Celestial Matters (2 page)

While I could inspire my scientists with the vision of Sunthief, it was Aeson who kept the whole crew, civilian and soldier alike, aware of the military importance of our work. Watching him, I became keenly aware of the central tenet of Delian rulership: two leaders for every command. There was a pang in my heart, an instant of worry about my absence. Would the ship run as smoothly with one full commander and one second-in-command? But that brief touch of wise caution was swept out of me by the spirit of surety that reigned over my ship.

Aeson nodded to me and handed me a plate of wine. “Enjoy your rest, Aias,” he said. “I will keep watch over our command.”

I drank the wine to the last drop, put down the plate, and gripped Aeson’s elbow as friend to friend. “I have no doubt of that,” I said.

Aeson returned the gesture, his scarred, strong warrior’s hand giving my arm a gentle clutch of reassurance. The two of us together raised a toast to our crew and to Sunthief and then with the hurrahs of my men still ringing in my ears, I retired to pack my traveling satchel and sleep off the heady wine of confidence.

The next morning
Chandra’s Tear
docked above Crete to take on supplies. Kleon, Ramonojon, and I bade farewell to our comrades and underlings, then disembarked to enjoy once again the pleasures that only Earth could provide. Kleon remained in Crete at the celestial navigators guild to obtain some new impellers for our ship and to catch up on the latest advances in mathematics with his fellow Pythagoreans. Ramonojon and I shared a light breakfast of bread and olives at a small restaurant on the coast; then he boarded a fast ocean ship bound for his home in India. Alone and at peace, I reacquainted my body with the sensations of immobility before setting out to refamiliarize my mind with the luxurious life to be found around the central sea of the Delian League.

My first stop was Memphis in Egypt; there I walked along the banks of the Nile, watched slaves harvest papyrus reeds to be pressed into scrolls, and saw the steamships ferrying gold and exotic foods from the heart of Africa into the Mediterranean basin. I paid due homage to Thoth-’Ermes at the temple in Memphis and gave a ten-year-old lecture on the properties of light-gathering materials to the schoolmasters and junior scholars of that city.

From there I passed on to ’Ierusalem and enjoyed a lively debate with the Pyrology staff at the rabbinical college on the exact motive properties of different forms of fire. We argued for seven hours without a pause and only stopped because night was about to fall and the ’Ebreu holy day of rest began that evening. The next day I and a few other visitors wandered the nearly deserted streets of the city while the inhabitants stayed in their homes praying with their families or went to their temple to worship their god.

The next day I traveled by underground evac tube to the port of Gaza and boarded a Spartan warship traveling to Rome in order to pick up soldiers needed for the war in North Atlantea. The Forum in Rome buzzed with the latest battle news; merchants and aristocrats argued cogently about what strategies the Spartan high command would use to capture the plains of that continent and what means the army of the Middle Kingdom would use to try and stop our armies. Of all the peoples in the Delian League the Romans come closest to the Spartans in their fascination with war.

As I was leaving the Forum, I was accosted by an old veteran who had when a much younger man served under my father’s command. I bought the retired soldier a bowl of wine and listened respectfully as he told me of the campaigns of his youth and the battles he had fought to take the river Mississipp.

He was particularly vehement about how easy today’s soldiers had it, since he had been in the army before the invention of celestial ships. In those days the enemy ruled the skies with their battle kites and our troops had only the artillery to defend themselves with. Before I left, he asked me how my father was. I smiled and shrugged, not wanting to tell this loyal old man that my father and I had not spoken in over two decades.

Not surprisingly, my lecture to the Roman college was poorly attended as I refused to speak about weapons research. The Spartans would have had my head if I had actually given out any details about an important military project like Sunthief. The night before I left I attended the New Orphic mysteries in the catacombs beneath the Pantheon, then I paid my respects to Zeus of the Capital and sailed away.

From Rome I went to Syrakuse, where I offered the traditional sacrifice of the blood from a black-wooled sheep to the hero-scientist Archimedes, one of the first great weapon makers. Few ask for his intercession, but I needed all the divine assistance I could muster for the completion of my work. In the bustling port of Syrakuse I took ship to the Pillars of ’Erakles; from there I traveled on land in the sweltering steel box of a military fire chariot eastward across the north coast of Africa. The soldiers driving the steam-powered wagon asked me if I had ever been in anything this hot. I, who was planning to capture a fragment of the sun itself, had no choice but to laugh all the way to Carthage.

The citizens of that part of the world are very traditional people. Of all the cities on the Mediterranean, Carthage is the only one to have no modern conveniences. Their tallest buildings are three stories high, there is no sky dock, no evac tubes for intracity transport, no weather-filtering grids of air-silver above their houses. They even refuse to grow animals in spontaneous generation farms.

Some people, no doubt, derive contentment from that primitive existence, but I had come back to Earth to enjoy myself. After giving a very abbreviated lecture and taking as few questions as possible, I fled on the first ship I could find bound for Tyre, the city of my birth.

I reached Tyre four days before my vacation was due to end. The moment I stepped off the boat, I was mobbed by two dozen of my maternal relatives. Young cousins pulled at the blue fringe on my scholar’s robe and asked me all sorts of questions about life on a celestial ship. Uncles offered me advice on how to keep my subordinates in line, and my aunts presented me with the names of several eligible women I might wish to marry; after all, I was forty-three and not getting any younger.

To drive home this point my aunt Philida insisted I attend my niece’s wedding the next day. She had me on prominent display, holding one of the two-foot-tall red candles in front of Ishtar’s altar. Looking down on me from a gallery near the waist of the huge gilded statue of the goddess of love were two dozen young women my aunt had assembled to look me over. By keeping my mind on the solemnity of the occasion, I think I managed to look distant and bewildered enough to disinterest them. Whether that is the case or not, I passed through the ceremony without becoming affianced.

At the wedding feast I indulged like a sybarite in the wonders of Phoenician cooking, supping on lamb with dates and figs, chickens potted with Atlantean tubers, wine aged in cedar casks, and fragrant honey-nut cakes. When my mouth was not full, I fended off the moneymaking schemes of my merchant cousins. To them science was neither a pure pursuit of knowledge, nor a vital factor in the prosecution of the war between the Delian League and the Middle Kingdom. No, to them science was a source of new devices they could sell. I enjoyed immensely ducking their attempts to inveigle me into complex deals that revolved around my inventing something for them, their selling it, and all of us making a fortune.

I stayed with my mother’s family for one more day before taking ship to Athens, where I was to give one last lecture, meet Kleon and Ramonojon, and be picked up at the city’s sky dock by
Chandra’s Tear.

At the marina in Tyre I looked over the Spartan high-speed priority transport ship that had been assigned to take me to Athens. The sleek steel craft, its long fire-gold impellers bristling like spines off its bow, would reach the city of knowledge in half an hour’s time. But I did not want my vacation to end that quickly; I wanted to savor the past month’s pleasures for a little longer before immersing myself in the rigor of the Athenian Akademe. So I told the captain I would find other transportation. A few piers away I came across a Phoenician merchantman that was bound for Athens but would take a leisurely twelve hours to reach that queen of all cities. My identification scroll marked with the seal of the Archons and a few obols from my purse bought me passage.

And that is how I came to be lounging on the open deck of an unarmed antique steamship rather than under the steel aegis of a cannonaded naval vessel when the Middler battle kite swooped out of the peaceful afternoon sky and tried to kill me.

At first the attacking aircraft was just a spot against the brazen disk of the sun; I thought it was a celestial ship, hundreds of miles above the earth, but as it drove down on us it grew larger much too quickly for something that distant. It darted away from the sun and I made out its silhouette against a lone cloud. A coiled serpentine form twenty feet long with broad translucent wings half the length of its body. I knew then what it was, a silk dragon with a human pilot and enough Taoist armament to easily sink this ship.

The dragon looped above the cloud, then furled its wings and plunged straight down toward the merchantman. On the tips of the aircraft’s wings its twin silver Xi lances vibrated, roiling the ocean with waves of invisible fury. My fragile merchant vessel pitched back and forth, toppling me onto the foredeck. The rough grain of the oak flooring scraped my face. At the same moment a surge of water came over the side; it drenched my robes, stung my eyes, and diluted the flow of blood from my scratched cheeks.

I pressed my salty robe against my face to stop the bleeding, wincing at the sting of brine. My lungs coughed out a spume of seawater. Again the silver lances shimmered; the realm of Poseidon heeded their silent command and waves rose up fifty feet from the formerly calm seas and slammed into our hull. The ship turned on its side, narrowly avoiding capsizing. Amid the angry rocking, I clawed my way across the boat, hoping to reach the navigation tower amidships before we were swamped.

Hand over hand I crawled across the slippery deck, spewing water and maledictions from my throat. First I spat oaths of condemnation against the shoddy old ship, against its antique engine, so slow that the ship did not even have restraining straps. Then I laid my curses where they belonged, against myself for taking civilian transport. But even as I scrambled and swore, my mind focused on the impossibility of the situation: I was on the Mediterranean Sea, not the front lines in Atlantea. How, in Athena’s name, had an enemy aircraft reached the center of the Delian League, and where was the Spartan navy when you needed it?

The dragon’s shadow rippled in multicolored grace as it soared upward and coiled into a loop, a serpent biting its own tail. It held that posture for a moment, then unfurled and swooped down over the steamer’s paddle wheel. It passed directly over me, blotting out the sun with its shimmering body. I could see the pilot, a small man in a black silk gi, pulling guide wires, turning the Xi lances to bear on our starboard side. I sucked in air and offered silent prayers for my life to Poseidon and Amphitrite, sure that the next blast would sink us.

My ears had been numbed by the hum of the Xi lances, so I didn’t hear the shot that saved us, but, O gods, I saw it. On the horizon a thin corridor of air pointing from sea to sky shimmered into sharp clarity. A trickle of hope entered my heart at the sight; that line of rarified air meant that just beyond my field of vision an evac cannon was prepared to fire. My hopes were realized; a steel tetrahedron the size of a man’s head flew skyward up that line of thin air. My practiced eyes followed the brightly outlined projectile, and I knew the gunner had done his job well. The twenty-degree incline of trajectory would carry the tetrahedron to a spot directly over our heads at the exact second when the projectile ran out of impetus.

The equations that governed the movement for an object of that shape and material swam through my mind, offering reassurance of our salvation, but they were drowned out by memories of my boyhood self standing up in classrooms and reciting the simplified forms of Aristotle’s laws of motion.

A terrestrial object under forced motion travels in a straight line, slowing until it stops.

The tetrahedron ceased its forward flight five hundred feet directly above the dragon. In the clear air I could see the gleam of sunlight reflecting off the pyramid’s four faces and six knife-sharp edges.

A terrestrial object under natural motion moves in a straight line forever …

The tetrahedron plummeted down into the kite, tearing silk and bamboo, flesh and bone like a scythe through papyrus reeds.

unless stopped by some force.

The projectile, spattered with blood and festooned with strips of torn silk, struck the steamship’s deck, gouging grooves into the thick wooden planks. Jagged splinters flew out from the impact, but the tetrahedron did not break through the thick slats of oak. The tetra teetered on one of its vertices for a moment, then fell over and sat still as if it had been eternally fixed into the ship like the pyramids into the sands of Giza.

The shattered corpse of the dragon lost control of the winds that were carrying it and crashed into our paddle wheel, wedging shards of silk and splinters of bamboo between the turning planks. The wheel stopped spinning, raising a wail of protest from the steam engine as it labored fruitlessly to give impetus to the ship.

That clamor cleared the numbness from my ears and filled my heart with fear. I ran aft, slipping several times on the tilting, sodden deck. Sailors ran past me. Cries of “Abandon ship!” resounded from the navigation tower. Some of the men dived overboard, desperate to get away before the archaic engine exploded.

The Xi lances, still protruding like claws from the broken wings of the dragon, shattered under the strain of the angry wheel. Silver shards rained down on the deck, biting into the loin-clothed sailors. I threw my arm across my face and a dozen needles stabbed into my forearm instead of putting out my eyes.