Celestial Matters (6 page)

After two days of watching him stalk by me without a word of greeting, I retreated into his meager library, hoping for something to take my thoughts away from both Athens and Sparta. Among the numerous tracts on strategy I found a chronicle of battles written by a Persian general six and a half centuries before my birth. It was a rambling discourse by a bitter old man who, like me, had been abandoned by the fickle goddess Fame.

The man’s morose words reached across the centuries and filled me with black bile. But when I put the scroll down and his anger left me, I realized I had learned a great deal about the time in which he had lived. I found myself wanting to know more, to drown my sorrows in the lives of dead men. It was then that Kleio first appeared to me and unrolled the scroll of time for my mind’s eye to read.

In the years that followed I snooped through the dusty archives of every city in the Delian League. I read chronicles and ship manifests, scholarly arguments and legal disputes. I stuck my nose into every faded piece of paper from India to Atlantea. I even managed to acquire some documents from the Middle Kingdom, though they taught me little. I tried to organize this knowledge, to formulate theories of the past that I might offer to Kleio as the fruits of my scientific training. But since the Akademe did not consider history a true field of study, my papers were not published, and my lectures were orated before an audience of empty benches.

When the Archons gave me command of
Chandra’s Tear,
I gave up Kleio’s worship in order to conform to the proper image of a research scientist; sharp-eyed, clean of mind, lacking in eccentricities. Now the Muse was back to reclaim me and use me for what she had originally intended. Tonight, the entire Akademe would hear me speak, and Kleio, whose voice had been unheeded since Aristotle’s day, would speak through me.

The Muse pulled me to my feet and made me walk through the orchard. As I passed each tree, Kleio showed me a different part of the world, a different component of the past out of which she had assembled the present.

Here was a cedar from my homeland, where trade was born and from which the ’Ellenic hand had stretched out across the Mediterranean. Here were incense trees from India, where Alexander united a thousand warring Razas and pointed them eastward toward the Middle Kingdom. Here was a baobab from Africa, where the gold that powered our weapons was found, and a maple from North Atlantea, where the nine-centuries’ war against the Middlers still raged. And throughout the grove grew the olives of Athens, the source of Delian technology.

The divine grip grew stronger as I leaned against one of those olives to compose my speech from Kleio’s divine words.

*   *   *

The sun set over the Acropolis, scattering red light through the silver bars of the Akademe’s cage and bloodying Captain Yellow Hare’s armor. I brushed leaves from my robes as I stood up and stretched the kinks of inaction out of my muscles. To calm my stomach I ate an apple off a nearby tree before striding through the orchard to the lecture clearing.

Redheaded slaves, stomping around with northern European gracelessness, uncovered sustained-fire lamps. In the clean blue light I saw dozens of students and scholars milling about between the low stage on which I would speak and the ring of marble benches on which my peers would sit to judge me.

The blue-fringed scholars chirped like crickets as they argued the esoterica of their fields while red-fringed students listened respectfully. Occasionally, a brave youngster would interject a question into the rarified discussion. Most such interruptions would be dismissed with a succinct sharp answer calculated to instill in the student an awareness of his own foolishness. Rarely, the question would be one of those strokes of juvenile brilliance, and neither query nor querier would be berated. Instead, the sages would debate the matter, growing the fruits of implications from the callow seed of youthful inquiry. The student who had spoken would listen with parental pride, drinking in the envy of his friends.

The time for my speech approached and the senior kerux of the Akademe strode onto the stage and banged his wooden speaker’s staff three times. The noise of the crowd dulled to a murmur. The kerux waited a moment, gathering all eyes to him before speaking. “Aias of Tyre will now address the Akademe.”

I stepped into the light, and the knots of talking people drifted apart as I passed among them. Captain Yellow Hare faded into the shadows as silence came to the meadow.

The students seated themselves cross-legged on the ground in attentive rows, while the scholars perched on the marble benches. The young had come to hear what it was like to command a League project, to develop weapons for the good of the state. The old wanted to know what that weapon was. With Kleio’s aid I planned to disappoint all of them.

“May Athena and Aristotle bless this assemblage with wisdom and knowledge,” I said. The assemblage made the obligatory response. The students leaned forward like grass before the wind; the scholars steepled their hands and sat straight backed. “Tonight, my subject is history; my thesis is that nine centuries ago the Akademe abandoned the study of philosophy for that of science, and that abandonment was done not for the glory of Athena but for political reasons.”

“What is this nonsense?” a querulous voice warbled from the back bench. Pisistratos, one of my teachers in Ouranology, forced himself to his feet, fighting the natural tendency of ninety-year-old bones to remain seated. “What are you babbling about, Aias?”

I flinched slightly; harsh words from a hated teacher could still cut deep. Pisistratos had been particularly vicious to me in my youth; he had confidently asserted that I would never be a scientist, he had sulked when I flirted with fame, and he had gloated when I had faded away for two decades. No doubt he resented my recent return to glory, and no doubt he was pleased at the folly of my topic.

“This is a lecture on the history and purpose of the Akademe,” I said. “You need not stay if you do not wish to learn.”

Several scholars stood up and left, not even following the common practice of slinking quietly into the orchard to escape dull lectures. But most remained as if chained to their benches by my celebrity. Pisistratos stayed as well; I knew he was waiting for a chance to challenge me publicly and remind the Akademe that Aias the commander had for a long time been Aias, “that fool dabbling in history.”

I kept silence until the last straggler had left. “Does anyone know why Athenians, of all the peoples of the League, developed science to explain the mysteries of nature?”

I waited, but the only sound in the grove was the chittering of Egyptian scarabs warring over nuts and fruits with European squirrels.

“What is the cornerstone of science?” I asked, needing some response from them before my talk could go forward.

Chorus of students: “Experimentation!”

Now I had them. “Who discovered experimentation?”

The students looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. I could almost hear their thoughts. Experimentation is the way things are done. One might as well ask who discovered breathing or pouring libations to the gods.

Pisistratos narrowed his eyes and leaned forward into a hunter’s posture. When I had made a complete fool of myself, he would spring and gut me with a well-placed aphorism.

A Cretan boy with matted black hair and a straggly beard spoke up from the fourth row of students. His harsh Minoan accent and his uncertain speech reminded me of myself at his age. “Aristotle was the first to perform an experiment.”

“Why?”

The boy’s comrades looked at him with sober frowns, but the gleam in their eyes was all too familiar to me. They were happy to watch one of their own make a fool of himself. “Sir,” he asked, “what do you mean why?”

I leaned back, clasped my hands behind my head, and gazed up at the pockmarked moon. “What motive did Aristotle have to do something no one had ever done before?”

“Um … uh…” The boy stammered into silence. He glanced around like a hunted deer seeking escape from pursuing hounds. Then he looked at Pisistratos and pleaded silently for help.

The old man gathered up his dignity and the hem of his robe and strode forward to battle me. The students parted for him like wheat before the wind. “Aias, why do you waste our time? This is an institute of science. That is all we study.”

“That is precisely my point. Why is science all we study?”

He threw up his hands in melodramatic disgust. “Would you rather we wasted our time with Platonist dithering on the nature of ideal forms while the Middle Kingdom conquered us with their impossible Taoist science?”

I knew that dirty word “Platonist” would come out eventually. “No, Pisistratos, I do not want to waste our time on that nonsense. But I do want the students to know how we came to study science and nothing else.”

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “What else is worth studying?”

Pisistratos was finally debating me, giving me a chance to make my case. But I didn’t let my happiness blind me to the Sokratic trap he’d laid. I framed my counterquestion carefully. “Can science be studied without knowing anything else?”

Pisistratos sidestepped like a bull dancer. “What other subject do you need? Philosophy? Theology? Ethics? Perhaps drama and comedy are used in your secret research, but I have never needed them.”

“History is needed in my work.”

He lowered an eyebrow, twisting his lined face into a frown. All eyes fixed on him. Watching scholars debate has been the favorite sport of students ever since Sokrates faced off against the Sophists.

“History. What can history tell you?”

I offered a prayer of thanks to Kleio for guiding me and felt her breath on my back filling me with divine strength. “Tell me, Pisistratos, would you ever impregnate fertile earth with fire?”

He glared at me, adding wrinkles of annoyance to the map of his face. “Of course not; it would explode.”

“How do you know that?”

He snorted majestically, a sacred bull ready for sacrifice. “Every educated person knows that.”

I leaned forward and pointed toward his emaciated stomach. “But how do you know it?”

He waved airily toward the north edge of the orchard. “Because, one hundred and fifty years ago the hero Kofites blew himself to pieces trying to do exactly that.”

I bowed my head as if acknowledging his mastery. The moonlight shimmered down through the silver cage, casting a checkered pattern on his sneering face.

“Then you use history to avoid past mistakes,” I said quietly.

“But—”

I cut him off. The knowledge I had gathered through years spent in the neglected archives of the Akademe poured out of my lips, overwhelming him with an epic tale of the labor thousands of scholars had performed in the last nine centuries of painful research to determine the myriad facts every educated person knew.

“Everyone in the world knows something of the past,” I said. “Family history, the history of their particular fields of science. Some, like the best Spartans, know military history. But the Akademe does not want its students to know its own history. Why?”

The audience looked eagerly at Pisistratos. They wanted an answer to my question. But he didn’t know it, so their heads turned back to face me. And Pisistratos walked in stiff-necked stubbornness back to his seat.

I paused to gather my thoughts and drink again the wine of Kleio’s inspiration. Then I began to speak.

“The Akademe,” I said, “is not primarily a place of knowledge, but of war.”

Silence.

“The supposedly equal partnership between Athens and Sparta that has ruled the Delian League since its founding is dominated by Spartan thinking.”

A questioning rustle.

“To prove this, I will lay out three examples from the history of science; I will start with the most recent and progress backward to the time of Aristotle and Alexander.”

The wind stilled and even the scarabs and squirrels quieted at the mention of those heroes.

“The first event I will discuss happened only forty years ago.”

The eyes of the assembled students brightened. They knew what I would speak about: the first voyage to the moon.

At that time the classical school of Ouranology said such a journey would be impossible because there was a Sphere of Fire between Earth and Selene and there was no air beyond that sphere, only unbreathable ether. But the modern school denied the existence of the Sphere of Fire and claimed that air extended all through the universe out to the Sphere of Fixed Stars.

I told my audience how the modern school was proved right when Kroisos and Miltiades crashed the first celestial ship,
Selene’s Chariot,
on the moon, and returned in triumph, flying on a piece of celestial matter they had carved out of the moon itself. The wonders of the spheres became available for study, and the science of Ouranology flourished because of their efforts. The students would have cheered, but that would have been contrary to Akademe etiquette.

“But,” I said, “It was not for the sake of Ouranology that those two great men risked their lives. They went to Selene because Sparta wanted flying weapons, platforms to seize the skies from the domination of the Middle Kingdom.”

The divine voice rushed through me, filling my thoughts. I could no longer see my audience; I could only speak Kleio’s words.

I vaulted back three centuries for my second instance. At that time the Middle Kingdom had just invented battle kites and our ground troops had no defenses against them. To counter this advantage Sparta needed thousands of huge evac cannons to shoot them down. The generals demanded that the scholars produce the vast supply of fire-gold needed to rarify the air inside these cannons.

The Akedeme dragooned all its pyrologists and geologists, their task to turn the production of fire-enriched metals from a slow, dangerous, complex task to a simple, safe, easy one. Ten years and ten million obols later, they succeeded. In the process two fields of science were advanced, and float carts, capsule tubes, and a thousand other modern conveniences based on fire-metals were made practical, but again those were side effects of military demands.