Best Science Fiction of the Year 14

by Terry Carr (ed)

  For five thousand years the rulers of Egypt had made this trip. Tradition held that when the sun ceased his northward journey, pharaoh would set forth, sailing all the way to Thebes, to ensure a proper flood. If pharaoh did not thus set forth on the bosom of Hapi, the river would not rise. If the river did not rise, there would be no sowing, and no harvest. Famine would grip the land. The tax gatherers would gather little or nothing. The army could not be paid. The dynasty could fall.

  Superstitious nonsense?

  Who was he to say?

  It was best to go along with it. Anyhow, he always looked forward to the long trip on the river. He just wished Arsinoe' were still alive.

  Noises in the streets below brought his eyes down to the parade of dancing torches. The annual infection had spread even here, to the guarded serenity of the royal quarter. In a way it was unsettling; yet on the whole it was reassuring that the people were content to stay within their multi-millennial rut. No riots, no revolutions, no marches against the granaries. Not this week, anyhow. Let the beer flow!

  He looked around as a woman in an elegant linen dress and cape parted the hangings and stepped out to join him. A thick black wig, artfully dusted with gold powder, fell to her shoulders. She was his concubine of the month. Her name was Pauni, daughter of a noble house. He named them for the current Egyptian month. It was the only way he could attach names to their beautiful faces. And so it had been, since the death of Arsinoe, his true sister-wife, twenty years ago. By Greek ideas, that marriage had been incest; but it was quite in the pharaonic tradition. A bit of irony: in the river tongue, the word for concubine was "sne-t," which meant "sister."

  (Ah, Arsinoe, Arsinoe. I loved you greatly. You should not have died. It was the only unkind thing you ever did.)

  "Respect their traditions. Respect their religion. Worship their gods," his great father Ptolemy, Alexander's general, had told him. "Be pious. You lose nothing, and you will preserve the dynasty." He took the woman by the arm and they listened in silence to the revelry. "The old man was right," he muttered.

  "Who, my lord?" said Pauni politely.

  "My father. When the Persians conquered Egypt, they flouted the local religions. Ochus, the satrap, killed the sacred bull. The priests invoked a terrible curse on him, and on his masters in Persepolis. And so Alexander came, and destroyed Persia. He came to Egypt, and gave all honor to the priests. He sacrificed to Apis and other native gods. He made the great journey across the desert, without road or path, to the sanctuary of Ammon at Siwah. There the priests declared his divine descent, and that he was indeed the son of Ammon." He reflected. "Did I ever tell you about Alexander's trip across the desert to Siwah?"

  (Several times, my lord.) "No, sire, I don't recall that you did."

  "Ah. Well, then. The storms had destroyed the roads. Even the guides were lost. The sun was pitiless, and the men were dropping from heat stroke. But trie gods sent a great flock of ravens, who flew in circles overhead, and shaded Alexander. And if the guides made a wrong turn, the birds screamed until they went straight again."

  "Amazing," said Pauni.

  The royal Greek sighed again. If only he didn't owe so much money to so many people. The Jews had helped him— and his father—finance the great light tower on Pharos. It had been finished these nine years, and the treasury was still paying. And the Egyptian priests. The public debt was soaring because of their demands for new temples. And then there was the standing army, all mercenaries, and they liked to be paid regularly, in hard clanking brass. And the navy. A thousand years ago Rameses had not been troubled with ships that sailed the Great Green. And two thousand years ago the pharaohs didn't even use money. There wasn't any. It hadn't been invented yet. Go, said Khufu to his peasants. Build me a tomb-pyramid. One million men, working twenty years. And they had done it, and not an obol paid out to anyone. Alas, how things had changed. "Who rules Egypt?" he mused softly. "Do I? No. Do the one million Greeks who have settled here? No. Well, then, do the priests and their seven million fellahin? Or is the land a hopeless anarchy?"

  By now she was used to this. "Speaking of priests," Pauni reminded him gently, "the high priest of Horus is here. Also Rabbi Ben Shem. And then the other notables: Eratosthenes and his lady. The geometer brings a very strange guest, who covers his body with a long black veil. And then there are the consuls and ambassadors—Claudius Pulcher the Roman, Ha-milcar Barca, the Carthaginian…"

  Ptolemy suppressed a groan. Eratosthenes. He had tried to forget him, but of course it was impossible. The man of measures was going to make his report tonight. And what will you say, noble philosopher? How big is the world? As to that, say anything you like. But the shape! Declare Earth a flat square, or a disc, or a cylinder. Any of these. But you know you must not say "sphere" or "ball" or "globe." That's heresy, mathematician. Don't betray me, my brother Greek.

  There is a long line waiting to take your place as curator of the great Library. And it isn't just me you should worry about. If you say "sphere," the local holies will have you floating in the canal before the night is out.

  He paused. The girl looked up at him in grave concern. He thought: she knows I am fifty-nine, and that I am dying. Ah, to be young again. No, don't turn back. Let it be finally done. Nothing really matters very much anymore. From here on in, let us have peace. He smiled. "Perhaps we should rejoin our guests.''

  12. Heresy

  A little cluster had already formed around the two ambassadors. The Carthaginian was explaining something: "One of my purposes here is to obtain copies of the world map of Eratosthenes."

  "And what good is that?" growled Claudius Pulcher, the Roman.

  "Carthage will probably win our present war with Rome, noble ambassador. If so, we will expand into Spain and Gaul. For that we will need good maps. If we lose—may Baal save us!—we will certainly need to recoup our fortunes, and we would look to western Europe for that. Again we would need good maps. Including—" (here he gave the stolid Pulcher a crafty leer) "a good showing of the passes through the Alps."

  "Passes… ?"

  "For our war elephants."

  The Roman genera! stared at him blankly. Then recognition dawned. "Oh—you mean from Gaul, over the mountains into Italy." He began to laugh. He laughed so hard he spilled his wine. "Excuse me." He walked back to the credentia for a refill.

  Ptolemy watched him for a moment, then turned back to the Carthaginian. "The great Alexander was always fearful of war elephants. He never really discovered how to cope with them. Quite an idea, Hamilcar Barca."

  "But there's still a problem," said Eratosthenes. "We have several reports by travelers in the Library. They all say the passes are very narrow, barely wide enough for a horse. How will you get your elephants through?"

  "You should read more of your own books, learned scroll-master," said Barca. "The mountains are made of calx.

  Vinegar dissolves calx. We shall bring hundreds of casks of vinegar. The mountains shall melt away, and the great war beasts shall pass."

  "Why does Carthage disclose its strategy to Rome in advance?" asked Ptolemy.

  The young Carthaginian grinned. "No harm in it at all. First, they think we lie, that we try to deceive them. Therefore, they won't bother to defend the passes. Second, they're so confident that if and when they do fortify the passes they would so tell us. Third, they are incapable of thinking in terms of empire for themselves, so they can't conceive that their enemies would have such impossible ideas. They lack imagination. They don't know what dreams are."

  "They seem to have done very well despite these deficiencies," demurred Eratosthenes. "Three hundred years ago they were just a fishing village on the Tiber. Now they rule the entire Italic peninsula. Who needs dreams?"

  "You have a point, mapmaker. Well then, reverse the case. We Phoenicians needed dreams, and we produced them. We have established trading outposts at the limits of the known world. We have sailed through the Pillars of Hercules to the Tin Islands. We have circumnavigated Afr
ica. We have traded in the Black Sea. Our ships rule the Western Mediterranean, and business on great waters has made us rich. And all because we had a vision. We still have it, and with it, we shall beat the Romans."

  "Peace, gentlemen," said Ptolemy. Wars and rumors of war made him uneasy. "Let us talk of other things. Eratosthenes, how go the angles?"

  "Today, my lord Ptolemy, the day of the summer solstice, I measured the angle of the sun at high noon. I found it to be seven degrees and ten minutes."

  The Second Ptolemy smiled graciously, yet warily, and with a warning in his eyes. "And pray what is the significance of seven degrees and—what was it—?"

  "Ten minutes, my lord. Significance?" The geometer eyed the Greek pharaoh carefully. "To determine the significance, we may need the assistance of the priests"—he bowed gravely to Hor-ent-yotf and Rabbi Ben Shem—"and the historians"—a bow to Cleon, the Homeric exegesist—"and perhaps to other philosophers, living and dead."

  Claudius Pulcher had meanwhile returned from the credentia with a wine refill. "Aside from all this assistance, real or threatened," he grumped, "can anyone tell me the significance of seven degrees and ten minutes?"

  "By itself, nothing," volunteered Hamilcar Barca. "However, taken with certain other measurements, it could give you the size and shape of the Earth." He said to the librarian: "Am I right?"

  Eratosthenes sighed, and glanced at Ptolemy from the corner of his eye.

  "Oh, go ahead," said the pharaoh wearily. (And oh, to be on that barge!)

  The Greek shrugged. "At Syene, where the finest red granite is quarried, a tall pole casts no shadow at noon on the day of the summer solstice, and the sun shines directly into the wells. This is so because Syene lies almost directly on the Tropic of Cancer. Also, Alexandria lies almost due north of Syene, at a distance of 5,000 stadia. Now seven degrees and ten minutes is about 1/50 of a full circle, so 5,000 is 1/50 of a full circle on the Earth. Thus we multiply 5,000 by 50, and we get 250,000 stadia as the circumference of the Earth."

  "One moment," interposed Ptolemy. "You say 5,000 stadia. How did you measure that?"

  "From cadasters—registers of land surveys for tax purposes, made by the Second Rameses, over a thousand years ago. The exact dimensions of the nomes are given. It's a matter of simple addition, from Syene to the sea, with certain adjustments."

  The Roman frowned. "I still don't see. What's a 'stadia,' anyhow?"

  Hamilcar Barca smiled. "The singular is stadion. A bit over eight stadia to your Roman mile. Using your units, General, the world is a sphere about 30,000 miles in circumference."

  "Ridiculous," breathed Pulcher. "It can't possibly be that big."

  "This is entirely unofficial," interposed Ptolemy hastily. "The Great House takes no position…"

  Rabbi Ben Shem smiled uneasily. "Dear Eratosthenes… the Earth cannot be a sphere. Our Holy Scriptures state, 'the four corners of the Earth.' "

  "I think we may be overlooking the obvious," said Hor-ent-yotf. "Our esteemed geometer assumes the sun is so far away that its rays, as received here, are parallel. The assumption is totally unwarranted, as I shall show. There are other, much more reasonable conditions that will give the same data." He pulled a piece of papyrus from his linens and inspected it. "If the sun is 40,000 stadia distant, it will give your same shadow angle of about seven degrees here at Alexandria, will it not, Eratosthenes?"

  The mathematician smiled. "Quite so—assuming the Earth is flat."

  "As is indeed the case," said the Roman ambassador.

  Hamilcar Barca shook his head. "Like the Greeks, we Carthaginians are a seafaring people. On shore, when we watch a ship come in, we see first the tip of the mast, then the sails, then the bow. That means to us that the Earth is a great ball, and that the ship comes up into view over the curvature. It is the same at sea. For example, my trireme arrived here at night. We came in. guided by the great Pharos light tower. At first, our man at mast-top could not see the light at all. And then, suddenly, 'Light ho!' and there it was, just over the belly of the sea."

  There was a moment's silence, broken by Ptolemy. His voice was strained. "This is a very interesting discussion; yet I do not feel that we can ignore a thousand years of research and thought that have gone into the problem. Certainly the ancient authorities leave no doubt on the question. Homer said the Earth was a flat disc, bounded by the River Oceanus. A decade before the battle of Marathon, Hecataeus announced the same fact."

  "One moment, your majesty," said Hamilcar Barca. "Your own Aristotle believed the Earth to be a sphere because of the round shadow on the moon, during lunar eclipse."

  Ptolemy shrugged. "Homer's disc, head-on, would cast a round shadow."

  "My lords," said Rabbi Ben Shem harshly, "/ make no attempt to define or deal with impiety. Certainly Greek history provides ample precedent. I have read widely in your Library, Eratosthenes, and I can cite your own laws and applicable cases. Your Anaxagorus propounded a heliocentric system, and wrote that the sun was a big blazing ball, bigger even than the Peloponnesus. He was condemned to prison for his impiety. Pericles was barely able to save his life. Aristarchus also proposed a heliocentric cosmos, and was accused of impiety. Alcibiades was recalled from the Syracuse campaign to face charges of impiety to Hermes: whereupon Athens lost the war. Socrates was executed for impiety. Protagoras confessed agnosticism and fled Athens with a price on his head."

  Ptolemy rubbed his chin. "I, for one, believe Homer, who declared the Earth to be flat, with its omphalos—navel—at Delphi. A sphere seems quite impossible. People at the antipodes would walk with their heads hanging down. Trees would grow downward. Rain would fall up. These things cannot be." He fixed a grim eye on Eratosthenes. "The gods gave us a flat world, my young friend. Adjust your numbers to fit the facts, not the other way around." And so having delivered his views, and having thus dried his throat, he and Pauni left the group in search of the wine table.

  "Well, then, man of the Library," said Ben Shem, with just a hint of triumph, "you will of course recant?"

  Eratosthenes found his body turning, not to face the rabbi, but instead to Hor-ent-yotf. It was to the priest of the hawk-god that he gave his answer: "No! I do not recant. I do not retract. It is as I said." The hawk-priest stared at him without the slightest expression.

  "Oh!" said Ben Shem. "You claim the Earth is a sphere?"

  "Yes."

  "And it circles the sun?"

  "Did I say that? If I didn't, I meant to."

  "Aiee!" shrieked the rabbi. "Heresy, heresy compounded!" He pulled at his beard, and a few hairs tore loose.

  "Sorry," said the Greek apologetically. "I didn't know you'd take it this way."

  The priest stumbled away, muttering.

  Khor shot a thought into the geometer's mind: "Science is a very upsetting subject around here."

  "Yes."

  Hamilcar Barca broke in. "May I ask a question about your 5,000-stadia measure to Syene?"

  "Of course."

  "Does that include a rake-off by your local priests? Say, one-sixth?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, suppose the true measurement is actually 4,285 stadia. Do the priests add one-sixth, or 715, for their share of the grain crops?"

  "Yes." It was Hor-ent-yotf who answered. They all looked around at him. "From the time of Menes," said the priest, "the first pharaoh, who united upper and lower Egypt, the temples have taken one-sixth of the crops. We do this painlessly, by telling the farmer his plot is one-sixth larger than it really is."

  Eratosthenes was embarrassed. "I am caught in a gross error. The circumference is then 4,285 times 50, not 5,000 times 50. More accurately, the circumference is"—he thought a moment—"214,250 stadia, or about 26,000 Roman miles."

  "The one-sixth difference is not significant," said Hor-ent-yotf. "The crux of the matter is, you have attempted to heresy of the gravest order." He signaled to Ne-tiy. She glanced once at Eratosthenes, then followed the hawk-priest away from the group.
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  "Watch him," warned Khor. "I see into his mind. He has condemned you, and he means to kill you."

  The geodesist shrugged. "It had to come."

  "Shouldn't you leave now?"

  "Why delay the confrontation? It might as well be here. Regardless of what happens to me, Ne-tiy can drive you back to your ship."

  "I wasn't thinking of that. When the time comes, I can manage by myself."

  "Can you see them?" asked Eratosthenes. "You are taller."

  13. Something in the Wine

  "I see them both very well. He and the female approach the wine table. He whispers to her. She is to put something in your wine."

  "Poison."

  "Yes. You are to die by poison. The mind of the female is in a great turmoil. She wants to refuse. But the priest threatens her. Ah, she looks back this way. but she cannot see you. What a strange expression on her face, Eratosthenes. How is one to interpret it?"

  "Horror, possibly. She does not really want to kill me. She resists strongly, but I think probably she will make the attempt. From childhood, this is what the temple trained her to do."

  "They argue some more. He insists. He says to her, if she fails, servants will bind her mouth and limbs, and carry her in a cart to the temple pool, and the crocodiles will feed. And you will die in any case."

  "Pleasant fellow."

  "Perhaps you should leave with me, Eratosthenes. As you know, I still seek a bipedal specimen. On my world you need have no fear of assassination."

  The librarian laughed forlornly. "Don't tempt me, admirable visitor. What are they doing now?"

  "Nothing as yet. I am in the mind of the priest. He is thinking about rings on his fingers, and three white powders. Arsenic… strychnine… aconite. Arsenic is tasteless, but takes a while, probably too long for what he wants. Also you might get sick and vomit. Strychnine? A good one. Not much is needed. Acts in a few minutes. Whole body goes into mortal spasm. He's seen a man die, lying flat, resting only on his heels and the back of his skull. But strychnine is bitter. You might taste it and not drink the wine. No, no strychnine for you. It's aconite. The deadliest known poison. It is extracted from a delicate plant that looks like a tiny helmet or hood, and which grows in mountains called the Alps, far to the north of the Roman domains. A crystal the size of a grain of sand can be fatal. You are quickly paralyzed. Your heart stops. Death is quick. Ah, he's moving. He cups his hand over a wine goblet. The cap on his golden ring opens. A powder falls into the wine. He gives the goblet to the girl. He snarls at her, and she moves away. Look sharp, Eratosthenes! Here she comes!"