in truth, it is you we are relying on.”

I raised my hand to my heart and gave him the Spartan salute.

*   *   *

We flew back to
Chandra’s Tear
on the same moon sled with the same navigator and the same guards, but a weightier silence. We traveled mostly in darkness, catching up to night over the mid-Atlantic, then flying over the black expanse of Atlantea. We reached my ship and the return of sunlight high over the Western Ocean. A thousand miles below us lay the island territories indisputably held by the Middle Kingdom; ahead lay Asia and the homelands of the enemy.

Looking at the sunrise from a thousand miles above the half of the world we did not control, breathing in the clarifying upper air, I ruminated on the events on Delos. The Archons had placed their trust in me, and it was my duty sworn before Athena and Zeus to carry out that trust. But Ramonojon had also placed his trust in me, and it was equally my sworn duty to aid him. I hoped that I would not have to choose between them.

We flew in from above and began to descend toward
Chandra’s Tear;
I leaned over the side of the sled to watch the small drop of pearl resolve itself into the gleaming silver of my ship. I expected to see that the usual bustle of shipboard activity; I did not expect to see units of guards marching all across the ship, walking to fore and aft, port and starboard, some going into caves, some emerging. It looked as if every single one of Aeson’s soldiers was on patrol.