Celestial Matters

by Garfinkle, Richard

  Yellow Hare said something to me, but I paid her no attention. I needed to know exactly where we were. Ignoring the pains in my legs, I ran up the hill until I could see all the way aft and over all the sides of the ship.

  Sternward I saw the trolley still jammed in its tracks, having somehow survived the pulling battle between sun and moon. The sun net itself was stretched over the port side and seemed to be curving downward.

  I looked to port and saw a mere hundred miles below us a bloodred orb the size of the earth. Above it the sun fragment was dangling helplessly in midair, flopping around like a netted fish; the net trailed behind it and seemed to have looped itself around some invisible ball, tethering the ship and the stolen celestial fire to empty space.

  For a minute the strange tableau overwhelmed my thoughts. But then long-known theoretical understanding connected with the facts before my eyes. I realized where we were and the need that had come over me was satisfied. My joy at having realized the answer to that one simple question was greater than any happiness I had ever felt save when the gods themselves had elevated me with their presence.

  “Ares!” I cried aloud, and the word was an ecstatic release.

  I ran back to Yellow Hare. “Ares,” I said.

  Yellow Hare looked up from examining Ramonojon’s injuries. “What?” she said.

  “That planet is Ares,” I said. “And the net is wound around one of the war god’s epicycles.”

  She stood up and stared at me with her piercing eyes, but the ecstasy I was feeling allowed me to ignore even her eagle’s gaze. I went on babbling to her about the celestial mechanics of the globe off our port bow.

  “Of all the planets in the universe,” I said, “Ares has the most complex orbit, for within the gap in the huge crystal sphere he half a dozen small spheres, each connected to the planet and to the outer sphere. They turn like a mass of gears, each adding its own circular motion to the war god’s world.”

  The complex equations that governed Ares’ eccentric orbit filled my mind, vying for space with the realization that we were the first people ever to reach this sphere.

  I kept on and on, until Yellow Hare slapped my face. “Aias!” she said.

  In that momentary flash of pain, I realized with perfect clarity what had happened to me.

  “Don’t breathe deeply,” I said. “The air’s too pure for human minds.”

  “I understand,” she said, and the gods of Sparta wrapped themselves around her, protecting her purity from that of the celestial winds. “We need to take Ramonojon to the hospital cave. I only hope enough medical supplies survived to save his arm.”

  The upper building of the hospital had shattered and been blown away during the flight, and the tunnel that led to the wards and dispensary was exposed to the cold air of the outer spheres. The smell of rotting meat assailed us as we made our way down the cracked passageway, and I held my nose rather than risk too deep a breath.

  Most of the couches in the public ward had been uprooted and smashed against the walls, and a jumble of shattered and twisted corpses lay on the floor, too broken and bloody for me to recognize the men and women whose souls had flown and now waited on the shores of the river Styx. From the corpses flies had already spontaneously generated and were buzzing lazily around the room.

  “Euripos!” I yelled, but no answer came; I hoped that he was not among the indiscernible bodies.

  Yellow Hare salvaged some cushions from the broken couches, piled them against a wall, and laid Ramonojon down on them. I went down the tunnel into the dispensary to find supplies. Smashed urns and boxes were strewn across the floor. The walls had been stained with a variety of medicines, painting a bizarre multicolored pattern across the silver cave. I managed to find bandages, two dozen injection quills, a large bronze amphora full of water, a few splints, and a padded case filled with jars of the various humours.

  Yellow Hare made a sling for Ramonojon’s arm and injected him with Sanguine Humour to speed the healing process and Jovial to cut the pain. He thrashed about for a few minutes as the liquids settled into his blood; then he seemed to relax and fall into natural sleep.

  While we watched him, Yellow Hare treated me for cuts and bruises and I wrapped her injured ankle in gauze. I was tempted to stay and wait for Ramonojon to wake up, but it was my duty as commander of that sad, wrecked vessel to see if any of my crew had survived and to do death rites for those that had not.

  “Where do we go first?” Yellow Hare asked.

  “Through there,” I said, pointing toward the private ward. “Paeans should be sung to Aeson, coins put over his eyes, and the Khthonian gods propitiated.”

  We walked through the ragged curtain, heads bowed like mourners. But Aeson was not dead. He lay securely strapped down on his slab, just as he had been the last time I had seen him. The flight had taken its toll on his body in the form of welts and cuts from where the tightening leather had dug into his flesh, but his Spartan soul still dwelled in its mortal vessel. I reached out and tentatively squeezed Aeson’s arm. There was no response; he was still in a coma, oblivious of the fate of his ship and his command.

  I turned to say something to Yellow Hare and caught a glimpse of a torn, black-fringed robe buried under a fallen medicine cabinet in the corner. I ran over to it and heaved away the tumbled oaken chest to reveal Euripos’s body. He had obviously died quickly when the heavy cupboard fell on him.

  I knelt down and prayed. But my prayers then were formed from my childhood remembrances of that old man. Therefore let me now give my proper respects to Euripos of the Claudian gens, a Roman patrician who did honor to his city by service in battle, a doctor who never shrank from his duty to save the lives of his comrades, and a man who served under my father and myself with the greatest personal loyalty that any commander could ask for.

  Yellow Hare gripped my shoulder, gently pulling me from my mourning. “What do you want done now, Commander?” she said.

  “We should survey the rest of the damage,” I said, accepting her gentle reminder of my duty to the living. “And search for more survivors.”

  “And we need food and water,” Yellow Hare added.

  “Agreed,” I said. “We should search the storage cavern first. Then we can see if anything or anyone is in the labs.”

  We went through the dispensary and down the tunnel to the half of the storage cavern that remained after the sundering of the ship. The crimson glare of the war god flowed in from the open fore end of the cave, illuminating the corpses of slaves splattered against boxes and walls.

  Many of the crates in the aft end were still secured. There might be enough grains, vegetables, and dried meats to keep us alive for a time. But one look at the dry moon rock at the bottom of the well told me that water was our greatest need.

  Then I heard a low moan echoing through the cavern.

  “Is that sobbing?” I asked.

  Yellow Hare cocked an ear. “This way.”

  We followed the sound to the starboard aft corner of the cavern, where we found Clovix tied to the wall, crying aloud and cursing in his native language. Hanging next to him was the body of a young Pridaenean slave. Her safety thongs had cut into her throat during flight and strangled her.

  Yellow Hare cut Clovix down, but he did not notice his freedom. His thoughts had focused on one thing alone, and his relentless cursing of Anaxamander told me what that thing was.

  “Clovix!” I said. But he did not hear me. The veneer of civilization which Clovix had long cultivated and which had earned him the position of chief slave had vanished as he wailed out the names of every slave on the ship and told their ghosts to hunt down the security chief to avenge their deaths. Clovix’s rage opened my eyes. He who I had always seen as corrupt and indifferent, as a slave whose heart was empty of virtue, he had seen himself as commander of our slaves, as responsible for their lives and spirits. His anger was my anger, the wildfire wrath of a chief betrayed.

  In the knowledge of our oneness, I found
the words that would draw him back from the grip of Mania.

  “Anaxamander is already dead, Clovix!” I said, though I had not seen him die.

  At those words he looked up at me, and his blue eyes glowed with bloodlust. “Where is his body? I want to watch the crows pluck out his eyes. I want to drink mead from his skull.”

  “He must have fallen from the ship,” I said.

  “I’ll hunt him down in the dead lands,” he said. “I’ll chase his spirit with my hounds. I’ll—”

  He fell to weeping again, but the hyperclarity seemed to have left him, so we waited for his angry passion to abate. At last he ceased his wailing and looked at me, this time with recognition in his reddened eyes.

  “Commander?” he said. “You’re alive!”

  “Yes, Clovix.”

  “Commander—” He gripped the edge of my robe to make sure I was not a ghost. “My people are dead.”

  “As are mine, Clovix,” I said and helped him to stand. “But we are not.”

  “Everyone is dead?”

  “Not everyone,” I said. “Ramonojon is in the hospital ward. And Aeson survived.”

  “You and Commander Aeson are both alive,” he said slowly. A spirit of relief settled on his shoulders. I could not understand why he who had shown us nothing but disdain would be grateful for our survival. But then Athena touched me with realization. Clovix had always relied on us; he had been corrupt because we had made it safe for him to be so. I could not let him sink back into that relaxed weakness.

  “Clovix,” I said. “We need your knowledge of this ship and its cargo if we are to survive and avenge the deaths of our people.”

  Clovix stared at me, unable to comprehend what I was saying, but then the breath of the upper spheres cleared his mind. I could see his eyes begin to gleam again; a new purpose was rising in him to fill his aching thoughts.

  “What do you require of me, Commander?” he said, and he sounded not like the most corrupt slave in the Delian League, but like a soldier seeking to do his duty.

  “I need you to attend to Ramonojon and then go look for water.”

  “Water?”

  “The reservoir was destroyed in the wreck. We found a jar of water in the hospital, but we will need a great deal more.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and walked off toward the dispensary tunnel, back straight, breath and soul filled with a fresh resolve.

  Yellow Hare and I left the cavern and went aft to survey the laboratories. Ramonojon’s lab was completely destroyed. Tables had toppled every which way. The materials cabinet had fallen over and the floor was pitted with fragments of metal, stone, and wood. A huge splatter of ink had dried into a spiral pattern on the same spot in the ceiling where Ramonojon’s model of the ship had crashed.

  We walked back to the surface, then down the stairs to Mihradarius’s lab. Halfway to the bottom Yellow Hare stopped and waved me to silence. Voices drifted up from the laboratory—three people conversing in the Kanton dialect of the Middle Kingdom.

  “He failed,” one voice said in an accent I did not recognize.

  “I did not,” Mihradarius said. Yellow Hare’s eyes squinted and her lips broke into a savage smile. I saw the Persian’s death in her eyes and I nodded my official sanction to her desire.

  Mihradarius continued speaking, unaware of how close the gates of ’Ades were. “Sunthief is no more. ’AngXou is safe.”

  “Perhaps,” the third voice said in a very cultured Middler accent. “But we are left here to starve. This is not the death I had planned for myself.”

  “One—no, two people are on the stairs,” the oddly accented voice said. “Come down!” he called to us in ’Ellenic.

  I looked at Yellow Hare and pointed down the stairs. She nodded and preceded me through the passage and into the remains of the Ouranology lab, which had fared much better than any other part of the ship. The walls with their gleaming frieze had survived, undamaged, the tables had been secured to the floor by iron stakes, and the three people inside were clean and well dressed. For the first time I became conscious of how disheveled Yellow Hare and I were. My robes of command were torn, stained with sweat, and covered with white marble dust and silver moondust. Yellow Hare’s armor was battered and dented, the sleeves of her tunic were torn, and the Spartan brassard she wore around her neck dangled by a thin ragged edge of leather strap.

  The three people we saw inside were Mihradarius, a Nipponian who I suspected was the assassin Yellow Hare had fought earlier, and an old Middler man dressed in a green silk gown decorated with blue oceans and covered with a multitude of pockets. He tapped long fingernails against his wispy beard and studied us as if we were laboratory samples.

  Mihradarius glowered at us. The Nipponian bowed slightly to Yellow Hare. She returned the gesture.

  “Who are these?” the old Middler asked Mihradarius.

  The Persian traitor pointed at me. “Aias of Tyre, the man who originally conceived and then served as Scientific Commander of this mission of Ahriman.”

  The Middler bowed to me and I to him.

  “The Atlantean,” Mihradarius went on, “is Captain Yellow Hare, a Xeroki corrupted by the Spartans.”

  “Introduce your stowaways, Mihradarius,” I said in my most cultured Persian.

  Mihradarius pointed to the old Middler. “This is Phan XuTzu. A scientist from ’AngXou.” He nodded to the Nipponian. “And this is Miiama Shizumi, a commando. They wish to thank you for your hospitality. They have been on Chandra’s Tear since the attack that put you in the hospital.”

  I switched to Kanton and addressed the old man with as much irony as I could muster. “I wish you had informed us of your presence. We would have treated you more appropriately.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me, then smiled and inclined his head slightly.

  “Your failures increase,” Miiama said to Mihradarius. “These at least I can correct.”

  He drew his sword and leaped for me. Yellow Hare was between us before I had a chance to blink. She was unarmed, but seemed to have no trouble dodging the Nipponian’s sword or striking at him with her bare hands.

  The two warriors sparred like angry gods while we scientists looked on. Then Phan spoke. “Miiama, stop!” he said in harsh Kanton. The commando stepped out of the fray, blocking Yellow Hare’s kick with the flat of his blade. She also stepped back.

  “My orders—,” Miiama said, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on my bodyguard.

  Phan cut him off. “Your orders are to obey me. Only two more people need to die in order to complete our mission, and those only at the proper time.”

  I raised my eyebrow at this statement. “And who might they be?” I asked in Kanton.

  Phan clacked his fingernails together in a quiet staccato. “Miiama and myself,” he answered in ’Ellenic. “We were supposed to die with this ship, but our Persian accomplice failed to complete the destruction of this vessel.”

  Mihradarius shrugged. “I have struck a great blow against the ’Ellenes.”

  “Why did you do this, traitor?” Yellow Hare said. “You were held in high honor by the Akademe; you could have joined the immortal heroes for serving the League.”

  A spirit crossed Mihradarius’s face; a Fury from the world below looked out from his eyes.

  “He wants no honor from us,” I said. I pointed to the frieze of the last emperor of Persia surrendering to Alexander. “Mihradarius is a Zoroastrian fanatic. He is trying single-handedly to defeat the invaders who conquered his people and assimilated his religion a thousand years ago.”

  “And I have done so,” Mihradarius said in the blood-slaked voice of the vengeful Fury.

  I nodded to Yellow Hare, meaning to have her carry out the death sentence on Mihradarius, but she was paying attention to something else.

  “Six men are on the stairs,” she said.

  We turned to look, and six of Anaxamander’s soldiers wearing battered steel armor stepped into the laboratory. Through the visors of their helm
ets I could see their eyes glowing from Hyper-clear Pneuma. They leveled their throwers at us and their leader spoke.

  “Stand still, traitors! We have orders to bring you to Commander Anaxamander.” He turned to the other five guards. “Take them to the navigation tower.”

  The soldiers advanced, intent on bringing us to a place that the anger of ’Elios had already destroyed.

  μ

  Yellow Hare spun around and kicked the thrower out of the grip of the leftmost guard just as the soldier slammed his hand into the ammunition bag; a spray of tetras flew from the mouth of the thrower, striking the ceiling. At same instant, Miiama leaped at the rightmost guard, sword upraised, and cut him down with a single swipe of blade across throat. The other soldiers wheeled drunkenly to fire at the two commandos, but they were far too slow.

  The orderly line of guards dissolved into chaos as Spartan and Nipponian bore down on those maddened men. With perfect efficiency Yellow Hare disarmed them and knocked them senseless. Miiama simply killed them. In a matter of seconds three guards were dead, three disabled, and neither Yellow Hare nor Miiama had been so much as touched.

  The Nipponian stepped over to one of the unconscious guards and raised his sword to decapitate him. Yellow Hare grabbed the defenseless man’s sword and prepared to defend the life of the soldier she had just rendered helpless.

  “Miiama, you have done enough,” Phan said, much to my surprise.

  “But Master Phan, the mission—,” the Nipponian began to object.

  “Is under my command,” the old man said quietly. “You will kill no one else without my express instructions.”

  “Yes, Master Phan,” the Nipponian said. He stepped back from Yellow Hare and without taking his eyes off my bodyguard sheathed his sword in one smooth motion. Yellow Hare held her blade in front of her and flicked a look in my direction. I shook my head. Obeying my implicit command, she sheathed her captured sword in her too-long-empty scabbard.