Celestial Matters

by Garfinkle, Richard

  I was not used to that kind of work, but still, after half an hour, I had managed to excavate a hole large enough for us to clamber through.

  Yellow Hare crawled in first, unhooking herself from the rope, then slipping through the gap like an eel through coral. I climbed after her, but I did not untie myself until I was standing on solid ground. As I stepped through the opening, Yellow Hare tore down one of the night blankets, flooding the cramped den with silver light. It was a rough-hewn cave eight feet long, seven feet wide, and five feet high. The floor was uneven, and bits of rough rock jutted out from the walls and ceiling. It was all too crude to have been carved by a professional dynamicist.

  The only furnishings were rolled-up bolsters of cloth, no doubt stolen from our stores, strewn about the floor to give the occupants some protection from the ship’s speed.

  Yellow Hare told me to stand in a corner while she searched the cave.

  “Two people have been living in this cave for at least a month,” she announced after a few minutes of poring over the carpets, the bolsters, and the blankets. “But there is no sign of them having eaten anything.”

  Two stowaways on my ship? Under the nose of our so-called Security Chief. “They must have been Middlers,” I said, restraining my anger, “living off alchemical food pills.”

  Yellow Hare nodded absently and started walking around the perimeter of the cave, tapping the walls gently with the pommel of her sword. There was a hollow clang halfway along the port wall. She stopped and with the blade of her knife pried out a thin piece of moon rock six inches high and two feet long. Behind this false panel was a niche lined with wadded-up cloth, and nestled in it was a block of glass that exactly matched Doctor Z’s description of a transmitter.

  “Got them,” I said.

  Yellow Hare shook her head. “They left this room about four hours ago.”

  “How did they leave? I don’t see any doors.”

  She continued wall tapping and behind another false panel found a concealed tunnel. This passage was also rudely carved and a mere two feet across, uncomfortable to crawl through to say the least.

  “Follow me,” Yellow Hare said. “And be careful.”

  We crawled through the narrow, straight tunnel, scraping hands and knees on the ragged moonstone. After several minutes we reached a dead end. Yellow Hare pushed on the cul-de-sac until the stone blocking the exit gave way.

  We emerged into a square pit that contained a wide steel pole, perched on top of which was a large golden sphere. The air around the ball was clear and bright; it had to be made of fire-gold. It took me only a second to realize I was looking at one of the ship’s lift balls, and we were in the bottom of its holding pit.

  “Climb out of there,” a voice called from above. I nodded to Yellow Hare, and she preceded me up the maintenance stairs that had been cut in an ascending spiral in the walls of the pit.

  We stepped out onto the surface of Chandra’s Tear. I stretched my back muscles and heard a harsh creak in my spine. I turned to the voice that had called us up and was surprised to see, not an individual soldier or even a squad of four, but a dozen of Anaxamander’s personal security guards, their throwers drawn and pointed at me and Yellow Hare. Behind this armed phalanx stood Anaxamander and, to my astonishment, Mihradarius.

  Anaxamander pointed at us and orated to the invisible audience he always seemed to be speaking to. “Aias of Tyre. Yellow Hare of the Xeroki. I arrest you on charges of treason.”

  “That is a ridiculous accusation,” I said.

  “I suspected you from the first moment you defended Ramonojon,” he said. “And now we have found the place where you hid your equipment. That is all the evidence we need.”

  “Aias, you are hereby relieved of command.” The Security Chief turned to his left. “Mihradarius, you will take scientific command of this project.”

  To my amazement, instead of protesting this absurdity, the Persian merely nodded, his face as placid as a statue of a god receiving a sacrifice. In that instant I realized who the spy was, and what a monumental act of folly I had committed in trusting him.

  Yellow Hare, meanwhile, had been studying the postures of the guards, and was bracing herself to leap forward. In a flash I realized she was about to lay down her life to give me a chance to escape. I grabbed her arm. “No Spartan self-sacrifice,” I whispered. “I need you alive!”

  She looked at me with those cat’s eyes of hers. I could feel the waves of her anger at the affront Anaxamander was committing against both of us and the honor of the League. I knew she wanted to kill him, and I was confident that she could have reached him through that line of defenders; but she would not survive for long after he was dead.

  “I need you alive,” I repeated.

  Slowly, she nodded. “I accept your command,” she said.

  She turned toward the line of soldiers and favored them with a glance that must have filled their souls with terror. She reached across her back for her thrower. The barrels of their weapons wavered; but instead of drawing, Yellow Hare slipped off her weapon strap and placed her thrower on the ground. Then with disinterested grace she divested herself of sword and dagger as if it did not matter to her whether or not she was armed.

  The relieved guards led us away and locked us in the same cell with Ramonojon.

  When we entered, Ramonojon opened his eyes and looked up from his cross-legged posture. “What has happened?” he asked.

  The door slammed behind us and the key turned in the lock. I smiled wanly and sat down next to Ramonojon while Yellow Hare prowled near the doorway. “Anaxamander has decided that we are also spies.”

  “Ah. I see.” Ramonojon closed his eyes.

  κ

  From the new perspective born of my sudden imprisonment, it was easy to see the errors I had made; trusting Mihradarius because he was an Athenian; believing that there were limits to Anaxamander’s ambition because of the narrowness of his mind; and the most grievous error of all, thinking that Chandra’s Tear was my ship given to me by the Archons and that only they could take it away from me. I had relied too much on my position and too little upon my mind.

  But throughout my self-castigation, Athena whispered condolence and hinted that perhaps there was some wisdom to be gleaned from my situation. I had just begun to contemplate what that wisdom might be when Ramonojon’s curiosity overwhelmed his new-learned Buddhist restraint and he broke the quiet with a question.

  “Why did Anaxamander arrest you?” he asked. “Could anyone, even he, believe that you two are traitors?”

  “To one like him,” Yellow Hare said, keeping her gaze fixed rigidly on the iron door, “the truth does not matter. All he sees is the chance for glory.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ramonojon said.

  “That is because you are not a Spartan,” she said. Her words carried no rebuke; instead they held the offer of her divinely won understanding to those of us not so blessed.

  “But Anaxamander isn’t a Spartan either,” I said.

  “True,” she said. “But he thinks he should be one, and he thinks he knows what being Spartan is.”

  “Say on,” I said, feeling Athena’s prompting.

  “All men know that the gods reward doers of great deeds with glory and the place of heroes.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “In Sparta we are made capable of doing great deeds in war; therefore, many of us have received those divine rewards.”

  She stood up and ran her hands along the door and the moon rock wall in which its hinges were buried. A god moved across her face, one I had never seen in her countenance before. ’Ermes, god of thieves, was whispering to my Yellow Hare and she, warrior pure, was listening to that must subtle of divinities.

  After a few moments of communion, the god left her and she resumed speaking as if there had been no interruption.

  “Many soldiers who are not of Sparta reverse the divine course; they seek to do great deeds for the sake of the reward of glo
ry rather than for the greatness of the deeds themselves. Such men are not given positions of command because they are a danger to their missions and their underlings. Anaxamander is such a man.”

  “So, when Aeson was wounded,” I said, “Anaxamander saw the only opportunity he would be given to earn the seat of glory. And to do that he tried to take complete control of the ship. And when that failed…”

  “He removed what he believed were the only two obstacles to his desire,” she said. “You and me.”

  “But isn’t he worried about the real spies?” Ramonojon asked.

  I looked up to see what she had to say about that. Yellow Hare shook her head sadly at Ramonojon. “He believes that he has the real spy,” she said. “He thinks that with you in prison all will go well with Sunthief, and that once we return to Earth, he will be able to simply hand you over for trial and have Aias and myself released. He thinks the glory for Sunthief will go to him and that his indiscretions will be pardoned. His thoughts are filled with a single image: a hero’s nine-foot-tall blue statue standing in the main square of Sparta next to Lykurgus, Leonidas, and Alexander, facing the gates of the military college.”

  She drummed her fingers idly against her empty scabbard. “He is wrong, of course. When we return, the Archons will commit him to death for usurpation and his name will be wiped from the rolls of the army.”

  “There is one thing you omitted from your admirable analysis,” I said.

  “What is that?”

  “That Anaxamander did not think of this all on his own. He is being advised by the real spy, Mihradarius.”

  My words pulled her out of her reverent awareness of Spartan spirit. “An Athenian scholar?” she said.

  “I believe Aias is right,” Ramonojon said. “It is much more likely that Mihradarius colluded in falsifying the demonstration of the sun net than that he would make an error on a matter of Ouranology.”

  “How did he falsify the test?” Yellow Hare asked Ramonojon.

  “Middler technology, I suppose,” Ramonojon said. “He must have used that equipment you found me with when you arrested me. But I have no idea how Mihradarius learned to use it.”

  “He did not have to,” I said, and told him about the stowaways.

  “But why falsify the test?” Yellow Hare asked.

  “In order to destroy the ship with a dangerous sun net,” Ramononojon said.

  I nodded my concurrence. “The attacks and assassination attempts were meant to distract us while Mihradarius built the means of our destruction in plain sight.”

  “I see,” Yellow Hare said. She steepled her hands together, shut her eyes and resumed her impersonation of Athena Nike. “If that be the case, Commander, we must escape.”

  “Agreed,” I said. I stood up straight and spoke with the breath of command. “Captain Yellow Hare.”

  My bodyguard faced me and saluted.

  “The rescue of prisoners is a military matter. As the senior Spartan officer present, I charge you with the duty of effecting our liberation. Chief Dynamicist Ramonojon and I place our skills and knowledge at your disposal for this mission.”

  “I am honored, Commander Aias,” she said. “I swear before ’Era that I shall carry out the orders you have given me.”

  * * *

  For the next two days Yellow Hare had us save most of the water the guards gave us with our meager meals. We stored the collected water in her empty scabbard, which she had been permitted to keep by our unwise captors.

  “In a Spartan jail,” she said, “they would have stripped us naked and poured water down to us through a small hole in the roof. Much more difficult to escape from.”

  “Could you?” I asked.

  “No one leaves commando school without doing so,” she said, and her golden eyes locked with mine and filled my heart with confidence.

  During the days of our imprisonment the guards never opened the cell door, not daring to face the danger of a captured Spartan; instead, they slipped plain wooden bowls of food and water under a lockable flap in the iron barrier. I tried to talk to the guards several times, trying to find a crack in Anaxamander’s command structure. But those assigned to watch our cell were always security staff, those with a personal loyalty to Anaxamander. I suspected that he was keeping away from me all those soldiers whose allegiance he could not rely on. And I began to wonder how secure his control of the ship was.

  When her scabbard was full, Yellow Hare set in motion the plan she had devised with the aid of ’Ermes. First she took the small fire box she used to light her pipe out of her pouch, extinguished the flame, and removed the thin square of fire-gold from the lid of the box.

  With laboratory precision, Yellow Hare tore a strip of leather from her greaves, rolled it into a hollow tube, and glued the long edges together with gum extracted from the seals in her sandals. Then she placed the fire-gold inside the tube and waited for the air within to rarefy.

  “A water drill?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It is an axiom of my city that anything Athens creates, Sparta can turn to war.”

  For the first time in my life I was pleased by that saying.

  “Now,” she whispered, “I need you two to start a loud argument. One of those noisy debates Akademics are so fond of.”

  And for the first time in days, Ramonojon and I smiled.

  We began quietly enough, discussing abstruse points of celestial dynamics, then gradually raised our voices until we were shouting formulas back and forth.

  Meanwhile, Yellow Hare knelt next to the door and poured the contents of her scabbard through her improvised drill. A stream of high-pressure water gushed out and struck the rock that covered the door hinges. Chips of gleaming moonstone flew from the wall and circled the room like a spiral of snowflakes. Ramonojon and I continued our shouting until both of the steel hinges were exposed. Yellow Hare put down the drill and set to work silently removing the pins from the hinges.

  When she was done, Ramonojon and I wound down our argument, finally coming to an agreement on a matter of complete indifference to both of us.

  Yellow Hare motioned us over to the holes she had dug in the wall. “Take hold of the lower hinge and pull it out while I do the same with the top.”

  Together Ramonojon and I managed to exert as much strength as Yellow Hare did on her own. The three of us pulled in unison and the heavy iron door wobbled on its base, then crashed inward, clanging like a bell against the floor of our prison. The two guards stationed outside barely had time to be shocked before Yellow Hare had leaped on them and knocked them unconscious.

  My bodyguard quickly relieved the soldiers of their throwers, swords, knives, and keys to the brig doors. Then she bound and gagged them with their armor straps and locked them in an unoccupied cell.

  “Stay here,” she said, and ran noiselessly up the tunnel. A few minutes later she came back and waved us to follow her onto the surface of the ship.

  It was late evening, and the summer constellations looked down upon us from the distant Sphere of Fixed Stars. Overhead the purple orb of Zeus occluded the heart of the Scorpion, while Ares and Khronos conferred secretly in the arms of the Kentaur. Chandra’s Tear glowed bright defiance against the darkness of the goddess Night, but I did not welcome the revealing light of my ship, for she was showing me to my enemies.

  “We need a base of operations,” I said to Yellow Hare, who was stooped over the insensate bodies of the three guards assigned to the brig tunnel exit, methodically stripping them of their weapons. “Where would you suggest we secrete ourselves?”

  “The storage cavern,” she replied as she relieved the last soldier of his sword.

  But fifty yards of brightly glowing open space stood between us and the nearest tunnel down into the cavern, and four soldiers guarded that entrance. We hid from their view around the side of the hillock in which lay the door down to the brig, but the moment we started toward them they would see us.

  Yellow Hare drew one of the throwers s
he had taken from the guards and aimed; I hoped she was not going to shoot the soldiers, who were only doing their duty. I should not have worried. She set her sights on the top of the hill, aiming toward the back wall of Aeson’s office, and fired a spray of tetras that ricocheted off the marble colonnade. The sounds of the shots rang through the clear air, and just as they struck, Yellow Hare screamed out a frighteningly real cry of agony that echoed piercingly across the ship.

  Two of the guards ran for where the shots hit. The other two remained behind; they drew their throwers and faced away from each other. Neither was looking at the entrance they were supposed to be guarding.

  Yellow Hare fired again. This time she aimed over the heads of the guards so her shot would fly into the cave. The clangs of metal on moon rock resounded through the underground, multiplying through echoes into the report of a thousand throwers. The two remaining guards spun around and darted down toward the storage cavern. We ran across the now unwatched open space and reached the tunnel. Yellow Hare pulled us into one of the heavy-equipment niches carved into the sides of the passage. This particular alcove held a moon sled chained to the floor. At my bodyguard’s direction we crouched up against the wall, hiding behind the floating disk.

  For two hours, guards ran back and forth, looking for whatever saboteur was in the storage caverns. Each time a patrol passed us we changed hiding places, ducking behind the fire box of a road grader, then under a float cart, and finally secreting ourselves inside the empty reservoir of a large water drill. Eventually, when the exhausted and confused men returned to their stations, we slipped down the tunnel, past the unwatchful eyes of the slaves, and hid inside a large empty crate that had once held stonecutting tools.

  “Where do we go from here?” I asked Yellow Hare.

  “We stay,” she said. “This is the safest place from which to act.”