Celestial Matters (5 page)

Captain Yellow Hare pointed toward a tube-capsule station. The sign over the entrance said: To the Akademe. I walked down the long tunnel and boarded an empty capsule, eager to return to the sanity of the scientific world.

*   *   *

Nine-foot-high statues of Athena and Aristotle stood on the left and right flanks of the Akademe’s ivory gate. I made obeisance to both, bowing first to the gilded bronze goddess who looked down beneficently with her owl eyes, then to the blue marble hero who stared up at the heavens searching for the divine knowledge Pallas already possessed. Captain Yellow Hare ignored Aristotle, but she saluted Athena like a soldier reporting to a superior officer. Athena seemed to nod her approval to the captain.

We walked past the hero and the goddess and entered the mile-wide circle of red marble laboratories, green lecture halls, and blue apartments that surrounded the grove of Akademe itself. Home at last, I thought, even if it’s only for one day.

The sweet smell of artificial spring air cleared my brine-encrusted nostrils as I stepped through the inner gate. Overhead, the huge cage of air-silver bars that regulated temperature inside the Akademe sparkled in the late afternoon sun. Outside this mesh the seasons passed in their unchanging cycle, covering the streets of Athens with the myriad discomforts of weather, heat, rain, fog, and cold, but the Akademe was kept warm and dry by its silver armor.

One of the horde of young Akademe slaves who cared for the welfare of students and scholars alike saw me enter and darted up to greet me.

“Scholar Aias?” the pale young man asked, bowing his red head.

“Yes?”

“May I conduct you to the visiting scholar’s quarters?”

The question startled me for a moment, but of course, my former rooms would have been given to some other scholar when I left for
Chandra’s Tear.
Not as much home as I would have liked, I thought; nevertheless, a place of comfort.

“Please do,” I said to the slave.

He took us to a nearby blue building colonnaded with subtly carved Korai, almost lifelike figures of young maidens. Inside, another slave was waiting to attend me. She took my traveling bag and placed my clothes in a cedar chest. She drew me a bath, filling the round brass tub with water and pouring a thin layer of lavender oil on top. Another slave brought me bread and wine. Captain Yellow Hare inspected the room and the tub, and made the slave taste the food before she let me eat it.

“Everything seems safe,” my bodyguard said, and stationed herself in a shadowed corner that commanded an excellent view of the bath and the curtained entryway.

I stripped and washed the blood and brine from my body in the hot lavender water. Then I leaned back in the tub, ate a bit of honey bread, sipped from the bowl of Aethiopian wine, and let the tension leak out of me into the bath.

After an hour of blissful inaction and thoughtless freedom from all cares and fears, I left the bath. I stepped into the rarified-air cabinet next to the tub. The last lingering drops of bathwater vanished into the artificially thirsty air, making my skin tingle and reawakening my lethargic mind. The slave dressed me in the formal blue-fringed white robes of a scholar, and I was ready to face the Akademe.

“Would it be safe for me to wander around?” I asked Captain Yellow Hare.

“If I go with you,” she said.

My sandals slapped familiarly against the smooth marble floor as I strolled into the pristine white corridors that linked the entrances to labs, lecture halls, dormitories, and scholars’ quarters. Those corridors were kept simple; the floors were scrubbed to a gleam, the ceilings and walls painted a bland undecorated white—all this to enhance the presence of the statues of scientist-heroes that stood in arching alcoves along the hallway. Each had been deified for some great contribution to the knowledge of the Akademe and the power of the Delian League.

If Sunthief succeeds, I thought as I bowed to each hero in turn, there will be a statue of me here. My mind filled for a moment with visions of the Elysian fields, of receiving sacrifices of blood and wine, of a blissful afterlife free from the gloom of ’Ades. Forgive my hubris, O ye gods.

I turned my thoughts back to Earth, to drink in the welcoming Akademic sounds of debate and experiment that echoed through the hallways. A knot of students, disarrayed in their red-fringed robes, hurried past me at a gait that said, “I’m not running, sir. I’m maintaining the proper dignified pace for a young scholar, sir.”

I strolled on through the corridors, only stopping when I saw a whiff of smoke coiling out from under a familiar soot-spattered curtain. I peeked through the stained tapestry into the students’ pyrology lab, a room I had spent a great deal of time learning and teaching in.

Inside the four-foot-thick concrete-and-steel walls of the scarred room a score of young men and women were seated on stone stools. Each youth leaned intently over a small bronze cauldron mounted on a tripod.

Smoke rose from some of the pots; others produced nothing. I hid a smile behind my hand. They were trying to stabilize fire, to keep a single flame burning forever. It was an exercise essential to the study of pyrology, but it had struck terror into many a neophyte scholar unused to the vagaries of this most volatile of the four elements.

The smiling middle-aged woman standing on the lecturer’s stage caught my eye and invited me in with a crooked linger. Polianara of Carthage was older, a little stouter; her hair was much grayer than when I left three years before; but her brown eyes still twinkled with amusement as they had since we were students together, twenty-five years ago.

Captain Yellow Hare preceded me through the curtain. Polianara’s eyes widened at the sight of this Spartan officer in the middle of the Akademe.

“What is going on?” Polianara whispered after I joined her.

“Don’t ask! It’s complicated and unpleasant. Talk to me about anything but that.”

“Such as?”

I shrugged and looked around the familiar room, renewing my acquaintance with each burn mark on the walls. “Tell me about your class.”

Curiosity was written in her gleaming eyes, but she respected my wishes and regaled me with the usual problems of teaching a first-year Pyrology class; the naïveté of the students, their nervousness around fire, the inevitable explosions.

“But there is the joy of teaching,” Polianara said. “Watch the boy in the corner.” She pointed to a young man with black hair, deep red skin, a chiseled Olmek face, and a large gold collar around his neck. He was laying thin rods of fire-gold in a crisscross pattern over the top of his cauldron and studying the effect with a careful eye.

I hid my smile behind the blue fringe of my sleeve. This boy obviously understood the first lesson that every Pyrology teacher had to beat into his or her students’ heads: Fire naturally moves upward.

And he had also clearly learned to apply that piece of theory to the real-world problem before him. If the fire is covered with a heavy material such as earth or water, that material will move downward to replace the flame and extinguish it. If covered with a light material such as fire or air the flame will leap up into the sky and disperse. But if the fire is covered with heavy material that has been previously saturated with fire, such as fire-gold, then the flame will remain where it is, burning forever.

The Olmek boy seemed fascinated by what he had done, but hadn’t called attention to his success.

“I wish I’d been that calm when I succeeded,” I whispered to Polianara.

She snorted, “As I recall, you shouted, ‘Eureka! Eureka!’ in that barbarous accent you had.”

I laughed out loud. Several of the students looked up, but a glare from Polianara returned them to their work. My provincial accent had been the curse of my student years. I had spent more time working to rid myself of it than I had studying science. “You grow up in Tyre, North Atlantea, and India and see how your voice sounds,” I said.

“No thank you,” she replied. “Besides, I didn’t have it any easier coming from a backwater like Carthage.”

“Oh yes,” I said, enjoying the teasing privileges of an old school friend. “I remember how you gawked at Athens’s tall buildings and refused to board a celestial ship for fear of falling off.”

We traded a few more reminiscences, but gradually we fell silent as our thoughts drifted back to our school days. At first I remembered the joys of school, learning, arguing, reading more than I had ever done before. But in the midst of my nostalgia some spirit—demon, hero, or god, I could not say—replaced those memories with recollections of the unpleasant aspects of the Akademe that I had blotted out in my three-year absence.

Memories welled up: of the Athenian provincialism of the scholars, the assumption that only in the city of wisdom was there any true understanding of anything. Of the scientific provincialism, the belief that the understanding of nature was the only worthwhile understanding. And of the militarist provincialism, the belief that only the science that aided the nine-hundred-yearlong war was worthwhile science.

The spirit filled the mirror of my mind with a blasphemous image. I saw the Akademe not as a nurturing mother to whom I, her wandering son, had returned, but rather as a ’etaira, beautiful in appearance, learned in speech, but fundamentally a whore.

“Tell me about the lecture you’re going to give us this evening,” Polianara said, breaking the silence and forcing the image into a dark corner of my thoughts, where something snatched it away. “Everyone is waiting to hear about your secret research.”

I laughed, trying to return myself to the mood of joyous homecoming, but the laugh was hollow. Secret, what a joke. The Akademe is the only place in the world where “secret” means “we’ll discuss it quietly,” and “most secret” means “let me whisper it to you.”

But Captain Yellow Hare was glaring at me; to a Spartan, secret meant secret. I did not wish to explain the attitudes of the Akademe on this matter to Captain Yellow Hare or to the Spartan general staff if she reported me for a breach of security.

“Sorry,” I said to Polianara, a bit too loudly, “it’s most secret.”

She offered her ear for me to whisper in. I cupped my hand over the side of my mouth and spoke at normal volume. “It’s really secret.”

She crossed her arms in front of her and looked at me like a stern elder sister. “Listen, Aias, rumors about this lecture have been running around the Akademe for the last month. All the senior scholars will be waiting in the main lecture clearing tonight. If you don’t have something interesting to say, your reputation will be ruined. Again.”

Now that was a problem. My reputation in certain circles of the Akademe was not good. Normally I would have been happy to tell those detractors of mine that the Archons had found a speculative paper I had once written on possible methods for capturing celestial fire and had given me the task of turning theory into reality. But I did not care to do so with Captain Yellow Hare listening.

But I had to tell the Akademe something in the lecture that evening, and I had to tell Polianara something now. “I’ll give it some thought.”

“Really?” Polianara’s voice turned dry, bringing out that penchant for sarcasm Carthaginians are famous for. “You have three whole hours to make up your mind.”

“That should be more than enough,” I said as I left the lab followed by my silent bodyguard.

I considered returning to my quarters, reviewing my notes, and cobbling together a talk that alluded to my work on Project Sunthief without being indiscreet.

Under pressure I did what scholars at the Akademe have done since Plato first bought this suburban orchard and transformed it into a college. I passed through the inner gates and wandered through the carefully manicured woods, hoping to draw inspiration from nature.

The leaves crunched pleasantly under my sandals. The aroma of a thousand trees, brought to the Akademe from all parts of the League, mingled with the bright scent of spring to sharpen my thoughts. Many of the more visionary scholars had seen Athena herself come down from Olympos to sample that heady mixture of fruit smells, spicy nut scents, and the cloy of sweet sap. Was it hubris on the part of scholars to imagine her wandering through our grove, letting that melange of odors tingle her divine nose and excite her matchless mind?

Hoping Athena would stop and touch me with her presence, I sat down under a chestnut tree and idly cracked some of the fallen nuts against the bark. I noticed Captain Yellow Hare dip her finger into the running sap of a maple and taste the sweet libation of her native land.

I was about to speak to her, but my voice froze in my throat; something bright and large danced into my mind accompanied by a chorus of praising singers. A goddess had descended to grip my thoughts with holy inspiration. But it was not Athena, mistress of that orchard. The radiance and the music clarified into a familiar image and voice. Kleio, the Muse of history, stood on the plane of my thoughts, calling me back to her.

At first I was afraid, afraid that she had come to chastise me for abandoning her service. For years I had been one of the few devotees of her disregarded field of study, but when her sister Ourania had called me to work on Sunthief I had given Kleio up for the sake of my reputation. Now she had returned.

I humbled myself before her and begged forgiveness for my apostasy. Her countenance was stormy but her eyes were loving. She was angry with me for neglecting her worship these last three years, but I could see she wanted me back. In her hands she cradled a scroll that I knew contained the lecture I would give to the Akademe that night. I held out my hands to receive her gift, but Kleio withheld it. Before she would grant me this favor, she would remind me why I had first entered her service.

Kleio cast me into the arms of Memory, pulling me back over the years to the time of my despair, when Fame had blessed me with a year’s glory for inventing the ’Eliophile engine and then abandoned me for not following it with any further triumphs.

My thoughts had run dry, my lectures were barely attended, and I had been relegated by the provost of the Akademe to teaching introductory Ouranology. In a fit of confusion, I had decided to visit my father in Sparta; my hope was that his completely different view of the world might pull me from the clutches of despair. Instead, he greeted me with silence and aloofness and gave me over to the care of his servants.