Chapter 19: Gods and Science
Abdera walls
August 3, 319 BCE
Briarus stood on the wall of Abdera and looked out at the army. Well, no. He looked out at the fleeing mob that wasn’t an army anymore. And though the individual men might be soldiers again someday, this army was gone. He didn’t blame those men a bit. Not the least tiny dash. If those blasts of death had been aimed at him, he’d be running too.
He wanted to run right now. Briarus was an experienced commander. He’d fought for half his life and more. He’d seen swords spill out men’s intestines and been splashed with the gore.
But he had never in his life been as frightened as he was right now, even though he wasn’t in the least danger. He looked over at the ship sitting quietly on the far side of the breakwater and no longer firing its cannon, and remembered the not quite contempt, but certainly not respect, that he had felt for Adrian Scott . . . and his balls tried to climb into his gut.
He turned to an aide. “Hold the walls, but make no sally. I need to go talk to the”—he stopped and swallowed a lump in his throat—“them.” He pointed at the Reliance.
* * *
On the trip through the town and along the breakwater to approach the Reliance, Briarus tried to decide what aspect of the Reliance’s actions had so frightened him. Part of it was clearly that it was new. He knew death and war, but this was a new sort of death and a new sort of war. But that wasn’t all of it. It wasn’t lack of discrimination. A flight of arrows or a boulder tossed by a catapult is indiscriminate too. But a man could understand a bow or a catapult just by looking at it.
He groped for a word that would describe what horrified him and couldn’t find it. He couldn’t find it, because the word didn’t exist in any language he spoke.
The word was “mechanical,” but in the twenty-first-century sense of the word with its connotations of uncaring power. Different from the “deus ex machina” he was familiar with. Just as powerful, but without the moral focus. As though the gods stepped in, but then stomped on the army without caring who got crushed. He didn’t get it worked out by the time he reached a point where he could wave to call a boat. He still didn’t have it worked out as he climbed out of the boat and up the rope ladder to the deck of the Reliance. But at least by then he had himself under control.
He saluted Commodore Scott with a firm fist to chest. And thanked him for his aid without any noticeable quaver in his voice.
Commodore Scott looked out at the battlefield, then looked back at Briarus. “I was angered by the attack on my ship, General. I’m afraid that caused me to be a bit less than fully circumspect in handling the Reliance. It shouldn’t be much of a problem, though. When the tide comes in, we should be able to get off the shore well enough.”
Briarus noted that the commodore didn’t even mention the enemy army or the use of the cannons. As though such things were without any importance at all. He asked for permission to use the radio room, and that boon was granted. He neither asked Commodore Scott to stay or to leave, but the commodore left him in the room with the radio tech.
There was no delay. The radio tech was already making reports and Eumenes was in the radio room in Amphipolis. Once the radio man knew that he wouldn’t touch anything, he too left so that Briarus could give his report in private.
He did. He told Eumenes all of it. What had happened. What he thought it meant. And he found himself telling Eumenes how he felt. “They are like gods, but gods in hiding. They go along, seeming like ordinary people, and then they sweep away an army like a child sweeping away straw.”
“They are ordinary people, Briarus,” said Eumenes’ voice over the radio. The radio that had seemed only a useful toy yesterday, but now seemed somehow to be more. “It is simply that they have tools we don’t understand. But we will understand them, and that understanding will come sooner than we might prefer. What matters for now is that Lysimachus’ army is broken. Send messengers to Seuthes and coordinate with him. He is the king of Thrace and Abdera is part of his kingdom. You’re a guest there.”
They talked then about the rights of the federal government as they contrasted with those of the satrapies and the states. The federal government had the right to move troops through any state, but if they did any unreasonable damage, the federal government could be held liable by the courts. Briarus listened and asked questions, and it sounded silly and convoluted—the next best thing to idiotic. The sort of silliness that the ship people were prone to.
Briarus swallowed again. And he wondered if there might be a connection between the silliness of a court that was separate from the legislature and the executive and the cannons that could rip an army to shreds. And a commodore who could defeat an army with just a single ship.
In point of fact, there was such a connection although it was not direct. The sort of industrial society that could produce a ship like the Reliance also tended to produce democratic governments. Even the worst dictatorships it produced were much more egalitarian and merit-based than the hereditary autocracies that Briarus was familiar with. You didn’t need to be of noble blood to rise high in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia.
But the immediate cause of Lysimachus’ army being routed was much simpler. It wasn’t even the disparity in weapons so much as the disparity in experience with those weapons. A Napoleonic-era army would not have been routed by the sort of carnage produced by the Reliance. Those soldiers were accustomed to standing up to twelve-pounder field guns, not the piddly four-pounders being used by the Reliance. But they were accustomed to cannon fire. To the men in Lysimachus’ army, the gunfire had been purely terrifying.
Amphipolis
The spy sat in the inn drinking sour wine and listening to the soldiers less than an hour later. He was a wine merchant, but he rounded out his income, and insured his continued prosperity, by providing Cassander with information. In this case, he would have to sneak out once the sun went down.
He went to the tavern that was frequented by the ship people radio operators and by their local support staff, and listened. It wasn’t hard.
Once the sun went down, he bribed a guard and was let out a sally port, then made his way across the field to Cassander’s camp.
Cassander’s camp, outside Amphipolis
Cassander sat on the camp stool and listened to the spy carefully. The oil lamps, newly designed with glass tubes on top, filled the tent with a ruddy golden light.
He tried to believe the man’s report, but it wasn’t easy. He thought back to the demonstration that the Queen of the Sea made when they dropped off the radio crew. He tried to imagine what those steam cannon would do to an army, and couldn’t. He knew it would not be good, but he honestly couldn’t imagine what it would actually feel like to have that rain of death falling on him.
What was quite clear was that whatever it was like, it was more than Lysimachus could handle. He found that both surprising and disappointing. Cassander had never liked Lysimachus, but the man was brave. “You have done well to bring me this news. You have your king’s thanks.” He gave the man a purse and waved him away. His bodyguards and companions started talking as soon as the man was gone.
“It’s a trick,” his brother Philip Lípos didn’t quite shout. “They bribed your spy or tricked him.”
Others chimed in, agreeing with Philip Lípos, or disputing his statement. Cassander listened and considered. He was always careful with these men. They were either the most prominent nobles in Macedonia or their sons. He needed them and the retainers they could bring to battle. Personally, Cassander was confident that his spy wasn’t betraying him, and rather less confident that he had not been fooled. The question that bothered him now was what to do about it.
He got up from the camp chair, another innovation of the ship people. It was a chair made of sticks with a cloth bottom and back. It was both lighter and more comfortable than the wooden camp stools he was used to. It also folded up for easy transport. He looked at that chair and realized he needed a way to sink the Reliance, not to take it. Two tries had proven that was impossible, but to sink it, to remove it from the game entirely . . . That might be done. A large enough charge of the black powder that even now powered the rockets that he sent over Amphipolis to burn its buildings. But until he could do that, he needed to be out of the range of Reliance’s guns. That meant ceding the coast to Eumenes and Eurydice.
Then he looked back at his staff and knew that he couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t stand for it. “Coward” was a word all too often used to describe Cassander, son of Antipater. It limited his options in a way that Alexander’s had never been. And even, in a way, that Eumenes’ options weren’t. Eumenes might never have killed a boar, but he had killed men, even generals, in single combat. No one truly doubted his courage, even if they disapproved of his lineage.
That left Cassander with a very large problem. He needed to retreat from the siege of Amphipolis and he needed to do it without seeming to retreat. And as he framed the question, he had the answer. When is a retreat not a retreat? When you’re just moving to attack elsewhere. He felt a smile twitch his lips at that thought. But only a twitch, because whatever mask he put in front of the matter, behind the mask he was facing a war that he’d been winning yesterday but was losing today.
He would need to send a message to Thessalonike and have her start working on a bomb big enough to sink the Reliance. The Cabeiri might help with that. They were skilled in magic and were rapidly learning the magic of the ship people as well. But they had no love for the ship people.
Pella, Royal Compound
August 6, 319 BCE
Thessalonike read the bundle of sheets, and as she read she began to wonder if she had bet on the wrong horse when she married Cassander. The USSE Constitution still didn’t seem to her to be a workable system. But Eumenes kept winning and satrapies kept going over to the USSE. She would send messages to the Cabeiri, for such a bomb might well be of use anyway. But she would also send messages to Cleopatra and Olympias, begging their forgiveness, and asking their aid and opinion.
Her situation was complicated by the fact that she was three months pregnant. She felt her belly, even though there was nothing to feel yet. So far this had been an uncomplicated pregnancy. She suffered morning sickness, but as bad as it felt, her midwife insisted it was mild. She could abort the child. Her fellow initiates in the Cabeiri knew the drugs, but those drugs were not safe. They sometimes left the woman barren and, more rarely, killed her. More importantly, if Cassander discovered she had aborted his child, he might well have her killed himself. And the chance of Cassander finding out was much too great. Sometimes Thessalonike thought the ship people’s insistence on using devices instead of slaves might be wisdom instead of softness.
She went to her desk and began to write letters in her own hand. Then she stopped. Her desk was a Greek table with modifications based on ship people ideas. It had a set of niches across the top where documents could be rolled into scrolls and placed. It was inlaid with mother of pearl and onyx. There, before her, three slots from the left, was the letter she received from the present high priestess of the Cabeiri on the subject of Calix.
She remembered what it said.
Calix is a despicable little toad, but he’s skilled and he is not so insane as Olympias. The last word we have from him is that he was working for Antigonus. We would prefer that his employment not be passed on to Olympias. The Cabeiri are a religious order. We follow the teachings of the goddess and her consort, and we protect the privacy of our members, just as we expect our members, especially those of high station, to protect the order.
Thessalonike had gotten the hint. She was told because she was the queen of Macedonia. Olympias wasn’t the queen of anything anymore. She’d respected that call for silence until now, not responding to Olympias’ repeated requests and telling Cleopatra that the order was being reticent. But now . . . Now it seemed that the women on the Queen of the Sea might be her only hope. She wrote:
I have finally gotten word from one of my contacts in the Cabeiri. Calix is considered a skilled poisoner and spy. My contact says that he worked for Antigonus at one time, but my contact doesn’t know who he is working for now, or even if he is still active as a poisoner and a spy.
Queen of the Sea, Persian Gulf, Tiz
August 8, 319 BCE
Lars Floden looked out at the small town on the northern shore of the gulf. They were about two hundred knots east of the narrows where the Persian Gulf turned into the Gulf of Oman, about where Chabahar was on Google Maps. In the here and now, Tiz was an important port, and while not the capital of Carmania, was its largest port.
It was no Alexandria and certainly no Miami, but it had docks that would accommodate the ship’s boats. And it had access to oil. Not local, but Tlepolemus could get his hands on it, and was in the Royal Lounge right this minute, selling out Antigonus.
Lars grinned, stepped back from the rail, and went back inside. The Queen had spent the last week and a half right here, while Tlepolemus sent ships to agents in Persia and Susiana to get loads of oil. There were tours of the countryside—read desert—and, among other things, Tlepolemus was profoundly interested in desalination techniques.
And that was another matter. The membranes for the reverse osmosis water purification system had a working life expectancy of around five years, and that assumed adequate pre-filtration with activated charcoal. They were making activated charcoal now. They had all the processes and those processes could be replicated in the here and now. Also, the polymer-membrane canisters, when they did wear out, could be disassembled and the membrane washed, which would extend their working life at the cost of decreased efficiency. But how much it would extend their life was an open question. Sooner or later, they were going to be reduced to what they were about to sell Tlepolemus: evaporative desalination. Saltwater, heated right to boiling, then the steam collected. It worked, but had a very high energy cost. Which was why ships used saltwater for toilets and washing until the reverse osmosis process was developed.
But the problem with the power purification was reflected in other areas as well. The Queen of the Sea was an almost new cruiseliner, six months out of the builders’ quays when The Event happened, just long enough to notice and catch any problems. But The Event was followed by a very tough two years. The Queen was gutted to install factories where they had the electricity, computers, and—almost as important—the waste disposal facilities. Even if sometimes that meant getting out in the middle of the ocean and dumping poisonous garbage, with the excuse that the Queen was just one ship and the oceans were very big. Anyway, the Queen was, in the first month after The Event, converted into a factory ship as well as a cruise ship, a cargo ship, a college, and a floating United Nations.
“Lars?” Marie asked as she walked up to him.
Lars turned and smiled at Marie’s worried expression. “Just thinking about the Queen and the fact that she’s become a floating United Nations.”
“It’s not, you know,” Marie said. “A United Nations, that is. It’s neutral ground, but there is no treaty that everyone has to sign. The Queen can’t condemn the genocide in wherever, the way they were always doing back in the world. In a way, it’s more like a floating Switzerland.”
“Granted. But that wasn’t the part I was thinking about. I was thinking about the future and how we are going to make a ship that has a life expectancy of thirty years when she had dry docks and a support infrastructure last without those things.”
“Now who’s being a worrywart?” Marie said severely. Well, trying to be severe, but the smile was there in the undertones. “The Queen is good for at least another five years before she needs an overhaul. We’ve talked about this. In fact, if I recall correctly, the first time we discussed it was two days after The Event, on our way to Alexandria for the first time. Food was the first issue, then fuel.”
“Food and fuel have both been solved, at least for the most part. There is a refinery in Trinidad now that is making diesel. Not great diesel, but plenty good enough to run the ship’s boats. And we have the resources to buy all the food we could ever need. Why else would Tlepolemus be so willing to bow to Roxane and little Alexander?”
“Loyalty to his father and to the dynasty, plus a desire for stability and good government.”
Lars snorted a derisive laugh.
“No, it’s true. Not all of the diadochi were monsters. It was the situation. I think most of them would have been willing to have either Philip or little Alexander on the throne if they could have been sure that the others wouldn’t use the weakness of the child Alexander or the autistic Philip. Not all of them, I grant. The more I look at it and examine the data available in the here and now, the more I come to believe that Cassander, under the orders of his father, did indeed have a part in poisoning Alexander. Or at least a part in introducing the pathogen that killed him. Part of that is simply that I’ve been able to correlate the information, but part of it is what I’ve learned about how they do things here and now. That hoof that the histories talk about is a fourth century BCE petri dish. A way of carrying a certain class of poison that has been used for the last fifty years or so.”
“Olympias?” Lars asked.
“About the hoof, yes. But she didn’t realize that Cassander was involved. Didn’t understand how Alexander’s last illness could be intentional until we put our heads together. And by the way, Lars, if Cassander or any of Antipater’s children should ever board the Queen, you want Olympias chained in her cabin for the duration of their stay.”
“Noted,” Lars said, then added, “How’s it going in there?”
“Fairly well. Glass-topped troughs with black bottoms a bit inland from the ocean, seawater pumped in, then the sun allowed to evaporate the water. When the sun goes down, the water condenses on the glass and drains into a second channel in the trough so that you get clean water suitable for drinking and agriculture. It won’t turn Carmania into a garden, but it should help them feed themselves. And the glass factory that Tlepolemus will have to build to make the glass for the lids is going to cost a fortune. Which will be paid for by a loan from the federal government. Which Roxane can do, because of the New America alliance.”
Marie leaned on the railing, and since Marie was a short woman, that lifted her arms, and that did interesting things to her chest. Then she continued talking to the ocean, or maybe the port.
“That wasn’t what I came out here to talk to you about. We have new information on the poisoning of Dag and Travis.”
“What is it? And why haven’t you told Daniel about it?”
“It’s not actionable. At least not yet. And Commander Lang is a good cop, but not a particularly good investigator.”
Lars wanted to argue, but couldn’t. Daniel was a good man and a good officer. He was all sorts of good things. But he didn’t read mystery stories as a hobby, and if he saw a bloody body and a bloody knife beside it, he didn’t look much deeper. He was, Lars knew, still convinced that Olympias had somehow been involved in the poisoning, even though all the evidence said she couldn’t have done it.
“All right. What do you have?”
“Cleopatra recognized someone in the . . . ” She told it all. How Cleopatra had recognized the man, how she had found the picture to confirm it, then identified the man as part of Arrhidaeus’ entourage. How they realized that he was part of the cult of Cabeiri, and how they’d sent off for information about him and learned that he once worked for Antigonus.
Lars listened to it all the way through, then said, “It doesn’t track. Why go after Dag?”
“We aren’t sure. We think it may be a shot at Olympias.”
“Pretty stupid if it was,” Lars said. “We eliminated her based on fingerprint evidence and lack of access early on.”
“Not really, Lars,” Marie said. “Remember that the locals’ mindset very much includes magic.” Marie paused, then said. “This is a bit difficult to express. We, you and I, grew up with Sherlock Holmes and all the other detectives. We watched TV with cops who used the motive, means, opportunity triangle. For us, if you’re going to frame someone, the first thing you do is make sure they don’t have an alibi and that they do have the weapon used, or one like it, and that they have a reason.
“But that’s just not how people think here and now. They think in terms of motive, sure enough. But Olympias has a motive to kill Dag, and to a lot of people’s minds an excellent one. Dag is having sex with Alexander’s wife. Widow, actually, but Alexander was Alexander, and Olympias’ son. So most people will look at Olympias and assume she will ignore the fact he’s dead and be pissed about the betrayal.
“Then, Olympias is a witch. A famously powerful sorceress and she’s right on the same ship as the victim. That mostly counts as means and opportunity rolled into one. It didn’t occur to them that we would be able to tell who touched the carafe, or that we could eliminate her from the list of suspects based on that and her known location at the precise time of the poisoning.” She shrugged. “Basically, they’re more general in the way they look at crime. Not so detail oriented. No, that’s not right. It’s more a different set of details they look at.” Marie gave Lars a sardonic half-smile. “Some of the things they pay attention to make no sense at all to us. Among other things, Olympias is an accomplished astrologer and knows the way she knows the sun comes up in the east that she has personally talked to Zeus and Athena, as well as Axiocersus, and his son, Cadmilus.”
Lars nodded. He knew by now that Axiocersus and Cadmilus were aspects of the four-part god of the Cabeiri cult. And he was not overly impressed by any of the cults of the here and now, not even the pre-rabbinic Judaism as practiced in the Second Temple.
“Lars . . . Never mind. Just remember that they believe it, and not just the ‘suckers.’ The high priestesses as well. What I was trying to get at was that it’s not unreasonable for them to think that we would react the same way they would. So it is entirely possible that it was a shot at Olympias.”
“All right, I’ll accept that much. What do you want to do about it?”
“We have a plan to get his prints, but we need to be able to compare them to the print from the carafe.”