Celestial Matters (11 page)

I looked at his companion, a morose, well-muscled Egyptian dressed in nothing but a loincloth and a leather tool belt. I did not remember his name, but I knew he was one of the heavy-equipment operators who worked under Ramonojon. He was equally frenetic and angrily waved a sander in the air. The rough stone block noisily dripped water on my floor. “These twittering birdbrains won’t even wait for us to finish beveling the prow before they install their impellers. We won’t be held responsible if they turn
Chandra’s Tear
into a lumbering hulk.”

I held up a hand to silence them.

“Now, tell me what is happening,” I said sternly. “One at a time.” I pointed at the Egyptian. “You first.”

Their accounts were decidedly laden with partisan anger, but I managed to piece together what was happening. Ramonojon’s dynamic reshaping was taking longer than expected, and Kleon was impatient to get the Ares system emplaced, so their underlings were getting into fights over who should be working where.

And while this had been going on, all the reports that had crossed my desk had spoken of amicable progress.

The rage of Ares boiled up in my heart. “Return to your duties. I’ll see to this matter myself.”

I slipped a woolen cloak over my shoulders to keep the wind off and, followed by Captain Yellow Hare, stalked outside.

The sky at five hundred miles up was perfectly clear, and ’Elios blessed us with streams of his clean gold light. We walked down the hill and across the starboard side of the ship. I was impatient to reach the navigation tower, but Yellow Hare insisted on maintaining proper security procedures. We walked for a cautious half an hour and with each slow step my anger at being deceived festered and grew in my heart. Aeson’s soldiers saluted as we passed their barracks, as did the gunners manning the starboard evac cannon battery, but none of them approached us. I don’t know if it was Yellow Hare’s orders or the fact that my countenance must have made me look like one of the Furies.

We were just passing the amphitheater when Athena tapped me on the shoulder. She reminded me that if I wanted answers, I would have to be calm, firm but calm. I stepped through the actors’ entrance in the rear of the open-to-the-sky auditorium. Tiers of solid moonstone seats were set in a half-circle around a stage carved from terrestrial granite. It had been a long time since the crew had put on any amateur dramatics. Aeson and I planned to remedy that situation once we began the long journey to the sun, but if things were not settled between Kleon and Ramonojon that trip would never begin.

I walked around the low platform where the chorus would stand and climbed onto the stage to face my audience of one.

“Fool! to think that I would brook with blood to stain me from my throat.” I quoted the
Orestes
of Euripides, hoping to expend my wrath in oratory.

“That is no way to contain your anger,” Yellow Hare said from the center bottom seat.

“Then how?” I asked, surprised but pleased at her solicitude.

“Keep hold of it in your heart,” she said, and I could almost see ’Ermes and Athena sitting on her shoulders, lending her eloquence and wisdom. “Let it give force to your words like the strength of your arm, but do not let it guide your words. At the Spartan college they say anger is fire; contain it with wisdom and it will give you strength forever; let it out and it will blow away, leaving only ashes.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Fire is something I understand.”

We left the theater and climbed over the small rise bowward of it. The sight that greeted my eyes from the top of that hillock fed the fire in my heart like a forest of dry wood. Across the sharp prow of my ship, dynamicists and celestial navigation engineering crews swarmed like two tribes of warring ants.

Water-spraying bevelers came perilously close to fire-belching road graders. Cranes with heavy loads of stone and metal wavered perilously over the crowd. The forward cannon battery was being pulled back on float carts by teams of slaves under the direction of some dynamicists. Scant yards away, engineers lowered the Ares impellers over the bow on other cranes whose lines threatened to tangle with their rival machines.

“Stop!” I shouted.

There was too much noise for most of them to hear me, but the ones in the rear did, and they relayed the order from man to man until there was silence across the fore part of my ship.

“Work crew leaders come up here.”

Kleon’s and Ramonojon’s senior deputies stepped up to the hill. They were about to open their mouths and complain but I raised my fist for silence. “I don’t want to hear any explanations. I’ll talk to your seniors about that. Clear everything carefully out of the way. Don’t interrupt, I don’t care how far behind schedule that will put you. I want this area to be safe before any more work is done.”

“Yes, Commander,” they said in uncomfortable unison.

“You will then work in alternate six-hour shifts, dynamicists first. Is that clear?”

“But, commander—”

“I asked if that was clear.”

“Yes, sir,” they said, and returned to their crews.

Yellow Hare and I went to the navigation tower while the cowed workers disentangled themselves. Yellow Hare spoke briefly to the guards stationed at the base of the moonstone spire, then preceded me through the thin blue curtain at the entrance and up the spiral stairs to Kleon’s control room.

My chief navigator was hunched in front of a writing desk, strumming his lyre with one hand and drawing lines with charcoal on papyrus with the other. The panel that actually controlled the ship was being manned by one of Kleon’s junior navigators, a young Theban woman named ’Ekuba, who was staring out through the square quartz window in front of the controls.

“Kleon!” I said, pulling slowly on the fire in my heart like Yellow Hare drawing on her pipe. “We need to talk.”

His hands jumped, raising a harsh discord from his lyre. “I nearly had it. I could have cut three days off our travel time, and now I’ve lost the chords.”

Then he looked up and saw who had interrupted him. “Aias? What are you doing out of your office?”

I ignored his question and pointed at the window. “Have you looked out there recently?”

Kleon leaned over to brush charcoal from the paper. The black dust fell slowly to the floor, then skittered trails across the hard stone as the ship’s circular motion forced the powder into unnatural perambulations.

“It’s not my fault,” he said. “I’m following the schedule.”

He picked up his lyre and pointed to a sheet of paper glued to the wall. It was in Ramonojon’s meticulous handwriting and gave specific times and dates when his dynamicists would be working on each part of the ship. From the state of work outside, it appeared that they were two weeks behind. This was the first time in three years that Ramonojon’s crews had been anything but punctual.

Kleon picked up his lyre and strummed the Pythagorean chords of the seven spheres. “My people are doing their jobs. I’ve tried to talk to Ramonojon about his workers, but he just says he’ll look into it and then returns to whatever it is he’s experimenting on.

“Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?”

“I am sorry,” he mumbled. “I did not mean to offend you, Commander, but with the danger and your own work … We thought it would be better to work things out among ourselves, but Ramonojon hasn’t been doing his work.”

“Ramonojon?”

“Yes, Aias. He said he would keep his men to the schedule but he hasn’t been out here once to oversee them.”

“Then you should have told me weeks ago.”

“Yes, Aias.”

“I’ll speak to Ramonojon right away,” I said, trying to keep my anger under control. “And as for you, the next time something like this happens I expect to see you in my office telling me about it.”

“Yes, Commander,” he said.

I stalked out of the tower and proceeded aft toward Ramonojon’s laboratory. The fury rose in me; all I could think about was that my friend who had always supported me was now ignoring his duty both to the project and to me.

“Commander,” Yellow Hare said quietly. “Settle yourself before you speak to him. Contain your anger.”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“You have dealt with the immediate emergency. You have the time to settle yourself and think through what you want to say.”

We came around the starboard side of the central hill and saw the bright yellow colonnade of the commissary.

“Food and wine to settle the balance of my humours,” I said.

“Yes, Commander,” she replied.

The commissary courtyard was nearly empty; only a tenth of the hundred eating couches were occupied. Most of the diners were junior scientific staff, but a few off-duty soldiers were present. These snapped to attention when Yellow Hare entered. I walked to the squat granite kitchen at the aft end and ordered a small loaf of bread and half a roast chicken from the chief cooking slave. Yellow Hare made the nervous old Norsewoman taste the food before letting me settle down to eat.

I had just cut off the drumstick when one of my staff approached me, a Theban woman named Phaedra; she was a good Ouranologist, but her student years at the Akademe had made her too cautious in proposing her own ideas. “Excuse me, Commander. I know how busy you are, but something strange came up and I didn’t know if I should disturb you with it.”

“Too many people have been trying to not disturb me, Phaedra.” I took a bite of the chicken, concentrating on the taste to control my anger. It was fresh and hot; the skin slipped down my throat just right, leaving a tang of Indian pepper on my tongue. “Tell me.”

“Chief Dynamicist Ramonojon came to the file room last week and asked to see the archive report on the first ’Elios probe. I gave it to him. The next day, Security Chief Anaxamander reprimanded me. He said that report was restricted to the Ouranology staff.”

“I’ll look into it,” I said. I finished the chicken and returned the bones to the kitchen so the spon-gen labs could use them in growing more birds. What would Ramonojon want with ten-year-old data on the sun? I wondered. And didn’t Anaxamander have more important things to do than checking on my files?

Aft of the commissary we walked onto a square, open plain of gleaming moonstone that extended in for a quarter mile from the starboard edge of the ship. The area was flatter than the rest of
Chandra’s Tear
, but with rougher ground. It was the place where ceremonial games were held and funerals performed. We had had no deaths so far, but both Aeson and I knew that we could not rob the sun without some loss of life. The corners of the plain were each marked with a ’Erm, a small head of ’Ermes Psychopompos set on a three-foot-high marble pillar. None of the crew knew that when Sunthief had begun, Aeson and I had gone to these statues and offered sacrifices of wine and blood to the god of thieves and guide of the dead.

Past the open enclosure at the ship’s widest point lay the lab caverns, where my subordinates did their work. The surface entrances to these caves were hemispherical mounds with curtained openings behind which lay straight stairways down into the ship. We entered Ramonojon’s lab through the starboardmost hillock.

Yellow Hare and I walked down two dozen steps and entered the dynamicist’s moonlit underworld. The cave was a demicylinder, like an eastern Atlantean longhouse. Its long edge ran from fore to aft and we had entered from the lone door in its fore end. The center of the cave was empty, though the flat floor and high arched ceiling bore as much soot and scarring as the pyrology lab at the Akademe. Drawing tables, stores of pen and ink, and stacks of paper fined the port wall, but no one was in that side of the lab. The starboard wall was covered with stacks of thick steel cases, each containing a sample of some terrestrial or celestial material. Ramonojon sat at a workbench near the cases, hunched over something. Yellow Hare gave the room a good eyeing, then nodded for me to enter.

Ramonojon looked up with a lined, haggard face. He coughed and rubbed his hands against his cheeks. “Aias, what are you doing here?”

“Trying to keep my ship from falling apart. Your people and Kleon’s are practically at war.”

He cocked his head. “What about?”

“The resculpting.”

“Oh, that’s my fault.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“I thought I could leave that work to my juniors. I suppose I had better take care of it.”

The rage began to spread from my heart into my blood. I could feel black bile rising to color my thoughts. Then I grasped the anger and did as Yellow Hare had advised. I placed my fury in the timbre of my voice. “Senior Dynamicist Ramonojon,” I said, casting my words like the spear of Ares. “Why have you not been doing your duty?”

But my anger did not strike him. He reacted to my rebuke as if it were a simple question.

“Because of this,” he said, and waved us over to his table.

On an oil-smudged cloth lay a scale model of
Chandra’s Tear
carved from Selenean matter. It was chained to the table by bands of iron to keep it from spinning off under its natural motion. The model was a foot-long teardrop, carved in so much detail that I could not only make out large features like the hill and the amphitheater, but small ones like the entrance to my cave. Dynamicists only made such models when they needed to study the unique motive characteristics of a particular object.

Twenty small weights depended from the bottom, representing our ballast spheres, and ten small fire-gold balls, miniatures of our lift orbs, floated above it, secured to the model ship by steel rods. A groove had been cut in the aft end of the model where we’d planned to put the sun net. Also on the table was a four-inch-wide fire-containment box. Something inside it was making a steady thumping noise. A gossamer net about two inches long waved jerkily in the air, pulling in three different directions at three different rates. The net connected the model to whatever was in the box.

“What’s this?”

“This is a model of sun net design Delta. I constructed it according to Mihradarius’s specifications.”

“I’m impressed. Mihradarius’s work is so abstruse I doubt any Ouranologist could duplicate it. I know I couldn’t. How did you do it?”