Celestial Matters (33 page)

“How does this work?” Phan asked.

“The fire and air force the water from the wood,” I said. “We use the wool blanket to soak it up before it has a chance to evaporate into the air. When the blanket’s completely sodden, we’ll squeeze the water out and drink it.”

Phan frowned. “More of your incomprehensible science. Why does turning wood into earth produce water?”

“We are not turning wood into earth,” I said. “That would be impossible. We are extracting water from wood, leaving a residue of earth.”

His brows knit in puzzlement. “Wood is wood, earth is earth. One changes into the other. Why should anything remain?”

I considered giving up on the conversation, but I had never had the opportunity to speak to a Taoist scientist before and my curiosity was too strong. But before continuing the discussion I spoke to Yellow Hare. “Watch me,” I said. “And stop the conversation if I show any signs of hyperclarity.”

“Yes, Aias,” she said.

“We seem to be having a language problem,” I said to Phan. “Let us start from first principles. You know the atomic theory, of course.”

“I have seen that phrase in your books, but I have never understood it.”

“Atomic theory says that everything in the terrestrial world is made of minute pieces of earth, air, fire, and water. The material properties of an object can be changed by modifying the amount of each element it contains.”

Phan shook his head. “Anything can be in a state of earth, air, fire, water, or wood,” he said. “The ten thousand things are changed into one another by the natural flow of transformation.”

We continued to argue about basics for half an hour. I explained that matter and form were fundamental to the behavior of objects. He declared them to be accidents, saying that the flow and transformation of things lay at the heart of all science. At the end of that time we had found no common ground, but we were both very thirsty. Thankfully, the blanket was soaked through with water. We squeezed the liquid out into a large bronze bowl Clovix had found and took turns drinking. The water was brackish; it smelled of pine and tasted of wool, but my parched throat took it in as eagerly as if I were drinking the first sweet wine pressed from springtime grapes.

Yellow Hare and Ramonojon came forward to quench their thirsts, as did Clovix. I looked around for the others, but could not see them.

“Where are Mihradarius and Miiama?” I asked Yellow Hare.

“They walked to the port side of the hill,” she said, taking only a sip from the bowl. “I can hear them from here. They’ve been discussing our chances for survival and considering whether it would be better to try and kill us now or wait. I decided it was better to let them plot where I could hear them rather than let them sit here and scheme in silence.”

“Very wise,” I said.

Phan crinkled his nose in disgust as he swallowed some more gray water. Then he took a small packet wrapped in dried green lotus leaves from one of his pockets and unwrapped it. Inside were a dozen orange-gold pills about the size of ripe grapes. “Not many left,” he said as he ate one.

“Middler food pills?” Yellow Hare asked.

“Hmm?” He looked at her curiously. “Survival pills, actually. They keep one awake and alert for days as well as satisfying the need for food. Water, however, is still necessary.”

He started to put them away, then looked at my bedraggled appearance and tired, red eyes. A gentle spirit entered him and he held the pills out to me. “Would you like one?”

I took one of the pills and studied it.

“Aias, don’t take it,” Yellow Hare said. “It could be poison.”

“I’ll take the risk,” I said, “if it can increase our chance for survival.”

“Commander, as your bodyguard I should test it.”

“No, Yellow Hare,” I said. “If you die, there will be no one to protect Ramonojon or Clovix from Miiama.”

“Commander, I insist—”

But I swallowed the pill. It tasted like a lump of dried clay, but the moment the pill was in my stomach the aches I had been trying to ignore went away, my eyes stopped straining, my hunger disappeared, and the niggling desire to yawn vanished. My muscles, which had been through days of pain, stopped groaning. But most amazing, my mind felt released to range freely rather than to focus on one thing at a time to the exclusion of all others. The threat of hyperclarity went away, yet the sharpness of thought bestowed on me by the upper air remained.

“Amazing,” I said to Phan.

“They are common pharmaceuticals,” he said.

I was tempted to ask him how they worked, but did not, at that point, desire another confusing conversation. Instead I turned to my bodyguard. “I believe the pills are safe.”

Ramonojon, Clovix, and Yellow Hare each took one after that. My bodyguard glared at me balefully for the risk I had taken, but I felt a spirit of compassion behind her anger.

“I will have to make some more soon,” Phan said, staring down at the seven pills remaining in the crackling bundle of lotus leaves.

“How long do they last?”

“One week,” he said.

“A week without sleep or food?” I said in amazement.

Phan did not even notice my surprise. He seemed lost in thought. “Miiama will not be happy about my giving them to you. But I doubt we will live long enough for him to report my indiscretion.”

Yellow Hare cocked a puzzled eyebrow. “Is not Miiama your subordinate?”

“And my jailer,” Phan said.

“Your jailer?” I said in ’Unan, sure that Phan was mistaken in the ’Ellenic word he had just spoken.

“That is correct,” he said in his native language. “This unworthy one is here to redeem his family from his disgrace.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Two years ago,” he said, his eyes losing focus and staring off into the past, “I designed a fire tamer.”

“A what?”I said.

“A device that controls the Xi flows that govern the way a fire spreads. The device worked perfectly in the laboratory, and the Son of Heaven himself congratulated me and gave me a position in the main laboratories in ’AngXou. My fire tamer was given to an army in the land you call North Atlantea. They planned to use it to burn down one of the great eastern forests, depriving your city-states there of materials and protection. But I had made an error.”

“The fire tamer did not work,” I said.

“It worked perfectly, except that the Xi that governs the wind can overpower the Xi that governs the motion of fire. The battle kites that flew above the army need to control the Xi of the wind in order to fly. The wind Xi forced the fire to go one way, and my fire tamer forced it to go in another direction. A tornado of flame rose up and burned half the army to death.”

Phan took another sip from the bronze bowl and wiped the residue of wool from his lips with his sleeve.

“The Son of Heaven ordered my execution and that of my three groups of relatives, but the Minister of Celestial Affairs intervened. He offered me the chance to save my family by aiding in the destruction of your ship. My death, of course, was inevitable.”

“What does that have to do with Miiama?” Yellow Hare asked.

The old man half smiled out of the left side of his mouth. “The plan, as I said, required that no matter what else happened, I was to die, so they gave me Miiama as assassin, guardian, and warden.”

Phan crossed his hands in his lap and clacked his long fingernails together. “But I am not as staunch as I should be in my acceptance of death. I was willing to die in the fires of the sun, but I find it harder to starve to death out here or to throw myself off and shatter against the lower spheres. Miiama would kill me if I asked him to, but I cannot bring myself to do so. I do not know how long he will be patient with me.”

He took another drink of water. “No doubt Miiama will choose his moment.”

Then he stood up, bowed to all of us, and went back to the edge of the ship to continue his drawings.

I stared at him for a time while Kleio and Athena whispered to each other in the back of my mind. At last I turned to Yellow Hare.

“Would you give someone in disgrace such an important assignment?”

“Of course not,” she replied. “I would give it to someone willing to die in the full knowledge that he would be acknowledged a hero for his acts.”

“As would I,” I said. “And would you assign someone else to make sure such a man died?”

“That would be an insult to the honor of whomever I had given the assignment,” she said. “What are you thinking, Aias?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Kleo and Athena are whispering to me but I do not yet understand enough to comprehend what the blessed goddesses are trying to say to me.”

“The water barrel is full,” Ramonojon said, interjecting a note of practicality. “What should we do now?”

I considered his question for a while. With food, water, and Phan’s survival pills, we would be able to live, at least for a time. I turned my thoughts toward finding a means by which we could return to Earth.

To move we needed impellers. And to make impellers we needed fire-gold, of which our stores held only ten pounds. The ship did not have much raw gold on board, nor did we have a foundry by which we could turn gold into fire-gold. That meant we would have to scrounge material for impellers from the only source left on the ship, the evac cannons.

The forward, port, and starboard batteries had departed with the front half of
Chandra’s Tear.
That left only the rear cannon battery.

Yellow Hare objected when I explained my idea. “The aft cannons are intact. If you take the fire-gold from them this ship will be defenseless.”

“We don’t have enough gunners to shoot the cannons,” I said. “We might as well use the fire-gold for movement.”

“If that is your decision, Commander,” she said.

“It is.” I turned to Clovix. “Fetch some long pry bars.”

“Yes, Commander,” he said.

The rear cannon battery jutted defiantly upward, pointing its metal spear shafts toward the planet of the war god. In the red light of Ares, the bronze-and-steel cylinders glowed like a clouded sunset. At the base of each cannon near the gunner’s seat was a series of levers that rotated the artillery piece in any direction. One by one Yellow Hare worked the gears to rotate the cannons until they lay flat across the surface of the ship. Then Clovix crawled inside the barrels and pried out the hand-span-around hemispheres of fire-gold that rarefied the air inside the cannons.

Ramonojon and I piled the gleaming yellow metal into a mound and kept a running tally of how much of the precious substance we had amassed.

At some point Phan joined us. He seemed fascinated with the fire-gold, picking up the nodules and studying them with an intent eye.

“We have never understood this substance,” he said. “I have experimented on captured pieces of it time and again. All I have gotten from my studies is a terrible smell and a light-headed feeling. I did transmute it into fire once; that was remarkably easy and remarkably bad for my laboratory.”

I laughed, remembering the play Euripos had been in with its wide array of explosions. Old man, I thought, may you join the chorus of actors in ’Ades and perform the greatest comedies before the lord and lady of that realm.

I took a deep breath; my mind cleared and I returned to thinking like a scientist. “Fire-gold is just metal impregnated with as much fire as it can hold,” I said to Phan.

“That makes no sense,” he said, turning the nodule around and watching the air clarify around it.

I tried the atomic theory one more time. “Metal is earth mixed with fire.”

“Metal is metal, fire is fire, earth is earth,” he said.

“I do not think we will make any progress arguing basic principles,” I said.

Phan cocked his head to the side and thought for a minute. “Very well,” he said. “Of what practical use is this fire-gold?”

“It pushes the earthly impurities out of the nearby air, rarefying it.”

“So?”

“The thinner the air, the faster objects can move through it.”

“Objects move as Xi directs them,” he said, returning to basics.

I looked over at Ramonojon for assistance. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. I sighed and gave up the debate. I had what I thought were more important issues to occupy my mind.

Over the next several hours we gathered all the fire-gold, amassing nearly two hundred pounds of the precious metal.

“Ramonojon,” I said, “is this enough to get us home?”

He sat down with a ragged piece of papyrus and a charcoal stick salvaged from the labs and started scribbling. He stopped half an hour later and frowned at his calculations. “We do not have the equipment to improve the dynamics of the ship, so those are fixed. But we can make new ballast balls and install some crude controls for new impellers. If we did all that, we might reach ’Ermes in one hundred and forty-seven years.”

“One hundred and forty-seven years?”

He nodded. “I concerned myself only with flight time. There is also the problem of maneuvering the ship out of this maze of epicycles we are trapped in, not to mention the difficulty of flying past the sun without a professional navigator. I am also assuming that we will jettison the net. There is no way we could make it back with the fragment pulling us randomly through space.”

“We need to find another way,” I said.

“I have a thought,” Ramonojon said. “We could do nothing.”

“Nothing?” Yellow Hare said.

“We can wait until the
Spear of Ares
arrives,” Ramonojon said. “They are supposed to depart for this planet in two months.”

I shook my head. “After Kleon stole their impellers, they had to commission new ones which will not be ready for at least eighteen months. And their expected flight time is another six. We could not extract enough water for all that time, and I doubt very much that Phan could make enough survival pills for such a stay.”

We lapsed into silent contemplation for a time. As we sat alone with our thoughts and our gods, Ares rolled inexorably in his epicyclic orbit, dipping below the horizon of the ship and dragging the sun fragment with it. The sky became dark and the stars came out for that brief nighttime. We were closer to the Sphere of Fixed Stars than any men had ever been, and all we wanted to do was return to Earth.