Celestial Matters

by Garfinkle, Richard

  Later that day Phan came to see me. “I need to make more survival pills,” he said. In a catch in his voice, I heard the spirit of realization stirring in his heart.

  “What do you need?” I said, breathing out reassurance in my words. He handed me a piece of rice paper with a list of ingredients even more esoteric than those required by the spon-gen farms.

  I called Clovix away from making the wings and told him to assist Phan in searching the stores for what he needed. They returned an hour later.

  “Some substitutions were necessary,” Phan said. “I will not be able to make pills as good as those we have been using. But I will do what I can.”

  Phan seemed to be having difficulty meeting my gaze, and I began to grow suspicious, wondering if his cooperation had been a means of concealing something. But then ’Ermes entered my heart and I realized the source of Phan’s nervousness.

  “Do your best,” I said. “I have every confidence in you.”

  Three hours later Phan announced that the pills were ready. The entire ship’s complement assembled at the water distiller. Phan handed around the pills and I took mine with a nod. These new tablets had an ugly purple-gray mottling and a slightly burned taste, but I swallowed mine with confidence and felt the return of a tirelessness that I had not realized had been waning.

  Phan put away his alchemical supplies and he, Ramonojon, and I settled down to review our schedule. The wings would take at least two more weeks to complete, and I would need that time to brush up my celestial navigation and do my best to calculate flight paths, given the impossible mode of transport.

  Phan only half paid attention to our talk. He kept looking to port and then to starboard, following the course of the sun as it came around for its daily trip under us. ’Elios fell directly beneath us, and the sky grew dark with the eclipse of Ares. The stars blinked down on us, and I looked up to the sky with the tentative hope that I would again see the heavens from the earth.

  Then it happened. Mihradarius screamed and clutched at his throat. Saliva dribbled down his lips, and he collapsed to the ground. Miiama jumped up and ran toward Phan. Yellow Hare tried to grab him, but he fell over on his own before she could reach him. The Nipponian clawed at his throat until blood poured out of his neck.

  Mihradarius’s eyes flashed open, but he was not gazing on this world. A god I had never felt before touched my heart with a pure drop of truth to show me what the Persian was seeing. He approached the bridge to the afterworld of Ahura Mazda. But it was not the broad bridge of a soul judged good, but the sword’s edge pathway that an evil man must tread. Upon the bridge stood Mihradarius’s second soul, not the maiden shape of a blessed spirit but the withered, twisted hag form of one who had done Ahriman’s bidding.

  Mihradarius screamed and fell dead. Miiama crawled a few inches toward Phan and tugged at his sword; then he too collapsed, his soul fleeing the world, for what strange afterlife I did not know.

  “I had to poison their pills,” Phan said; his hands shook like autumn leaves about to fall from a tree. “I had to. I waited as long as I could. But the work was becoming dangerous. I knew Miiama would find a way to arrange an accident. I had no choices left, no options.”

  “I know, Phan,” I said. “You have done well.”

  After a stunned moment in which nobody moved, two guards rushed over and grabbed Phan by his trembling arms.

  “Let him go!” I said stepping forward. “He was doing what I wanted.”

  All heads turned to look at me. The soldiers released the old man, but did not step away from him until I walked over and escorted Phan to a seat near the barrel of clean water.

  I filled a small brass bowl from the barrel and gave it to Phan to drink.

  “You did well,” I said to the old man.

  “I had no choice,” he said as he stared hard at his reflection in the bowl.

  “Aias,” Yellow Hare said, and I heard the echo of divine sternness in her voice. I looked over at her, standing tall and solid grave as a mountain. The wind whipped through her braids and her eyes flashed in the gleaming light of Ares. “Did you order Phan to poison them?”

  I stepped forward to meet her; my eyes drank in the fiery gold light of her eyes and the questioning spirit they carried. In my heart I understood her anger. Why had I not trusted her who was sworn to me in so many ways to carry out this task?

  “I did not give the command,” I said. “But I surmised what he had planned to do and I approved. Had I told you of it, you would have disapproved. You would have prevented me from taking the gamble, fearing that Phan was going to poison us and not them. As commander, I took that risk.”

  “But poison?” she said. “Why did you not let me execute them properly?”

  “I judged that the taking of their lives was not worth the risk of losing yours,” I said. I turned to Aeson. “Is it not a commander’s duty to choose when to place his soldiers’ lives in peril and when to keep them safe?”

  Aeson nodded, and slowly Yellow Hare bent her head in acknowledgment.

  But while my words satisfied the Spartans, they did not do so for the Buddhist. “But how could you add to the deaths?” Ramonojon asked.

  “Because Phan is correct,” I said. “Eventually, they would have tried to kill us. In my heart I had already condemned them. It was only a question of finding the opportunity. Phan provided it.”

  “I could not think of another way,” the old man said. “I tried my best, but there was no choice. No choice.”

  “But, Aias,” Aeson said. “To trust a Middler.”

  “Those who dwell in ’Ades,” I said, “are equally dead.”

  Aeson bowed.

  Phan looked up into my eyes and I could feel him still turning the possibilities over in his mind, still looking for another way to have solved the problem, and though he could find no such answer, his own mind forced him to continue the search.

  “He thinks too much,” Yellow Hare whispered to me, and I finally understood what those words had meant so long ago. Had it been my hand, not just my desire, that had taken the lives of Mihradarius and Miiama, had I actually been the conduit of Thanatos, I would be suffering the same confusion as Phan. The Spartan testers had been right to cast me out from their city of war. But though I had sympathy for Phan Xu-Tzu, there was nothing I could say that could help him.

  Ramonojon, however, did know words of comfort that could aid an old Middler scientist.

  “Still your thoughts,” Ramonojon said, sitting down next to Phan. “Rest in the Tao.”

  Phan turned an angry gaze on Ramonojon. I could see his lips poised to emit an insult, but in my friend’s eyes he saw a gentle spirit that could not be abused by words. “I have never learned how to stand upon the Way,” the Taoist said. “The Tao outside of me I know well, but the Tao within I do not.”

  “I have been told that they are the same,” Ramonojon said. “But I do not understand it either, and my teachers are too far away to offer help.”

  Athena stirred in my heart and I saw a vast chasm between myself and Phan, wide as the gulf between Earth and the Fixed Stars, deep as Tartaros itself. The goddess told me that somewhere along its rocky rim there was a bridge to be found or built.

  ξ

  For the good of our souls and our bodies we spent the next three weeks concentrating solely on the work of remaking the ship. In that time the soldiers finished the skeleton and tacked the cloth over the bones of steel and silver to make the wings. The work was more difficult than before because the new survival pills were not as good as the old ones. We needed some food and some sleep, and we felt the aches and pains of strained muscles. The guards did not complain, but I could see their haggard faces when they came back onto the body of the ship after unrolling and riveting down the black-wing sails. Aeson worked alongside them and the three guards drew great comfort from his presence. When he stepped fearlessly onto the fluttering patchwork of linen that stretched out over the side of the ship and crawled across the
sheets billowing in the wild crosswinds of Ares, the men took heart and confidently followed him to do their work above the vast emptiness of the upper air.

  While the soldiers did the work of sailwrights, I took up the post of charioteer, designing reins for the horse that would be pulling us and trying to teach myself how to guide that heavenly steed. I may say truthfully that I am an excellent Ouranologist; I can calculate to the inch the position of any planet at any time and plot a course from Earth out to the Fixed Stars, but my hands had little practical experience in celestial navigation. The only time I had ever piloted a celestial ship was when I had been stationed on ’Ermes. I had learned to control the medium-sized vessels that did the day labor around that orb. Those were the easiest ships to control, not wild and bucking like a moon sled, and not slow to turn like Chandra’s Tear. Just simple, easy flying, a pull here, a tug there, a reliance on natural motions; that was all I had to do. That free and easy flight hardly compared to the job of controlling this new, untested vessel that even we, its designers, barely understood.

  To try and make up for my lack of experience I made the controls as simple as possible to operate, and prayed that Daidalos the hero or perhaps the ghost of Kleon would help guide my hands as they piloted the ship through the shoals of heaven.

  The controls I created consisted of a simple arrangement of four reins, silver guide wires that were interlaced with the strands of the sun net itself. The wires ran up the outside of the net, one on the port meridian, one on starboard, one on top of the net, and one on the bottom. Strung along each wire like drops of dew on a spiderweb were thumb-sized nodules of fire-gold. When a rein was pulled, the line connected to it would tighten and the nodules would rise up along that edge of the net. A thin column of rarefied air would be created and the net itself would be pulled in that direction; the sun fragment would follow the net, a horse following the guide of its reins, and the ship, chariotlike, would turn to follow the steed pulling it.

  One week after I began work making these reins, Ramonojon presented me with a coiled strand of wire that glowed with the silver of Selene.

  “What is this?” I said, holding the rope in my hands, feeling it slowly roll of its own accord through my fingers.

  “I managed to take some of the moon rock that broke from the walls during the long flight and draw it out into a wire. Unlike your other reins, this one is unbreakable. It is to be laced through the center, in a spiral. When you pull on it, it will compress the net itself and draw the sun fragment toward the ship. That should slow us down momentarily if you need to. Don’t overuse it; this ship cannot take much more strain.”

  “Thank you, Chief Dynamicist,” I said.

  Ramonojon bowed and left, and I returned to preparing the ship.

  I needed a sheltered place from which to fly the vessel, so the guards built me a makeshift control cabin out of one of the storage crates. The large pine box was hauled out of the storage cavern leaned up against one of the laboratory hillocks, and lashed to the body of the ship with steel bands and spikes. A door was cut in the starboard side and a window in the front, from which I could see the now solidly anchored trolley, the sun net, and my fiery horse. The four silver and one Selenean control wires were strung through the cabin’s window and tied to hempen pull ropes that hung down from pulleys on the ceiling. I glued my charts of the spheres and epicycles to the walls of the cabin and put rolled-up carpets on the floor as a pilot’s seat. It was not Kleon’s navigation tower, but it would serve.

  While I did all this, Phan prepared the controls he would need for his half of the piloting duties. Each day he wandered seemingly aimlessly across the ship, nailing gold and silver spikes into various places: seven of each on top of the hill, over twenty next to each wing, one at each of the cracks and turnings in the ragged tail of our bird. Then he took a large vat of vermilion paint and, with a horsehair calligraphy brush, painted lines of red between selected pairs of spikes. Three times he did something with a mesh of woven gold laid on the ground that made the lines of paint skitter across our surface, rearranging themselves into strange patterns that drew the eye to follow them. The curves of crimson flowed into graceful arc from wing across hill to wing, from tail to tip and back again. After the third such action, Phan pronounced himself satisfied.

  “What have you done?” I asked.

  “I have healed the body of this ship,” he said. “It should now be able to survive the rigors of flight.”

  In response to this Ramonojon dug out the few dynamicist’s tools he had remaining and, tapping the ground with a hollow hammer, calculated the solidity of Chandra’s Tear.

  “Many of the stress fractures are gone,” Ramonojon reported to me when he had finished the survey. “Somehow, Phan has caused the Selenean matter to heal itself as if it were the flesh of a living being.”

  “That makes no sense,” I said.

  “Yes, it does,” Ramonojon replied. “It accords with the Tao.”

  “Are you saying you now understand Taoist science?” I asked.

  “No,” Ramonojon replied. “I can only accept it by ignoring my own training. If I think about Selenean matter, if I concentrate on the dynamic form of the ship, all I can see is a block of stone to be carved into the right shape. But if I apply all the mental disciplines I learned from Xan and breathe deeply of the clear air to push out of my mind what I know to be true, then, for a brief moment, I can accept that one could treat this ship as an injured animal and try to cure it.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Tell me if any more of what Phan does begins to make sense to you.”

  “Yes, Aias,” Ramonojon said.

  Phan had the guards haul two three-foot-cubic bundles of bamboo lashed together with golden wire, each studded on one side with exactly one hundred silver nails, from a secret cave in Mihradarius’s lab. Under the old man’s direction, the soldiers secured these wooden sheaves to what had been the aft end of Chandra’s Tear, but had now become the fore end of our as yet unnamed new ship. The blocks were placed equidistant from the midpoint of the ship’s long edge, the spiked ends pointed out across empty space toward the sun net. Phan painted more cinnabar lines across the surface of the ship to connect these blocks to the makeshift cabin he had set up at the base of the hill a quarter of a mile directly behind mine.

  “What are those bamboo sheaves?” I asked.

  “Xi strengtheners,” he said. “I used them to increase the fragment’s wild flight when you first captured it. They were supposed to ensure the ship’s destruction, but I think they were responsible for bringing us to Ares on the long Xi flow.”

  “How did you smuggle them onto my ship?”

  “Mihradarius had the raw materials brought on during your absence, before anyone on Chandra’s Tear knew of oncoming danger. I assembled the devices myself once I had been smuggled aboard.”

  “But why are you mounting these weapons here?”

  “They are not weapons,” he said. “They make the power of a given Xi flow stronger. Using them, I will be able to guide the fragment down the descending currents from planet to planet. I am also going to use them to slow the fragment down when we are orbiting so that we will be able to move about safely on the ship’s surface.”

  “Are you finished with your preparations?” I said.

  “Yes,” Phan replied. “We can attempt to leave this orb whenever you give the order.”

  “First we must pray,” I said.

  I gathered the crew together on the playing fields next to the fluttering left wing of our new-made bird. I had timed the ceremony so that ’Elios, Ares, and the sun fragment were all beneath our keel, so the only light came from the stars and the body of the ship itself.

  I dressed myself in my purple robes and stood in the mingled light of above and below. In my hands I held a plain bronze bowl filled with unmixed wine.

  “The time of preparing is done,” I said. “When Ares rises in four hours we will cast ourselves before the knees of the gods
and try to escape this trap of the heavens.”

  I paused and raised the bowl up in front of me.

  “Zeus, lord of the sky, bless our undertaking.” I poured purple wine upon the silver ship. Thunder rumbled in my heart.

  “’Era, queen of heaven, bless our undertaking.” More wine poured on the ground, and that goddess descended onto Yellow Hare’s shoulders.

  “Athena, guide our thoughts. ’Ermes, guide our hands. ’Elios and Selene, forgive our thefts. Ares, let us flee from your snare.” With each god’s name I spilled more wine and felt the touch of the divine presence invoked. The assembled divinities waited in my heart, filling me with strength. The stars grew bright, and overhead the gleaming purple orb of Zeus passed in his majestic orbit around the earth.

  “The omens are good,” I said, and laid down the empty bowl.

  “Phan Xu-Tzu,” I said, turning to the old man, “is there any ceremony you wish to perform?”

  “No, Aias,” he said. “There is no proper li, no ritual for this place and time.”

  Athena touched me gently, whispering in my ear. “Very well,” I said to Phan. “Then I give to you the honor of naming our new ship.”

  Phan turned in a slow circle, studying the bird with wings of night and head of fire, body of the moon and will of the sun, that we would soon be riding to life or death.

  The old man raised his arms and his silken work robes glistened in the moonlight. “I name this vessel Rebuke of the Phoenix,” he said; then he turned and walked to his control cabin in silence.

  “A strange name,” Yellow Hare said. “I wonder why he chose it.”

  “I do not think he did,” I said. “I think he answered the prompting of a spirit.”

  We separated then, each to his own meditations. Yellow Hare and I went to the top of the hill and spoke together for a time. What passed between us then was as between man and woman, and thus I will leave it as private.