Celestial Matters - Softcover

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I supplicate myself before Apollo of the poets and before the Muses. I ask them to fill me, a weak-voiced scientist, with their gifts so that I may in their honor adorn the tale I must tell with beauty, yet in it say nothing but the truth.
But forgive me, O gods, it is not right that I honor Apollo with my voice and dishonor his father Zeus, god of guests, with my anonymity. Therefore, I tell you that my name is Aias; that I was born in the city of Tyre in the 935the year since the founding of the Delian League; that my antecedents are honorable, since my mother was a child of a great Phoenician merchant house and my father a Spartan general who in his youth commanded armies and in his maturity served as military governor of many city-states within the League.
As for my personal honors, I graduated at the age of twenty from the Athenian Akademe and in the twenty-three years since then I served the League as a scholar in the fields of Pyrology and Ouranology. Most recently I held the post of Scientific commander of the celestial ship Chandra's Tear, and on that vessel I oversaw the researching, creation, and operation of Project Sunthief. It is because of my actions in that capacity that I am now called and do freely submit myself and my story to the gods for judgment.
Once again I bow before Phoibos and the Nine who follow him, and offer prayers for their assistance. With their help and your indulgence, therefore, permit me to begin my table during the last peaceful period in my life, that final stretch of pleasant time the Fates gave me before they snarled the thread of my existence.
For three years I had been in command of Chandra's Tear, during which time I and my subordinates had by the labor of our minds and the experiments of our hands brought Project Sunthief from a theoretical possibility to an incipient reality. At the end of those three years, we were actually capable of spinning celestial matter mined from the inner planets into a sun net. We believed and hoped that we would be able to use such a net to capture a portion of 'Elios's celestial fire.
But the exact specifications of the sun net still required a great deal of patient calculation and experimentation that could only be performed by Mihradarius, my chief Ouranologist. No other progress could be made until he finished that part of the project. When I put the matter to him Mihradarius passed a few minutes in silent contemplation, then confidently declared that he would be able to complete the work in a month.
So, much to our surprise, I and my other two primary subordinates, Kleon, chief Celestial Navigator of Chandra's Tear, and Ramonojon, the Chief Dynamicist, found ourselves with nothing to do for thirty days. We each decided to take advantage of this unexpected gift of time to take leave from the ship.
Of the thousand days that had passed since my crew had first assembled on Chandra's Tear not one of us had spent more than ten on the earth. I do not know how the others felt, but I had come to dream of once again walking across Gaea's stationary ground, and laying my motion-wracked body on her peaceful grassy surface, and enjoying the stillness of that static globe that lay at the center of the endlessly moving cosmos.
I sent messages down to Earth requesting permission from the Athenian bureaucracy, the Spartan military high command, and the Archons on Delos for a month's vacation for the three of us. Both of the Archons approved without comment. The Spartans had no objection since Chandra's Tear would still be guided by its Military Commander, my friend and partner, Aeson. They knew, as I did, that the firm hand of that wise officer would ensure that the project proceeded smoothly and securely. But the bureaucrats in Athens were another matter. They had no problem with Kleon and Ramonojon taking time off, but to their pedantic minds a ship's commander belonged on his ship.
For four days message capsules flew back and forth between Chandra's Tear and Athens conveying my arguments and their counterarguments. They finally gave in when I threatened to lodge protests with the Archons and the provost of the Akademe. I hinted at dire consequences to careers, and implied a level of influence with those in power that I was not sure I had. My bluff worked, but out of spite the bureaucrats insisted I find some way to pay for my absence. I grudgingly offered to make a lecture tour of some of the city-states around the Mediterranean to offset the minute costs of my month's rest.
That matter settled, Kleon, Ramonojon, and I cleared our desks of paperwork and prepared to depart. We arranged to disembark from the ship at the sky dock on Crete and come aboard again one month later from the port in Athens. I considered having a formal ceremony of departure, during which I would explicitly hand over scientific command of Chandra's Tear to Mihradarius, who was my second-in-command. But on reflection I decided that a formal ceremony of leave-taking with the requisite prayers, sacrifice, and taking of omens would make the crew too conscious of my absence and worry them unduly. However, neither did I want to simply vanish from my own ship like a thief in the night, so, the night before I was to go back down to Earth, I had a celebratory feast laid on in the ship's commissary.
The slave cooks did a marvelous job of preparing the meal, which centered around a whole roasted lamb marinated liberally in olive oil and oregano, served with barley bread fresh from the ship's ovens; there were also fresh vegetables from all across the world and little honey cakes dotted with dates. To add to the celebration, Mihradarius himself brought out some jars of Persian wine that had aged for many years in his family estates near Persepolis. He broke the seal on a dark red vintage and let the heady smell waft deliciously from the clay clask; then he poured and mixed the wine with water and toasted me with fulsome congratulations for having brought Sunthief this close to final success.
The whole scene is engraved in my heart with perfect clarity; I remember Mihradarius's aristocratic, upright stance, his flowing Athenian scholar's robes, and the sight of his right hand as he raised up the plate of wine. The last rays of sunlight glinted off the deep crimson liquid while the silvery glow that came up from the ship's deck set off the black figure painting of Mithras on the underside of the drinking vessel.
"To Aias of Athens," Mihradarius said, his voice carrying clearly though the crisp air of five hundred miles up. "Commander, may you well enjoy your rest after long labors."
I bowed my head in thanks and the two hundred crewmen of Chandra's Tear, both my own scientific staff and Aeson's soliders, raised their plates of wine and drank to my triumph from which their own triumphs would flow.
As the sun set, I raised my plate and drank to my crew in the mingled silver light of moon and stars and ship. That dark purple draft of Dionysos flowed down my throat and elated me with thoughts of my soon-to-be-completed achievement. All around me my crew were drinking and laughing, praising me and delighting in their own efforts. O gods, how easy it is for man to fall into hubris. O Prometheus, maker of man, why did you bless us with so little of your divine forethought?
Basking in the warmth of wine and praise, I took a plate of lamb and wandered for a while through the party, graciously accepting the congratulations of all about me and complimenting each crewman in turn upon his work. In one corner of the commissary, seated on two adjacent couches, I came upon Mihradarius and Ramonojon in animated discussion. They formed a strange contrast, the tall, intense young Persian genius, keen and clear with his ideas, and the old Indian man cautiously rounding off the sharp corners of concepts,...