Celestial Matters (22 page)

“Why don’t you stop him?”

I smiled at her Spartan propriety. “I learned a long time ago that it does subordinates good to think they can get away with little indiscretions,” I said. “It improves morale.”

“That is not true in the army,” she said.

“But it is in the Akademe,” I replied. We reached a five-foot crate with stenciled writing on the side that claimed it held sacks of flour. A quick search revealed that it contained sacks of flour.

We spent five hours walking from aft end to fore end, searching the open crates and checking the sealed ones for signs of tampering. We found nothing apart from a small cache of South Atlantean kaufi and koka beans hidden under a shipment of dried dates. No doubt Clovix was selling the roasted beans to my underlings for their stimulant qualities.

We stopped searching when the deepened voice of Pandenos, one of Kleon’s junior navigators, reverberated from a speaking tube into the cave. “Brace for speed.”

The slaves quickly strapped themselves to walls and floors, and we joined them, waiting out two painful hours tied to bare moonrock while Pandenos pushed us nearer to ’Ermes.

After we unstrapped, Yellow Hare and I marched to the fore end of the cavern and into the tunnel that led to the spon-gen farm. We passed through a pair of heavy limestone double doors that had been plastered over and washed clean of any dust. Two lab assistants draped gray linen sheets around our clothes and made us rub a sticky coagulating oil on our hands and faces to prevent us from perspiring, a necessary precaution since just a few drops of human sweat accidentally dripped into a spontaneous-generation mixture could change an embryonic pig into a writhing mass of dragonfly nymphs.

The assistants escorted us through a second set of double doors and closed them behind us. We were instantly assaulted by a cacophony of rank odors, as if a herd of sweating horses had stampeded through a field of wildflowers, then smashed through a tannery, and finally collapsed in exhaustion over a battlefield filled with putrefying corpses.

I held the sheet over my mouth, inhaling its clean smell. Yellow Hare looked around, grimly unaffected by the miasma of the room.

The low-ceilinged cavern contained two hundred steel-buttressed glass boxes in which the farmer slaves grew livestock. Many of the boxes had gray-brown mixtures of slop which had not yet sprouted. In others fetal animals could be seen forming. And in a few, full-grown cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens scratched the walls, waiting to be released.

Between the cases were piles of manure, the primary component of life, and stacks of boxes filled with the odd ingredients I had requisitioned. Captain Yellow Hare and I spent three hours searching through that reeking environment under the watchful eyes of spon-gen farmers and partially made animals. We found nothing.

Tired and reeking of the stench, we returned to my cave. After being washed and oiled clean, I went immediately to sleep, not wanting to eat any food after being that close to seeing it made.

The next day, I went to visit Kleon in the hospital. He had spent the night in the lying-in cave and was breakfasting listlessly on bread and pears when I came in.

“Commander,” he said, “I must resign my position. But with your permission I will help train Pandenos for the circumsolar maneuvers.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “I want you back in the tower flying this ship for the next speed period.”

“I can’t do it, Aias,” he said. “If I catch the Pneuma while flying, I might never slow down. It’s too dangerous.”

“I’ve taken care of that,” I said. “Someone will be watching you at all times.”

“But, Aias—”

“Furthermore, your illness was induced.”

“What?”

I told him Yellow Hare’s theory, though I did not mention Doctor Zi’s denial. The important thing to me was getting Kleon back to work.

“They tried to pull me from the sky!” Kleon’s normally smiling face became filled with the rage of Ares. “I’ll burn ’AngXou to the ground for this.”

“Calm your heart,” I said. “Remember who you are. Remembers the purity of Pythagoras. Remember the harmony of the heavens.”

Kleon shut his eyes and began to hum for a few moments. Gradually, the rage left him.

“Aias,” he said. “Can you have someone bring me my lyre? Give me an hour with the music and I will be ready to fly again.”

Kleon was as good as his word. His juniors told me there was no sign of returned obsession and Euripos said his breath and humour balance were perfectly normal. I hoped we had scared the spy away from making attempts on Kleon. And I hoped that we would catch him before he did something else to jeopardize the ship.

For the four days it took
Chandra’s Tear
to reach ’Ermes, Yellow Hare and I continued to search for the communicator. I wandered all around the ship, checking the barracks, the dormitories, and the labs, as well as conducting more haphazard inspections of the storage cave. We found nothing, but I learned later that there were whisperings among the crew about my odd behavior.

Kleon took a cautious approach to the planet of the god of messengers, carefully maneuvering the ship between the main crystal sphere and the smaller epicyclic spheres that gave ’Ermes his few eccentricities of orbit. But after two careful hours sliding through the two-mile gaps between the spheres we reached the orange-red orb itself.

Unlike the pockmarked surface of Selene, ’Ermes has only a single scar on its body, a five-mile-long gash that leads into the League’s underground base. Six years previously I spent a year in that cavern complex studying the properties of ’Ermean matter and watching the dynamicists carve out the high-speed celestial ships used for flying low over the Middle Kingdom and spying out their military bases.

Aeson, who had never been farther out than the moon before, drank in the sight of the planet and offered a small libation at one of the ’Erms, thanking the god for the sight.

Soon after we took up orbit, the celestial ships
Mercury’s Sandal
and
Rod of Thoth,
the two ruddy, quarter-mile-long swift arrows permanently stationed at the base, flew up from the caves in their planet of origin to deliver the ’Ermean matter we needed for the net. Both ships were slimmer, more maneuverable craft than
Chandra’s Tear,
though, as Kleon jealously pointed out, with our Ares impellers they could not match our speed.

Mihradarius took charge of the boxes of ’Ermean matter and set his knitters to work on weaving the second segment of the net. He promised to have the work finished before we reached Aphrodite and obtained the final consignment of celestial matter.

θ

Beyond the sphere of ’Ermes we lost the comforting uniformity of day and night. The earth so rarely occluded the sun that we had almost perpetual daylight, but we saw nuances and distinctions of brightness unknown on Earth. When
Chandra’s Tear
and the sun were in the same quarter of the sky, the light of ’Elios was so bright that we had to wear cloth over our eyes to keep from going blind. But when sun and ship were on opposite sides of the earth, occupying opposite quadrants of the heavenly circle, we enjoyed stretches of peaceful twilight that would last for hours. For want of a more original phrase, we came to call these extended periods of star-filled, dark orange sky the “long evenings.”

Aeson and I reworked the crew schedule so that most of the staff would be free for at least part of those pastoral spans. Many times when the heavens tantalized us with the approach of short night, Yellow Hare and I would find Aeson sitting on the side of the hill, squinting out through the dregs of light to glimpse the outer planets and the sphere of fixed stars beyond them. He talked about the heavens as if they were a magical place, beyond the touch of man. It was soothing to let his romanticism wash away the cold facts of Ouranology, to forget orbits, epicycles, and lumps of celestial stone, to see with him the royal jewels of the gods adorning the crown of the sky.

Those evenings revitalized me, giving me something to think about apart from Ramonojon’s plight and the spy aboard ship; for those problems occupied my thoughts all the remaining hours of the day. My searches of the ship had been fruitless, and as the first week of our flight to Aphrodite waned, I came to realize that I would not be able to find what I was seeking by the systematic methods beloved of the Akademe.

I turned therefore to the gods for inspiration. One by one I consulted them in the manners laid down since man’s creation. Athena I entreated first, offering a libation before her statues, but Wisdom, though my patroness, remained aloof. Then I supplicated Apollo, inhaling the burning fumes of bay leaves, but no oracle came to me. To ’Ermes, I gave a black rooster and a necklace of gold during one of the ship’s dark periods, but the Lord of Language said nothing. Finally, I turned to the most dangerous source of divine assistance, Dionysos.

We were seven days out from ’Ermes, and
Chandra’s Tear
was bathed in one of its rare hours of complete darkness. I was sitting on the floor of my cave, alone with Yellow Hare. The night blankets were down, cutting off the silver glow. The only light came from four beeswax candles sitting on my desk. I had eaten no food and drunk neither water nor wine for twelve hours. I had dressed myself in a handmade tunic of untanned leather; on my lap lay a thursis, a wooden staff wrapped with grape vines, and in front of me sat a large clay jar on which was painted the story of Dionysos’s birth and his subjugation of Thebes. The vessel was filled to the brim with unmixed wine, so thick it was almost jelled.

“Lord of the vine,” I said, bowing my head to the image of the god on the jar. “Leader of the Bakkhai, holy child born from the thigh of Zeus, grant me the power of your divine mania, bless me with the wisdom of your frenzy.”

I lifted the heavy round jar and poured the fire of Dionysos into my mind.

The taste of grape in my mouth became the scent of maple in the forests of North Atlantea. I was a wolf running through the woods, hunting something just out of reach; I knew it was there, but I could not smell it for the heady odor of bleeding sap. I became a dolphin swimming through the oceans, feeling the currents as I fled from a shark. I became a leopard, white against the snowcapped mountains, darting through the new-fallen powder, chasing the white hare. Then I found it, a tiny rabbit cowering against a rock, shivering in fear and cold. I leaped to tear its throat out; but it sprang on me, and with its fragile forepaws blocked the curved blades of my ivory claws and with its back legs kicked hard against the sharp points of my fangs.

“Aias!” The iron-sure heel of Yellow Hare’s hand slapped against my cheek, pulling me from the divine vision, but not from the Bakkhanate madness.

I slashed at her again, trying to rake her with my claws, lunging with my hands to scrape across her armored chest, but she was no longer there. Yellow Hare had darted around behind me. As I turned to face her, she grabbed my arms and threw me to the floor. I roared and spit like an angry cat, trying to push her off me, but she had become immovable as Olympos; for half an hour she held me down until the god left my mind and I became human again.

“You can let me up, Yellow Hare,” I said through a throat grown dry with snarling.

She released her iron grip, and I stood up, taking care not to move my aching head too quickly.

“My thanks, Captain,” I said.

“I was honored to serve as your warden,” she said. “Did the god bless you with any understanding?”

“I think so,” I said. “I did not comprehend all of the vision, but Dionysos definitely implied that I should seek assistance from you.”

A wave of dizziness came over me and my knees buckled, but Yellow Hare caught me before I collapsed. With a gentle, firm grip on my shoulders, she took me over to my couch and helped me lie down.

“Commander,” she said, keeping her words mercifully quiet, “I have assisted you in your searches as you asked me to.”

“But have you done so with your whole heart?” I took a sip of water from the bowl beside my sleeping couch. It did not clear my thoughts, but it soothed my throat. I had roared for a long time while I was a leopard.

Yellow Hare said nothing for several minutes as I lay with my eyes shut, feeling my pulse course through my temples like the ocean tides through rocky straits.

At last she spoke. “No, Aias, I have not committed the whole of my heart to your search for another spy.”

“Another spy?”

“I still believe Ramonojon is an agent of the Middle Kingdom,” she said. “Celestial Navigator Kleon’s illness only demonstrates that there is another.”

“Why can’t you believe it’s just one spy?” I said, and instantly regretted the vehemence of my words. “Why must you persist in believing Ramonojon guilty?”

“The evidence against him still remains.”

“And if there were another explanation of the evidence?” I asked, tentatively.

“Tell me what it is,” she said.

And there lay my dilemma. I could not tell her why Ramonojon was innocent; but the god had implied that I needed her assistance to prove his innocence.

Then Athena whispered to me through the fog of Dionysos. The goddess reminded me that there were things that would convince so pure a Spartan as Yellow Hare that would not sway a lesser soul.

My legs nearly gave out from under me as I stood up into the most erect posture I could manage. Then with careful movements I covered my heart with both hands. “I, Aias of Athens, swear before almighty Zeus that I possess evidence exonerating Ramonojon from the charge of spying.”

Yellow Hare stared at me with a frown of mingled respect and concern. “Why have you not shown this evidence to Aeson?”

“As Military Commander of this ship,” I said, “Aeson has duties he would feel obligated to carry out even if he personally disagreed with them.”

Yellow Hare leaned forward, her bright eyes burning with understanding.

“What crime has Ramonojon committed?”

“I cannot tell you that,” I said, pleased at the quickness of her mind. “But I swear that his offense will not prevent Sunthief from succeeding. I swear to you before the Styx that in trying to help Ramonojon, I have sought to fulfill all of my own duties.”