Celestial Matters (41 page)

The guards took us down to the brig and locked us into the three cells that still had doors. Their former comrades-in-arms Xenophanes, ’Eraklites, and Solon were given a cell. Yellow Hare was put in with Ramonojon. Aeson and I were locked down together.

“Até and hubris,” my co-commander said. “The Fates have written Anaxamander’s death.”

“But why have they done so?” I said. “Why did they preserve him in the first place?”

“Perhaps he is to be the instrument by which the sun fragment is delivered,” Aeson said. “Perhaps Anaxamander will be responsible for winning the war.”

“No, Aeson, even if ’AngXou burns the war will not be won.”

“How can you know that?” Aeson said.

“I have learned a great deal in the last week about the Middle Kingdom,” I said. My eyes lost focus. I could no longer see Aeson; rather, my vision was filled with the panorama of men and events Ssu-ma X’ien had painted with his words. “It is true that without their capital the Middle Kingdom will be disorganized. And yes, they will lose a great deal of territory, maybe all of Atlantea, maybe Tibet. But no, we will not defeat them. They will step up their campaign of assassination and in a matter of months they will disorganize the League. Eventually they will choose a new Son of Heaven and a new capital. Eventually they will develop a means of stopping Sunthief. At some point in the future, they will gain scientific superiority again, and Sunthief will become just another in a long series of scientific advances that was of temporary use in the war.”

“Aias,” Aeson said, “I heard the thunder of Zeus in your voice. What is happening to you?”

“The gods have been trying to tell me something,” I said. “And I almost know what it is; but I have not yet heard it all.”

*   *   *

Hours later our cell door was opened and two guards motioned me out. “The commander wants you,” one of them said.

“Your commander is right there,” I replied, pointing to Aeson. The guard pushed me up the stairs.

I was led across the deserted surface of the ship to my control cabin. Anaxamander was inside with two of his soldiers. “The Middler claimed we could turn inward soon,” he said.

I looked out the window. ’Elios was almost directly above us. “Phan is correct,” I said.

“Good,” Anaxamander said. “I am anxious to return to Earth.”

His guards tied me down in the pilot’s seat with my own straps, and then they and Anaxamander tied themselves to the walls of the cabin with ropes threaded through knotholes in the boards. All five of them pointed their throwers at my immobile body.

“Is Phan in the other control room?” I asked.

Anaxamander nodded. “The Middler knows his job, and the penalty for failure.”

Rebuke of the Phoenix
entered the Xi flow, and I pulled on the port guide wire, turning our bow downward along the direction by which the current of nature traveled. I was thrown lightly back by the sudden impetus, but once we entered the flow there was no force upon my body; nature carried me along cradled in her arms. No pilot of the Delian League had ever flown so smoothly. Far away I saw the tiny green dot of Aphrodite waiting at the far end of that river of Xi. The familiar hum of the Xi strengtheners started and the ship picked up speed.

Aphrodite was a slim green coin in my forward window as we started to fall. Then she grew, and grew, until when we turned starboard and righted ourselves the goddess of love was a sphere one foot across. We had halved the distance between planets in a handful of minutes.

Anaxamander looked out the window in wonder, and his face lit with ecstasy.

“This ship is a great prize,” he said. “Thank you for providing it, Aias.”

You will not live to bring it home, I swore silently.

“Take him back to his cell,” Anaxamander said to the guards.

“I need pen, ink, and papyrus to make some calculations for the next flight,” I said.

“You shall have them,” he replied, his eyes fixed firmly on the heavens.

“I need Phan as well.”

“No. You will not see the Middler.” Anaxamander turned to look at me. “Take him away.”

The guards returned me to my cell and gave me the supplies I needed. I sat down on the floor and consulted the two sciences in my heart, and the gods above, to give me aid in planning an accident.

It took me two days to do the theoretical calculations for the Taoist device I wanted to make. No doubt Phan could have done them in a matter of minutes. But those two days of work sharpened my awareness and gave me a feel for the Xi that I had not possessed before.

At the end of that time, Anaxamander brought me out to pilot the ship downward again. Thankfully, we did not quite reach Aphrodite in that fall, but we were sufficiently close that the next time we entered the Xi flow it would carry us all the way to the green sphere. I had no choice, I had to act immediately.

“The guide wires are coming loose,” I said to Anaxamander when we emerged from the control cabin. “I have to fix them or they will snap during the next flight.”

“What do you have to do?”

I pointed to the twirling, intertwined lines of the sun net. “Climb out along that,” I said.

Anaxamander bared his teeth in a parody of a smile. No doubt the prospect of my risking my life to help him appealed to his twisted soul.

The soldiers tethered me to the ship by long hempen ropes tied to my shoulders and waist. I crawled carefully out onto the sun net, followed by two men who did not seem to care how dangerous the trek was.

The spun cords of celestial fibers bit into my leather-gloved hands and stung my legs through the folds of my robes. The wind whipped around me, threatening to pull me off as I climbed across the open space, following the port guide wire until I reached the first of the finger-long impellers that lined the silver cord.

From a pouch tied to a rope belt I had threaded around my waist, I removed two small gold needles, a paintbrush, and a pot of vermilion paint. I tied the needles to the closest impellers on the port and starboard wires. Then carefully crawling backward, I painted a thin line of red down a single strand of ’Ermean matter. That crimson stripe connected the gold needles to the network of red paint lines Phan himself had drawn on the body of the ship.

If I had done the job correctly, then whenever I pulled on the starboard or port guide wires a humming signal would be sent to Phan’s control cabin through the Xi strengtheners. I could only hope he would interpret the signals correctly.

*   *   *

The next day, as
Rebuke of the Phoenix
neared the Xi flow, the guards took me from my cell and strapped me down again in my cabin. I sat, hands poised near the pull ropes, and waited to put my plan into action. The ship passed over Aphrodite, eclipsing the goddess of love, and I pulled gently on the port wire to start our maneuvers. The fragment bucked a little to the left, and a tingle ran up and down my arm. The transmitter was working. I hoped that Phan understood my messages. I wished I had been able to devise something to receive responses from him, but Anaxamander had not let me near Phan’s cabin.

We turned downward and started to fall toward the sea green orb below. We flew along the last few hundred miles of the Xi flow and entered the calm tidal currents around Aphrodite. I pulled us up ever so slightly. The planet disappeared beneath the prow of the ship. Then I yanked hard on the port wire, turning us sharply to the left and sending a shock up and down my arm. Phan got my message and turned off the port-side Xi strengthener.

The sun fragment reversed itself, turning hard to starboard and pulling
Rebuke of the Phoenix
in a wild spiral.

“Right us!” Anaxamander shouted, leveling his thrower at me.

“I’m trying,” I lied. I pulled on the starboard wire. A shock went through my right arm, and the other Xi strengthener turned off. The sun fragment was free of the currents of natural motion; now it was solely under my command. I pulled the down and port wires and the ship stopped tumbling a quarter of a mile above Aphrodite’s surface. I did not give Anaxamander time to notice that we were stable. I pulled frantically on the down wire and the ship dove nose first toward the planet below. Then, before we crashed, I pulled hard on the up wire and gently on both port and starboard wires. The hum of control returned; but before we pulled up,
Rebuke of the Phoenix
scraped its underside on the love goddess’s skin.

The ship wailed in anger, screaming the note of the moon. I heard a sharp crack and knew our keel had fractured. In my cabin a board broke off the wall and slammed down on the head of one of the guards, knocking him unconscious. I pulled again on the up cord and we sailed through the gap between planet and crystal sphere. We passed inward beyond the green orb and limped into orbit like a wounded horse.

Now only ’Ermes and Selene stood between us and Earth.

“I warned you that I could not fly this ship without consulting Phan,” I said to Anaxamander. “Now we will have to repair the keel before we can go on.”

“Very well,” he said. “We will heave to for repairs.”

“I need Phan,” I said.

“No, the Middler stays where he is.”

“Then at least give me the assistance of a dynamicist; give me Ramonojon.”

Anaxamander untied himself from the wall and stalked over to where I was sitting. With his mailed left hand he lifted my head up by the chin and forced me to meet his gaze. I could feel him trying to muster the spirit of a warrior with which to intimidate me, but the gods of war wanted nothing to do with Anaxamander. I stared straight into his eyes, while with ’Ermes’ aid I hid my hatred deep inside my heart. “Very well,” Anaxamander said. “Take the Indian.”

“And I will need Mihradarius’s laboratory; it is the only intact work space on the ship.”

“Agreed,” he said, and walked out onto the ship to stare up at Aphrodite and the Sun beyond her.

Two guards brought Ramonojon to me in Mihradarius’s lab and then stationed themselves at the bottom of the staircase. My friend’s face was worn and haggard, his pants and shoulder wrap were torn and disheveled, and there were bruises on his neck and arms. I gripped his hand gently and smiled reassuringly at him.

“Aias,” he said, “what has been happening?”

“There was an accident,” I replied. “We need to repair a crack in the keel. Come help me with the equipment.”

We walked over to the corner of the lab behind Mihradarius’s old writing table and opened the leather bag in which Phan kept his gear. Ramonojon cast me a quizzical look but I shook my head. I rooted through the bag while giving a very long-winded technical description of the damage.

The guards rapidly lost interest and Ramonojon and I gradually stopped speaking ’Ellenic and started speaking Hindi.

“Is Yellow Hare all right?” I asked.

“She is well. Her shoulder healed quickly thanks to Phan’s pills; but she is still pretending to be injured for the sake of the guards.” He paused and rubbed his bruised face lightly. “Anaxamander wants me to sign a confession before we reach the moon.”

“With Athena’s help we will have taken back the ship long before then.”

“You have a plan?” he asked, leaning forward to catch my words.

“During the repairs we will be making certain devices.” I outlined what I had in mind.

“Can you make such things?” he said.

“When Athena graces my heart,” I said, “I can.”

Over the next week Ramonojon and I took several moon sled trips to the underside of the ship, accompanied as always by the guards. We laid a huge leather bandage over the twenty-yard-long crack in the ship’s underside. I mapped the Xi lines and, using the equipment Phan had employed to heal the ship previously, I made the hole begin to repair itself. To speed the process up we used fire-gold cannibalized from sled impellers to melt the edges of the crack and seal up the damage. The combination of repair techniques worked extremely well; the softened matter, guided by the Xi lines, sealed itself into a silver scar. And as the gap closed in the body of my ship, the chasm in my mind closed with it. Guided by Athena, thoughts leaped across from one science to the other, each side casting light upon its opposite.

The guards watched us carefully; Anaxamander had told them to make sure we did nothing except fix the crack. They were suspicious of us, but that did not disturb me as long as they did not concern themselves with what we did with the leftover scraps of leather and the small flakes of fire-gold we shaved off from the impellers.

Working under their noses was difficult, but we managed with the help of stealthy ’Ermes to cut ten thin leather strips, put silver pins in the ends of each band, carefully paint ruler-straight cinnabar lines down the smooth front of each strip, and cover the rough back sides of the leather with a mesh of fire-gold wires.

When we were finished, I informed Anaxamander that the ship was ready to fly. He had me locked in my cell with Aeson while he and his men did a thorough inspection of the repairs.

That one action, placing me once more with Aeson, proved to me that the gods were guiding Anaxamander to his own destruction. He could not have delivered himself to me more perfectly if he had given me a sword and laid his head down on the chopping block. For in returning me to prison, he allowed me to give one of the leather strips to Aeson.

“What is this?” Aeson asked.

“Put it under your tunic,” I said. “The fire-gold side must face outward.”

“But what does it do?”

“It should protect you from the guard’s throwers.”

“What? How can something this thin serve as armor?”

“It is not armor, and do not ask me to explain; it is too technical.”

“Very well, Aias,” Aeson said, and he slipped the band under his tunic, placing it near his heart.

I had already given Ramonojon the rest of the leather strips, except for one that I had hidden in the folds of my robe. I just had time to explain my plan to Aeson before the guards came to take me to my control cabin. We strapped down as usual, I, Anaxamander, and two blindly loyal guards. The soldiers tied me down, but I managed with a little subtle squirming to slip the knots slightly loose after the soldiers had strapped themselves to the walls.