Celestial Matters (21 page)

I was not so fortunate. I wanted to devote myself to finding the spy, but it took me the next three days, half of our travel time to ’Ermes, to clear away my other duties and give me time to deal with the problem of Ramonojon. It would have been only two days, but Kleon kept interrupting me with suggestions for how to shave a few hours off our travel time. Some of his maneuvers I approved, others sounded too risky. I always gave quick, peremptory answers, not wanting to be caught up in the minutiae of celestial navigation. I should have noticed the fire in Kleon’s eyes as he declaimed the wonderful advantages of some minor course correction or other.

As it was, I did not realize that something was wrong with my chief navigator until just after lunch on the third day, when he burst unannounced into my office and narrowly avoided being killed by my bodyguard for not knocking.

“I’ve done it,” Kleon said, oblivious of Yellow Hare holstering her evac thrower. “I can cut two days off our journey to Aphrodite without increasing the time we spend at speed.”

I looked up from a maintenance report on the trolley. “That’s quite impressive,” I said. “How will you do it?”

“It’s so simple.” He was capering around the room like a child. “All we have to do is flip the ship on its side so
Chandra’s Tear
cuts a sharper corridor through the air.”

“Are you mad? We’ll all fall off the ship,” I said, stunned at having to remind him of basic terrestrial mechanics. “We’ll plummet toward the earth and turn into pasty smears when we strike one of the crystal spheres.”

He clapped his hands together in a strangely uncoordinated way that produced hollow thuds instead of sharp rapping sounds. “But if we strap everybody down!”

“What about the livestock? What about the water in the reservoir?”

He started to answer; no doubt he had thought of a way to handle that as well, but I cut him off.

“Kleon, stop!” I said. “We have settled the timetable. We do not need any more speed.”

“But we can cut down the time,” he said, ignoring my attempts at rationality.

“No, Kleon, we will not. I don’t want you working on this anymore.”

His face contorted into a Fury’s mask; he tried to leap across my desk to grab me, but Yellow Hare plucked him out of the air and secured his hands behind his back.

“I have to finish it.” His eyes burned with rage and his heavy, sobbing breath stank of choler.

I realized what had happened to him. “Yellow Hare, we have to take him to the hospital.”

My bodyguard dragged the navigator, screaming and cursing, down to the hospital caves where I told one of the orderly-slaves to summon Euripos.

“What’s wrong?” the old doctor asked when he emerged from the lying-in cave.

“Hyperclarity of Pneuma,” I said. “At least I think that’s what it is.”

“Really?” Euripos beckoned to the orderly. “Fetch me a bag of water-heavy air.”

“Yes, Doctor,” the slave said, and he darted down the tunnel to the dispensary. He was back a minute later with a large leather sack coated in wax.

“Let me go,” Kleon said, struggling to get out of Yellow Hare’s steel solid grip. “I have to do my calculations.”

Euripos held the bag up to the navigator’s mouth and forced him to inhale the contents.

Kleon sucked in the heavy air in harsh, ragged gasps. After a few breaths his eyes dulled and he fell limp in Yellow Hare’s arms.

“Captain, please, put him on the examining couch,” Euripos said motioning toward the oaken bed at the back of the room.

Yellow Hare did so, then walked back to me. “What happened to him? I’ve never heard of, what was it, Hyperclarity of Pneuma.”

“It’s the air,” I said. “It made his mind so clear that he could only concentrate on one thing. It became a mania to him, his every thought was focused on refining our course. But…”

“But what?”

I took a hesitant breath to clear my own mind. “But it’s a very rare condition, and the Celestial Navigator’s Guild checks its members to make sure they’re not susceptible before they let them fly ships. Kleon’s been tested repeatedly and always passed.”

Euripos came back from examining Kleon. “He’ll be well after a few hours’ rest and a dose of Sanguine Humour.”

“Can he still carry out his duties?” I asked. Without Kleon’s brilliant piloting, there was little chance of Sunthief succeeding. None of his juniors was able enough to fly the ship that close to the sun.

“He should be,” Euripos said, “but I’ll want to give him a heavy-air bag to breath from just in case. And there should be someone watching him at all times.”

“Poor Kleon. When the guild finds out they’ll never let him fly a celestial ship again.”

Yellow Hare turned to stare at the couch. “What are you thinking?” I asked.

“That too many things are going wrong here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am wondering if the Middler weapon that made you sick could have induced this condition in your navigator.”

“If so,” I said, seizing the opportunity, “someone used it on Kleon recently. Whoever that is is the real spy.”

Yellow Hare slowly nodded. “How can we find out if the weapon could do that?” she asked.

“We can ask,” I said, and my heart was lifted. Captain Yellow Hare, my perfect Spartan bodyguard, was going to help me find the spy. “Come with me to the brig.”

The Middler doctor’s name was Zi Lan-Xo. He had been locked in his silver bright cell since he saved my life. He had been given food and water, but no one had spoken to him.

He looked up at me with sad eyes gleaming from many light-induced tears. His old face was crisscrossed with lines of worry and pain; he reminded me of friezes I had seen of those who suffer punishment in ’Ades for offending the gods.

“What do you with this poor prisoner want?” he asked in slow ’Ellenic.

“I have questions for the honorable doctor,” I responded in ’Unan. His eyes widened in astonishment; then he shut them against the glare.

Captain Yellow Hare tapped me on the shoulder and motioned me to the side of the cell. “You didn’t tell me you spoke Middler,” she whispered in Xeroki.

“Some Akademics learn it,” I said. “Those of us trying to understand the enemy’s science.”

“I thought the Akademe had no success understanding Middler technology.”

“True,” I said, “but we keep trying. No Athenian likes to admit he can’t comprehend something.”

I returned to Doctor Zi.

“What does my captor wish of this degraded prisoner?” he answered in rustic ’Unan.

I leaned against the cave wall and stroked my beard. The doctor’s gaze turned longingly toward the wavering shadow my body cast on the floor. I wondered how long he had been kept under the glare of the silver walls, away from the peace of darkness.

“The illness you cured me of,” I said. “The weapon that brought it on, could it make someone sick from the clarity of the air?”

“What do you mean?” He arched his eyebrows in bewilderment. “How can one be sick from pure air?”

I described Kleon’s illness.

“There is no such disease,” he said, sitting erect and stern like an Akademe lecturer. “Your barbarian doctors are fools to believe in such a thing.”

“Then how do you account for it?”

“Your pilot is a madman; he must have been cursed by a spirit.”

“Ridiculous. Kleon is a devout Pythagorean; the spirits would never harm him. This is not a matter of divine action, but human assault.”

“If my honored captor says so…,” Doctor Zi replied, letting the sentence dangle.

I concluded that this discussion was a waste of time, so I started to turn around to leave. But Athena gripped me, forcing me to look back on the prisoner, who was staring desperately at the patch of darkness I was casting. She whispered that there was much to be gained from this man even if he knew nothing about Kleon’s illness.

“There is a spy aboard this ship,” I said. “What do you know about him?”

“What could this unworthy prisoner know? Dragged here from a prison camp to heal his estimable captor, and paid with imprisonment in this glowing stone monstrosity in which it is impossible to sleep.”

“Help me catch the spy and I will have blankets put up to cover the walls.”

“How could this worthless prisoner aid his captor?”

“I do not know,” I said. “But if you can I will get you the sleep you need.”

Let me say that I did not relish asking this old man to relinquish his honor. But both my duties to the state and to my friend required it of me.

The doctor stared at my shadow, then at the glowing wall. He had been down here for weeks surrounded by silver light. Doctor Zi was a tired, aged man who would never see his home again, and I was offering him a little comfort in his exile. Trembling, he bowed his head.

He spoke haltingly, almost crying as the words came out. “I have heard that a spy would have a…” Then he said something I did not understand.

“What does that word mean?”

“It is a contrivance for communicating over long distances.”

We knew the Middlers had such a thing, but, as usual, we had no idea what it looked like or how it worked. But I was surprised that a common town doctor captured in a raid on the borders of the Middle Kingdom would know about such a thing.

“There are two pieces to the device,” he went on. “A sender and a receiver. The receiver is … it looks like a four-inch block of silver with twelve gold needles stuck into it. The needles are arranged in two columns, making six lines of two needles each. A strip of cinnabar paint joins each pair.”

“And the sending device?”

He hesitated, then drew a ragged breath and continued. “The sender is a block of glass three feet on a side. It has two columns like the receiver, but instead of gold needles there are silver spikes, and there are no paint lines.”

His voice deadened into that of a technical lecturer. “The sender is placed into a Xi flow. Then six lines of cinnabar dust are laid down between the spike pairs. Each line is either solid or has a gap, thus producing a hexagram. The Xi flow is slightly changed by the hexagram. Any receiver lying in the same Xi flow will pick up the change, and its paint lines will develop gaps if there are gaps in the corresponding sender line.”

The description of the device seemed clear enough, but how it worked and what a Xi flow was I did not know.

“Why does an ordinary doctor know about this?” I asked.

“Medicine is the foundation of science.” he said in the same mechanical way I might recite Aristotle’s laws of motion.

I had seen that sentence in several texts on Taoist science but had never believed they meant it. To our science, medicine was an offshoot of zeology, the study of life, and anthropology, the study of man. No Academic could believe that such a minor offshoot subject could be the cornerstone from which an understanding of the world could be built.

“Guard,” I called through the door. One of the soldiers opened the heavy steel barrier.

“Commander?”

“Have slaves fetch night blankets for this cell.”

“But Commander,” he said, “the Security Chief wants the prisoners kept in the light so we can see them.”

“That was an order,” I said; but both he and I knew that my authority did not extend down into the cells. “If you wish I will have Commander Aeson come down here personally to ratify it.”

“Yes, Commander,” he said, not wanting to suffer Aeson’s displeasure. “I am sorry, Commander. I’ll have it done at once.”

Yellow Hare and I left as the slaves were hanging darkness in the cell and the doctor was lying down for his first good sleep in weeks.

As we climbed up the tunnel I told my bodyguard about the communications device.

“Will you help me look for it?” I asked.

“Of course, Commander,” she said.

“I thank you.”

“It is my duty,” she replied, but despite the impersonal words, the tone of her voice, or maybe it was a hint of softness in her gleaming gold eyes, I do not know, but there was something that made me believe she appreciated my gratitude.

“Where on
Chandra’s Tear
would you hide a three-foot piece of glass?” I asked, drawing on her knowledge of spies and spying.

“Only two places have enough room, protection, and hiding places for an object that large and fragile,” she said. “The storage cavern and the spontaneous-generation farm.”

We checked storage first, in order to put off the stink of the spon-gen caves for as long as possible. The huge stores cavern had more than a dozen entrance tunnels scattered around the ship. Fortunately one of them was next to the brig access tunnel, so we did not have far to go.

Slaves pushing laden float carts nodded their heads humbly but said nothing as we walked down the echoing tunnel into the perfectly square (Ramonojon had made sure of that), half-mile-on-a-side cavern.

I listened to the hum and bustle of the slaves who lived and worked down there and surveyed the rows and rows of large wooden boxes strapped to the ground by steel bands. A perfect ordering of cubes, arranged in flawless phalanxes around the circular well in the center of the cave that afforded access to the ship’s massive reservoir.

Clovix was standing near the entrance, talking to a blond female slave who was balancing two heavy wooden boxes on her shoulders with surprising ease. They stopped speaking as we approached.

“What can we do to serve you, Commander?” the chief slave said in that Gaulish accent that can make even the most humble statement sound like an insult.

“We need to search the stores,” I said.

“Commander,” he said, “we have over two thousand crates in here. Most of them are sealed until needed. Do you wish us to suspend all our normal work to open them for you?”

“We will do the best we can.”

“Should I come with you, perhaps, to help you find what you need.”

“No, Clovix, return to your duties.”

“Um, yes, Commander.”

“He’s hiding something,” Yellow Hare said to me in Xeroki as we passed into the cave proper.

I laughed. She looked at me in surprise.

“Of course he’s hiding something,” I said. “Clovix is one of the most corrupt slaves in the Delian League. He makes a great deal of money smuggling little luxury goods into the stores and selling them to my underlings.”