The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “I’ve done that too,” I admitted, and we laughed together.

  Kreusa stood up. “I envy you your hair, Maia.”

  “My hair?” I ran my fingers through my hair, which I kept at shoulder length, the same length the children kept theirs. It was almost dry, so I started to braid it.

  “It’s the kind of hair we all wanted when I was a girl. Straw pale.”

  “But it’s so straight. My mother used to curl it, and the curls would just fall out again. And your own hair is lovely, like heavy bronze.”

  Kreusa pulled a curl of her hair and squinted at it. “Lukretia has lovely hair,” she said.

  “Envy, vanity, what next?” Klio teased. Klio always kept her own hair short.

  Dressed and dry, the four of us started to walk back up around the curve of the bay towards the city. It looked beautiful from this angle and in the afternoon light. It looked beautiful to me from every angle and in every light, it was so well-proportioned and so well-situated. Athene, Builder of Cities, had chosen the site well. The vineyards and olive groves stood around it like the Form of agricultural civilization made concrete, and the volcano steamed away behind, like a reminder of mortality.

  Aristomache paused for a moment, contemplating it. “If the gods will help us see the right metals in their souls, we’ll have done all right,” she said.

  “Plato was so clearly only concerned with the guardians,” Kreusa said. “I know the list of qualities for the golds by heart.”

  “Love of wisdom and the truth, temperate, liberal, brave, orderly, just and gentle, fast to learn, retentive, with a sense of order and proportion,” Aristomache reeled off. “You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to assess, until you were looking at a set of seventy sixteen-year-olds and weighing each of them for those qualities.”

  I sighed. “It’s hard to find enough people who have them. The really difficult thing is getting the numbers right. But fortunately, with the ones we have to decide for, Ficino seems really sure in most cases. It’s the ones where he isn’t sure that are causing me anguish.”

  “The difficult thing is deciding who’s iron and who’s bronze, when Plato gives no guidelines there at all,” Kreusa said. “And it’s hard to assess exactly what work each child has an aptitude for and ought to be trained for. Not to mention what work we need done. And who can train them for it.”

  “I think the Committee on Iron Work will report on training skills tomorrow night,” Klio said.

  “That’s a relief,” Kreusa said. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “When I talk to the children, they seem to know where they belong,” Aristomache said.

  “Well maybe you and Ficino can see into their souls, but it’s difficult for me,” Klio said. “There are always the ones on the edges. And getting the numbers, as you say—we have to have it done by the meeting by tribes on the Ides, when we’ll do the final adjustment.”

  “Some of them are so certain and easy,” I said. “So unquestionably one thing or the other, with the metals in their souls so clear even I can see them. Others are more of a puzzle. And as you say, it’s so important. Such a responsibility. I’m very glad Ficino is so good at it. I’d hate to be doing it alone.”

  We came to the gates of the city then and bade each other joy of the day, and divided to go our separate ways on our common task.

  16

  SIMMEA

  “How many golds are there?” I asked Axiothea one day as summer approached.

  “Two hundred and fifty-two,” she said.

  I was thinking of Damon’s question. It would take only thirty-one years for every gold to be married to every other gold, discounting time lost for pregnancy and potential repetitions. Did I want that? Could I avoid it? “Are they divided equally by gender?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Then I stopped. “How many silvers?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Axiothea asked, frowning.

  I wanted to know because two hundred and fifty-two is such a very round number, considered as a percentage of ten thousand and eighty, but I wasn’t Sokrates with the privilege of asking anything. If I made myself too much of a gadfly, I’d get swatted.

  “Just curious,” I said.

  “Well, about a thousand,” Axiothea said, clearly having thought better of her precise answer. “And about two thousand bronze. Just approximately. Now, to get back to the calculus?”

  Later, in Thessaly I asked Sokrates if he knew the exact numbers. “Two hundred and fifty-two doesn’t seem like a round number to me,” he said.

  “It’s what you get if you divide ten thousand and eighty by exactly forty,” I explained.

  Kebes sat up in surprise. “You think they’re not judging fairly?”

  “Two hundred and fifty-two, divided equally by gender, can’t possibly be chance. There must have been some people they either included to make up the number, or excluded to get it down.”

  “It could be chance,” Pytheas said.

  “Just barely possible,” Sokrates said. “Numbers are difficult evidence. You can make them mean so many things.”

  “There are masters here who are obsessed with making them mean different things,” Pytheas said.

  “Not Axiothea,” I protested.

  “No, not Axiothea. I was thinking of old Plotinus, may he be reborn in this city. And some of his friends. Proclus. Hermeios. Even Ficino can get all starry-eyed about the mystical significance of numbers.” Pytheas shook his head.

  I nodded. “We need to find out how many silver and bronze. Exactly how many.”

  “I shall find out,” Sokrates said. “Meanwhile, I tried an experiment today. I talked to a worker that was cleaning the street of Apollo early this morning.”

  “What did you say?” Pytheas asked.

  “I asked it what it was doing and why, and whether it liked the work or preferred other things.” Sokrates smiled. “It didn’t reply.”

  “They don’t talk,” Kebes said. “I’ve told you before.”

  “Maybe they don’t talk because nobody ever talks to them,” Sokrates said. “I intend to persist. Perhaps they will find a way of answering.”

  The next day he had an answer to the question of numbers—there were eleven hundred and twenty silvers, and twenty-two hundred and forty bronzes.

  “Leaving six thousand five hundred and eight iron,” I said.

  “Those are not random numbers,” Kebes said.

  “No,” Sokrates said. “So we should revisit the question of how the masters decided to divide you up.”

  I had been thinking about it constantly since Axiothea had given me the number. “I think they must have had lots of dubious cases,” I said. “I mean, take Klymene.” I looked over at Pytheas, who didn’t seem upset that I’d mentioned her. “She displayed cowardice once. But since then she has faced up to everything, she made herself brave. She’s a gold. But they must have thought more than twice about whether she should be. If there had been somebody more deserving, somebody who had never showed cowardice, it wouldn’t have been wrong for them to have set Klymene among the bronze, or more likely iron, because I don’t think she has many artificing skills.”

  “But they didn’t say,” Klebes said.

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Just no?” Sokrates asked.

  “They didn’t say, and they should have said. It makes a difference. We thought they were only thinking about our own worth, and actually they must have been thinking about numbers too.”

  “They had to make it gender-even,” Pytheas said. “In every class. Because otherwise the weddings wouldn’t work.”

  Kebes sighed.

  “And is that so important? That everyone has a partner of their own rank?” Sokrates asked. “Could you not choose for yourself, as people did in Athens?”

  “Women?” I asked. “Did women choose?”

  “Their parents tended to arrange marriages,” Sokrates said. “But they knew their own children.”

  “Th
e masters know us. And the marriages are to be only for one day, not stuck forever, the way they usually were in other cultures. Were you happy in your marriage?” I knew he had not been.

  “It’s very difficult when people are married and don’t like each other,” Sokrates admitted.

  “Did your parents like each other?” Kebes asked me.

  I thought about it. “Yes. But they led very separate lives.”

  “My parents loved each other, and they loved me,” Pytheas said. It was the first time I had ever heard him mention his parents. Sokrates too looked at him in astonishment. “They’re still alive as far as I know, in the time I came from. They had a farm up above Delphi.” He caught Sokrates’s expression and laughed. “Not so far above Delphi! That’s where I was born, sixteen years ago. In the hills, half a day’s walk from the Pythian shrine.”

  “Would you like to have a marriage like they had?” Sokrates asked.

  It was Pytheas’s turn to look surprised. “I’d never thought about it.” He looked away. “It’s too hard to imagine.”

  “How about you, Simmea? Are you looking forward to the one-day marriages, or would you want a life partnership?”

  Involuntarily I looked back at Pytheas, who was still staring into space. Kebes was glaring as I met his eye as I turned to look back at Sokrates. “We can have friendships for life,” I said. “And friendships don’t have to be exclusive.” I smiled at Kebes, but he kept on frowning.

  “Plato didn’t have as much experience of humanity as he needed to write a book like the Republic,” Sokrates said. “Perhaps nobody does.”

  “What sort of experience would it take?” Pytheas asked, smiling, and we were off down another dialectical avenue exploring that.

  I thought about Sokrates’s question when I was alone that night. Klymene and the others were sleeping and the light was off. If I could choose—well, it would be Pytheas, of course, but would he choose me? I was better off as I was. I knew he liked me and valued me, but would he want that kind of marriage if it were an option? I didn’t think he would. Kebes definitely would, but I wouldn’t want it with Kebes. I didn’t know enough about it. I thought of my parents. It seemed so long ago. I wondered if my mother could still be alive. Then I realised that “still” meant nothing, she wasn’t even born yet, and in another sense she was certainly dead. Then I sat up in bed. If we could move through time, could we change things? Could we go back to before the slavers came with an armed troop of Silvers and prevent them from killing my father and brothers? If I prayed to Athene?

  I prayed, and felt as an answer to my prayer a strong urge to go to the library. I got up and dressed and found my way through the dark streets. There was no moon, and it was very late and the sconces were dimmed. I went to the big library in the southwest corner. It was not so grand as the one by the Agora, but it had a charming bronze Athene by the door which always seemed to be welcoming me. It was here that I had learned to read.

  The doors were open, and inside the lights were on. I looked about for direction. Would the goddess send me to a book? I waited for guidance but none came. After a while I walked up to the seat where I usually worked and took out Newton’s Principia. I knew there was nothing in it about time travel.

  When I had been reading for a few minutes, I saw Septima. She was shelving. I watched her, then stood and went over to her. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” she whispered.

  “I couldn’t sleep, and thought I might as well read. How about you?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, and thought I might as well work. Why couldn’t you sleep?” She looked inquiringly at me.

  “I suddenly thought of something.”

  “Let’s go and sit on the steps where we can talk out loud,” she said.

  “But … there’s nobody else here!”

  “I don’t think I could raise my voice in here, even in the middle of the night,” she admitted. We went outside and sat on the steps by the feet of the bronze Athene. “What did you think of?” she asked, and her normal voice sounded loud after the quiet.

  “Moving through time. We all did it. The goddess brought us here that way. If she can do that, she could use it to change things that have happened. We could raise a bodyguard and go back and save my family from the slavers.”

  “We could raise an army and save Constantinople from the Turks,” Septima said.

  “Yes, exactly!” I said, glad she had understood so quickly.

  “I’ve thought about this a lot, and no, we couldn’t. The gods are bound by Fate and Necessity, and Necessity only allows the kind of changes in time that nobody notices. We can’t change what’s fated to happen. One vanished sculpture,” she patted the shiny bronze toe of the goddess, “is neither here nor there. Two slave children?” She gestured at us. “Thousands of people like us lived and died and made no difference. When Fate is involved, especially when the gods know what happened and try to change it? That just makes everything worse.”

  “How could it make it worse if—” I decided to use her example rather than my own. “—if we saved Constantinople?”

  “Without the fall of Constantinople bringing manuscripts to Italy, there might have been no Renaissance. Constantinople hadn’t done much for civilization throughout the Middle Ages. It had held on, that’s all. It hadn’t built anything new, produced any new and truly wonderful books or art or scientific discoveries. The flowering of the Renaissance, on the other hand…” She spread out her hands.

  “Is it like the bit in the Iliad when Zeus is deciding whether to let Patroklus die or live for a bit longer, and Patroklus kills all those other people, who clearly don’t matter to Zeus even though Patroklus and Achilles do?” I’d recently been allowed to read the unexpurgated Homer.

  “Just like that.”

  “Then my family didn’t matter?” I hated that thought.

  “They mattered. Everyone matters. But not everything is bound by fate. Everyone has their own fate, that they chose before they were born. But they’re just choosing a chance of filling out as much as they can of the shape of it. What actually happens is up to the choices they make—well, until they come right up to the edges, where they run into Necessity. Necessity is the line drawn around what anyone can do. Life is full of randomness and chance and choices, and only some things matter to fate. The difficulty is knowing which things.” She sighed. “I talked to Krito once about why most of the male masters here were old when most of the women were young. It seems it’s because men achieve so much more in their lives, and they couldn’t be missed from them until they were near to death, whereas most women might as well not exist for all the individual contribution most of us get to make to history.”

  I thought about that. “Some of the women are older. Lukretia of Ferrara is. And Aristomache of Olympia must be at least fifty.”

  “Aristomache translated Plato into the vernacular in Boston in eighteen eighty-three,” Septima said. “She published it anonymously. Nobody in her time would have trusted a woman as a scholar. But her translation helped a lot of young people discover philosophy. She couldn’t come until she’d finished it, and until after a friend of hers had written a poem to her.” Septima shook her head. “I really like Aristomache. She really deserves to be here.”

  “And some of the men are younger,” I said. “Like Lysias, and Ikaros.”

  “Oh, Ikaros,” she said, her eyes softening at the thought of him. “He deserves to be here too. He died before he had the chance to do what he could have done. But he’s spending so much time with Sokrates now. He hardly ever has time to talk to me.”

  “Do you ever think the masters envy us?” I asked.

  “Yes. They obviously do. Who wouldn’t?”

  It was so strange to hear her certainty, after spending so much time talking to Sokrates. “I think this is the best place, too,” I said.

  “Even if we can’t go and fix time?” she asked.

  “Not even Necessity knows all ends,” I quote
d. She laughed. I found myself yawning. “Perhaps I should go to bed now.”

  “Good night, Simmea,” Septima said, and went back into the library.

  For a moment I wanted to run after her and tell her that I knew she was Pytheas’s sister and ask about their childhood together. She was a very reserved person, difficult to get to know. I seldom saw her except in the library. That was one of the most intimate conversations I’d ever had with her. But when I imagined telling her that Pytheas had told me their secret I could only picture her pulling away. I watched the doors swing shut behind her, then walked slowly back through the city towards my bed.

  17

  MAIA

  “Did you ever wonder why Plato isn’t here?” Klio asked one evening in the Year Seven as we were walking back after a debate. She and Axiothea had their arms around each other. They were an established couple now. Lysias was walking beside me. He and I were not so much a couple as friends who did on occasion share eros—the true note of our relationship was definitely philia. As far as eros goes, silphium always worked so far, for me and for the other female masters, though I always fretted about it.

  “I suppose he didn’t pray to be here?” I suggested.

  “He knew it wouldn’t work. He never intended it to be tried seriously. He was just trying to provoke debate.”

  “Well that may be true, but that doesn’t mean we’re wrong to want to try it,” Lysias said. “And it is working.”

  “It’s mostly sort-of partly working,” Klio said.

  We came to my door and I opened it. “Wine? Cake?” The debate about whether it was appropriate to take food out of the eating halls had been decided in favor, as long as the food was always shared. We all went in and I fetched the wine and the mixer. Lysias took the cups out and distributed them, while Axiothea took the cushions off the bed and put them on the floor. I mixed the wine—half and half as we always drank it, on Plato’s recommendation.

  “It’s working. We have children who love philosophy, who think a debate between Manlius and Tullius is the best imaginable way to spend an evening. I envy them sometimes,” Lysias said, as I put little nut cakes on a plate.