Celestial Matters (20 page)

“Poseidon, though we do not sail on your ocean, give us your blessings,” I said to the waters. “For we are sailors with the same fears as those who go across your seas. Bless this ship that she may sail across the skies without mishap, and bless her sailors that they may return home safely.”

I felt no touch of acknowledgment from the deity so I looked down, hoping to see some omen in the waters, but they were too far below to make out any details.

We turned our backs on the world and processed solemnly to the stage of the amphitheater. The crew were assembled on the benches, senior staff at the bottom, their juniors above them, and so on upward to the higher tiers occupied by the lowest-ranking soldiers.

On the stage was a red marble altar filigreed with gold, and on that were a blazing fire, a golden bowl, and a sharp steel knife with a handle of chalcedony. Beside the altar, tethered by ropes were a bull, three white sheep, and three black lambs.

Aeson held the bull while I slit its throat with the knife, then roasted it on the fire, offering its life to Father Zeus with prayers for our success. I felt the touch of that greatest of gods and his appreciation of the honor. Then I sacrificed one of the sheep to Athena and felt her familiar presence reassuring me. Aeson burned the second sheep to ’Era. I do not know what passed between him and the queen of heaven, but I saw his face grow stern and grim. Then we both gave the last of the snowy flock to ’Ephaistos, praying that the device on which our success depended would succeed. Aeson and I leaned close to read the flames, but neither of us saw any omens therein.

Then in quick succession we gave the blood of the three black lambs to Aristotle, Alexander, and Daidalos, patron hero of celestial navigation. I could feel the heroes drawing life and presence from the drafts of blood, but when they had drunk their fill they departed in silence.

We spoke no words to the crew; they knew what the ceremony meant, they knew what was to happen, and they knew that all our fates rested in the laps of the gods. Aeson, Yellow Hare, and I waited in silence on the stage as the crew filed out slowly to take up their flight stations. As they passed some raised their hands in salute, but many walked by without acknowledging us, their thoughts intertwined with the gods.

When the last man had left, slaves entered and began to clear the stage and clean away the blood while we left to change from priestly garb to the robes of command.

Half an hour later, Yellow Hare, Aeson, and I met again at the base of the navigation tower. The divine presence of the ceremony had not left us and we could find nothing to say to one another. We climbed the spiral stairs in silence and entered the control room.

Kleon was carrying the scroll with the initial flight path over to the rostrum next to the control seat.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “Strap down and we’ll be under way.”

Yellow Hare, Aeson, and I carefully tied ourselves to the cushioned marble couches riveted to the rear wall of the control tower.

“We are ready,” I said to Kleon. My words sounded distant to my ears, as if I had been pulled back from my body and the world around it.

“Excellent.” He sat down before the control panel and secured his chest and legs to the floor with half a dozen padded leather thongs.

“Brace for lift!” he called into the speaking tube in front of the control panel. His voice reverberated slowly through the artificially dense air which filled the tube, deepening the timbre of his words, giving them bass overtones he could never have sung himself. A few seconds later the words emerged from the megaphone on top of the tower and echoed across
Chandra’s Tear
for all the crew to hear.

Kleon rubbed his hands together and his fingers twitched like a musician eager to play. He pulled down, one after another in rapid succession, the twenty short levers above his head. I heard the tooth-grinding sound of gears turning in the belly of the ship as the ballast spheres that had been hanging down below its centerline were pulled up into the underside of
Chandra’s Tear.
Then, a sloshing noise as they emptied their cargo of water into the ship’s reservoir. No longer weighted down by the natural heaviness of the water,
Chandra’s Tear
began to rise slowly into the sky.

Kleon leaned forward and pulled twenty levers sticking up near his feet. There was an audible hiss that whispered like a west wind across the ship, and a gleam appeared from the window as the twenty fire-gold lift balls were pushed up on their pillars out of the containment pits on the rim of the ship and up to fifty feet above the surface. There was a sudden pull upward as the twenty-foot-across orbs rarefied the air above us. We began to rise faster, but still no swifter than a climbing hawk.

Kleon did nothing for several minutes but rock back and forth on his stool like a rower on a galley, keeping time to the Pythagorean rhythms of flight.

“Now,” he whispered. “Brace for speed!” he shouted into the speaking tube, and his voice boomed like war drums across the sky.

Kleon pushed four of the control levers to his right. “Tertiary impellers deployed.”

A line of gold rods emerged from the bow like the spears of a phalanx.
Chandra’s Tear
tilted upward ever so slightly, and the air around the bow became bright and clear, sharpening my vision. A whine rose up from the bow as fire burned water out of the air.

Kleon pushed the four levers to his left, and a longer row of gleaming spikes joined the first. We were pushed back onto our couches as the ship rose faster into the welcoming sky. The force of the backpush yanked my soul completely into my body and away from the realm of the gods. “Secondary impellers deployed.”

Kleon sang a hymn of praise to Pythagoras and pushed the four long levers directly in front of him. Poles a quarter mile long emerged from the bow. Their fire-gold shafts glinted brighter than the ship, brighter than the sun. The sky became the rich yellow of mead, precious, glorious, intoxicating. The whine grew into a scream. “Primary impellers deployed.”

The air became as transparent as the crystal spheres themselves, and as the ship angled away from the earth I saw the heavens laid out before me in perfect clarity, the planets dancing in the eternal chorus laid down by the Prime Mover when the world was made. I blessed Ouranos, grandfather of the gods, and praised Zeus, lord of the sky.

The staid natural speed of
Chandra’s Tear
was multiplied a hundred times by the thinness of the air created by the Ares impellers, yanking us away from the earth in a swiftly climbing spiral.

“At last,” Aeson whispered. The air was pushed from my lungs and my back was slammed down into the couch as we rushed toward the celestial spheres. Day succeeded night succeeded day in cycles of five minutes as we whirled upward in a rising orbit toward the moon.

We flew like that for two breathless hours, until a glint appeared before us, turning rapidly into a transparent wall that filled the sky as we neared the unbreakable crystal sphere that held the moon in place.

“Retracting starboard impellers,” Kleon said as he pulled two levers from each group of impeller controls.

The right side of our bow lost its fiery glint and the air over it hazed up in a sudden return of density. We banked sharply, turning parallel to the equator of the sphere that held the moon in place. A mere thousand miles ahead of us, I could see the orb of Selene itself.

“Brace for catching orbit,” Kleon called. He retracted the primary and secondary impellers on both sides and redeployed the starboard tertiary impellers. We plowed into suddenly dense air and shed our excess speed. In a matter of seconds we had slowed down to a mere five times the natural orbital speed of the moon.

I sucked in air, grateful to be able to fill my lungs completely. “’Ermes, lord of messengers, protect us from such speed,” I prayed. Then I sat up and addressed the navigator. “Kleon, the crew won’t be able to tolerate that speed for long.”

Kleon smiled. “I know, Commander. That’s why I’ve scheduled only four hours of flight each day. Two blocks of two hours each.”

“Well done,” I said.

“But I think I might be able to do better,” he said.

Before he could elaborate on that remark, the scarred silver ball of the moon appeared in front of us.

“Brace for stop!” Kleon called as he retracted the tertiary impeller array, and slid us into the five-mile gap between the moon and the crystal sphere that gripped it with the unknown power of its natural motion. Kleon let
Chandra’s Tear
assume an orbit just behind the body from which it had been carved.

“Well done, Kleon,” I said as I unstrapped myself from the couch and stretched the muscles in my bruised back.

“Thank you, Commander,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do about minimizing the actual flying time.”

“Very good,” I said.

Aeson and Yellow Hare extricated themselves from their couches and the three of us left Kleon behind to muse over his lyre and his calculations.

Signal fires were lit on the ship, and in response, the crates of supplies Kroisos had promised were already being ferried up from the carved-out caves of the moon base on dozens of sleds. The guards at the base of the navigation tower told us that Anaxamander was on his way to the reception area with two dozen guards to inspect the cargo; Aeson went to join him.

Yellow Hare insisted that I stay away from the sleds and the crate inspections. She wanted me to go to my cave, but some god, perhaps Selene herself, commanded me to go to the edge of the ship and forced me to look across at the cratered body of the moon.

When Yellow Hare and I reached the port-side railing I caught sight of a gleam of bronze sticking up from the lunar surface. Though I could not make out the details, I knew it had to be the two-hundred-foot-tall statue of Artemis that marked the exact spot where Kroisos and Miltiades had landed on the moon in the year of my birth.

The divinity touched my thoughts and pulled out a memory: my mother telling me that on the first full moon after my birth she had taken me to the courtyard of Ishtar’s temple and showed me to the moon; she had looked up and prayed to that flawless pearl for a good life for her son. She talked reverently of the unmarked beauty of that celestial gem.

Now I was looking down, not at the perfect pearl of my childhood, but at a pockmarked hunk of pumice. So many sleds and ships had been mined that the untouched maiden Selene who had greeted me with her silver light had been aged to the life-ravaged hag, ’Ekate. I wanted to look away but the god or goddess would not let me until Yellow Hare tapped me on the shoulder.

“Aias, what are you looking at?”

The deity left, giving me back my mind.

“A casualty of war,” I said to Yellow Hare.

“There have been many of those,” she said.

“I know, but this one can never be replaced. I wonder if we’ll have to carve up all the planets before the end.”

“Not if the Archons are right,” she said. “If Sunthief wins us the war, there will be no need for more celestial ships. The matter lies in your hands.”

“Thank you, Captain,” I said, grateful for the reminder that I had the power to change this.

The delivery and checking of supplies took five hours, after which we slipped through the gap in the crystal sphere and entered the translunar heavens. A large escort of ships and sleds saw us away from the moon, and a fusillade of message flares lit a beacon of farewell as we shot out beyond the first sphere of heaven toward the domain of the Prime Mover.

As we flew, the Sun passed behind Earth, darkening a broad cone of space with us in it. The outer planets gleamed in the sudden starlight. I made out bloodred Ares and purple Zeus, and caught a glimpse of sea-green Aphrodite far to starboard. But orange-brown ’Ermes, our next goal, was unseen, hidden like a thief behind the cover of Earth.

*   *   *

The next day, Aeson and I met in my office over a light breakfast of curried lamb; the last few days on Earth we had been fully consumed with making sure the ship was prepared for the journey. Now we had to settle certain matters related to the flight itself.

The first thing Aeson did was hand me a scroll. “Anaxamander’s report. He’s searched the ship from stem to stern and found no evidence of a spy.”

Neither of us knew then that Anaxamander had done no such thing. And here I must enter a plea for Aeson. My co-commander had little regard for his security chief either as a man or as an officer. But whenever Anaxamander had been given an order, he had carried it out meticulously. True, he often failed to exercise common sense in his obedience, but nevertheless he had never disobeyed before. Therefore, though Aeson blames himself for dereliction, I say on his behalf that he had no way of knowing what would come from believing Anaxamander.

But to return to the meeting. I read the report quickly, then tossed it onto my desk. “Aeson, I give you my word that Ramonojon is not the spy.”

“Aias,” he said, “your loyalty does you honor, but our first duty is to the League. We must see to the welfare of this ship.”

“Will you permit me to carry out my own search?” I said, knowing I would not be able to get more than that from him.

“Yes if you must. Now, may we turn to other matters?”

“Yes, of course, and thank you.”

First we checked Kleon’s timetable: one week to reach ’Ermes, another three weeks to Aphrodite, one month to go from there to the sun, and a further two months to return, dragging the sun fragment with us. Based on that, we spent an hour making up crew rosters, planning emergency drills, setting meal schedules, and so on. Eventually, we came to the last item: bolstering crew morale, sorely needed after the attempts on my life, the attack on the ship, Ramonojon’s imprisonment, and our sudden unexplained departure from Earth.

We decided to hold weekly games for the soldiers, weekly debates for the scholars, and biweekly plays for all the crew. After the meeting we had announcements posted in the barracks and the dormitories asking for actors and play suggestions. I cannot say how well these activities worked to improve morale, but they kept the crew busy in their off-duty hours, so that they had less time to worry.